The Butlerian Jihad

Just finished reading Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson, the first book of their most recent trilogy set in Frank Herbert's Dune universe. The book presumes to tell the story repeatedly aluded to in the Dune series, about humans overthrowing their "thinking machine" masters 10,000 years before.

The book is somewhat better than the authors' House trilogy. I think having freed themselves of the restraints of the original Dune universe, they were able to give free rein to their imaginations and put out a better product. However, the bad prose that characterized the House trilogy remains. It seems like the authors at some point in their lives took a really bad creative writing class where they were told to use lots of flowery prose with tons of unnecessary (and ridiculous sounding) adjectives. For example, Norma never runs, she is carried by her legs. And they are never just legs, they are short legs. And it's diminutive Norma (they reuse the same adjectives over and over again ad nauseaum). So "Norma ran" becomes "Norma's short legs carried her diminutive body." Rinse, blather and repeat for 675 pages. As just one more example, on page 593, a ship doesn't enter and exit Jupiter's gravity well. Instead we are treated to the following monuments to absurd prose: "the gas giant reached out to them, beckoning with a siren song of physics" and "breaking free of the elastic threads of gravity."

Even though the prose is no better, the story is. They did a relatively good job crafting the plot, and depicting the psychology of the struggle. Iblis Ginjo, Vorian Atreides, Serena Butler and Xavier Harkonnen are depicted realistically - if somewhat one-dimensionally. Other characters, e.g. Agamemnon, are less believable. Could he truly believe that "the barbarians didn't understand freedom or free will" even as they were revolting against the machines' rule? It is unlikely that he could be that oblivious to reality. (As an aside, the whole "brain in a jar" concept is pretty 1930s. No wonder the "philsophical" "deep-thinking" 2000-year-old cogitors are so unrealistically oblivious to the consequences of their actions. They're idiots. Only an idiot would have his brain transfered to a glass jar.) The Titans as a whole are very poorly motivated. Let's say Omnius succeeds in its goal of exterminating humans and the Titans succeed in their goal of regaining power from Omnius. What exactly would they be the rulers of? Absurd.

On the other hand, the parallel between the cymeks and the human rulers of Poritrin (whose motivations do seem more plausible than the cymeks) is quite enlightening. It goes along the lines of the "good guys vs. bad guys" theme which I explored in my review of House Corrino. In that review I pointed out that the authors took a simplistic view of good vs. evil and did not consider valuable avenues of exploration in their writing. The fact that they do so here shows considerable growth in their writing. I look forward to reading The Machine Crusade and The Battle of Corrin (the latter only when it comes out in paperback, the books are nowhere near good enough to merit plunking down $20 for).

The authors' complete ignorance of science is blatantly obvious in almost every chapter. The absence of even a hint of the science and mathematics behind the "inventions" of Tio Holtzman and Norma Cenva, despite "discussing" them at great length, is quite odd. The authors mention "arithmetic"; what meaningful science involves only arithmetic? What calculations could their solvers work on after only the most basic training? At one point, one of the solvers sabotages a result by "moving a decimal point" and claiming nobody would notice. If the authors knew ANYTHING about mathematics, they would understand that moving a decimal point is the mistake MOST LIKELY to be noticed. If I'm expecting an answer of 10, and you give me 5 or 20 I might not notice. But if you give me 1 or 100 I will definitely notice. Duh! The science-related quotes that start many chapters are meaningless as well.

Despite the derivativeness of the robot Erasmus, they nevertheless managed to make him interesting in a macabre sort of way. What is unrealistic is that he would be so completely clueless about human behavior. Think Dr. Mengele meets the Terminator. If intelligence means the ability to learn, then Erasmus must not be particularly intelligent. (After all his "study", how could he not predict the reaction to the murder he commits?) The relationship between machines and humans at large is somehow odd. Things like robots serving as drivers of a horse-drawn carriage for a human are not realistic in light of the master-slave relationship. The resources dedicated to keeping the humans alive for slave labor are inconsistent with Omnius's oft-mentioned desire for efficiency. What do humans provide for the machines that they could not more quickly provide for themselves while consuming fewer resources? Surely a machine of some sort could do any required work faster than slave labor (which has long been known to lead to low-quality results). The final chapters of the revolt and the surprise experienced by Erasmus and Omnius on the other hand could form a fascinating study in "AI psychology" if such a thing existed.

There are several gaps in the plot, a fact which I would be remiss in not mentioning. Without providing any spoilers, I can provide one example. The flaw in the defensive measures the humans used at Salusa Secundus and Giedi Prime was glaringly obvious. That the machines did not take advantage of it in their raid on Salusa Secundus AND that no human noticed the flaw either in the original design or when Xavier Harkonnen visited Giedi Prime for the specific purpose of evaluating their defenses simply defies belief.

One last disappointment in the book is that the authors clumsy attempts at foreshadowing gave me what I believe is conclusive proof of where they are headed in "Dune 7." On page 224 it says, "By the time humans expanded into those distant star systems, Omnius would already be there. Waiting." And in House Corrino, we were already treated to "ancient enemy ... future enemy" (when Navigator D'murr Pilru goes off course because of the amal). Other brief comments in House Corrino (regarding the unnamed planet that Tleilaxu Master Ajidica was setting up to take his BG axlotl tank) made me hopeful that they might head off in another direction. But now I have no doubt, the Honored Maitres and others returning from the scattering are fleeing thinking machines. This bothers me, as I am fairly certain that is NOT the path that Frank Herbert would have taken had he been alive to write Dune 7 himself.

My last thought, which really encompasses everything mentioned above, is that the story is not bad (you really want to keep reading to see what happens next), but the writing is bad, bad, bad. These guys need a good editor like nobody's business.