Frank Herbert wrote six Dune novels that ranged in quality from “brain-explodingly amazing” (the original) to “flawed yet fascinating” (God Emperor of Dune) to “uh, really, you’re going with that?” (Chapterhouse: Dune).
Then Frank Herbert died.
And now, via Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, I see that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have sold another quartet of Dune novels to Simon & Schuster. (Update 6/4/08 10:38 PM: Duh. I’m slipping in my old age. The new Dune books are actually Tor books. S&S only has the UK rights.) I must be behind the times, because the first of the quartet (Paul of Dune) is already finished and headed for bookstore shelves in September.
Counting these latest four novels, that makes twelve Herbert/Anderson books in the Dune universe. Their Prelude to Dune trilogy took place about a generation before the original novel. Their Legends of Dune trilogy mined the deep history of the Dune universe thousands of years back. Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune picked up the story where Herbert left it. And now this latest quartet (titled Paul of Dune, Jessica of Dune, Irulan of Dune, and Leto of Dune) will be filling in the gaps of the original series that most of us silly people assumed were just meant to be, you know, gaps.
So: twelve Herbert/Anderson Dune books. For those of you who are not Mentats, that’s twice the length of Frank Herbert’s original series. And we’re not even counting the biography Dreamer of Dune and the collection of notes, miscellaneous stories, and ephemera called The Road to Dune. Wikipedia even lists a publication Brian edited called The Songs of Maud’dib, which I’m afraid to Google in case this turns out to not be some kind of perverse joke.
At the outset, Herbert and Anderson were supposedly working off notebooks and drafts that the old man left behind. Hunters and Sandworms were based on additional outlines miraculously discovered in a safety deposit box twenty years after Papa Herbert’s death. (Funny how legendary authors have a penchant for hiding things in safety deposit boxes that only turn up twenty years later.) But I’m not sure Herbert and Anderson are even pretending to be fleshing out old notes anymore with this latest series. Surely anything worthwhile that Frank Herbert had to say about the Dune universe has already found its way onto the shelves.
You’ve got to admit: Dune was an incredible dog, but this is one really, really, really long tail.