The Return of "Ask John Harrison"

[Mahdi]

That's right, the sci-fi channel has brought everybodies favourite feature in the Duniverse back: Ask John Harrison! For those of you who don't remember this nice little part of the miniseries site, or just weren't around back then, it works kinda like this: Every week up until Children of Dune premieres, Harrison is going to answer one fan question on the official website. To submit your question, you simply e-mail him at askjohnharrison@www.scifi.com.

If your question is selected, John will answer it, and your name and/or e-mail address may also be posted on the official site.

Because this is the first week up, he's been kind enough to answer three questions instead of the usual one.

To give you a taste, here is one of the three questions he answered:

What books does Children of Dune cover? Why not call it Dune Messiah?

After the enormous success of SCI FI's first Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries, SCI FI asked Richard Rubinstein and me to come up with a proposal for another. After a lot of thought and conversation, it seemed that the next books in Frank Herbert's epic presented unique adaptation opportunities as well as problems.

Dune Messiah by itself did not resolve completely enough to stand on its own; it set the stage for Children of Dune. But that third book couldn't be the basis for a new miniseries without the precedent of Dune Messiah. So I decided we should combine both books and create a continuation of the first miniseries. Simply put, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune would complete the saga of Muad'dib and set the stage for what was to come.

There is a significant passage in Frank Herbert's Dune, spoken by Reverend Mother Ramallo, in which she tells Paul that "when religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows." Of course she means Muad'dib - he is the whirlwind. As Dune fans know, in Dune Messiah he is tortured by what that whirlwind has meant, of what has become of his revolution. And, as students of history, we know that "every revolution contains the seeds of its own destruction." In Children of Dune, those seeds have started to bloom. But there is an answer, a road that Muad'dib was unable or unwilling to take: the Golden Path. By the end of Children of Dune, Muad'dib's son, Leto II, is willing to go down that path.

So I decided to combine both Dune Messiah and Children of Dune into one seamless narrative that would complete this chapter of the Atreides on Arrakis and set the stage for the next 3,000-year era, the Golden Path, and the reign of the God Emperor.

The other two questions deal with how close this adaption is to the source material and how Harrison dealt with Irulan in this miniseries. I've got a few to send in, how about you?

Also up on the official site is a new, high res version of the CoD poster which had previously been made available for download.