That’s the ones. I had a friend who was a Dune superfan who convinced me to continue after I’d finished Frank’s books. He expressed to me that he liked the Brian Herbert better and wished they’d started the recent Dune movies with Legends of Dune, the Dune trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson that’s set earliest in the franchise.

(To be fair, it’s ridiculously unrealistic to wish for that. And it’d only really be “better” than starting with Frank’s book if they adapted basically… 11 to 14 novels worth to finish off the whole saga.)

Now, I’m not going to say I like Brian Herbert’s better. Nor that there aren’t things that I don’t dislike about the Brian Herbert books. But there’s a lot to love as well.

I’ll talk about some of that in spoiler tags, but even in the spoiler tags, I won’t give everything away.

Things I dislike about the Brian Herbert books:

spoiler

• The whole “superhuman” thing (Bene Gesserit and various Kwizatz Haderach’s) kinda wasn’t a thing in any of the prequels until very near the end.
• They definitely diverged from Frank’s vision for the franchise in certain ways. Largely to tie the prequels (that were set before Frank’s first book) to the sequels (that were set after Frank’s last)).
• Some of the books that come in between Frank’s books drag a bit.

Things I like:

spoiler

• I was afraid talking explicitly about the happenings during the Butlerian Jihad, the Brian Herbert books would ruin the mystery, but I’ve been really happy with how he pulled that off.
• The way the sequels dealt with the long future of how Ghola technology would be used was great, I think.
• The Brian books did introduce some of the best characters in the franchise.