The Lasting Of The Mohicans Book

This was a very entertaining collection of deleted scenes, short stories, and letters about the novel Dune and its sequels. It's definitely one for the Dune enthusiast and probably won't be much use to the casual fan.

"Spice Planet" takes up most of the first half of the book. The cover advertises this as a "new" novel by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson. In reality, it is a short novel length work that they put together based on an outline by Frank Herbert. This outline was a very early draft of what would eventually become Dune. Dubbed "the alternate Dune" novel, this is really an early vision of what might have been. The story itself is much different than what Frank Herbert eveutnally published, though there are many recognizable plot points and characters that are kept in the final product. This story on its own was a fun read. The writing is bad in places and quite adolescent in many spots. It seems to lack any kind of editing, which surprised me since Kevin J. Anderson is also a professional editor as well as author. It read like a rough draft. But that being said, the story was very engaging. The characters had cheesy dialogue, but were otherwise well detailed. Perhaps the parallels to Dune helped make them likable, but "Spice Planet" on its own is an entertaining story. But let's all be thankful that Frank Herbert kept expanding on his ideas and polished them up to produce the true masterpiece that Dune was.

The letters of Frank Herbert and those sent to him about the Dune publishing experience were interesting. It was cool to see the path that the novel took before being accepted and finally published. And you know some of those publishers that rejected the manuscript have to be beating their heads on the wall to this day.

The deleted scenes. Well, I compare this section to the typical part of a DVD that has extras. The scenes that were cut from Dune were interesting to read, but there really wasn't anything awe inspiriing. In short, they were cool to read but the original novel didn't lose anything by having them cut. I won't say the same about the scenes from Dune Messiah, though. The last two "alternate ending" chapters included here were very interesting, beautifully written, and quite surprising. I think the original Dune Messiah ending was just fine as it was, but these two scenes show how it could have ended. They would have been a good way to end the novel as well, except that they would have screwed up the next novel, Children of Dune.

The short stories. Now, these were fun to read. The first one, "A Whisper of Caladan Seas" tells the story of a troop of Atreides fighters in the Harkonnen attack in Dune. It's sad and poignant, while giving an air of mystery and intrigue. The writing is a little jagged, which is understandable as it is the first collaboration work between Brian and Kevin.

The other three short stories deal with the Butlerian Jihad era, occuring some 10,000 years before Dune. These focus on the war between the "thinking machines" and the oppressed humans. I feel sure that Herbert's orginal ideas for this era were a big influence on later works by movie producers such as Battlestar Galactica, The Terminator and The Matrix. These three stories serve as an appetizing introduction to the Legends of Dune series written by Brian & Kevin. As entertaining as they were, I've pushed those books up on my TBR. Great stuff! These stories probably pushed The Road to Dune up to a 4-star rating for me, from the 3-star I was thinking it would get until I read those.

My only complaint about this book: the paperback edition was released about a year later and it included a new short story left out of the hardcover edition: "Sea Child". Those that buy the more expensive hardcovers should not get less than those that wait a year and buy the cheaper edition. The only way I can get that story now is to buy the paperback. I don't want to spend that kind of money on a single short story, and I don't want to give up my copy when I have the entire Dune library in hardcover. They did this again with the release of their next book, Hunters of Dune. They should at least make those stories available for free as ebooks or something to those that bought the hardcovers.