Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

M. Elizabeth Pietrzak on House Atreides wrote:The entire Pardo Kynes story simply does not belong in this novel. It is little more than a fleshed out version of Appendix One from Dune, and Frank Herbert wrote a more compelling version in 6 or 7 pages than son Herbert and co-writer Anderson do with a dozen chapters. Pluck this plotline out of this book altogether and make it a smaller, separate book of its own. It's presence here shows us how little these two really know about storytelling.

This book feels more like a color by numbers painting that a child could easily do, rather than a complex and intriguing work of art.

Let's talk about Dune now. First off, how did your collaboration with Brian Herbert come about? You didn't already know him, did you?


No, I didn't know him. But the science fiction community is like a small, tightly-knit dysfunctional family. We all either know each other or have mutual friends. So it's not really hard to get in touch with someone. I was always such a huge Dune fan, and had read all six of his books. Frank's last Dune book was called Chapterhouse Dune and it ends on a cliffhanger. It builds up, and then it just ends. As a Dune fan, I couldn't stand it. I mean, Frank Herbert died, so I couldn't expect him to finish it, but his son Brian was an established science fiction writer. In fact, Frank's last published book, entitled Man of Two Worlds, was co-written with Brian. So I knew that they had worked together and that Brian had obviously followed in his father's footsteps. But after ten years of waiting, I was beginning to lose hope that Brian was going to write the next Dune book that I wanted to read. Finally, through a mutual friend, I sent a letter introducing myself. By this time, I had quite a few credits, some award nominations, and had written a bunch of Star Wars and X-Files books, so that proved not just that I'm a hack, but that I could write in somebody else's universe and do a good job at it. So I sent him some samples of my books and asked him if he was ever going to write this book, because if he was, that I wanted to read it. And, if he was putting it off, or didn't know what you were going to do the rest of the Dune story, could I help you with it or offer my assistance -- or if you're not going to do it at all, could I do it. The first line of my letter was, "What you just heard was a shot in the dark." Because I had finally convinced myself that I had nothing to lose anyway. If he said no, well that was all there would be to it. But Brian called me a little later after he received the letter and -- not surprisingly, although I didn't think of it at the time -- Brian had many people who had asked to write more Dune books.