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

It took me a few years, but following my reading of Frank Herbert's opening novel Dune, I finally got around to the other books in his eight-part Dune science fiction series...with the final two installments written by his son Brian and sci-fi writer Kevin J. Anderson following the original author's death.  I just finished reading that closing book, titled Sandworms of Dune, and feel convinced that Brian's dad would not have written this kind of ending.  I'll explain why, but first you need to beware that I am going to play the plot spoiler with this article: if you haven't read the Dune series but plan to, you're better off for now just to stop reading at this point and go get the book...

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson began writing Dune novels some ten years after Frank Herbert's death in 1996, by writing prequels first about the three main families of nobles in Dune and then about the Butlerian Jihad, the novel for which came out in 2002.  They published the final two Dune novels in 2006 and 2007...I'm emphasizing the dates for a reason. While Frank Herbert was writing the first six novels of the series from 1969 to 1985, he did not discuss in any detail a war between artificial intelligence and humanity...only that the Butlerian Jihad, which had preceded the events in his first novel by some ten thousand years, had resulted in the universal banning of "thinking machines".  When the movie The Matrix came out in 1999, the stage was set for a war between humanity and artificial intelligence...with one of the machine world's agents, Agent Smith (played by Hugo Weaving) declaring that humans were like viruses on Earth...and that they (the machines) were the cure.  In the 2006 book Hunters of Dune, thinking machine leader Erasmus, earlier introduced in that 2002 prequel book by son Herbert and Anderson, makes an eerily similar comment that humans are germs invading the galaxy...a coincidence? Or may the Dune authors had picked up on the human/machine conflict from the Matrix series and used it, first to set the stage for the Dune conclusion with a prequel novel...and then to use that novel to set up the final resolution for the series, which, like in Matrix Revolutions, the 2003 conclusion of that film series, involved a singular human being with special qualities combining himself with the machines for that resolution.  Sounds terribly, terribly derivative to me and while I enjoyed the writing style of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Andersons, their ending to this series...at least to me...seems unimaginative and copied.  No, I don't believe that Frank Herbert would have done it this way...maybe I was a little too quick in an earlier article to endorse the idea of another writer finishing recalcitrant "Games of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin's much-delayed series-ending books...