Children of Dune, Frank Herbert

5 stars

First Sentence: A spot of light appeared on the deep red rug which covered the raw rock of the cave floor.

Thoughts: Nine years have passed since Paul Atreides was blinded and went into the desert. His twins, Leto and Ghanima, have grown up to very weird pre-teens. Like Alia, they were both “pre-born” due to their mother’s spice overdose while pregnant so they’re only children in size. Unlike Alia, they have not yet become Abomination. Instead they’re trying to figure out how not to fall into that trap.

How did Alia fall into it? She had a mental crisis some time back, getting lost in all the voices in her head. She was trapped in the clamor of her past lives until one voice offered to help keep the others back. For a price: she had to let that ancestor have access to her consciousness occasionally. Desperate, Alia agreed without considering who was making that deal. It was her grandfather, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who has found a way to get revenge on her for killing him.

Side note: Alia is my second favorite character in the Dune universe* and I hate how she always gets a raw deal. Nothing ever goes right for her. Even in Dune Part Two she gets the shaft by not even being there! Seriously Villenueve? You couldn’t follow the book’s four year time jump? Maybe if you had split the movies in the same place as the book you wouldn’t have this problem! At least David Lynch followed the time line. And, since he only made a movie of the first book, he figured out how to give Alia a happy(ish) ending.

And that’s why I love David Lynch.

Anyway, as with all the Dune novels, there are plots within plots. Jessica returns to Arrakis, ostensibly to visit her grandchildren but actually to test them to find out if they’ve become Abomination. She doesn’t realize Alia already has until a fateful Judgement Day when the Baron let his mask slip. Jessica, like a proper Bene Gesserit, set another wheel within wheels in motion. She goes along with the plot to kidnap her and Duncan Idaho so she can get to Salusa Secundus, the home of the remnants of House Corrino. There she trains the Corrino heir in the ways of the Bene Gesserit. Duncan, meanwhile, has a crisis from which he will not recover.

Duncan is also put through the wringer but {SPOILER DELETED}.

There was also an element of revenge in Jessica’s training. House Corrino had recently set a pair of Laza tigers loose on Arrakis and Leto was killed. Except he wasn’t. He and Ghani had faked his death so he can set his own plans in motion. He goes into the deep desert to Jacurutu, the cursed sietch of legend, while Ghani erased her memories of Leto’s escape and hid them under a layer of false memories of his death.

While all this is going on, The Preacher is stirring up unrest on Dune. The Preacher is a blind man who knows more than he should. This leads people to wonder if he’s actually Paul come back from the desert. No spoilers because it’s obvious: it is Paul. His plan, however, is still a mystery.

*Norma Cenva will always be my number one.

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert

5 stars

First Sentence: What led you to take your particular approach to a history of Muad’Dib?

Thoughts: It’s been twelve years since Paul Atreides defeated the Corrino emperor. Now he’s Emperor of the known universe. His Jihad has swept across and subjugated all the occupied planets. His rule is secure. Except it isn’t.

Conspiracies have been forming against Muad’Dib. One of these contains some of his most dangerous enemies: Bene Gesserit Reverent Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Guild Navigator Edric, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer named Scytale, and Paul’s own legal wife Princess Irulan. All of them have good reasons for turning against him. The Reverend Mother’s reasons date back to Dune, Edric isn’t happy with Paul’s monopoly and rationing of spice, Irulan is mad because Paul loves Chani more than her and won’t give her a child, and Scytale just wants to watch the world burn.

The conspirators present Paul with a gift: a ghola named Hayt. A ghola is a clone created from the cells of a dead person. The particular person Hayt was cloned from is Paul’s old friend and teacher Duncan Idaho. He looks, sounds, and moves like Duncan, but he doesn’t have any of Duncan’s memories. Paul knows that accepting this gift is dangerous, but he does it anyway.

Why? Because he knows the end is near. His visions have been getting steadily darker. He foresees that giving in to his and Chani’s desires for a child will spell doom for both of them, but if he doesn’t things will get much worse. Irulan had been secretly slipping a contraceptive into Chani’s food, but when Chani switches to a spice-heavy diet she can’t keep it up. The spice counteracts the contraceptive and Chani does get pregnant, but the damage has already been done.

Meanwhile Alia is coming into her own. She was pre-born with all the memories of her female ancestors going back to time immemorial, but she’s still sixteen years old with all the problems that brings. One of those problems is Hayt. She, like Paul, knows he’s dangerous, but he’s also very good looking. It doesn’t help that he’s attracted to Alia as well. Also, her prescience has been showing her the same doom Paul foresees and she doesn’t like it. Especially since she knows she can’t do anything at all about it.

And then Paul goes to a secret meeting with a Fremen Fedaykin injured in the Jihad. His doom begins that night. He can’t fight the future, but even his prescience can’t show him everything.

The hopefulness at the end of Dune is gone in this book. The Jihad brought peace across the empire, but it was a peace bought in oceans of blood. Paul knew this from the beginning, but he was caught up in the winds of his own prescience and couldn’t break free. Now he can but it will be a freedom dearly bought with the blood of people Paul loves.

Winds of Dune, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

4 stars

First Sentence: The unscheduled ship loomed in orbit over Caladan, a former Guild Heighliner pressed into service as a Jihad transport.

Thoughts: At the end of Dune Messiah Paul Atreides, the Emperor Muad’dib, is blinded by an atomic blast and goes out into the desert to die like a proper Fremen. This is the story of the immediate aftermath of this decision, specifically how his mother Jessica dealt with her grief and how his sister Alia consolidated her rule as Regent until Paul’s children could take over the empire.

I’ve always felt sorry for Alia. She’s the whipping girl of the entire Dune series, even before her birth. When Jessica was pregnant with her, she took a massive overdose of spice to become the priestess of Sietch Tabr. The spice passed to Alia, giving her awareness before she was even born as well as giving her access to Other Memory, the memory of all her female ancestors to the nth degree. This made Alia a very strange child, an adult even in infancy. The Bene Gesserit called her an Abomination. The Fremen thought she was sacred. Meanwhile Alia was all alone, trying to deal with all the voices in her head until they overwhelmed her. Maybe if she had been a twin like Paul’s children (also pre-born due to all the spice Chani took during her pregnancy) she might have been able to survive but she wasn’t and didn’t.

Here, however, Alia seems fully determined to embrace the Abomination label. She follows her brother’s footsteps as a cruel tyrant, but she lacks his prescience to see the ultimate goal of his actions. She has to be tough to keep the Empire from falling to pieces after the death of its God-Emperor. The priesthood is going off half-cocked, assassins are everywhere, and Bronso of Ix is surreptitiously publishing pamphlets calling out Paul for his worst atrocities and reminding people that he was only a man, not a god.

Jessica, meanwhile, is trying to hold things together on Caladan. When some of the priests of Muad’dib pop by to announce that they’re changing the name of the planet to properly reflect its importance as the birthplace of their god, the populace takes up arms and starts talking about seceding from the empire. Right when things are at the most sensitive, the Bene Gesserit summons Jessica back to the motherhouse on Wallach IX. This is not a coincidence. The witches have their own plans for regaining their power in the power void. Things do not go well for the Bene Gesserit and Jessica formally breaks from the Sisterhood.

Once things on Caladan have calmed down, Jessica and Gurney Halleck go to Dune for Paul and Chani’s funeral. There they’re confronted with Duncan Idaho who was killed in Dune and brought back as a ghola in Dune Messiah. Duncan keeps insisting that he’s the same person they knew way back when, but Gurney’s not so sure. For one thing Duncan seems to be more loyal to Alia than to the whole of House Atreides. This could be because Duncan and Alia are engaged, it could be because Duncan’s a Mentat (human computer) now, or it could be because he, like everyone else, has been changed by the events of the last fifteen years. Still, Gurney joins Duncan in the search for Bronso of Ix. Then Jessica steps in and tells Gurney that he needs to defy Alia and leave Bronso alone.

Interspersed with all of this are flashbacks of Paul’s youth, specifically his adventures with the young Bronso back when they were both mere scions of noble houses. They run off to join the Jongleurs, a group of extremely talented actors and acrobats with secret mental powers they use to hid their real purpose. This leads to the truth behind Bronso’s smear campaign and Paul’s decision to die. Like everything else in the Dune universe, there are wheels within wheels and plans within plans.

Paul of Dune, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

3.5 stars

First Sentence: A serene ocean of sand stretched as far as the eye could see, silent and still, carrying the potential for terrible storms.

Thoughts: This is the tale of how Paul Atreides changed from the hero of Dune to the tyrant of Dune Messiah and how his jihad spread across all the worlds of the former Corrino empire. It’s actually two stories: the first few years of Emperor Muad’Dib’s reign and the War of Assassins that taught twelve-year-old Paul about the realities of war.

One of the sayings of the Dune universe is “the laws of kanly must be obeyed.” Kanly is the code that rules conflicts between the noble houses of the Landsraad to keep them from destroying each other and their planets. The War of Assassins between House Ecaz and House Moritani is an object lesson in why those laws must be obeyed. According to kanly, only the principal antagonists can be killed. Viscount Moritani doesn’t care. His son died because House Ecaz refused to export a rare drug that could have treated him because of a grudge that I can’t remember the details of. When Duke Leto Atreides arranged to marry Archduke Ecaz’s only surviving daughter, the viscount* saw his opportunity. He booby-trapped the decorations at Leto’s wedding, killing his bride, and sparking a war that involved their three houses with the Harkonnens lurking in the background. They fought each other across the galaxy until they all ended up at the Moritani homeworld where Emperor Shaddam Corrino the Ineffectual popped in to grandiosely broker a peace treaty that did not go the way anyone expected.

Ten years later, Paul calls upon the lessons he learned during that war to consolidate his rule over his empire. He is threatened on all sides. One of his Fedaykin has appointed himself High Priest of Muad’Dib and is creating a religion around Paul. Shaddam Corrino is still vainly trying to gain support to regain his throne, but his main henchman, Hasimir Fenring has had enough of him and upped sticks to the Tleilaxu homeworld with his wife and daughter. Fenring and his wife have their own plans to eliminate Paul so they can install their daughter Marie as Empress. Earl Thorvald has gathered all the discontented Landsraad nobility he can find to spark an insurrection against Muad’Dib**. Meanwhile the jihad sweeps across the known universe, subjugating all planets to the rule of their new emperor.

Paul is torn between being the beloved ruler his father was and the merciless despot he sees in his visions of the future. He wants to be a good king, but his prescience shows him that kindness is a trap that will doom humanity. If he wants the species to survive, he must sacrifice billions to save trillions.

*Why are noble titles so random in the Dune universe?

**I seem to have a talent for finding the right Dune novel for the historical moment.

The Machine Crusade, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

6 stars
First Sentence: Historians do not agree on the messages carried in detritus of the long-ago past.

Thoughts: Twenty-five years have passed since the Butlerian Jihad began and things are going. Serena spends most of her time at the City of Introspection on Salusa Secundus being a tragic goddess figure while fellow former slave Iblis Ginjo runs things to his liking. Out on the battlefield Xavier Harkonnen and Vorian Atreides are using a double pronged attack with Xavier employing traditional military tactics while Vorian does sneaky stuff to fake out the machines. Neither side has made any advances in years, yet the human side is constantly told that they’re winning and any day now the machines will be eradicated.

Clearly someone is up to no good.

Meanwhile on the planet Poritrin it’s about to get real. Vorian Atreides used the planet as the site of one of his greatest bluffs, a fake orbital fleet that tricked the machines into thinking the world was more heavily defended than it really was. The false ships were all built by slave labor by Buddislamic slaves who have been nursing a grudge against the Poritrins for the last quarter century. That was when their first rebellion was brutally put down and the lead rebel ripped to pieces in front of the rest of the slaves, a date that is commemorated every year because the nobility on this planet is evil and don’t you forget it. After the planet was saved from the machines, the slaves decided it was their turn to attack. This rebellion will have consequences that change the entire universe forever.

See, Poritrin is the home of Tio Holtzman, the galaxy’s greatest scientist. He has invented countless devices to aid in the war effort—except most of his inventions were created by his assistant Norma Cenva who got no credit.

Let me tell you about Norma. *climbs onto soapbox* She is the daughter of Zufa Cenva, the most powerful of the Rossak Sorceresses. Rossak is a planet where everything is poisonous and will most likely kill you. (Australia! In! Space!) The toxic environment makes having children extraordinarily difficult but every now and then a girl will be born with psychic powers: a Sorceress. Zufa had tried for years for a sorceress daughter, but all she had was Norma, a stunted dwarf who just so happened to be a mathematical genius. Not that Zufa cared, so Norma apprenticed herself to Holtzman where she was disrespected just as much as she would have been if she stayed at home.

Eventually Holtzman’s jealousy over Norma’s abilities caused him to exile her to a distant laboratory—really a shack down by the river. Norma didn’t care because by now she was working on her own project to fold space to allow instantaneous travel between star systems. Eventually her friend and her mother’s former lover, Aurelius, came by for a visit where he was simultaneously horrified by Norma’s living conditions and fascinated by her research. He decided to buy Norma free from Holtzman so he could fund her research. Cue the legal wrangling. Eventually Norma and Aurelius’ business partner were exiled from Poritrin so Holtzman could steal her research. Cue the slave revolt where Holtzman is killed by his own hubris.

Meanwhile Norma has been captured by the Titan Xerxes who tortures her almost to the brink of death. The torture wakens Norma’s latent psychic powers, which she uses to destroy all the cymeks within reach. She then rebuilds her broken body atom by atom until she has recreated herself in the image of the sorceress her mother always wanted. She then takes control of Xerxes’ ship, flies to a distant moon, and starts a new space-folding research facility.

And that is why Norma Cenva is the greatest character in all of literature. She’s not done yet. Just getting started, in fact. Even greater things lie in her future.

While Norma’s out being awesome, Serena is starting to have suspicions about Iblis Ginjo and his plans for the jihad. Vorian also has suspicions, especially when he discovers Ginjo’s disturbing sideline while he’s out on reconnaissance. The time has come for the final confrontation between Serena and the machines which will determine the future of her jihad.

The Butlerian Jihad, Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

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