Good choice. Heres hoping Shohreh Aghdashloo gets a role too. I'll watch that woman in anything, especially scifi.

For real. Her role in the Expanse was so well acted. You could hear the fire in her heart.

The source material is “Sisterhood of Dune” written by the original Dune author’s son. Can any dune fans attest if it’s as good as the original books?

I thought she was pretty good in Kenobi despite the shitty writing in the show. Hopefully she gets a better chance to shine here.

Like trying to compare erotic Spongebob fan fiction to The Brothers Karamazov. They were barely even written by Brian Herbert. A vast majority of the writing was done by Kevin J Anderson, who is a complete hack. He does his writing by taking long walks and just freestyling the prose into a microphone, which he then transcribes when he gets home with only a bit of tweaking. Everything about them is terrible, there is not a single redeeming quality.

Damn, well hopefully they do their own thing then. I was very skeptical when I searched the book and saw it was written in 2012.

Brain Herbert and Kevin J Anderson together are basically public enemy #1 of the Dune book fandom, but I'll at least say that that I can't recall anyone specifically calling this book out as especially bad. Never read it myself though.

We should just all be thankful that HBO is not using their work to make a show about the Butlerian Jihad.

> done by Kevin J Anderson, who is a complete hack

It's lowkey inspiring that Kevin J Anderson has had a writing career as long and as successful as he has when his best work is a few mediocre Star Wars novels in the 90's. If he can get published, you can too!

I should probably thank you for saving my time. I'm currently working my way through the first books and on the fence about looking into the rest of the expanded series.

I want her as a Star Trek admiral

Read originals and books by son and Co. It's not great but not that bad for TV material either. We've seen a lot worse stories the past few years even on high budget TV productions. I have serious doubts though how you can drop an audience in this story which requires you to know the events of 3 more books for the character motivations to make sense.

They are not entirely garbage but a very different type of story telling. More mainstream, more predictable and... Plot holes.

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Shohreh Aghdashloo is in The Expanse as Chrisjen Avasarala.

The problem is that it's written in the same cookie cutter style as the rest. Every chapter follows a different character and ends right as it's getting interesting. It means that you're constantly given cliffhangers to keep you reading and by the time you finish it has become apparent that you've just been strung along without almost any payoff.

Their books are about 3 times as big as they need to be and pack way too much plot that ends up being largely irrelevant, with the end result being that it's hard to even remember what happened. Like one of those Netflix Marvel shows that stretched a great 2 hour movie into a middling 10 hour season of TV.

And finally, their books don't actually exist to tell standalone stories and rather exist to write plots that are justified by their eventual relevance to his father's much better books. This means they'll have half a dozen or more completely independent plots that never meet. The Butlerian Jihad books are the worst about this and would be improved by taking that different non-intersecting plots and giving each their own book that spans the full time range. As it stands, the reader gets 100 lb of mediocre plot dumped across half a dozen or more completely different plot lines with no indication that it will ever converge into some actual coherence.

>We should just all be thankful that HBO is not using their work to make a show about the Butlerian Jihad.

Yeah, as written by these guys, those books would be expensive as hell to film and absolutely not worth it.

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They'll have the take the name and a few key plot points only. There's far too many storylines to cover that don't have anything to do with the Sisterhood.

She’s already been a Commodore in Star Trek. Does that count?

Should just her in SNW as the Prime Timeline version of the same character.

Have you read the original books? The original Dune books aren't exactly the stuff exciting TV is made of in the first place, especially after the first book. They are very philosophical and reflective with a Lovecraftian horror for a protagonist. It's more like Ayn Rand than Star Wars or Game of Thrones. Deviation from the original storyline is probably for the best, just because you don't have to follow the script since fans won't really have the same level of expectations. They can aim for something a bit different and capture a different aspect of the Duniverse than what the movies focus on.

I just started Heretics of Dune and haven’t read any of Frank’s son’s books so maybe I’m not there yet but this Dune prequel seems entirely lacking context

The Bene Gesserit are my favorite faction in all sci-fi. Political witches with complete control over their minds and bodies steering the human race. Dope.

They gave her a shitty haircut and just destroyed her character in Game of thrones unfortunately.

Going from current house of dragon to season 5 of GOT onwards reallyy highlights how badly the writing suffered back then.

He's a nice guy. I've met him.

Is he a complete hack? No. That's not a nice thing to say considering writing novels and having them coherent and interesting enough to read through is pretty fucking difficult. How do I know? I'm still struggling on book #1.

Are his books just kinda OK? Yeah. But the man has written hundreds of novels. HUNDREDS. He's the guy when you want a novel tie-in to your TV/movie/game.

He can crank something out in a week or two. I'm not kidding. It just flies out of his fingers.

She would have been a perfect character if Oberyn's death was the last we saw of her.

Right as they ventured off the books was when I started thinking “this is not holding up”. I lost interest somewhere in season 5 and haven’t seen most of the series after and literally no ones reviews tempted me to go back

I’d watch her taking orders at a Taco Bell for 8 hours

Wasn't there some subplot in one of those books about this kick-ass society of super swordsmen who trained their whole life.. and the book followed that story for half the book, and then a comet came and blew them all up the end.

Her character in kenobi was fairly awful. She's a good actress who's unfortunately been saddled with terrible parts since >!oberyns death!<

Hers was the only main character I found interesting. Great performance.

I feel that. I stuck it out and OOF it got messy. Just bad soap opera shit.

House of dragon is much much better this far.

Agreed, or have her in her book role advocating for peace rather than plotting to fucking murder her beloveds brother!

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i wonder if bran and the boys ever found her and her daughter's body in the dungeon

> Can any dune fans attest if it’s as good as the original books?

Brian Herbert & his writing partner are absolutely awful. Like horrific. It's all 100% a cash grab

I think the only part I remember about this book was one of the woman discovering the space folding math, or whatever it is they use to navigate.

If I recall correctly she used a bunch of spice, which had only recently been discovered, and becomes the first space navigator. The fish people who live in spice tanks.

This seems to be based around it, though I don't believe this character was in it.

Brian and Kevin's books are passable, so long as you don't compare them to Frank's. The original Dune, for instance, was self-contained and a good little adventure with lots of other stuff, but it seldom flitted from the main adventures of Paul - and when it did so, it did so with purpose.

By comparison, Brian and Kevin's are all "trilogies" and try to tell a multitude of branching storylines, taking place in a myriad of differing locations. It can be quite disjointed - in one chapter you can be in a space battle, and in the next a princess wonders what to wear to the ball. The tease is that storylines will come together but that rarely happens, and is rarely satisfactory.

Although their latest trilogy, the Caladan trilogy, does reduce this significantly. It does, however, have a fair few bits of bad "wtf" writing, as in one instance Hawat hypnotised Paul in the middle of the street to believe the Baron is about to kill everyone, for shits and giggles obvs.

Frank Herbert's books are left untouched by Brian and Kevin's, if only because it is impossible to confuse the two. Brian and Kevin just don't have the plots and are a very different style of writing. You can read the six core Dune books perfectly well without reading Brian and Kevin's - they add nothing - and whenever anyone nee to the Dune series suggests reading in "chronological" order - so 12 Brian and Kevin books before getting to Dune - we will advise them to rethink and go publication order.

So if you can accept them for being "stories in the same universe as Dune", rather than any sort of continuation, then you can get some enjoyment out of them. There is some bad writing in them - and I've reviewed the three most recent - but if you can plot through it, and the endless recounting of motivation (that really annoys me, and I begin to wonder if it was done just got padding, as each chapter the characters seem to want to recount the story so far a lot of the time), then they're entertaining brain fodder.

ummm she's definitely still plotting in the books shes just a lot smarter about it then the show writers could ever imagine.

True, peace between sand snakes and the prince of dorne I meant. She isnt pro coup or anything.

hopefully this is a better role for her than ellaria or Kenobi

Not to mention retconning parts of frank's works that don't line up with the story brian wants to tell and making the whole story a shitty battlestar galactica rip off when the original series had nothing to do with that in the slightest

that whole storyline got ground into dust and mashed together with the Jaime redemption arc that they tried their best to make happen. I just wanted more of the magical and ridiculous characters but people can handle rape and gore but patchface is too weird.

I think a prequel series could be really good. All the court scheming and politicing of game of thrones mixed with the bizzare low tech future of dune, showing different worlds and the workings of the empire.

The fact that it's based on Brian's books and has his involvement makes me think this will be utter shit that has nothing to do with Dune, but a prequel is cool in theory

Get to God Emperor at least.

I met her once in Toronto, super friendly lovely person. Glad she's in this.

Why are they enemy number 1? Cause they're shitty writers?

Oooo good call. I can definitely see it.

I don’t know anything about this show but I can’t stop thinking “Dune: The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants”

Only read book 1 and 2, and imo they’re some of the best books ever written, but I can understand if they’re not for everyone

They ruined a lot of characters, hers along them.

She was really good in Kama Sutra. All good

She just has such a regal quality about her

Dune is one story where a cinematic universe is actually warranted, given how many thousands of years the timeline spans in both directions, the rise and fall of empires and planets, the Dune universe is so old probably most of what has occurred has been forgotten, so there are plenty of wild stories that could be told in the Dune universe.

They are shitty writers, yes. But the most awful thing they did was “complete” Frank Herbert’s original series (he died before writing the last book). They shoved their own original prequel characters as the big bad, and changed other parts that were set up with the cliffhanger of Chapterhouse: Dune. Then they claimed that it was based off of some discovered “Dune 7” notes that they claim to have found among Frank’s things. The book so so clearly has nothing from Frank (maybe one specific thing), and so he basically exploited his father’s name and the goodwill of the fans with a complete lie.

The fact that he writes shitty EU books doesn’t bother me, but it’s the fact that he claims to have completed the story the way his father wanted, when in reality it is used to advertise his prequel series by reviving characters from thousands of years before with no other reason.

It’s a slap in the face.

I think I laid it out pretty extensively there but the other reply to your comment sums it up. I’d also add that not only do they pretend to complete Frank’s books but they retcon the events of his first Dune book or two in order to shoehorn their characters into their in-betweenquels

She was great in Fleabag

I've read Frank's original ending for Chapterhouse in his notes (No joke, there's a college library near LA that has a bunch of his papers and drafts). Daniel and Marty were exactly who we thought they were, and certainly NOT Thinking Machines.

She was great in that, and her and Emily Watson give me hope this Dune show won't be a turd.

I have just seen her recently in season 2 of The Capture, playing the main presenter on an actual show in the UK ' Newsnight'

It even says in the book that they are advanced Facedancers. It’s clear that they were an extension of the idea of a FD not having a “core” or base personality, and would take on their copied personas. That in the scattering, they had absorbed so many memories that some new “self” had emerged. They maybe even had copied someone with prescience and even with deep other memory, seeing as they were expressing ancient earth customs.

IMO they were meant to be the ultimate Abomination, where another soul (other memory) didn’t take over someone’s body because there was no one “home” in the first place.

I think there was going to be a significant time jump as well.

Booo why can’t we just have a good trilogy. Why do we have to have a fucking cinematic universe franchise

Niobe.

If I had multi-dimensional capabilities one of the things I would check out before omnipotence tore away my fleeting human sensibilities would be the dimension where HBO made Dune instead of GoT.

I know I’m alone in this but she’s an instant turn-off for me. I absolutely hated her character (writing and performance) in Game of Thrones and while I’m currently going through Rome for the first time and enjoying it, Vorenus’ bloody family is by far the least interesting part of it for me and I end up skipping her scenes.

Can't say that the fandom is fond of Brian Herbert's work.

This is Brian Herbert and his writing partners content.

Don’t know why people are downvoting you for telling the truth

Disney cast her in Kenobi and then completely wasted her.

They're both very shitty writers but Anderson is in a league of his own. The man is probably the worst scifi writer I have ever read -- he knows nothing about science, he makes no effort to do any research, and he delivers book after book of pathetic schlock scifi just for the paycheck. He's the scifi equivalent of those nameless authors who churn out an endless stream of bland romance novels.

That wasn't her

Huzzah, another spin off from an established property nobody asked for.

Nothing the son has done has ever been good, read the original author books and avoid the rest.

She seems perfect for this kind of show.

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It was entertaining atleast for me since i watched all of season 8 at a bar with a bunch of other people as we got drunk and laughed about it all. And trying to figure out what details may have come from martin and how things would actually play out if he decided to continue the series.

But damn did the show nosedive in quality. I understand that after a few years the showrunners got tired of it and wanted to do different things, but you'd think they would have wanted to atleast put some effort into finishing it well so they could keep the popularity they had built up for themselves. The fact they dropped it so forcefully is kinda insane to me

I loved going from dune to wheel of time. The bene gesserit and aes sedai are practically the same organization, although the aes sedai are all far more incompetent and generally more terrible people.

Gotta love magical witches thinking they know better than everyone else.

Shohreh is made for sci fi.

Oh :|

The "let's make 3 books out of a short story content" gang.

Yes, no need to repeat a page of some character portfolio every time they appear in a chapter just so you can have more useless shit written.

She was so beautiful as Niobe in Rome.

I can't believe they didn't mention Rome. She was great in that!

"Pullo, my old friend" he told me, "I have a wife, Niobe, and she's worth more to me than all the women of Gaul."

Torchwood.... Episode one, followed on after seeing her knock it out the park in Rome, and then they tossed Indiras character out. Tired of seeing this quality actor being passed over by Julian Fellowes, and ending each role she plays in death.

If you want to see her in a great recent tv show check out The Capture

I was really, really excited for this show, given it was HBO and DUNE content.

I've never walked off a cliff faster than I have just now.

Just...Fuck sake.

I hate sand.

you're struggling because you're not a novelist.

>He can crank something out in a week or two.

No shit. that's what hacks do. they don't spend years fussing over work.

> you're struggling because you're not a novelist.

always saying such nice things

>the series will follow the Harkonnen Sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind

That's the line from the Deadline article that has me worried. I'm really hoping I'm wrong and it's not the big bad they created on their own.

thanks for that. "I would like a fucking crunchwrap supreme and don't fucking forget the hot sauce"

Sisters? Does Jessica have a sister in the books?

This would be set far in the past of the book Dune, or the recent movie.

Oh it's one of the extended universe things

Oho neat. Exciting for more Dune stuff!

She was great, they totally wasted having her though, it would have been nice to have that character be able to show up in other series.