The novel “Hunters of Dune” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson was published for the first time in 2006. It’s the seventh book in the Dune saga and follows “Chapterhouse Dune“.
The crew of the enormous no-ship named Ithaca continues its efforts to outrun the mysterious Enemy who seems determined to capture it. Scytale, the Tleilaxu master held prisoner on the Ithaca, has one last trick up his sleeve to improve his situation.
Murbella continues the complex work of creating a united sisterhood that includes the Bene Gesserit and the Honored Matres who have agreed to follow her. There’s a lot of internal friction and external enemies that make the situation tense on Chapterhouse. Murbella seeks to understand the nature of the Enemy and at the same time strike at the Honored Matres who are still independent, starting with those on Tleilax.
“Hunters of Dune” picks up the saga left interrupted at the end of “Chapterhouse Dune” due to Frank Herbert’s death. His son, Brian, stated that he found his father’s notes and, together with Kevin J. Anderson, developed them to write the conclusion of the saga.
The seventh book in the series was planned as part of a larger project to write prequels, sequels, midquels, and so on set in the Dune universe. However, Brian Herbert stated that examining his father’s notes led him and Kevin J. Anderson to estimate a length of around 1,300 pages. I strongly suspect this conclusion was reached due to Anderson’s standards, as he’s a writer of quantity. For this reason, what was meant to be the seventh book became a pair of books.
The prequels written by these two authors have a completely different style from Frank Herbert’s, and it would be enough to change a few names to make them completely independent of the Dune saga. Instead, these books, which aim to write a conclusion to the original saga, seem to make an effort to at least in some ways imitate Frank Herbert’s style.
The story begins three years after the events at the end of “Chapterhouse Dune” picking up the various unfinished subplots. The story arc Frank Herbert was developing in his last books was tied to the return of the Honored Matres from the so-called Scattering, driven by an all-powerful Enemy. Only two mysterious elderly figures represented the Enemy, and in this new book, the authors give them an identity.
It’s still difficult to determine how much of this novel is the development of notes left by Frank Herbert and how much is the result of ideas developed by his son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson. The connection to the past extends not only to the original books but also to the prequels, with some references that can be significant to the plot. For this reason, it’s important to have read the so-called Legends of Dune trilogy that begins with “The Butlerian Jihad” to understand them. If you don’t want to take this Gom Jabbar test, you should at least read its synopsis.
Frank Herbert’s last two books were criticized and certainly have flaws. However, you could still see the author’s narrative based on sophisticated plots and subtleties typical in the development of the Dune saga. In this new book, however, we increasingly see a narrative in which character choices and other story elements are explicitly explained.
The decision to continue a story that already had specific developments at least forced the authors to maintain a minimum level of quality. This is probably why “Hunters of Dune” seemed to me superior to Kevin J. Anderson’s typical pulp-style space operas. It might be worth reading for fans of the original Dune saga, with the understanding that the final book is also necessary to reach the conclusion. You can find it on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
