I think it was always one. There wasn't much left to tell, even though the duo managed to bloat the story quite beyond what Frank intended, I suspect.

My guess is that with Dune 7, Frank would have returned to the sort of almost huis-clos structure he used in books like Destination: Void and The Whipping Star, with most of the action taking place in the ship itself, and pretty much limited to the players he placed in the ship. I don't think he imagined the last book as a big space epic, except for the last act, which typically might have been rushed a bit. I think it would have been a book of fairly limited scope plot-wise, but very dense with ideas and discussions (and inner monologues, no doubt). Emperor-God is also a bit like this, so is Chapterhouse and Odrade for that matter. But I think Dune 7 in his hands would have been even more like that, and perhaps fairly short for a Dune book. Frank would have gotten rid of all those preparations for battle and most of the fighting, and a lot of the episodic and planet-of-the-week fat.

It's debatable whether Frank was very good at writing this sort of books, but it's not debatable that BH/KJA aren't capable at all. They turned it into a plot-based book, constantly struggling to incorporate the more intellectual stuff along the way.



Yup. I'm not sure Frank knew concretely what was at the end of Leto's Golden Path when he wrote Children of Dune, I think he conceived it more as getting rid of prescience and the programmed evolution of the BG, that Leto II would hold humanity in check for millenia and then it would explode in all its diversity, forever impossible to "rein in" again. It's pretty obvious he did know there was also an hidden threat when he wrote God-Emperor and spoke of the apocalypse awaiting humanity down the line, which seems to have given him the idea he could write this part in full one day, and eventually this developped into the unfinished trilogy, which would bring things full circle to the (untold) genesis of his version of humanity in the days of the BJ.



I think about every Dune fan wish for the outline to be published one day. I don't know if it will any time soon. I think the Herbert Foundation will more likely refuse to do that this generation. They are to close to Brian, and too directly benefitting from the sales of his books.

The problem is, publishing the outline now would probably be opening Pandora's box about everything that isn't in there, a lot of which they claim (and personally I don't think they lie- I think they really just lacked the talent and intelligence to make something interesting out of it) is rather from Dune notes left by Frank.

This is pretty much calling for an essay on Dune written by a scholar given access to the notes and outline, one day and I don't think the HF will let that happen too early.

It's really someone like Bill Ransom who should have written Dune 7 with Brian Herbert.



I really wish I'd never read those. That's really pure masochism, fuelled by their pretense that the prequels were needed to set up Dune 7. I read them because I wanted to read Dune 7 no matter what. I don't intend to ever read their other Dune books (I understand they're now hard at work ruining the original series by "filling the gaps" between the book, like telling the story of Paul's Jihad in full and other totally stupid ideas like that).

"Dune 7" is a better effort, but I'd be hard pressed to tell if I would have enjoyed it more without reading the prequels (that made it seem better in comparison) or if I'd been more disappointed if I had not some previous experience with the duo's effort.

I've been recommanding people who want to know the ending not to read the prequels, in any case. My best friend did that and enjoyed Dune 7 more than I did, I think. I had to put some pressure to convince her afterward she mustn't go on and read the prequels!



I think I disagree. I think early on, the threat was a lot more than humanity had stopped building machines to turn humanity itself more and more into machines. By God-Emperor, though, I think it's not obvious but the hints are there that the humans would face the machines again, notably through hints that the mentality and anathema against building thinking machines was faltering, and humanity didn't understand anymore the real threat the machines represented to humanity, which in a way Leto II reincarnated/emulated, while amusing himself with totally harmless "thinking machines", like his transcriber. Leto II re taught humans about tyranny, stagnation and absolute order to arm them before they had to face the machines again, IMO.

I didn't think they'd face remnants of the BJ machines, though. In the many years between I read Chapterhouse (around 1987-88, I think) and Dune 7, my theory was that a faction in the Scattering had built new thinking machines that again has escaped their control. In hindsight, I think leftover machines hidden at the other end of the universe that the Scattering bumped into is a more Frank-like concept.



I think the keyword is "seemed". I'm pretty sure Frank intended them to seem something else in Dune 6 than they really were, but it's pretty clear the Face Dancers had some sort of "God" and that it wouldn't be the Tleilaxu masters from the Scattering, so what else exactly if not AI?. When you think about it though, the new Face Dancers were at last "human machines" and pretty much the antithesis of Leto's genetic experiments to spark wild mutations, uncontrolled evolution. The latter Dune books were full of little examples of the respect for life declining - like those mindless lifeforms used as seats and other hubristic notions, like the attempts to control and program something as fundamental to the survival of the species as sexuality.

It's BH/KJA who went and ruined it by making it so plain Omnius and Erasmus would return as the threat in Dune 7, which was especially bad after forcing us to endure 3 books of their "adventures". They were really terrible at portraying machine thinking in the prequels. This was all a big joke, all the more painful since Frank himself had made pretty good attempts are potraying AI or non-human thinking in some his other books, and I would have very much loved to see how he pulled it off in Dune 7. In his books with Ransom, in Destination:Void before them, Herbert had given us a pretty good idea of how he envisionned conscious thinking-machines and AI. It's pretty close to the basis BH/KJA followed, except their execution was pathetic.




Not much of that is salvaged in Dune 7 alas. The ending is one of the worst parts of the duology. It's awfully written. It reads like KJA/BH picked Frank's concepts for that and wrote them virtually as is in very bad scenes (the final dialogue between Erasmus and Idaho is a vacuous atrocity), with no idea how to expand these thoughts properly. Imagine the transformation of Leto at the end of Children of Dune as they woud have written it had it happened in the House books and you'll get the idea of how good these scenes in Dune 7 are. The only redeeming quality is that those chapters typically go on for about 2 pages, so you don't suffer too long.



What I'm the most angry about is that they've purely and simply switched genre. The prequels aren't science fiction, they're space opera - and not of an high quality. Star Wars has more depth and coherence in its themes and ideas than the Dune prequels. That's sort of unforgivable.

Dune is science fiction. As fiction, it sometimes falls short of the ideas behind it, but it's definitely not books one can accuse of lacking in ideas and thoughts. Before entertaining you (which sometimes they even fail to), they make you think. I think I'm very attached to this, because at 14-16 when I read Dune, this was a revelation to me that SF could make you think.