I've decided to answer a post of Connavar's from another thread, as the discussion it may start seems more appropriate here than in the "Are Books Becoming Obsolete?" thread....
Dune's Maud Dib chronicles or whatever it is that is written by The Princess annoys me alot.Its spoiling things before you read it. FH should have been alot smarter than giving away things before you read it.....
I must admit that this never bothered me. For one thing, I'd run into the technique before, with Asimov's Foundation series (as well as others); and for another, it did precisely what it was intended to do (or at least, one of the things it was intended to do): It presented Muad'Dib as an historical figure, where we were already seeing the distortions of legend surrounding the facts of Paul Atreides and his life. It allowed for a contrast between insight into him as a person and as a force of history; a man whom other people had made into a myth, so that the man was in constant danger of being lost. At the same time, Princess Irulan's own comments are slightly shaded, too, so that they aren't always reliable, which puts yet another layer of complexity on the whole thing.
To my view, Herbert was very canny in using this technique, as it allowed him to play with the reader's perceptions of the incidents of the tale and their implications (a huge theme in the series as a whole), making the assumptions a reader might form from such sources a part of the mythopoeic process, so that the reader himself becomes as prone to distort the people involved as those within the tale itself. Basically, it's a very complex and difficult technique, as it allows one to say all sorts of things that can't be said within the body of the story without bringing things to a grinding halt and editorializing it to death; yet it is fraught with dangers of becoming silly, redundant, or simply boring... all of which I feel Herbert managed to avoid because the very writers of these passages (not just Irulan) were themselves "unreliable narrators" to a degree....
