[Nota Bene: As Frank Herbert's last two published novels in the Dune series, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, along with the unwritten Dune 7, in fact comprise a single story that happened to be divided into three parts, I'll post the same review for both of the two published volumes. This review contains no spoilers.]During the first half of his literary career, Frank Herbert focused most on coming to terms with what it meant to be conscious. The evolution of his thinking on the subject can be traced from real-world events which happened to him in his youth, through his earliest published science fiction stories, crude as they were, and on into novels like The Dragon in the Sea and the stories that would coalesce into The Godmakers, and certainly The Santaroga Barrier and Destination: Void. This line of thinking reached its fruition in the novels Dune and Dune Messiah.Having expanded his understanding of the full spectrum of consciousness about as far as it could go (although admittedly he never stopped tinkering with the subject), in the second half of his career Herbert refocused his attention on how the limitations imposed upon individual consciousness – or perhaps it might be better to say the limited perspective encompassing a single human lifetime – leaves humanity ill-equipped to confront an infinite and ever-changing universe. In effect we end up in a continuous crisis mode, always vainly insisting that the world of tomorrow conform to the expectations of yesterday. We're persistently and comically always shocked to discover our assumptions are wrong. Elsewhere I have described this aspect of Herbert's thinking, the human failure to deal with, or even to recognize, the implications of an unbounded universe, as an absolute-infinity breach. This theme begins to emerge in Children of Dune and is especially prominent in God Emperor of Dune, for a final surmounting of the absolute-infinity breach is the primary target of Leto II's Golden Path. But we also encounter the concern in Herbert's final trilogy: Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune, and (by implication) in the unwritten Dune 7.It is a hallmark of Herbert's imagination that he pursues an ever-elaborating expanse of concerns, always tracing a spectral pathway across a continuum of broadening bandwidth, chasing after considerations of widening implications across grander and grander scales of magnitude. An original interest in a fleeting moment of hyperconsciousness ultimately led Herbert into defining consciousness, hyperconsciousness and subconsciousness in all their aspects and dramatizing what he had learned and concluded in his stories; likewise his contemplations of the diverse implications of the absolute-infinity breach. And it might be added that he pushed his spectral analytical approach through time as well, so the Dune saga becomes probably the most temporally discontinuous series ever written. The first three novels take place roughly around the year 21,200 AD. The drama of God Emperor of Dune unfolds 3,500 years later, and that of the last three books (Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune are difficult novels, and attempting to distinguish them as separate novels, or independent from the unwritten Dune 7, is an artificial and arbitrary exercise) takes place an additional 1,500 years after that, placing us circa 26,200 AD.As the primary goal of Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune was to shatter the innate mythmaking in humanity that compels us to conservative convergence, these last three books are intended to unveil the consequences of living in a multiverse that has become irreparably divergent. This divergence followed in the wake of the downfall of the God Emperor and the subsequent Scattering of humanity not throughout multiple star systems or galaxies, but across multiple universes which are discontinuous with one another. Any threat can now come upon our heroes and heroines from any direction, but with all the eggs no longer in one basket, no matter what catastrophe might befall locally, the whole story can never come to a final end.In Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the Bene Gesserit has recovered substantially from the tribulation of the era of the God Emperor, and now we're allowed a far more intensive view of the inner workings of the Sisterhood than ever before. But the Bene Gesserit and the remnants of the old Imperium, as ever, are confronted by a host of power-hungry enemies, new and old, in the usual style of Herbert's Machiavellian plotting. It is these plots-within-plots that seemingly all other reviewers have focused on, and I'll forego doing the same here.Herbert said it wasn't until he was writing Children of Dune that he came to understand that an important role of an author was to entertain his readership. That will come as surprising news to some of you who like Herbert, and not to some of you who don't. But it's important to note that the word "entertainment" carries different connotations for readers than it does for hacks or more seriously-aspiring authors. Entertainment is something that is doled out to the action-adventure-thriller crowd, to those who love reading or going to the movies in no small part for the sheer escapism of the thing. Now I'm not overly bigoted about this. There's nothing more boring than a book that's, well, boring. But I think what Herbert was getting at was that as he matured as a writer he came to see, as many writers do, that plot per se is less interesting than character, no matter how many car chases or lasgun exchanges are involved.I for one can't separate a reading of the last books of the Dune series from knowledge of what was going on in Herbert's life as he wrote them, which he did, by that way, at an absolutely furious pace. This happened to be during the most stressful part of his entire life. His wife, Beverly, had been dying for ten years, and the last two years of her life were especially painful for her and for her husband, both physically and emotionally. I believe that, had he lived, Frank Herbert would have easily written the Dune 7 novel to complete the series. I am less sanguine that he could ever have written another coherent novel after that one.By the time God Emperor of Dune was published in 1981, and with the signed contracts for the later Dune novels in hand, Herbert was financially secure but, as I've suggested, he was suffering from increasing emotional instability. Furthermore, I can't help believing he was struck by a supreme irony, which is that, like Paul Maud'Dib, he now found himself hemmed in by the conservative mythology of his own image which he himself had created. To this day you can still see this in reviews of his later books, wherein readers who were born after Herbert's death still bemoan the fact that his later books are not like Dune in style. Everyone wanted, and continues to want, Frank Herbert to write books that seem like quote-unquote Frank Herbert books: everyone wanted, and wants, Herbert to remain frozen unchanging in 1965. But in his later years Herbert, with his financial security, felt free to try to break out of that myth regardless of the demands and expectations of his fans, and for this I applaud him. I'm sure he did have basic plot elements in mind for the last three books of the series – call this the "entertainment" necessary to bring the masses along – but it's quite obvious that he had already grown more interested in character development than in weaving such masterful webs of palace intrigue anymore.Herbert wanted to change course, but he had not yet found a new direction. I see hints of this in Children of Dune, in which Duncan Idaho tells Alia about the practice of setting out blocks of marble in the desert to be etched by the blowing sand of a Coriolis storm. Idaho argues that the sculpted pieces produced are beautiful but they are not art, as they are not carved according to human volition. But in the latter books it is Sheeana who creates an abstract sculpture she calls "The Void," which is art. How might these two kinds of sculpture compare? What is the symbolic significance of Sheeana's abstract work? The question is particularly relevant, it seems to me, when Sheeana's piece is recognized as a symbol set in tension with a Van Gogh which, at the end of Chapterhouse: Dune is carted off into a new, uncharted universe. Clearly, I think, the matter can be read as a form of self-psychoanalysis undertaken by the author. "The Void" is the primitive and unformed new expression welling up inside him; the old and familiar, even conventional Van Gogh has been let slip away with a fond farewell.A kind of quantum uncertainty pervades Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune which are, after all, a single story occupying multiple volumes. We do not have enough pieces to interpret this story or to fairly critique its parts, which must therefore remain finally unadjudicated and unjudgeable. This is because the unwritten Dune 7 was also to have comprised a full third of the complete tale. We can see that Herbert was bending writing to a new direction, and we can hazard some educated guesses about (entertaining) plot elements that would have informed the third book, but we can never know. The best we can do is ponder any written records or notes that Herbert may have left behind as poles in the sand to mark the path he intended to follow. Anyone who possesses any such notes, it seems to me, can be a good steward to the memory of Frank Herbert only by publishing them in unexpurgated form: lacking that, Herbert's career accomplishments can never be properly assessed. And that is an injustice to an important 20th century American writer.
And so here it is, the final novel that Frank Herbert wrote before his passing in 1986. The book picks up after the Honored Matres have destroyed planet Dune and the Bene Gesserit are releasing Sandworms into the ecosystem of their homeworld, Chapterhouse, to make a new desert planet rich with melange. Meanwhile, as the Bene Gesserit's homeworld is being turned into a desert, the Honored Matres are scorching planet after planet trying to destroy the Bene Gesserit once and for all. If you've read all the Dune books that Frank Herbert wrote as I have then you know how complicated these plots get! And there are times in the book where it feels like the story's dragging it's feet, like Frank Herbert just wanted to write in a bunch of over complicated nonsense just to add more pages and make the story seem longer than it needed to be. However, unlike Heretics of Dune, the only book in the series that I feel did just that for no particular reason, Chapterhouse Dune actually makes up for it because the story is actually building up to something interesting. Heretics of Dune pretty much built up to the fact that Dune gets destroyed, interesting but not enough to extend for a 400 page book. Chapterhouse Dune builds up the desertification of the Bene Gesserit home planet. It shows the Bene Gesserit evolving and questioning their own motives as they try to survive. They build up the destruction of the Old Empire and the blossoming of the Scattering of humanity into the Infinite Universe. There's new factions, new beliefs, even new human mutants and hybrids. The characters are also very interesting, there's even some cool character arcs and minor yet pleasing plot twists here and there. However, this book ends on a cliffhanger and leaves a bunch of unanswered questions. Frank Herbert was going to answer those questions but as I mentioned before, he passed away in 1986 before he could give us answers. But his son, Brian Herbert, teamed up with scifi novelist Kevin J. Anderson to write Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune which are follow up sequels to Chapterhouse Dune and from what I hear, all questions will be answered. Hopefully :/But again, Chapterhouse Dune is not as good as the first book, trying to reach the standards of the first book is quite a challenge in of itself and this book is really for anybody who loves the universe of Dune enough to sit down and indulge in it. Being a scifi literature nerd I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I read all the Dune books, I will admit this series is by far one of my favorite works of science fiction literature. I have every intention to read the sequel and prequel Dune books written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson and I anticipate they will be worth my while.
What do You think about Chapterhouse: Dune (1987)?
Chapterhouse: Dune was the last Dune novel that Frank Herbert completed and published before his death in 1986. Though he had written notes and the series would continue with his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, most Dune fans regard the six Frank Herbert publications as the “Original Series”. After many books written since his death, pundits have stated that the only notes left is a post it note that says, "write more books."In this installment the direction taken in Heretics of Dune, the fifth book in the series, published in 1984, continues with the Bene Gesserit front and center. Heretics had followed a thousand five hundred year hiatus following the events in the fourth novel, God Emperor of Dune(published in 1981) and had taken a new direction, resurrecting much of the intensity and charisma of the original. The reign of the God Emperor, Leto II, son of Paul Muab ‘Dib Atreides, has ended and the story has been taken up with political and economic intrigue between the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilax and a new power, the Honored Matres. Chapterhouse involves action between the Bene Gesserit and the rising power of the Honored Matres.As literature, Chapterhouse: Dune is inconsistent and unbalanced. There are sections that collapse into a syrupy space opera melodrama and other parts that demonstrate some of Herbert’s best writing. “Power attracts those who are corruptible” muses Herbert and his Dune work represents an accomplished skill that highlights his remarkable powers of observation, detail and complex characterization. It is these talents that keep a reader engaged when the plot wears thin. Though it drags intolerably in places, Chapterhouse ends very well and makes me (almost) want to explore the continuations and explorations of the world building following Frank Herbert’s untimely death.If I had to rate the original six, making a mini-listopia, I would do so as follows:1. Duneand a very distant2. Heretics of Dune3. Children of Dune4. Dune Messiah5. Chapterhouse: Dune6. God-Emperor of DuneIf I was asked for a recommendation, I cannot endorse the original 1965 publication higher, it is in a rare atmosphere, populated by such classics as Fahrenheit 451, Childhood's End and 1984. If you REALLY loved Dune, by all means read the series, but alas, gentle reader, as great a writer as Frank Herbert was, and he was, he never comes close to Dune again.
—Lyn
This book continues from Heretics of Dune with only a few years' break and almost the same cast of characters. Again, it focuses on the Bene Gesserit, who Honored Matres have now launched a war of extermination against. Traditional Bene Gesserit strategies don't offer much hope against Honored Matre ruthlessness. Mother Superior develops a daring plan to save the Sisterhood, which the other characters and the reader only find out about as she puts it into effect. There's some fascinating explanation of Bene Gesserit philosophy in the course of all this. The ecological engineering theme also resurfaces, with the Bene Gesserit introducing sandworms to their Chapterhouse Planet.
—Silvio Curtis
Buddy read with Athena!“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”The Honoured Matres have returned with their full strength from the Scattering, and their fleets are assaulting all the worlds that once made up the old Empire at the core of the universe. The nobility and the Ixians have fallen, and the one force resisting the relentless invasion is the now legendary sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit.Heretics of Dune ended with one of the most dramatic and unexpected plot twists in science fiction, and this sequel takes up where the last book left off. Unfortunately, the first eighty percent of this book were a total chore to get through. Little or nothing happened, the setting and the characters were unremarkable and dull, and not even the writing was particularly good. After having read those eighty percent, I was more or less ready to give this book a one-star rating.Even so, I'm raising the whole book to three stars based solely on the short part in the end. Frank Herbert has once again demonstrated his ability to write a boring book where nothing happens and then turn everything on its head in the end. In an impressively fascinating way, I might add. I was almost tempted to give up on the series on occasion while reading this, but after reading the ending there's absolutely no way I could do that.
—Markus
