Just Finished Reading Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

About a decade after original Dune series author Frank Herbert died...leaving this series in an inconclusive limbo...his son Brian began to team up with another science fiction writer, Kevin J. Anderson, to write prequel books related to the senior Herbert's Dune universe.  Along the way, they discovered old outlines that Frank Herbert had prepared to conclude his series...using these and adding new material of their own, the son and Anderson decided to write two more books to bring everything to a more satisfactory ending: Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune.  I just finished reading the former and am about a third of the way through the latter: this team's writing is easily more readable than that of the original author.  But I'm not surprised: when Brandon Sanderson took on the daunting task of finishing Robert Jordan's protracted and extremely convoluted Wheel of Time fantasy series, he not only was able to ingeniously tie together all of the loose threads that Jordan had created in the first ten books, but wrote in such a way that did honor to the series as a whole.  Now if only George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire ("Game of Thrones") series, would just relent and hire someone else to finish his work, we might actually find out what finally happens in that popular (and long delayed) series sometime during our lifetimes...

I can't describe the characters and events in Hunters of Dune without spoiling for potential readers of this series what happens in the books preceding it.  I will instead just say that a lot of the mysteries that Frank Herbert had created in the volumes he personally wrote are being explained.  Also, it is pretty clear to me that, although I haven't read any of the Dune prequel novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, they drew upon these stories when they wrote Hunters of Dune as well as Sandworms of Dune.  Of particular interest is their 2002 book The Butlerian Jihad...that event, which in the timeline of Dune preceded the opening novel's setting by some ten thousands years, was something that Frank Herbert had alluded to in general passing but never deliberately focused on.  Well, turns out that it was a big, big deal after all...I might read that book after I've finished Sandworms of Dune...