Brief Reflection on a key point of adaptation:
Some of the hard-line purists in Dune’s fandom like to pretend that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson never added a word to Frank’s mythos, and while a part of me can understand the sentiment, and I concede that nothing can even come close in narrative richness to that of the original six books, I don’t think the work of the younger Herbert and Mr. Anderson should be discounted out of hand.
Consider the great spans of time between Dune and Dune Messiah AND between Dune Messiah and Children of Dune: about a decade in each case. (Longer as we must necessarily make Leto II and Ghanima Atreides older than their 9-year-old selves as in the book, as they did in the ’03 miniseries–child actors being what they are.) These gaps in time would seem strange to those unfamiliar with the books, and Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Paul of Dune and The Winds of Dune help to fill these gaps, with the former going so far as to take care of a dangling plot-thread from the original novel whose unresolved status always bothered me: that of the bastard child of the Lady Margot Fenring by Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.
I’m not saying we should try to adapt Hunters and Sandworms of Dune, (assuming there’s even the possibility of making it that far to begin with). But Paul and Winds should definitely be used to bridge the three novels of Frank’s original trilogy.
After all, as much as I’d like to one day see a Miles Teg on-screen, the latter trilogy, particularly the inconclusive Chapterhouse Dune, is very probably unfilmable, despite Heretics of Dune being perhaps my second favorite in the entire series.
The Dune Project 