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Hello readers, it's your host Stuart welcoming you back to now playing book review and back to the

Duniverse author Frank Herbert's best-selling science fiction literary saga.

My apologies for taking a little bit longer than expected to produce this podcast.

Heretics of Dune is what we're talking about today.

Hey, I thought it would be easy. I thought I could just crank through these next 471 pages and get it out to your lickety split.

After all, I've done four Dune book reviews already.

I feel like I have a pretty good handle on this mythology. It won't be any trouble and then I crack open the cover and boy am I quickly humbled looking at where Herbert is taking readers.

No lie, halfway through my first attempt, I threw this novel across the

room and just screamed, what the hell is going on? I, the long-term doomed fan could not follow this narrative and keep in mind this is the

first time I've read this book whereas all the other ones I've had the advantage of

having had years to contemplate them. But this one, I didn't even

understand how like things would happen in one chapter and we jumped somewhere else and I couldn't even

link up all of the action. There were so many new names and I just had to take a deep breath.

I had to just start over, read much more slowly than I'm used to and mapping everything. I had to write down all the names,

connecting all the relationships. It added weeks to the proceeding. So I'm sorry about that, but I figured you'd want me to be able to be coherent, better to be late than to have no idea what I'm talking about.

And I do want to credit Frank Herbert. If there's a silver lining to all of this, he never

turns in the same book twice, right? It is, to his credit, his ingenuity that he always wants the saga to progress. No cookie cutter, no doing

what we did last time. You know last time we had this worm that pretended to be a god, and this time worm is dead, all his slaves are breaking free, and everything is just scattered far beyond the known universe.

That's the word they use.

It's this time period is called the scattering.

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