‘Dune’ authors talk new trilogy at San Diego Comic-Con

If a star-studded, upcoming movie adaptation wasn’t enough to keep ‘Dune’ fans excited, there’s a new trilogy of books coming as well, the first of which will launch on October 13.

The new prequel trilogy will directly lead into the events of the first book, ‘Dune’, written by Frank Herbert in 1965.

‘Dune’ series authors Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert, announced the new trilogy of books during a virtual panel at the home edition of the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC).

The events of the first book, ‘Dune: The Duke of Caladan’, take place one year before the events of ‘Dune’ and explores the lives of Paul Atreides, his Bene Gesserit mother Lady Jessica, and Duke Atreides on the ocean planet of Caladan, before they are called away to Arrakis.

“We might be getting a lot of brand-new readers, so we didn’t want to do something that was in a very obscure time frame. We wanted something that could be easily accessible and familiar to anybody who’d just read the first Dune novel,” Anderson said during the panel. “It’ll be a familiar way to get everybody right up to speed to reading Dune and seeing the film, so we felt this was the right time for bringing this story.”

Anderson and Brian Herbert are also working on the much-anticipated ‘Dune: House Atreides’, a 12-issue comic book prequel series based on the 1999 novel by Anderson and Herbert (with illustrator Dev Pramanik and colourist Alex Guimaraes).

But it doesn’t end here. There’s also a graphic novel adaptation of the original ‘Dune’ novel in the works, and both the comic book adaptations are set to launch before the release of Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ movie, set to release in December this year, and which stars the like sof Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Dave Bautista, Stenna Skarsgard and Zendaya.