How to Decide What to Read and Not To Read In the Dune Series

With the second part of Dennis Villanueva’s Dune out, I think it’s time to talk about the larger series of Dune, its themes, how they changed over time, and the quality (or lack thereof). 

I think the easiest way to break up the series is into these parts.

Dune

Just the first book by itself. Honestly, this is one of the few stopping points around, so if you don’t want to read a lot stop with this one. The book follows Paul Atredies as he becomes Emperor of the known universe.

I will say that no other book anywhere in the series will match the quality of this single volume. It can be argued that a lot of the series as a whole can rival or even exceed what this single volume does, but the series also has a lot of flaws and simply can go on forever on exposition, setups, and diatribes that aren’t necessary. So, if you just want to read this book, that’s fine, but I argue once you go past this volume, you can’t stop until you get the ending presented by Sandworms of Dune.  

But this volume presents a lot of themes dealing with ecology, evolution, social structures, the power of religion, and, most importantly, that leaders can never be trusted. Ever. It does this by providing the perfect leader, a man who has a mind that reasons like a computer, which has virtue directing his every call, who has known love and loves about those close to him but also has compassion for people he had never met, and who has the ability to see the future with near perfect clarity. He is the ideal leader.  

And he is a genocidal butcher.  

That is what happens when you put your faith in a leader and give up on things like laws, democracy, and systems. Every cult of personality in politics will lead to destruction, even if the person behind that cult is a good person. Why? Because cults of personality have a power and force that even the person at the center can’t inhibit. And worse is when you have the kind of person who revels in a cult of personality, and they encourage the whirlwind of destruction.  

Despite the fact that liberal democratic republics make no appearance anywhere in the entire Dune series, the whole thing is a statement of why we need those kinds of governments because to give up on them puts us at the whims of strongmen. Maybe they’ll be indifferent to keeping a status quo that sees no evolution like Emperor Corino (but even he will destroy others when he feels threatened), but more often, we will be under the heel of men like the Baron Harkonen because vicious people always thrive in systems that do not rely on law and rights. But even if you want to put all your faith in descent men like the Atredies, it will still always result in suffering because a cult of personality cannot be anything but destructive.  

This book is a masterpiece of watching Paul wrestle with this problem. He can either embrace the whirlwind that will lead to billions dying because of him or accept the death of those he loves—not to mention himself—and watch unjust butchers continue to torture people. But the main reason he doesn’t turn back is he keeps hope alive that he can find a way out that will not result in genocide…spoilers, he can’t. But once committed to the path of being the leader to rally around, he finds that, as with all cults of personality, the force of the cult is what drives things, not the person at the center. That might seem odd, but think about the fact that Hitler was a moron who never came up with a single coherent plan other than “let’s invade Russia in the winter”—he didn’t come up with the actual plans for taking over (that was Goebels, Hess, and Spears), he wasn’t there when the plans for the Final Solution were drawn up, he wasn’t a military mastermind behind even the early victories he was just a figurehead. The movement has a power of its own. Same with Trump. Trump has the IQ of a rotting turnip and doesn’t hold a single political thought other than he hates other countries and thinks he should get everything his infantile brain wants…but the movement around him has spawned a practical on how to turn the nation into a fascist nightmare in only a couple year if he gets back in office. The movement has power beyond the leader.  

Sadly, for Paul, even being a good man with perfect knowledge of the future isn’t enough to stop that destruction.  

The Golden Path: Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune

These cover the story of the evolution of humanity. It concludes Paul’s story and carries the story through the long and tragic life of his son, Leto.

If you decide to go on, this is the next segment you must get through. I honestly feel that stopping here would be a letdown, but some people find the end of God Emperor a satisfying ending.  

But this part of the story follows Paul’s reign into the reign of his son, Leto II.  

Remember that part where the first book was about how all heroes are terrible… this is either doubling down on that or showing you what a hero would have to do to not be terrible (and to do that they have to be unspeakably terrible). While I won’t get too much into the details, the basic theme is that Leto II, the God Emperor, sets out to ensure that humanity will never again be ruled over by one person like it has been ruled over by him, his father, and ten millennia of emperors before them. Part of this is forcing the evolution of the species to ensure that beings who can see into the future can never take control again, but also by inflicting five thousand years of absolute tyranny on civilization, stiffing the desire to be free for so long that when it is let loose, it will never be put back in the bottle again.  

This is also where the books start bringing the real hero of all the books besides the first one, Duncan Idaho. A minor character in the first book who dies is restored through a cloning process called a ghola, and his memories are restored. Over the course of his reign, Leto II will go through a long series of Duncans, getting a new one each time the last one dies. This allows there to be some continuity from the start of the story to the end, but it causes Duncan a lot of pain.  

I will be honest: this is some of the most difficult writing to get through. Messiah and Children are arguably the weakest of Herbert’s entries in the series, and God Emperor is vastly more cerebral with vastly little action to move the themes forward—it’s mostly musing of a giant worm diety, which he has some very insightful thoughts on human nature, but it’s not a book you can just blaze through over a long weekend. 

With God Emperor, it is also at this point that the quotes at the beginning of chapters starts becoming more important than the actual content of the story.

Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune

These books start a new part of the Dune saga, no longer focusing on the Atredies but through their loyal friend Duncan Idaho. Sadly, Frank Herbert died before he could finish the story he started to tell with this section. But the section starts with the universe thousands of years after the death of the God-Emperor and the universe being free for the first time in a long time. It does not solve all the problems, but it has alleviated a lot of them. But then some of those who, for the first time, tried to expand past the boundaries of the galaxy seem to be coming back with a vengeance. This part of the story is the fight of the Bene Gesserit and Duncan Idaho to save humanity from this returning problem.  

I will be honest: these books, while a stronger story, are a little weird in that there is an odd obsession with sex that was not there in the previous books—sex was there…but an army of dominatrixes who can turn any man into their slaves through a good roll in the hay is not exactly where I thought this story was going to end up.

But in this part of the story, we also get Super Duncan (which is what happens when you have a Duncan Ghola not just remember his first life, BUT ALL OF HIS LIVES WITH THE GOD EMPEROR together). Paul and Leto II may have been able to rely on the memories of all their ancestors for insight, but Duncan is working with 5000 years of one mind, and it offers insights that neither of the Atredies had.  

But, again, these books end on a cliffhanger where the returning armies explain they were merely running from something far worse…

Which leads us to the none Frank Herbert books…

House Atredies, House Harkonen, House Corino, The Butlerian Jihad, The Machine, Crusade, The Battle of Corin, Hunters of Dune, Sandworms of Dune

Technically, these titles consist of three different parts (a prequel trilogy to Dune taking place only a generation before, a prequel to the entire series in the distant past, and the two books that offer the conclusion to Chapterhouse Dune), but the prequels set up the events in the last two and you kind of have to take it as a whole.

Now, these books can get fairly controversial with some Dune fans. Purists scream that it’s raping the memory of Frank Herbert and his son Brian is just after a cash grab (as if Frank wasn’t after money when he wrote these, and as if every author if they find something that pays the bills they don’t usually write a little more in that direction). Are they up to Dune’s high level of writing? No, they’re not. But neither is any other book in the series that Frank Herbert wrote. Dune by itself is a singular book. There are few books in science fiction, hell, only a couple dozen in all of literature that compare. Of the House Trilogy, there are parts that I find far more insightful than anything in Heretics of Dune and its weird introduction to sex slavery. In the Jihad Trilogy Erasmus is one of the most interesting characters—he starts as something inhuman, a metal Mengele who sees people as only subjects for experiments but who, over the course of time, learns to respect human life and then envies it, finally dying in a moment that is almost tragic.

I will admit the books are not at the level of, say, the first four books of Dune, but they were something Herbert planned for, although I’ll probably never be sure how closely Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson followed the plans set out by Frank Herbert’s plans…but as an author, I doubt any book I have ever finished looked exactly like what my original notes had been.  

One of the problems I have with the last two books is that there seems to be a build-up to an idea of the soul, which, up to this point, had not been present in the fairly agnostic (if not atheistic) Dune series. With two goals of Paul running around at once, there seems to be the sense that only one of them will be able to regain his memories (and thus his soul)…but the way the two Pauls’s problems are resolved is a little different than what I would have said was being thematically set up (which actually suggest to me that Herbert and Anderson were following some detailed early notes, but didn’t have the insight to see where Frank was going). Further, Baron Ghola having to deal with the voice of Aliya, who was his granddaughter, seems to not make sense given that so much of the argument of Dune has been that when achieving prescience, the person reaching this level is tapping into the genetic memories of all their ancestors (which was when Herbert wrote still an idea that sci-fi played with but has since been shown to be an idea that doesn’t even have enough basis for science fiction to play with and is just pseudoscientific bullshit.). My suspicion is that this issues may have come from Frank Herbert’s notes—that in his older age, he was leaning more toward the spiritual and less toward the agnostic tendencies seen in most of his earlier writing, but that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson either didn’t fully grasp where Herbert’s notes were directing or decided that the sci-fi audience of the books would have approved of a spiritual ending that seemed to fly in the face of so many things that Dune originally stood for (even if it was where the original author wanted to go) and moved the plot back to a squarely “scientific” (at least scientific by the standards of the Dune Universe) and not fly in the face of what people were expecting. There is a long history of authors having to cater to the wants and expectations of audiences even if they wanted to say something else, and already taking so much flak for not being Frank Herbert, I feel they decided to play it safe even if the original notes had something far more ambitious in mind. But I will only be able to test this theory if Herbert and Anderson were to release copies of Frank Herbert’s notes; it’s not an impossibility, but certainly not something I would hold my breath for. As such, the last novels are thematically muddled. We do aget ends of the thematic themes of human evolution as an unstoppable force, and personal endings for many of the characters are certainly pleasing, but they still never quite reach the heights that the first novel reached.  

A whole of other books that fill in the blanks for the timeline of Dune

(By my lack of specificity, you know I’m not going to have a lot of praise here).

The fact is that the modern publishing world is much like the modern film world. All existing intellectual property and very little originality. I won’t name names, but we all know that a lot of authors are continuing their series and publishing two or more books a year by just having ghostwriters fill out the plot outlines they provide. And be it the original author just spewing out one book after another without soul or ghostwriters pushing out slews of heartless novels that continue the story but add nothing to the characters, it’s why almost all series seem to become pointless after a while.  

I have not read all of the other books in the Dune series, and maybe they don’t all fit this category, but what I did read (Paul, Winds, Mentats, Sisterhood, Navigators) felt like it fit in this category. They weren’t bad; they’re fine if you just want to spend time in the universe, but they add nothing, ask no new questions, and offer no new answers or insights. They’re comfort books at this point. If you enjoy them, that’s fine, but it will never be anything anyone will ever reference, nor will it be something that anyone will ever likely gain anything deep from other than a couple hours of distraction. Up to you, but I personally don’t think they’re worth what they want for books nowadays.