Rating: 
Summary: I give up.
Review: I started these prequels because I wanted a glimpse into Frank Herbert's notes. I'm not sure if it's worth the agony of reading them to get the shreds of information that they contain.
They didn't have to imitate slavishly Frank Herbert's books, but it seems that they didn't even understand wherein lay the orginal books' greatness.Simply put: If you liked and could appreciate the original novels, these are NOT for you. If you thought the originals were needlessly dense and complex without much "action," then, by all means, give these new books a try.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, not Great, Expectations
Review: Being a huge fan of the original Dune books, when I heard about House Atreides I was both excited and skeptical. More Dune certainly seemed like a good thing, but I doubted that anyone could truly recapture the unique style of Dune. I read House Atreides and House Corrino, and they were certainly good, but they didn't hold much of a candle to the original six novels. House Corrino, however, was very engaging and had the kind of "wheels within wheels" plot that keeps you reading. What I realized is that with House Corrino, Herbert and Anderson had moved away from trying to duplicate the original Dune, and were instead writing in the style they do best: not Dune, but a story set in the Dune universe, and a good one, too. When I heard that a book on the Buterlian Jihad was coming out, I was even more excited, and more skeptical. After all, in the Dune series, it was referred to as an impossibly epic, always remote chapter of history, rivaling the importance even of Muad'Dib. A book about it would have to be impossibly epic, more so than the original Dune, or else kill the romance of it. This book does kill the romance, if you take it literally as a part of the Dune legacy. But if you approach as more of a fan fiction, you will find an intriguing and complex story set in one of the largest backdrops in science fiction. This book has the distinct style that slowly emerged in the House books, and it uses it well. So what's the bottom line? If you approach this looking for a good sci-fi novel, you will not be disappointed at all, and will be eager to read the next installment. But if you are expecting a great novel that lives up to the grandeur of the name "Buterlian Jihad" bestowed by Frank Herbert, you will almost certainly feel cheated.
Rating: 
Summary: Revisiting the world of Dune
Review: This is another prequel series set in the Dune universe (as memorably created by Frank Herbert) in which his son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson carry on the torch. After the first instillation of this trilogy, set some 10,000 years before the events in the original novel Dune, I can already say that I find it to be an improvement over the first three "House" prequels. Their first prequel trilogy had potential, but there is no way that you can appreciate Brian's development of the younger characters after having been introduced to them so richly by his father. If you allow it, reading the first prequels can change how you look at the original Dune novel, and that really shouldn't be. That being said though, this trilogy picks up on an often mentioned yet never developed thread from the original series: that of the fight of humankind to escape the slavery of the thinking machines that they created. It also lays the basis for the birth of the Great Houses of Atreides and Harkonnen, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood (presumably an offshoot of the sorceresses of Rossak?), the Fremen people, and the guild. Butlerian Jihad also makes the connection to human origins on Earth, which was never explained in the original 6 novels, although it was increasingly hinted at as the series progressed. It's a lengthy novel, but fun to read, and I'm already curious as to how they will develop the other two novels in this set. So in short, this one gets 4 stars strictly for its entertainment value and how much I enjoyed another chance to visit the Dune universe. It's not a novel that I'm going to reread several times like the Frank Herbert classics, but a single visit was well worth the time taken to read it.
Rating:
Summary: Tsk Tsk
Review: Well, I confess first - I do NOT love all of Frank Herbert's Dune books. In fact. after Children of Dune, I find them very plodding and pathetic, the work of a man who obviously stretched a trilogy into much more than he could handle. I DID like the prequel "House" books, simply based on entertainment value (despite the obvious consistency issues and the weak ending).
That being said, this might be the worst of all of them. "The Butlerian Jihad" neither retains the unique vision found in the first three F. Herbert books, nor the outlandish beach-read entertainment of the B. Herbert trilogy. I won't embarass anyone with a plot summary - there is no plot of which to speak. I will simply say that I checked the book out of the library over a period of eight months, and it took every bit of my patience to put this abomination to rest.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what it should have been, alas
Review: Having read Frank Herbert's original Dune series, I was interested to see what the authors of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad would have to contribute to this sprawling saga. The plot is engaging enough, providing detailed accounts of things only hinted at in FH's books (such as why Earth is spoken of in the past tense in those works), and there is much scope for wrestling with any number of issues in such a story.
Unfortunately, this is where the good news ends. The prose style is banal and irritating, riddled with gloss* and laced with far too many adjectives; worse yet, Messrs. Herbert and Anderson seem to be overly fond of abstract adjectives, such as "ethereal" and "great", as if they believe that merely tossing such terms out can evoke what the words denote. The result is that it reads more like a Batman comic than like the kind of work the authors presumably intended it to be.
Also, with the ironic exception of the evil robot Erasmus, almost none of the characters really came alive for me, despite all the adjectives the authors toss at them; I got frustrated at how little we are really allowed to understand the main characters' motivations and emotions as individuals.
Moreover, the book has lots of the kind of beginning-of-chapter epigraphs that were a hallmark of the original Dune. This is a treacherous thing to attempt, and if a writer is going to attempt it, he or she had better really have something important and relevant to say. The elder Herbert did in fact have something of a knack for this, whereas the epigraphs in DTBJ strike me, for the most part, as fatuous and sophomoric, and would best have been omitted.
In summary, what could have been a three- or four-star effort ended up as mere two-star pulp entertainment.If you are a hard-core Dune fan, and are interested in the plot for its own sake, then you might be interested in reading DTBJ; otherwise, you won't miss a great deal by giving it a pass. *Gloss: a hack literary device wherein the author either breaks out of narrative to deliver the reader a synopsis-like block of information, or else transparently and artifically manipulates dialogue to a similar end.
Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment
Review: I just started reading the dune books, starting with the originals, and got up to "god emperor of dune" before I found out about the prequels. So I took a short break from reading Frank Herbert's excellent series and read the House books and The Butlerian Jihad. This is one of those books that you read for the sake of the originals, in the belief that it must improve eventually. After 600 pages, it still didn't. The writing style is incredibly cliche'-ish, the plot is utterly predictable except where important events are left out, and it has none of the scope of the originals, nor their believability. It's depressing to think how much better this story could have been told. It is inferior even to the "House" trilogy. And after all this, the main jihad events referred to in the dune books are absent, including the harkonnen betrayal and the battle of corrin. I am inclined to think Herbert and Anderson were simply unable to tackle any actual storytellng, which accounts for the gaps. As mentioned earlier, their are also substantial gaps in believability. There is just no way characters could be this flat, especially in a dune book, and the "spark of the revolt" is completely unconvincing, as is the idea that all the main organizatons in the dune books were formed during this one time period. It's as if everything leading up to the "real" dune series happened in a space of twenty years or so, and nothing much occurred for the next ten thousand. Finally, "The Butlerian Jihad" lacks the depth and complexity characteristic of the dune books. Brian and Kevin seem to make only a halfhearted attempt to deal with major issues. Frank was much better at analyzing religion and fanaticism and war and so forth. So, that's my two cents. Hope it saves you the price of this book.
Rating:
Summary: At least I got it from the library
Review: 619 pages of garbage. One of the most poorly written, plot dead, character dead books I've ever read. (OK, I went to skip reading after the first 40 or so pages). One bright point, I think I read the abridged version. An amazing shambles! Amazon reviews seem to compel the award of at minimum one star. Believe me it's not worth any, more appropriate would be a toxic waste drum icon.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I've read two Dune books in the past, but not a true "Dooner". I liked the SF and I thought the characters and story line were very interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Sci-fi even better than the original
Review: When I bought this book I was skeptical, but already two chapters into it, I was thrilled.
To me this was a better book because it was more sci-fi and less people plotting, than the original series by Frank Herbert. The author kept fascinating me to want to read more and more, even though I was at work and needed to do other stuff, just couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: er A1O58KEEMZQ0I3
Review: The writing itself was fine. The story and attention to detail was horrible. The book read like a 600 page introduction in which every piece of the action was totally predictable. There was not even a hint of the plot complexities usually associated with Frank Herbert's Dune books. The three prequels where masterpieces next to this book. The only highlight of the whole thing is reading about the origins of what will be the Dune universe. ... I thought the other three Dune novels by Brian Herbert and Anderson were pretty worthy prequels. "The Butlerian Jihad," by contrast, misses the mark completely. I rarely give only one star to a book that I have actually finished, but this one will be an exception. ... ... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition
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