I first read Dune in 1984. I liked it a lot and later read and enjoyed the five sequels.
When I read Dune and the following novels by Frank Herbert I could see where the ideas for the nobles in Traveller has got (some of) its inspiration from. I also liked the style in which these books was written, with chapters about the different adversaries that met in a confrontation in the final chapters.
Other than that there wasn’t many ideas from the books that could be used in Traveller. There are no personal shields in Traveller, nor are there any Guild monopoly for transportation, and not much cloning (with restored memories) either. But this doesn’t matter. These books are still a great source for inspiration for Traveller just because of how the nobles are described. It is also some of the best science fiction that I have read.
Now I have read one of the new prequels called House Atreides by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. This was an interesting book written in the same style as Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. It described the intrigues of the nobility in the Dune Universe very nicely, and the book also had a good plot. Now I just must read the rest of the prequels. 🙂
Original image from wikimedia. License Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Hey BeRKA,
Love your site, and have nicked some of your nebulae for use as backgrounds on my site (with acknowledgements).
I borrowed Herbert’s House Major and House Minor ideas for MTU which neatly enabled me to avoid people rolling up Subsector Dukes. PC nobles are from Houses Minor. MTU is heavily feudalised as my sector was settled by a Merchant Adventurer private equity company lead by a scion of the House of Deneb. The end result is more like the medieval Holy Roman Empire than the OTU.
The only prequel to Dune I’ve read is House Atreides and, well, The Dune Encyclopedia was really cool and had Herbert’s blessing. Brian Herbert and Mr Anderson basically binned that and have gone off on another tangent. The scene where Baron Harkonnen (to be) gloats and metaphorically twirls his moustache over some plot basically blew it for me – though I’ve never been a fan of Anderson at the best of times. I dipped into one of the other books in the sequence and it was worse, so, I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with you, there.
If you get a chance, hunt up the Dune Encyclopedia – it’s well worth it.
Regards
David
Thanks for Your advice. I’ll try to find the Dune Encyclopedia first, and then I’ll read House Harkonnen, to see what I think.