As you pointed out, there are soon to be twelve novels written by Brian and Kevin, while there are only six novels written by the original author. For someone who is new to Dune, that means you will have to worm your way through perhaps six novels that are inferior in every which way to the originals, before you reach the originals.

It took me a minute to figure out what Secher was talking about. What do you mean, you have to worm your way through the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels before tackling the original Dune? And then it hit me that there are plenty of readers out there whose natural inclination is to read a series in fictive chronological order. Under that scheme, Secher’s right: The Butlerian Jihad comes first, and then The Machine Crusade, and then more BH/KA subpar-ness, and finally you hit the original Dune several thousand pages later.

So the question is: in what order should you read an SF/F series, and why?

It’s an especially pertinent question to genre fiction, because serial storytelling is so much a part of what we do. I don’t recall anyone ever arguing or much caring whether you should read Richard Ford‘s Independence Day before The Sportswriter, or God forbid skip straight to The Lay of the Land. Even most genre fiction besides science fiction doesn’t have this problem; I don’t think Sue Grafton gives a bloody razor whether you read E Is for Evidence before G Is for Gingivitis or P Is for Pterodactyl. (What, those aren’t the actual titles? Fine, you go look them up.)

But in science fiction and fantasy, it matters deeply whether the Empire struck back before or after the clones attacked. When I sit my children down to watch the Star Wars movies, you can be damn sure that I will make sure they’re properly shocked and surprised to see (spoiler alert!) Darth Vader reveal himself as Luke Skywalker’s father. And I will continue to send anonymous nastygrams to HarperCollins editors insisting that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes before The Magician’s Nephew until they pry those old editions from my cold, dead hands.

This peculiarity of science fiction and fantasy and related genres is a weakness related, I think, to the overemphasis we often place on the plot in such stories. The obsession with “spoilers” is a related weakness. It reduces stories to a hollow enterprise of surface tension and mechanical plot twists. As if an SF/F story is nothing more than manipulative melodrama + funky SFnal idea.

But it’s a weakness I share with so many others. Believe me, if someone had told me ahead of time what happens at the Red Wedding in book 3 of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” I would have been pissed.

So back to the question. What order should you read the books in? The easy answer, of course, is that you should read the series in whatever order the author believes you should read it in. It’s the author’s world, after all, and the author’s decision.

But can we always trust an author to know what’s right for his/her series? George Lucas would have you believe that you’ll get the most out of the Star Wars series if your first exposure to it is through the lens of a mercantile dispute between the Trade Federation and the planet of Naboo. And yet the number of people who would prefer to have seen episodes I-III of Star Wars before episodes IV-VI could probably fit into Yoda’s jockstrap. C.S. Lewis is on record telling readers to start the Narnia series with the somewhat-lacking sixth book, The Magician’s Nephew, instead of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Isaac Asimov suggested that you should read Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation before actually tackling Foundation, which is kind of, well, dumb.

I can think of a number of authors whose judgment grew somewhat… suspect, I guess you could say, as they grew older. Robert Heinlein didn’t hesitate to start trotting out old characters and planting seeds in long-fallow fields as he grumbled his way towards the grave. Orson Scott Card seems hell-bent on creating alternate storylines in the Ender universe, creating great consternation for borderline OCD sufferers like me who can’t decide whether to file Ender’s Shadow before Speaker for the Dead (where it belongs chronologically) or after Children of the Mind (where it belongs in order of publication). (Honestly, I think he would have been better off stopping after Speaker for the Dead.)

So let me answer the fucking question already. Personally, my feeling is that, when presented with a series of interconnected SF novels, it’s best to follow order of publication. I find that there’s a fascinating progression in the way authors gradually develop and unveil their imaginary universes which is part of the fun. One of the oldest and most satisfying traditions of Western literature is to begin stories in medias res, just like Homer did in The Odyssey. This lets the reader develop a sense of the characters, the setting, and the conflict; it gives us a viewpoint for the background that’s to follow. And it taps into that Western cultural drive for discovery. Give us something to explore! Show us the map, point out that blank area on the edge where Thar Be Dragons, and then let us get on over there and explore the sucker. Only textbooks start off by explaining everything outright. Where’s the fun in that?

Of course, there are exceptions where the first published work shouldn’t necessarily be read first. I’m thinking of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which was begun decades before The Lord of the Rings ever saw the light of day — in the trenches during World War I, if I’m not mistaken — but only hit the shelves posthumously in 1977. Even had he completed the book back before LOTR hit the shelves, The Silmarillion would have been, frankly, unpublishable. And yet… if you crack open The Fellowship of the Ring without knowing anything about the First Age and the struggle against Morgoth for the Silmarils, you’re missing crucial context that Tolkien clearly intended to put there all along.

But to Secher Nbiw and all those neophyte Dune readers out there, I say: you’ll get the most bang for your buck if you pick up Dune and work your way through all six Frank Herbert books before you tackle the BH/KA books.

A baby is smothered to death by its mother. Another baby is blown to bits by its mother. One man has weights attached to his ankles and is drowned in a vat of excrement. A character strangles his father and has his grandfather tossed off a cliff. There is a prolonged death by bull-goring, and the drugging and violent rape of a Bene Gesserit woman. One woman is raped to death by hundreds of men, another put in a tank and turned into a mindless chemical factory, a third leaps out a window to her death. Soldiers are flayed alive, others have their legs sliced off. At least half a dozen eyeballs get skewered on knives.

A Fremen slices himself open, another is eviscerated by a sandstorm. A traitor has his eyes, ears, tongue and hands sliced off as punishment. There are dozens of deaths by poison. One man is torn to pieces by a pack of dogs. An entire village goes mad to the point that its citizens smear their bloody innards on walls. A woman is stabbed to death by a “psychic” blade. A dozen whales are brutally gored to death. An 8-year-old boy watches his mother get shot in the head.

Wait, I’m not done. Men get eaten by sandworms. On about a dozen occasions, soldiers from one house or another gleefully fire lasguns into crowds and (specifically) cut down women, children and the elderly. Innocent bystanders are slaughtered by the tens of thousands in battles, explosions. A nuclear conflagration blinds a quarter of a planet’s citizens. Dozens of nameless henchmen are tortured, mutilated, stabbed, raped and strangled in graphic detail. Prisoners are framed and executed to public applause. Heads hang on spikes. Corpses are hung on walls to rot. Blood drips from ceilings and puddles on floors. A group of scientists leap into a living vivisection machine, causing blood, gore and body parts to spray all over the attending crowd.

Had enough? I could go on.

We all understand that humans are violent creatures. Frank Herbert, author of the original Dune books, was not above the occasional scene of shocking brutality. But too often Herbert fils and hired gun Kevin Anderson settle for such graphic sensationalism in lieu of subtlety or insight. There’s no need to chastise the authors for not slavishly imitating the beloved originals — but couldn’t they have peeled back the covers on Herbert pere‘s grand mythic and ecologic themes, just a little bit?

Instead we get gore, buckets of it. Alongside the gore the authors meticulously develop plots and counter-plots over hundreds of pages. Much of the royal intrigue is quite clever, but like the bloodshed, excessive. We get to learn the background stories behind many of the minor characters in the original Dune series (including Duncan Idaho, Liet Kynes, Emperor Shaddam, and others). But many of these tales would have been better left as unexplored bits of background texture. (Was anyone really clamoring to know how “Beast” Rabban got his nickname?)

Certain other major characters are diminished by their extended treatment. As written by Frank Herbert, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was a ruthless and villainous antagonist to the Atreides family, not above the occasional bit of sadism to get his way; as written by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, he’s a cartoon, constantly going out of his way to sodomize, pillage, maim and torture the innocent. (And let’s not ignore the fact that the prequel authors play up and make an issue of the Baron’s homosexual tendencies in a way that smacks of gay-baiting.)

Probably the greatest sin that the Dune prequels commit is the same sin that The Phantom Menace committed by revealing C-3PO’s creator: they’ve made a much-studied and richly detailed universe a smaller place.