The Book Blawg

Sandworms of Dune, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

Well, ok.

First, I should congratulate myself for reading all fourteen Dune novels in less than a year. I don't know how many pages that was, but it was a lot. Of course, this is coming from someone who has read War and Peace twice so I guess it's not too surprising.

So Sandworms was good. It had a plot that moved along. It tied up loose ends and answered questions. I was a little disappointed in the ending - not how it ended, but how the ending was written. Sometimes, I get to the end of a book and get the distinct feeling that the author was just tired of writing it and wanted to finish it up. Or had a deadline. Some of John Grisham's later novels are like that - exciting plot, with the wrap-up coming as almost an afterthought. At the end of Sandworms, we learn the identity of the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach. I was a bit surprised, but so be it. But do you remember the scene in Dune when Paul drank the water of life and could see the paths of the future, and accessed his other memories? Or when Leto II took the sandtrout as his second skin and began his transformation into the worm? This scene, when Duncan Idaho becomes both man and machine, gave me no such feeling of awe. The writing gives me no idea what that must have been like, what impact it had on him or on others. We get facts, but no vision, no gravitas to the most important single moment in the Dune universe.

So I liked it. But it could have been better.