The novel “The Battle of Corrin” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson was published for the first time in 2004. It’s the third book in the Legends of Dune trilogy and follows “The Machine Crusade“.
Omnius has ordered the development of a virus to attack free humanity at the suggestion of a traitor. Erasmus and a Tlulaxa prisoner create a virus with a direct mortality rate of 43% and attack the planets of the League of Nobles. Doctor Raquella Berto-Anirul realizes that patients who regularly consume the spice imported from Arrakis are more likely to not get sick or at least recover.
For Omnius, bacteriological warfare is only the first step in an offensive aimed at striking at the heart of free humanity. However, Vorian Atreides wants to start a counteroffensive to attack the planets controlled by the thinking machines. To do so, he must use spaceships that use space-folding technology, which Norma Cenva hasn’t yet managed to make risk-free.
About a century after the start of the Butlerian Jihad, the war between humanity and the sentient machines enters its final phase. There’s a leap forward in time after the end of “The Machine Crusade” and now Vorian Atreides is the only one of the original characters who fight against the thinking machines and the cymeks. After a phase that seems substantially stalemate between the contenders, something changes in their fight.
Omnius is supposed to be a very powerful artificial intelligence and yet it needs a human traitor to advise it to use bacteriological warfare as a strategy. It’s also supposed to be an absolutely rational entity but often behaves like an egocentric and emotional entity. The worst enemy of humanity seems like a chatbot trained to have the attitude of an ancient king with a gigantic ego but not to be a conqueror.
It’s not that humanity seems much better. In the Legends of Dune, humans fight the thinking machines that had kept their ancestors as slaves and continue to use humans as slaves. However, on various planets of the League of Nobles, slavery is legal. The war against the thinking machines seems to stimulate the worst of humanity and in this final novel religious fanaticism is again a central element.
One wonders if this humanity deserves to be saved but its best elements are indeed of great value and in “The Battle of Corrin” they show their extraordinary skills. These are skills that are in some cases crucial in the creation of key organizations in the history of the Dune fictional universe and of some great houses. In the end, the story of that origin is the only reason for the existence of this trilogy.
The end of “The Battle of Corrin” also shows the reasons for the feud between the Atreides and the Harkonnen. The impression is that the authors made up some forced situations in which there are characters who behave in certain ways different from their usual ones with the sole purpose of obtaining certain plot developments. In this case, all this happens despite the past interpersonal relationships between the characters involved.
If you already read the two previous books, you already know that you shouldn’t expect a style even remotely close to Frank Herbert’s. Where the Dune novels show depth and subtlety, these prequels are crude space operas. There’s a strong sense that these are fanfiction in which Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson interpret certain ideas by Frank Herbert as they see fit. Anderson can easily write thousands of pages but the quantity is far from the quality of the original novels.
If you have already read the previous two novels, you might as well finish the Legends of Dune with “The Battle of Corrin” and the final phase of the Butlerian Jihad. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have continued to write prequels and other novels set in the Dune universe but I have grown tired of reading them because their merits seem few and their flaws many. If you at least complete the Legends of Dune trilogy, you can say that you fall into the definition of a human being. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
