Eric Allen's Reviews > Heretics of Dune

** spoiler alert ** Heretics of Dune
Book 5 of the Dune Chronicles

A Dune Retrospective by Eric Allen

Heretics of Dune is a bit of an odd book in my experience. The first time I read God Emperor of Dune I was so put off the series by it that I refused to pick Heretics up for almost an entire decade. When finally I did pick it up, reading through the entire series again with the hope that age had given me new perspective on life to keep God Emperor from sucking so hard, it was probably my second favorite book in the series. It had characters I liked, things actually happened in it, and the story was pretty enjoyable with a huge OMFG DID THAT REALLY HAPPEN moment at the end. In comparison to God Emperor, Heretics is a friggen masterpiece. Of course, just about anything is a friggen masterpiece next to that abomination.

I have read this book several times since, and I remember enjoying it each time. However, this time, I made a bit of a mistake. I read Fragments by Dan Wells immediately before picking up Heretics, and that was so much better written, with so much more interesting characters, in a much more interesting setting, with a better story that is told better in every way than Heretics of Dune. And so, this time around, all I could think of was how mediocre it was, how it wasn't as well written as Fragments, how the characters weren't as interesting as the creations of Dan Wells, how the story was so distractingly vague and didn't seem to be going anywhere.

And after this experience, I have come to the conclusion that Heretics of Dune can either be a very good book, or a soul-crushingly mediocre one depending on what you read immediately before picking it up.

We begin after another 1500 year jump into the future. After the fall of the God Emperor due to his own stupidity, arrogance, and lack of any enjoyment factor for anyone reading the books in which he appears, humanity scattered to the nine corners of the universe, multiplying and finding new planets to call home. Why this could only happen AFTER the death of the God Emperor is anyone's guess, but whatever, I'm sure it made sense to Herbert as he was writing the book and who am I to tell Herbert what is stupid in his own universe?

After the Scattering people are beginning to return to Arrakis, called Rakis now, and the surrounding part of the universe, bringing with them the Honored Matres. These women are a perversion of the Bene Gesserit, ruling their people through the power of sex. No, I'm not kidding. In fact, the book goes into extensive and graphic detail on this point, and let me tell you... Herbert ain't no sex writer, that much is for sure.

The Bene Gesserit see them as a threat because ... and some girl is born on Rakis with the ability to ride the worms and this is important because ... and the Bene Gesserit have cloned Duncan Idaho yet again to do ... and they make an alliance with the Tlelaxu where they are clearly the underdogs because ... Do you see what I keep saying about Herbert leaving WAY too much of what would make his books make more sense vague and up to the reader's own imagination instead of giving us clear character motivations and explanations on the import of certain people and events that bring us into the story?

The Good? In a story that literally spans across thousands of years, Herbert bridges these books together with a common character, Duncan Idaho. It's not the same Duncan in every book, but he's got the same memories and personality so it works to hold the series together. Though he's more of a minor character in the first three books, he becomes a more central figure as the series progresses and all other bridges to the earlier volumes are washed away. He works pretty well in this role and is probably one of the more entertaining characters in the series for his penchant for saying the exact thing that will most piss people off in any given conversation.

The scope of the story, spanning across thousands of years shows Herbert's true visionary powers. That he was able to concieve of a story spanning so great a time, and account for the passage of time, like the names of planets changing, and show the long term effects of decisions made in the distant past by long dead characters, speaks to his prouesse as a storyteller.

At last, after three books of nothing but plots, within plots, within plots, wrapped in layers upon layers of intrigues, Herbert brings some much needed action back to the series. It's not that I don't like the political intrigues. Herbert is excellent at writing them. It's just that when that was ALL that there was to the story, it started to get a little stale. When characters do nothing but plot, and plot, and plot, and NEVER DO ANYTHING ELSE, it gets boring. People stop caring if anything is going to happen next, because they've seen that it isn't going to. When I first read this book, I loved the ending, because the last 25% of it is basically just non-stop action, which was something I was craving from this series since the first book ended, being a teenaged boy at the time and all.

The Bad? Although Herbert's sexism is not as pronounced in this book as it was in the previous one, it still comes out. Nearly every female character in this book is described by the size of her breasts, or by the attractiveness of her figure. The whole women perfecting the art of sex to enslave their followers thing is just a little too far over the top for my taste, and shows, once again, that Herbert thinks women are the scum of the universe. His mommy must never have held him as a child or something... There's thinking you're better than women because you happen to have been born with a dick, and then there's the complete and utter hatred that Herbert seems to have. He's in a class all of his own.

This book is not very well written. In fact, it's almost downright terribly written. Herbert used to be able to tell a coherant story, but as his career meandered on, he became less and less able to do so. The plot of this book, frankly makes no sense, it goes through several reversals, keeps the readers completely in the dark on the motivation and reasons behind generally everything going on, and skips over serveral key scenes without even referencing them or what went on during them. This book needed a lot more editorial influence than it got. Herbert really needed to sit down with a good and experienced editor and work through the plot for a few months before setting to work on the final drafts. These are things that could easily have been fixed, and I'm completely baffled that they weren't.

Characters do things that make no sense, because their motivations are never made clear to the reader. As such, their actions have no context. When we don't know what drives a character to do what they do, anything that they DO end up doing is confusing and pointless. Emphasis and importance are prescribed to certain people or places for no apparent reason because the author never saw the need to explain his own story to us or elaborate on all of the vagueness. Being vague is not bad in and of itself, you can build up mysteries in your stories to ratchet up the suspense and keep the readers interested. That's NOT the problem here. It's that NOTHING--N O T H I N G--is explained. Not who characters are, why they are important, why they do the things they do, why those things are important, what is going on, why any of that is important, why I should care about any of it, and so on. There's building up mysteries and plot twists, and then there's leaving the readers in the dark to the point that they begin to wonder if even YOU know what you're talking about. Characters start doing wildly irrational things and I can't even tell if it's in their character to do so or not, because they're not developed well enough as people for me to know anything about their personalities.

Nothing that happens in this book feels as though it was part of a flowing narrative where events move seamlessly and flawlessly along until it all comes crashing down at the end. Instead it feels like a whole lot of different scenes that have nothing to do with each other being tied together by the fact that they just happen to occur around the same characters. This book is a monumental failure to tell a story right from the foundation on up, and the worst thing about it is that it could have been fixed with just a little editorial influence. It didn't HAVE to be this bad. But Herbert had to come down with that whole George Lucas Syndrome thing and well, here we are, with a book that desperately needed an editor in the worst way, and never got one.

During almost every single scene in this book I was constantly asking one of the following questions. Why is this important? What does this have to do with anything? Why is this scene even in the book at all? What is going on, and how does it relate to anything else? These are questions that I should never find myself asking during a story. A narrative should be cohesive, with every single scene serving a purpose to the whole, flowing seamlessly from one event to the next and culminating in an epic climax. The entire story of this book is so disjointed and nonsensical that I was constantly trying to figure out how any given scene was supposed to relate to any of the others. And on top of that, several key scenes seem to have been cut near the end. On one page, Teg is plotting a bloody revolution to escape whatever planet he was on. And on the VERY NEXT PAGE, he's on Rakis waiting for a sandworm to arrive with some little girl whose importance STILL has not been touched upon by ANYONE at the very end of the book. I can make GUESSES at her importance to the plot, but Herbert holds her up as a golden child to be worshiped by all, but never tells us WHY. There was CLEARLY a deleted sequence here and the lack of it had me flipping back to see if my book was missing pages. Do you see what I mean when I say this book is disjointed and none of the scenes lead into any of the others? A good 30 pages seems to be completely missing from the published draft of the book.

The Ugly? Duncan Idaho: Teenaged Sex God... Need I say more? Okay, people, I've likely said it before, and I'll say it again, as many times as I need to for the point to sink in. Pedophilia of ANY sort is NOT COOL. Now, imagine if you will, that Duncan Idaho is not a fourteen year old boy, but a fourteen year old girl, and the sex temptress forcing herself on him is a man rather than a woman. Does this scene start to feel a little more uncomfortable to you? It should. It should have been just as uncomfortable to anyone as it is. Pedophila is pedophila, whether the victim is male or female. It is just as wrong either way, SO WHY IN THE HELL IS AN UNDERAGE BOY BEING RAPED BY AN OLDER WOMAN SO ACCEPTED IN FICTION IN OUR SOCIETY!?!?! It is just as bad when it happens to a boy as it is when it happens to a girl, and nothing that you can say will justify it. Pedophila is pedophila. It's the same damn thing, and I shouldn't have to explain why it is to anyone. This is a double standard that has both baffled and angered me for just about as long as I can remember. A young girl has an older man force himself on her and it's horrible and unthinkable, the same thing happens to a boy with an older woman and everyone is like, "good for him." NO!!! NOT GOOD FOR HIM!!! That's called pedophila, AND IT IS WRONG!!! Just because a woman is far less likely to sexually assault a teenaged boy than a man might be to assault a teenaged girl doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, and that it's not just as wrong when it does. Sexual abuse toward ANY child, male or female, is still sexual abuse, and guess what, having sex with a fourteen year old, no matter how many lifetimes of memory he might have, qualifies as sexual abuse.

This book has no protagonist. A Protagonist is the hero of the story, the one around whom the events of the story unfold. A Protagonist is a surrogate for the reader, a character that we can project ourselves onto and imagine having all those fantastical adventures as. They will be faced with some sort of conflict, and be tried and tested, coming to the very brink of ruin before finally learning and growing as a person and overcoming all opposition. Not every story is the same, I will grant you that, and not every story has to follow that exact pattern, but typically, there's at least a central figure in the story around whom events are woven. There's a main character that is vital to the plot, and without whom there is no story. Not so with Heretics of Dune. There are characters in this book. Some of them do things, though the vast majority of them only take up space, but the book isn't really ABOUT any of them. Without a strong central figure to identify with, we're left with the fragmented plot and the terrible writing to draw us into the book, and as they were both awful, what are we left with? Is it so much to ask that a fictional story I'm reading actually BE ABOUT SOMEONE? This is a concept as old as stories themselves, so why do so many authors these days have trouble identifying to the readers who their book is about and why we should care about them? Say what you will about Stephenie Meyer, but she at least knows who her books are about, and how to tell a cohesive story surrounding them. I mean... they SUCK, but at least they're put together better than this crap.

Anyway, despite liking this book in my younger years, I found it terribly written, convoluted, and far too vague for comfort. None of the narrative seems to flow along, and it feels something like a shattered stainglass window rather than a clear picture of a story. None of the character motivations are clear, and far too many plot points are left entirely to the reader's imagination. There is far too much pedophila going on for comfort here, and the fact that I never see anyone bring that point up about this book has me feeling a little nervous over where society is going. Despite bringing some much needed action back to the series, this book fails to entertain because it is written so poorly, and the plot reads like a map for a roadtrip planned out by a crack addict. Compared to God Emperor of Dune, it was a masterpiece. Compared to anything else, it's pretty much crap.

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