5 stars
First Sentence: Any true student must realize that History has no beginning.
Thoughts: Generally I don’t read series expansion written by people other than the original author, but I make a large exception for Dune. Why? Because while Frank Herbert was great at describing the philosophy and beliefs of the people living in his universe, he wasn’t so hot on explaining them in layman’s terms.* Nor was he good at action scenes. Enter his son Brian Herbert and co-author Kevin J. Anderson who fill in those gaps. As my friend Irish Storyteller put it, Frank Herbert will give you the buildup to the epic space battle and then the next chapter will be “Wasn’t that an epic space battle? Let’s discuss the ramifications of this.”** Herbert the Younger and Anderson will actually show you the epic space battle and then explain why it had this particular set of consequences and repercussions.
One of the things Herbert the Elder brought up and never really explained was the Butlerian Jihad. It was an epic battle about 10,000 years before Dune where humans threw off their machine overlords. It began when a woman named Serena Butler witnessed her baby being murdered by a machine and vowed eternal revenge. Enter HtY and KJA. In this book they explain not only how the jihad got started, but also how machines enslaved humans in the first place.
It all began with the Titans. They were originally twenty humans who thought that the race was stagnating because their lives had been made too easy by technology. They took the names of mythological and historical figures like Agamemnon, Tlaloc, Dante, Barbarossa, and Xerxes. Then they staged a rebellion and began ruling themselves. They didn’t want to lose everything they had worked for after their death so they became immortal cymeks, which involved having their brains removed from their fragile human bodies and inserted in nigh-indestructable machines. Then, Xerxes decided he’d rather live a hedonistic life so he let his AI computer have a little too much control over his planet. The AI gained sentience, named itself Omnius, and began spreading, virus-like, throughout the known universe. Soon Omnius had taken over all of the cymek worlds and began enslaving humans to serve it. Only a few human planets remained outside of Omnius’ influence, so they formed a League and began fighting the machines.
So it has been for several centuries. Humans are barely keeping one step ahead of the machines when Serena Butler, the daughter of the prime minister of Selusa Secundus, is captured by a cymek and brought to Earth. She’s delivered to Erasmus, an independent robot who isn’t connected to Omnius, who proceeds to study her to determine what makes humans so determined. When he discovers she’s pregnant he’s even more thrilled. Now he can witness human development firsthand! But it turns out toddlers are really annoying, so he kills the baby and sparks the jihad.
No spoilers in that paragraph because Baby Butler’s death has always been known from the earliest books. But this story isn’t just about that. It’s the journey, not the destination, and this is a very long book. There’s so much I haven’t gone into like Xavier Harkonnen’s rise to power, Vorian Atreides’ search for self, the legend of Selim Wormrider, and Norma Cenva’s baby steps to brilliance. I will have a lot to say about Norma in my review of the next book because she is the greatest female character in all literature. I want to be her when I grow up.
*I’ve read the entire Dune series three times and I still only have a vague idea of what the Golden Path is.
**This actually happened in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune
The Eclectic Reviewer 