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.

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.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of hate out there for Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson because of these books. Says the top review on Amazon for Dune: House Atreides: “One read through on this book and you will probably need to brush your teeth just to get the bad taste out of your mouth.” Sixteen people have given their “helpful” stamp of approval to an Amazon review of The Battle of Corrin in which the critic says: “These books are horrible. If you loved Dune or good writing or have any kind of intelligence, you will avoid them. Don’t help Brian Herbert cash in on his father’s legacy with such garbage. Brian, please stop doing this to your father’s legacy. Grow up, be a man, and make money off your own ideas rather than doing this.” David Itzkoff of the New York Times more politely summed up the criticism in his review of Hunters of Dune by saying, “For ‘Dune,’ it’s probably time to let the fields lay fallow for a while.”

What do I think of the prequels? I read the first prequel trilogy — Dune: House Atreides, Dune: House Harkonnen, and Dune: House Corrino — and I found them pretty gawdawful. Here’s what I had to say in my review, elsewhere on this blog:

Frank Herbert… 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.

So I haven’t taken the time to tackle any of the remaining books in the series. But just because I don’t care for what Brian and Kevin have done with the series doesn’t mean that I resent them for continuing the series. All snarking aside, I say to you, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson: go, write more!

Why?

Well, every time one of these second-rate novels pops up on the new releases shelf of your local Barnes & Noble, new eyeballs are drawn into the series. People who haven’t read the originals in a while dust them off and start in on them again. The series sales figures inflate even further — “40 kajazillion Dune books in print!” — and publishers keep cranking out new dustjackets and new commemorative editions of the original. Hollywood comes calling every dozen years or so, and the cycle of attention continues.

There’s a reason people call long-running series like Dune “franchises.” I find it very interesting that Webster’s gives one definition of “franchise” as “Magnanimity; generosity; liberality; frankness; nobility.” Frank Herbert had a fantastic thoroughbred of a novel. Now that he’s gone to the Great Spice Mass in the Sky, he’s handed the reins to that workhorse over to someone else to ride for a while. Perhaps he’ll do great things with that horse, perhaps he’ll just stumble around a little bit. But hopefully, once he’s made what use he can of the horse, he’ll hand on the reins to someone else.

Okay, let me abandon the horse metaphor — it should be painfully obvious by now that I know nothing about horses — and that I tend to mix metaphors when I’m tired. Let me say simply that great works of art grow and change with the times and with the audience. Keeping a piece of art locked up and blocked off restricts its growth. It becomes a museum piece, a snapshot of an earlier time.

I mean, honestly, would the Mona Lisa remain such a revered work of art if it hadn’t been endlessly reproduced, deconstructed, mustachioed and bespectacled by later artists, commentators, and satirists? Closer to home, would The Lord of the Rings be as relevant today without Peter Jackson’s often-brilliant-if-sometimes-over-the-top films? Would you know the names Conan and Cthulu if other authors hadn’t taken up their banners? Would you have any confidence that your kids would know who the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion were if not for the subsequent efforts of Ruth Plumly Thompson, John R. Neill, Philip Jose Farmer, and Gregory Maguire — not to mention the Victor Fleming film and even The Wiz?

Nobody’s going to confuse the post-Herbert Dune books with the originals — and I can’t imagine that Brian Herbert would want them to. The originals will survive the worst elaborations Brian and Kevin throw at them. I certainly plan on re-reading them a few more times before I go join Frank in the Great Spice Mass in the Sky.

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.