Prelude to Dune: House Atreides - DC's Page

Prelude to Dune:
House Atreides

by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
NEL: £6.99
ISBN 0-340-75176-2

If you had a friend who had never, ever read SF and, wanting to see what it was like, they asked you to compile a list of, say, ten books to try it out, Dune would have to be on that list.

It is a stupendous book, marvellously textured and breathtaking in its depiction of the harsh, dry planet Arrakis, the Fremen who live there and the clash between the Houses Harkonnen and Atreides, and the appearance of the messianic figure of the Kwisatz Haderach. It is deservedly one of the most widely-read SF books ever written.

Several people have commented to me on how uncomfortable they felt near fountains — such a waste of water! — immediately after finishing Dune. It is one of those books which leaves images in the mind for many years after it has been put back on the shelf — one reason, I suspect, that the David Lynch film disappointed so much (well, that and the relentless stream of infodumps).

In many respects, the prequel, Prelude to Dune: House Atreides by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert (son of Frank, if you were in any doubt), is similarly crippled before it starts. It would have to be damn good to live up to the original, and, let’s face it, even Frank Herbert’s own sequels to Dune were not in the same league.

Dune is better than anything else Herbert wrote; someone — Brian Stableford, I think — once suggested that was perhaps because John W. Campbell had lent an extensive hand in, if I remember right, “hammering it into shape”. That includes the five sequels, which rapidly demonstrate the law of diminishing returns. To be fair, there are those who think that Chapter House Dune, the final sequel, was a return to form and was pretty damn good — but, equally, there are those who think it’s complete keech.

One thing which could be said about Chapter House is that a sequel would not go amiss. How irritating of Herbert to die just when things looked like getting interesting again! Odd, then, that Herbert & Anderson go the prequel route.

Apparently they at first considered writing of the Butlerian Jihad; that might have stood a chance of working, separated chronologically by a sufficient gap from the events and characters of Dune. But for some reason they decided to write of the period leading up to Dune, just a generation earlier.

Well, perhaps I can see the attraction: it has always struck me that it would have been interesting to see more of Leto Atreides, who is rapidly disposed of in Dune. He seemed a tragic character there, and I would have enjoyed seeing a bit more of him at home on Caladan, and his relationship with Paul. But not as he is presented here, cardboard-thin at best.

By writing of people we know from the original, Herbert & Anderson invite comparison, and they do not benefit by it. Whatever the flaws of the later books, in Dune Leto, Duncan Idaho, Thufir Hawat, Baron Harkonnen and all the rest lived and breathed: here they are puppets inexpertly jerked across a stage which feels no more imaginative than a matte backdrop from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In fact, that analogy brings to mind one of the queerest things about the book: the way it reads like a hackwork novelisation of a “major motion picture”. It certainly has the obligatory irritating kid.

There is much that is poor, but the single worst feature is that events described (if briefly) in Dune are played out at length here, and diminished in the process. Pardot Kynes telling his designated assassin to go away is particularly inept: what was a semi-mythical story imbued with meaning has become a silly story of an absent-minded professor and a man who has to be the stupidest Fremen on Dune.

Also presented for our delectation is the administration of chaumurky on Elrood IX by Hasimir Fenring: if you’ll believe he can sneak into the Emperor’s bedroom, squirt anaesthetic spray over him then ram a needle (I don’t care how fine it’s supposed to be) up his nose, you’ll believe anything.

Characterisation is pretty basic. Leto is rash. Er… that’s it. Thufir Hawat seems to have been based on Freddie Jones’s performance. Duke Paulus seems quite pleasant, despite the impression from Dune that he was some sort of cold monster.

But then, and bizarrely, this does not always seem to take place in the same universe as Dune. The Tleilaxu seem to be midgets here, and the Face Dancers seem to be one Tleilaxu standing on another’s shoulder! Jessica’s mother was named in Children of Dune, yet someone entirely different is shown giving birth to her here.

Which I suppose brings us to the Bene Gesserit, here reduced to a bunch of bickering women. When their exceptional skills are brought on stage, they are ludicrous: picking one spermatozoon to fertilise a particular ovum during sexual intercourse, indeed! The coup de grace for the Bene Gesserit’s street cred has to be when one particularly irritating Reverend Mother calls in a Feng Shui expert!

I have not mentioned Baron Harkonnen. Keeping my bile tighly in rein I shall simply say that on this showing, becoming a Marvel (or DC for that matter) villain would be a step up for him. In a different age, he’d be wearing waxed moustaches and a top hat.

And now for the bad news… this is the first of AFSFT, to be followed by House Harkonnen and The Spice Wars. Take my advice: read Dune again instead.