Rating: 
Summary: Dune Cartoon
Review: A lost opportunity to develop the origins of the Dune series. Anyone buying this book hoping for a literature level science fiction read will be sorely disappointed. At best this effort is a cartoon; a space opera without plot, depth, characters or anything else that you look for in adult fiction. One star is a gift for this total miss.
Rating: 
Summary: Best SF novel of 2002!
Review: once again the writing team of Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert have brought Frank Herbert's epic vision of the distant future alive in Dune:Butlerian Jihad!the authors have taken us thousands of years in the past of the dune universe to tell us one of the most enduring legends in the saga: the war against the machines!this epic space opera is about how the humans battled the genocidal machines! You will see this horrible galactic war through the eyes of some unforgettable characters!
Serena Butler-this novel's heroine who's uses her tragic grief
to fuel a holy war a jihad against the evil machines!Xavier Harkonnen-Serena's lover and supreme commander of his planet, Salusa Secundus. Believe it or not a heroic Harkonnen! Vorian Atreides- the human son of the evil cymek titan Agamemnon. Erasmus-the sadistic robot scientist who seeks to understand all humans who's cruel deed against Serena will fuel of her holy war!
Tito Holtzman-the brilliant scientist who struggles to find a weapon to defeat the machines.Norman Cenva- the daughter of powerful sorceress, Zufa who lacks her mother's telepathic powers but makes up for it with her brilliant mathmatical mind!Selim-the young exile on Arrakis who binds himself to the sandworms.Iblis Ginjo- human slave leader on earth who starts a revolt against their brutal machine masters. The authors's world building skills are incredible. The battle scenes in this book are outstanding as the authors describe in great relish battles scenes in space and on planets!One of the things I love about this book is the theme of indominable human spirit against the face of slavery and genocide! Pick up this book and watch the battle between the humans and evil machine masters for fate of the universe!
Rating:
Summary: made me angry
Review: This book promises to explain and show all these wonderful things that we have grown to love in the dune series and even the prequels and then just as everything FINALLY starts to get rolling it ends.. nothing.. zip zero.. this book has absolutely no quality whatsoever and dont give anyone the satisfaction of your money for it or the frustration to yourself of reading it.
Rating:
Summary: I want to burn this book
Review: "The Butlerian Jihad" had some interesting ideas, and shone some light on the roots of major forces and ideas present in the original Dune books... but other than that...It's just awful, and I can't sum it up any better. The Dune books literally changed the way I see my world, and then this atrocity comes along bearing the Dune name. No political intrigue... no poetic composition... no layering of plots... no interesting characters... no mind-bending concepts of reality... no epic ideas or scope... nothing. Every intriguing idea in the book struggles for a few pages and fizzles out, drowning in the fog of the meaningless wash in between. Most epic concepts were totally bungled in their execution; the insane cruelty of the Machines and the cymeks was strangely muted by the same repetitive and annoying generic devastation, and the death of Duncan Idaho in the original book outweighed the nuclear devastation of Earth in "The Butlerian Jihad" in emotional impact. The liner notes were even wrong... the book never even touches on the Battle of Corrin, and despite claims of showing how the Houses Atreides and Harkonnen are set as bitter enemies, shows how an Atreides and a Harkonnen come together as allies in fighting the Machines. ...Huh?! Maybe I'm missing half of the book in my copy. I'm kinda doubting it. If the original "Dune" books are a luxury cruise ship, "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad" is a leaky rubber dinghy with a smelly captain and a five-horsepower trolling motor. And it's out of gas. I'm not a writer, and I'm not a pro critic, and frankly, other than the fact that I speak English I'm not qualified to write a literary review... I'm just a guy who really loved the Dune series and wanted to cry when he finished this one. I'm really disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Done with "Dune"
Review: To be succinct, this is a bad book. Poorly written, slackly plotted, full of cliches and predicabilities, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have succeeded in grinding Frank Herbert's brilliant creation into pure, unreadable hackwork. Their previous trilogy of "Dune" prequels ("House Atreides", "House Harkonnen" and "House Corinno") was acceptable at best, but at least held my interest, even as I was aware that the overall quality of the writing was deteriorating as the series progressed. Now, however, they cannot provoke even the momentary suspension of disbelief, as every page, practically every paragraph, is larded with indigestible chunks of bad writing. This guys have succeeded in putting me off the "Dune" universe for good, something that Frank Herbert, even at his worst, never came close to doing. Good work, fellows, you have managed to convert gold into dross.
Rating: 
Summary: Ideas aren't bad, but execution is execrable
Review: The writing in this novel is not even up to the standard of the three "House" prequels this team has already cranked out. These authors need to repeat the mantra "Show, don't tell" a thousand times. They continuously tell the back stories of the characters rather than showing them by their actions and interactions. When the story returns to the characters, the authors compound this failure by repeating the back stories. It's a shame the writing gets in the way of the story the authors try to tell. Generally, the story is not bad. There are a couple of occasions when characters respond in ways that seem excessively simple-minded; motivations do not always seem to match to response in the book. I would not encourage anyone who isn't already a Dune fan to pick this book up. This book fails to follow basic creative writing rules.
Rating:
Summary: Profoundly Disappointing
Review: I have been reading the Dune books and pondering the Butlerian Jihad for 30 years; but this was a terrible disappointment. It appears that TOR books told Herbert/Anderson to keep the book simple, the sentences short, and put in lots of slam-bang action - never mind what the other Dune books were about. What a sickening, catastrophic waste! The 4th grader video game junkies for whom this is obviously written will probably not buy this book anyway, and certainly will not appreciate what is going on. And oh yeah! Never mind about the relativistic problems of interstellar travel that Holtzman/Cenva solved (TOR told Herbert/Anderson.); never mind what an incredible break-through that could have been. If you guys worry about the relativistic problems, your book won't have enough action - so just gloss it over - never mind that it ruins the whole point. What a crock.
Rating:
Summary: plunder and defication
Review: I have read many books in my days, but i can honestly say that this was the first book i simply could not finish. It seems that with every consiquential installment of the series, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson violate the brilliant principles and conventions laid down by Frank Hurbert. To sum up what is wrong with this book: The charicters are awful, not one of them has any real deminsion besides what is directly in fron of their face. The writing quality could be described as highschooler with the plot falling still farther behind with its deeply pervasive inplausabilites (especially making Hotzman a hack, im never going to forgive that) that make it impossible to lend any credibility to at all to anything that is happening. Add to that the god-awful dialogue and things like the 'love' scenes with Xeavier and Serena and you have passages that were so poor that they were humiliating just to read. Of course all of this would just make for a bad book if it weren't for the fact that this is a Dune book. The Butlerian Jihad, held within Frank Hurbert's vast and ingenious universe should have been perhaps the greatest science fiction novel of all time. Instead it is an unreadable travesty. I genuinely wonder if Brian is reading his father's old books, and if he is, how he could publish these. It should be vastly abundant that he can not write at anywhere near the level he should be when trying to write a Dune book. It's not that i have anything against him writing the book, I absolutely love the Dune universe, and am always hungry for more, but untill Brian can write for it, I really wish he would stop destroying his father's lifes work.
Rating:
Summary: Where's Jar Jar?
Review: I grew up on Dune. I actually loved all the books, up to Chapterhouse: Dune. What I've always liked about the Dune series is it's sheer believability and consistency. The complexity of it's storyline and characters made the books a challenge to read and understand - but well worth the effort. Enter Brian Herbert. I had read "Man of Two Worlds", which was a collaboration he did with his dad - and was amazed at the difference. It [was very bad]. The story was a joke. It had some interesting ideas, but I have a feeling they came from Herbert Sr. Now - I just read the 3 Dune "House" novels. The series had some promise in the beginning, but it quickly decayed into typical and mediocre mass-market space opera for which Kevin J. Anderson is well known. Now - if you like the innumerable Star Trek and Star Wars series out there - you'll probably love this. But to me, franchise stories lack any kind of real passion and creativity. Being a fan of the originals - I stuck it out. Read the 3 books, and tried to like them. But the awful truth is that they're [garbage] - filled with transparent plots, one dimensional characters, and a complete disregard when convenient for Frank Herbert's original ideas. So - with some trepidation, I approached the new book. It covered one of the most intriguing periods of the Dune timeline. I could not begin to comprehend how this book got released. Why would a publisher have a complete hack ghost-write an incompetent wanna-be, when there is so much excellent writing talent out there? What would Gregory Benford or Stephen Baxter (or anyone of the numerous writers of their caliber) have made of this project? The characterization of the Titans is laughable. And the sentient machines should be called "Artificial Sort-of Roman Hedonist Bad Guys". There are some solid ideas which obviously came from Frank Herbert in there - but the rest is fluff. "Oh the machines are soooo bad, and they're kicking the humans' collective [butt]... I wonder how the humans will triumph?!?!?!". I'd say skip it unless you're a devoted Dune fan, or like the first three in the series. But then again, if you liked those books you probably thought "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones" were good. If you want to read some good books about humans struggling against machines, I'd recomend William Barton's "When Heaven Fell", Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" series, and Brian Stableford's "The Omega Expedition". Or for a slightly different take, Karl Schroeder's "Ventus" - and of course, the originator of the idea: Fred Saberhagen's "Berzerker" series.
Rating:
Summary: Rabid Dune fans only, please
Review: This book is worthwhile only in the context of its sire, the immortal _Dune_ and the other lesser volumes in *Frank* Herbert's original series. Read all those volumes before devoting time and money to this pale shadow of the original. The style is weak and the characterization is shallow. The plot is interesting only to the extent that it makes interesting speculations about the historical background of the original.
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