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If you're a dune fan ... Great Read!        Rating:

Herbert & Anderson have written the wonderful precursors to Dune, following in the footsteps of the Master & firmly entrenching themselves as his worthy successors; Road to Dune is an impressive adjunct & valuable reference material (for the world of Dune) of itself...

The bottom of the barrel is okay. . .        Rating:

In looking at the other reviews, it is clear that everyone who reads this comes to the book with a set of prejudices that completely color their take on this book. So let me begin with that. When I was in fifth grade, I fell madly in love with Arrakis. I've always been much more ambivalent about _Dune_ and its sequels. The world itself is so rich that it feels just as real as the moon in the sky. The characters, however, are all cut from the same power-hungry cloth. They might be good or evil (rarely in between) but they're always striving and scheming. It seems like such a narrow take on the human experience. It was all the more shocking to read Herbert's moving description of the end of his wife's life that follows _Chapterhouse_. The short essay left me with a sense that we readers had been robbed of so much of what _Dune_ could have been.

The narrowness of the characterization turned, in my view, into self-parody in the second generation novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. They're credible pulp fiction but at the end of the day they're nothing more than light adventure stories and as you get older that loses its hold over you. I stopped reading them when I got tired of the homophobia and the machismo.

I found _The Road to Dune_ remaindered, so I bought it on impulse. It's a mixed bag. It contains four separate parts.

The first is an early attempt at the original _Dune_ novel. As an example of campy pulp fun, it's not bad. It has a glaring plot hole that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in the classic version of _Dune_ (but would have to reread to double check). In seeing the evolution of the novel, it also makes sense of some of the less explicable parts of what was ultimately published. The replacement of the Harkonnen with the Atreides on Arrakis always struck me as forced, for instance, but seeing its origins in more of a contest in an `action story' at least gives it some context. My main reaction to this short novel is that it gives what a sense of an accomplishment _Dune_ is. It took an enormous amount of work to create such a vivid world in this `Spice Planet' story. To keep working it and working it into _Dune_ was quite the feat.

The second section, rather brief, is a series of letters about the publication of _Dune_. That the novel had such difficult getting published is the stuff of science fiction legends, but the actual story is more interesting than I expected. I hadn't realized that the major objection was really to the length of the novel -- it doesn't seem like that big of a deal today -- and that a number of the publishers who rejected it had a sixth sense that they were making a mistake.

Unless you put the fanatic back into fan or have read _Dune_ or _Dune Messiah_ recently, the deleted scenes that make up the third part of the book generally deal with such minor points and are so hard to put into the time line that they seem like random minutiae. The alternate endings to _Dune Messiah_ are the arguable exception.

The fourth section is four stories by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson that others have criticized for already being available for free online. I wouldn't want to read something that long online myself , so their inclusion doesn't seem so baffling to me. One is set during _Dune_; the others are based on the Butlerian Jihad thousands of years before it that the second generation authors have fleshed out (in books I haven't read). My main sense of these three stories is that they are consistent in quality with their other work. So if you like their novels, you'll probably like them. If you've gotten to the point where the relentless violence and scheming seems old or the one-dimensional characterization isn't worth your time, then you won't.
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This review is based on a remaindered trade paperback edition. After having written the review, I realized that it appears to be a UK edition.

The Dune that might have been        Rating:

Ever want more information about how the books got written? The characters developed? Want to see the original drafts for Dune, drafts that contain significant changes? Want a deeper insight into Dune than ever before? Then prepare to walk The Road To Dune.

A treasure trove!        Rating:

A treasure trove! Amazing historical stuff from the archives of Frank Herbert, letters, rejection slips, missing chapters, alternate endings. Plus the collected Dune short stories written by Brian and Kevin. I particularly enjoyed the unorthodox collaboration of "Spice Planet" -- a science fiction adventure story that Frank Herbert had outline, a prototype version of DUNE. Something in this book for all Dune fans.

Great Book        Rating:

Awesome Read for any Dune fan. This duo really did a wonderful job as usual on their books. Thank you Mr. Herbert, and Mr. Anderson for writing this among the many other books you have shared with all of us Dune fans.

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