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I totally agree with this. One of the strengths of the original Dune series is how willing Frank Herbert is to leave things unsaid -- it's a complex universe that has lost a lot of knowledge, just like ours! It covers timespans that admit archaeology! The idea that there's an accessible succinct narrative arc that ties the story up in a neat little bow is antithetical to the strengths of the original series, in my opinion.

That may the difference between good world-building and what people think good world-building is.

People think that if the author doesn't know everything about the world, it's not "fleshed out". But if you look to some of the best fiction out there, the world is more suggested than built.

I think a good example of this is George Lucas. He went from good to bad by doing the thing people perceived as good. In the original Star Wars trilogy, things just are. The Clone Wars were a line. A throwaway to explain why Leia was seeking out Obi-Wan never having even seen the man. Han and all of his pre-trilogy relationships are given surface level explanations. You never go deep. What happens between A New Hope and Empire is suggested, alluded to, but never explained. And why should they be explained? All the characters know these things. There's no need to exposit these things again. You're given the impression that there exists a much larger world than the small window you've seen.

Then, in the prequel trilogy, everything is presented as backstory to some other element. Stormtroopers are the successors of the Clone Troopers who are cloned from Jango Fett who had a clone made of himself he named Boba. Of course, Jango is also a bounty hunter. Anakin is from Tatooine. Chewbacca rolled with Yoda back in the day. We know, biologically, exactly what allows people to access the Force. And on and on. Everything is given an explanation. And that, ironically, makes the world feel a lot smaller.

I loved Dune, and while I don't think all the original sequels were as strong, I enjoyed them all and have reread them several times over the years.

I slogged my way through the first couple of his son's work, but I read the first page of Butlerian Jihad and, for the first time in my life, threw the book against the wall and tossed it in the garbage.

    Inside his pyramid-shaped vessel, the cymek general
    Agamemnon led the attack. Logical thinking machines
    did not care about glory or revenge. But Agamemnon
    certainly did. Fully alert inside his preservation
    cannister, his human brain watched the plans unfold.

If you're a fan of Dune and made it all the way through this paragraph without feeling ill, then you're a stronger person than I.

I so wanted the Bulterian Jihad story to be good, or at least decent, because it was always the most intriguing part of the prehistory to me. Oh well.

There are strong indicators that "Jihad" was used not in a sense of armed struggle there, but more akin to a social revolution; "thinking machines" were declared a problem not because they were a physical threat a la Saberhagen's Berserkers, but because their influence on society was deemed overly negative.

Given that, a book that would cover the Jihad would probably be another philosophical treatise in the vein of God-Emperor of Dune.

The Dune Encyclopedia had a couple of articles on the Butlerian Jihad. All of the material was invented for that work -- Frank Herbert's novels only had the barest shred of explanation of what it was -- but their theory was fairly reasonable, and were consistent with the spirit of his writing. (In summary, a hospital's "self-programming computer" terminated a Bene Gesserit woman's pregnancy; her protests ignited existing tensions against computers and high technology.)

Sounds like the hackneyed portrayal of Harkonnen as a super villain who has to refer to himself in the third person while exposition dumping his plan to a nephew who already knows who he is.

This a really strong, and very good breakdown of the problems with the prequels. They essentially take the complex, developed characters of Frank Herbert and turn them into into trite caricatures of themselves.

> These 2 books largely tie the Frank Herbert Dune universe with the B. Herbert/K. Anderson Dune universe. And that seemed quite forced to me and, cynically, felt like an attempt to force you to read their Dune prequel trilogy

I really like the Frank Herbert books. They are on my favorites shelf. The sequel/prequel books were just ok, and felt like they were trying to fill in details that were left to the reader by Frank Herbert. By filling in the details, I'm sure the thought was we are completing the story... but that story was already told.

It's interesting (and perhaps accurate) that you critique the use of lazy themes in backstory, but praise the effortlessness of leaving the backstory out. (I've not read the new stuff myself)