Book Review: Dune: The Battle of Corrin (Dune #3)

 

The Battle of Corrin is the third novel in the Legends of Dune trilogy. The book was written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson and published in 2004. The book's events start approximately 60 years after the events of the prior novel, The Machine Crusade, and conclude the war between humans and machines. There are some time jumps in the book that make keeping track of characters a bit tricky.

The hardcover version of the book is long. It is a little over 600 pages and could have easily been split into two smaller books with a bit tighter storylines. In fact, it is separated in the novel into Book I and Book II, but there are really three stories in the book that kind of interweave. The first is the thinking machines deploying multiple weapons to kill off humans, the Titans working against the thinking machines and the humans, and the humans trying to take out both groups of machines while bickering among themselves. I will not go into the fine details to avoid spoiling the plot, but it is not spoiling anything to say that the humans ultimately win. By the end of the book, it is revealed how the three main "Houses" in Dune came about and why the Atreides and Harkonens are rivals in the original Dune novel. 

The book is good, but it seems like it would have been better had it been split into two books. The actual defeat of the various machines is detailed in the last few chapters and felt a little bit rushed to me. Had the book been split into two novels I do not think the authors would have had to jump from storyline to storyline as much and would have made everything a bit easier to follow. That said, it is still worth the time to read to find out how the events that would set up the original Dune novel played out.