House Harkonnen (Dune: House Trilogy, Book 2)
by Brian Herbert, Kevin Anderson

List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $3.74
You Save: $4.25 (53%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of House Harkonnen (Dune: House Trilogy, Book 2)

Book Review: Chapter after chapter of nothing
Summary: 2 Stars

Question number two: How many repetitive, meaningless phrases can you think of? Here are a few of my favorites that get over used in this book: "the room smelled of lubricants and chemicals," "the tart coolness of the cidrit juice," "an archipelago of rocks," (wait an archipelago is a series of small islands...I guess it's better not to ask), "the oily liquid." It gets even better when you are continually reminded of people thinking and talking about their "plans within plans" and "tricks within tricks" and "wheels within wheels" and "plots within plots" I don't want to read dialogue where people say that they are clever, I want them to be clever. Oh, here's an original and clever description of a fat man direct from the book: "the roly-poly appearance." Let's not forget the timeless passages that put us in mind of a future more than 10,000 years from today, where they will still use lovely phrases like "jury-rigged systems."

Question number three: What are some of the silliest things you can think of? How about raseals, clabsters, whale fur, or an elecran (a water/electricity elemental)?

Question number four: How well can you represent diversity? Here we get to see each diverse culture simplified down to one export: whale fur, spice; or one biome: forests, swamps, desert, ocean, islands. Arrakis has been purported to be a oddity in the universe, having a most extreme and individual climate. Might we safely assume that every other world could spawn at least half as much diversity as our earth?

Herbert junior and Anderson are trying too hard to give us as many new and different exotic worlds that the entire book (and the prequel cycle) loses its focus, and is especially lacking in the core of the story because, well there is no core of the story. The book is like layers of an onion, and you can peel back layer after layer, but what you are left with when you get to the last layer is nothing.

The characters lack any real personality. They all continuously talk about the same things. Every thought, decision, or concern either involves a reference to the "thinking machines" and "the Butlerian Jihad" or refers to the "dirty Tleilaxu" or revolves around "the Bene Gesserit witches" and "their damnable breeding programs." All the main characters seem to have much the same opinions about these and other metaphysical issues that you would be amazed that they are supposed to be in conflict with each other. Sure they take different courses of action (the Harkonnens kill for pleasure, the Atreides try to make choices that reflect an honor bound system) but they all have they same opinions about the greater universe at large, and there is no uniqueness among them that can be attributable to varying cultures. Even the Fremen seem to have a much wider grasp on the workings of the entire Imperium than was ever suggested in the first three Dune books of Frank Herbert. If everyone knows everything, where is the conflict?

It's a joke the way they describe how Rabban began to be called "Beast Rabban" and just as trivial to learn how Leto would first be called "Leto the Just."

Again, as with their other two books I have reviewed, they rush through every scene, every event, every important moment, and everything becomes snippets of the real meat, and we never get any real meat.

Look at the specificity of this quote: "He applied chemicals to his face and hands to leach the remaining color from his already pale flesh, and smeared wrinkling substances on his face to give himself the gray-skinned, shriveled appearance of a Tleilaxu overlord." Couldn't they do a little research and find a more specific agent that would make your face turn gray/pale? Nope...let's just call them chemicals...and "wrinkling substances" to make your skin wrinkle...as if it would have an immediate effect anyway...when you read lines like this, you realize just how amateur these writers are...

There is also no continuity from chapter to chapter. They can't even remember what they wrote previously and we get more repetition where we don't need it. The first time we come to Dominic Vernius' hiding hole, it is described with rugs strewn about to make it feel more like home. Three years later we are back in the same place, and the writers feel compelled to write that it "is strewn with rugs to make it feel more like home."

Frank Herbert originally intended to write Dune as an ecological treatise based upon the character of Pardot Kynes. When he realized that he didn't have a compelling story, he approached the issue from a different angle and we got Dune. These two writers should have realized that if Frank didn't want to write these prequels because there was no core conflict, then they either should have avoided the subject like the plague, or they should have created a core conflict. Instead they have given us many short and rather meaningless conflicts, conflicts that do more to dilute and distort the Dune universe than enhance it. Chapter after chapter of nothing...little bits and pieces of little meaningless events. There is no grand arc to the story, no grand scheme to any of the writing.

Question number five: Why should you read this book? Well, if your life has no purpose and you just want to fill it up with meaningless drivel, here are 700+ pages of it. Or maybe you are just a true sicko like this reviewer, and feel the need to read everything Dune out of respect for the original series by the Elder Herbert. Either way, enjoy!

Summary of House Harkonnen (Dune: House Trilogy, Book 2)

Everything has its cost. We pay to create our future, we pay for the mistakes of the past. We pay for every change we make--and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change.

Ultimately this is the theme of a compelling game of consequences, choices, and responsibility, a study of Leto's growth into power and the price of politics and love. --Gary S. Dalkin, Amazon.co.uk

Literature & Fiction Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction
• Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction