I can find no redeeming quality in this book.

For a book published in the mid-1980s, this is socially and attitudinally regressive. If a cast of deeply unlovable characters were not enough, the way they talk about women is barely out of the 50s. This might be forgivable were it demonstrably a character flaw, but these same attitudes are present in the author's own voice when describing female characters and in his depiction of them as people.
Perhaps it is a book half written much earlier and resurrected with a younger eye (Herbert's son) on the story. And perhaps Herbert was unwilling to update his language. And perhaps it should have been left where it was in a bottom drawer because, despite persevering with it almost to the end, I can find no redeeming quality that should have brought it to publication.
The premise, an unwillingly blended human/alien lifeform with the two at loggerheads, had so much promise, all of it squandered on brash, blokey, hugely USA-centric, misogynistic main characters with no substance to them, and female characters who may just as well have been cattle for all the true agency and intrinsic capacity they had. The narrator did his best.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!