The 1969 novel Dune Messiah is a sequel to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi traditional Dune. TV author Andrea Kail is a diehard fan of the unique Dune, however has at all times discovered the sequel disappointing.

“Overall, as a book, it just feels like it’s very unformed,” Kail says in Episode 537 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It just felt like, ‘These are the ideas, and I put these ideas down, and here’s a first draft. Now let’s go back and fix it.’ And then, no, never went back to fix it.”

Dune Messiah picks up 12 years after the unique novel, when the younger hero Paul Atreides has change into a despotic emperor. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley liked the idea of the e book, however felt that Paul’s supernatural powers made the story much less thrilling than it may need been.

“The reason I wanted to read this is because I was really fascinated by this idea that you take the messiah hero from the first book that everybody loves and show him having flaws and becoming a bad ruler,” he says. “But I was a little disappointed in that I felt like Paul wasn’t actually flawed. Because he has no choice, because he’s doing his best to try to avoid the worst futures he can see, I felt like that made it less interesting than if he was actually making choices and succumbing to the temptations of power.”

Science fiction creator Rajan Khanna loved the e book regardless of its flaws, and says that sure scenes from it are nonetheless burned into his mind from the primary time he learn it. “It doesn’t live up to the first novel, but I also think it’s really hard for anything to live up to that novel, because it’s one of my favorite novels of all time,” he says. “But I do think that there’s a lot of cool stuff in there.”

Science fiction creator Matthew Kressel had combined emotions about Dune Messiah, however that hasn’t dimmed his enthusiasm for the Dune collection as a complete. “The universe that Herbert created is amazing,” he says. “I had a little bit of a problem with the execution. The first two thirds it’s kind of slow, but then it picks up in the last third. I have some problems with the ending, but still I’m excited to continue reading the next book.”

Listen to the entire interview with Andrea Kail, Rajan Khanna, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 537 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And try some highlights from the dialogue under.

Andrea Kail on studying Dune Messiah:

Dune is likely one of the books that made me need to be a author. It was one of many three foundational books of my childhood that fashioned who I used to be. And so I learn it once I was possibly about 13 or 14 and simply devoured it up. And in fact, the very first thing you do once you end a e book that you simply love is you go run for the sequel. So I ran for the sequel, and I learn Dune Messiah, and it was not the identical. It was a really totally different expertise. It was very perplexing. It was miserable. I simply didn’t know what was occurring. And I learn all of them—I went on to learn the following two that had been obtainable on the time—nevertheless it simply type of put me off the entire thing, so to talk. So coming again to it now, I hoped for a unique expertise, studying it once more as an grownup. And I didn’t really get that. It was form of the identical expertise.

Matthew Kressel on perspective:

So a lot [in Dune Messiah] occurs off-screen, which is type of loopy when you consider it, as a result of Herbert does this point-of-view switching in the midst of the web page, which just about no author does right this moment—or not less than in speculative fiction that I learn, I infrequently see that point-of-view switching. And what I imply by that, if individuals aren’t clear about it, is that you simply’re in somebody’s head and then you definately’re instantly in another person’s head on the identical web page. Most writers, they’ll put both a scene break or a chapter break to modify that, however Herbert doesn’t do this. So it’s not like he can’t be of their perspective when this occurs, he simply decides to not.

David Barr Kirtley on feminine characters:

I believed all the feminine characters weren’t effectively deployed on this novel. I’ll simply speak about Alia a little bit bit. She’s a younger teenager at this level within the story, however she was born with the information and reminiscences of this entire line of smart previous ladies. And she simply acts like a young person. It was such a bizarre characterization of her, given what’s established about her, that her thoughts has this entire archive of all these totally different lives and knowledge. But it looks as if that doesn’t have an effect on her characterization nearly in any respect, in a approach I discovered actually, actually odd.

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