God Emperor of DuneBook 4 of the Dune ChroniclesBy Frank HerbertA Dune Retrospective by Eric AllenWhat do you say about the book that was so completely terrible that it so turned you off of the series that you refused to read the four books that came after it for over a decade? This book is bad in a way that few things achieve. Oh, yes, there are worse things than this book in human history, and I do not mean to cheapen the horror of those atrocities, but when it comes to complete and utter failures in fictional exploits, this is amongst the worst. By this time in his career, Frank Herbert's Dune series had sold multiple millions of books. He was a veritable gold mine for his publisher, and so, he had the power and influence to basically get anything he wanted from them. As a result, God Emperor of Dune is pure and complete insanity. Oh, but its not just normal insanity, oho no. Its a special sort of insanity. Its the sort of insanity that happens when you give crazy way too much money, power, influence, and creative license. I like to call this kind of crazy, George Lucas Syndrome. Allow me to explain. In 1977 George Lucas, a rookie filmmaker, under huge budget constraints, and with heavy studio influence, managed to produce one of the greatest movies of all time. Though Star Wars was well recieved by the world at large, his distributer still placed very harsh budget constraints on the following two films. These movies were a great illustration of the concept "Art from Adversity". Despite all of the people telling him no, all the limitations of special effects technology, all of the problems with budgeting and studio executives trying to change his work, he managed to produce one of the most lucrative franchises in movie history. He was viewed as a filmmaking genius by many... and then he made the prequels. He had unlimited funds, was no longer constrained by the limits of special effects technology, and most importantly, everyone on earth was utterly terrified to tell him no, because he could very easily take his goldmine of a series elsewhere and be just as happy. When you take the adversity, the thing that CLEARLY created the art to begin with, out of the picture, you are left with a man who is completely insane, making movies that are also completely insane. What does this have to do with Dune, you ask? Plenty. You see, having sold millions of copies of his first three books in the Dune series, Frank Herbert had enough clout with his publishers that he could have taken a dump on a blank piece of paper and they would have published it, because they were utterly terrified that he would take his series elsewhere. And so, when he handed them the manuscript for God Emperor of Dune, NO ONE SAID ANYTHING ABOUT HOW TERRIBLE IT WAS TO HIM!!! They published it because he wrote it, it had Dune in the title, and people would buy it, read it, and claim to love it because of it.So, this leaves the question, was Herbert balls out insane from the beginning, and simply constrained by his publishers and editors to create art for his first three books? Or did he just do a crapton of drugs between book 3 and book 4? We may never know the answer for sure.Why is this book so bad? Well, lets find out, shall we?I can't put enough quotation marks around the word "story" here, so I won't even try. 3500 years have passed since the events of Children of Dune. Leto Atreides II has become a giant sandworm with a human face and arms... Yeah, I'll give you a minute to wrap your mind around that. You good? Ok, moving on then. The ENTIRE plot of this book revolves around Leto talking, and talking, and talking, and talking, and talking, and talking, and talking. He talks about being a sandworm. He talks about what it means to be a sandworm. He talks about why it's important that he has become a sandworm. He talks about how being a sandworm fits into his plans. And through all that talking, HE NEVER MANAGES TO TALK ABOUT WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT TO THE PLOT OR WHY I SHOULD CARE!!! And then he dies, easily killed by his utter arrogance in believing that mere humans could never possibly rise up against him. And I get a lot of people telling me I've got it wrong on this... but try reading his last few bits of dialog after falling in the water with this in mind and tell me I don't have a point. If this was not what Herbert meant to convey with this dialog, he sure failed at what he actually meant to get across to me.The Good? Nada. In fact, skip this book if you plan to read this series. Your life will be better for it. You miss absolutely nothing that the next book does not readily explain in a few sentences, and you don't have to wade through all the complete fail that this book embodies.The Ugly? First of all, while Herbert's views on women were pretty apparent in his previous works, he is openly sexist in this book to a huge and offensive degree. He has some extraordinarily strange views on the roles women play in society, what they want out of life, and how their thoughts and feelings differ from those of men. He devotes a large section of the book to explaining in great detail why women are inferior to men, veiling it behind the guise of praising them as a gender. Nice try Herbert, but you FAIL to hide your complete contempt for women in general. Every woman that I know that has read this book has come away from it TERRIBLY offended. Women beware, this book basically says that you're the scum of the universe and the source of every problem that man knows. If this sort of thing offends you, and believe me, I'm a guy and it offends ME, steer clear of this book.Not only does Herbert put forward some very offensive ideas about women, he also puts forth some very offensive views about homosexuals, soldiers, and pretty much all humanity in general. Women get the worst of it here by far, but soldiers and homosexuals come close on their heels. He seems to have great contempt for pretty much anyone that is not exactly like he is. This is an actual line from the book. I have not altered it in any way. "All soldiers are homosexuals at heart." There are so many layers of offensiveness buried in those six little words that I could write an entire essay on that alone. Needless to say, it is offensive to every party mentioned in multiple ways. It takes true talent and bigotry to imbue such a short sentence with so many layers of insult to so many different people. And let me say right here and now, so that there is no mistaking Herbert's views for my own, though I may come from a strong Christian background, I have no problem with gay people. My philosophy on life is that everyone should have the freedom to live as they see fit, and it is not my place to tell them that they are doing it wrong, regardless of my own personal feelings on the matter. I have worked with gay people all my working life and you know what I've learned about them? They're people. Just like everyone else. Doing their best to live their lives in a world that is not very accepting of them. They deserve to live their lives just like everyone else.Every character in this book other than Leto exists for one purpose and one purpose alone. To ask questions that facilitate even more talking from him. Let me describe to you every scene in this book. Leto rants for about thirty pages on his morality and plan for humanity. Someone is confused by his complete insanity and asks him a question. He then goes on at great length explaining the answer. The other character is still confused and asks another question, which facilitates yet another long and boring rant from him. These characters have no personality. They have no motivation. They have no plans or desires of their own. They exist within the plot for one purpose and one purpose only, to give Leto an excuse to further explain Frank Herbert's insanity.Leto is still not a sympathetic character. He has more personality here than he did in the previous book, this is true, but here he is even more loathsome because of it. I'm sorry, I do not sympathize with a grotesque mockery of humanity who goes on, and on, and on, and on about he's the only hope of said humanity, and as such has the right to severly subjugate all life in the universe under his strictures and rule. He was not a likeable character to begin with, and here, he has become a loathsome tyrant that it is impossible to sympathize with. So why should I care about a book that is, primarily, about him talking at GREAT LENGTH about his own personal philosophy? I don't. I really, REALLY don't. He's a terrible character, and as an extension of that, any story revolving around him is also terrible.Herbert STILL does not seem to feel the need to explain what motivates Leto to do what he has done, and why I should care about it. These are basic elements of the plot of this book and the previous one that are COMPLETELY LEFT TO THE READER'S IMAGINATION. IF you want me to care about your character and the story revolving around him, you have to tell me WHAT he is doing, WHY it is important, and most importantly, WHY I SHOULD CARE!!! These are basic storytelling elements that Herbert completely FAILED to employ.In conclusion, this book is awful. It's a special kind of awful, the sort of which you will rarely find in fiction. It's basically a thinly disguised excuse for Herbert to give his own philosophies on life. If you want to write a book of philosophy, by all means, go ahead and do so. But don't try to tell me it's the next installment of your epic science fiction series. This book gets ZERO stars, but since the rating does not show up here on Goodreads with zero, I threw one up there. It feels FAR longer than it actually is. It centers around a character that is completely and utterly loathesome, without a SINGLE redeeming characteristic, and I'm supposed to feel for this character? Yeah, sorry Herbert, but no. I don't. I really, REALLY don't. This book is terrible in a way that few books are. And worst of all, it's boring. I can forgive bad writing. I can forgive a bad story. I can forgive wooden characters. It is my opinion that one of the truly unforgivable things that a storyteller can do, is to tell a boring story. Only the most hardcore fans of the Dune series will likely be able to find any enjoyment here, to any casual readers I typicaly recomend that this book be skipped over, because it really is THAT bad. Check out my other reviews.
Having finished writing the third book of the trilogy, Children of Dune (first published in Analog, January-April 1976), Frank Herbert did not intend to revisit that imaginary universe. He had said all he wished to say about Paul Atreides and his legacy, and about the spice, and sandworms, and the Bene Gesserit, and the like. He would move on to other matters.And so he did. The Dosadi Experiment followed hard on the heels of Children of Dune, first published in the summer of 1977. This was succeeded by a screenplay for a Dune movie in 1978, and complicated legal wrangling involving the writing and rewriting of The Jesus Incident, which was published in 1979. Competing negotiations for a film version of Soul Catcher preoccupied Herbert during the summer of 1980. During this period he also coauthored a now almost unreadable book about new technology just beginning to arrive on the scene, 1980's Without Me You're Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers.As early as 1977, however, Herbert had admitted that he felt pressure to continue the Dune series, although he was uncommitted to doing so. He said then: "The thing that attracts me is, say, coming back to the character of Leto 3,400 years later . . ."When Herbert did decide to return to the Duniverse, he felt free of any constraints so far as the plot was concerned. So long as he remained within the general boundaries established in the original trilogy, he was free to write about absolutely anything he desired. He must have felt very liberated, knowing he had a guaranteed audience and to be able to start fresh. He wrote the fourth book in the series between March 1979 and July 1980. Published in May 1981, God Emperor of Dune is Frank Herbert's magnum opus.Dune Messiah reads like a convoluted Shakespearian tragedy, but God Emperor of Dune bumps it up a couple orders of magnitude: here we find not excessively Byzantine plot convolutions, but rather a graceful and elegant prose found nowhere else in Herbert's writing. Herbert had begun to consciously try to meld literary and science fiction in Children of Dune, and that experimentation reaches its apex in this novel. God Emperor of Dune is the most literary science fiction novel I've ever read. This is precisely the kind of writing that I wish all science fiction authors would try to meet or exceed.In Children of Dune the character Leto II had unambiguously declared that the choice for humanity was one of extinction or his Golden Path: some dangerous something was embedded in the human psyche that needed to be corrected. In writing this novel, Herbert asked himself one question: If I had thousands of years at my disposal, how would I fix humanity?Within that question lies the character of Leto II, and the character of Leto II provokes all of the action of the story.I'll give away none of the plot here, but in order to appreciate the tragedy that is God Emperor of Dune it's important to consider the quality of the main character, Leto II.In the earlier Dune books, the primary superheroic gift of Paul Atreides was an ability to foresee many different possible futures. The ability of Alia, and of the Bene Gesserit, was to assimilate the life-experiences of their past ancestors. In Leto II Herbert has merged these gifts. The God Emperor has extraordinary access to all spacetime, past and future: he is the real Kwisatz Haderach. Furthermore, enveloped as he is in a skin that is not his own, he has become virtually indestructible and immortal. He may not have the power of physical creation at his fingertips, but for all practical purposes Herbert has created in Leto II what may be at once the strangest and the most believable god-figure in literature.Leto II contains and can access the full-life experiences of all his ancestors, back to the dawn of human consciousness. So how many personages are rattling around within the psyche of the God Emperor? Counting n generations backwards in time, each of us has 2*2^n ancestors, which means after only n = 19 (i.e., 19 generations back), we each have more than a million ancestors. As Herbert elsewhere (i.e., in Destination: Void) posits human consciousness originated 16,000 years ago, a bit of math suggests that Leto II has direct access to approximately 3.0 x 10^371 fully integrated ancestral lifetime memory-records! Add to that his prescient abilities, and this character is suddenly discovered to be the Alexandrian library incarnate multiplied to an unprecedented degree. His experience of humanity is legion. Nowhere else in fiction, to my knowledge, has the portrayal of a character even remotely like this one been attempted. Given this understanding, Leto's unique perspective on the human condition becomes a bit more comprehensible. 3,500 years to such a creature can seem little more than the blink of an eye. He can scarcely be concerned with the individual: it is only survival of the species that matters to him. This makes him the ultimate alien, the enigmatic sphinx whose utterances may be heard and recorded but must be interpreted within the context of millennia.God Emperor of Dune presents us with Herbert's most careful, most thoughtful, most philosophical, most profound writing of his life, and the prose of its telling is exquisite. Every page is alive and electric, jolting with new insights. To have made the prolonged journey with Herbert over the long years and to arrive at this point with him is a kind of privilege. For more than any other character he created, Leto II is inseparable from Frank Herbert. If nowhere else, Herbert will live forever in God Emperor of Dune.
What do You think about God Emperor Of Dune (2003)?
Michael wrote: "I was very disappointed in the sequels to Du e myself. The first one wasn't bad, but I felt none of the ones after were worth reading."Have you read the books by his son? A more palatable writing style.
—Greg Strandberg
Buddy read with Athena!“I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. Such an accumulation of riffraff has never before been imagined.”More than three thousand years have passed since the events described in the Great Dune Trilogy, and everything has changed. Arrakis is now a planet of running water and green growth, and the days of stillsuits and crysknives are gone. The Sandworms and the Fremen remain only as legends from the Ancient Days of Dune. Only one part remains from the old days: Leto II, the God Emperor.God Emperor of Dune is, logically, a book centred around Leto. However, that is precisely its greatest problem. The so-called God Emperor who so valiantly sacrificed his human existence for that of an emperor doomed to serve his people by living through the ages and preserving the universe, has turned into a tyrant. And everyone sees him as such, except for himself and his fanatically loyal Fish Speaker cult. It seems as if though the book is an attempt to justify the government of Leto, and that is a task in which it fails miserably.Because of that, one should think that there would be other people to sympathise with. People living under the oppression of Leto’s rule joining together in rebellion against the monstrous tyrant. Well… there really aren’t any. The rebels on Arrakis are led by Siona, the last of the Atreides line descending from Ghanima, Leto’s sister. But in reality, Leto is allowing the rebellion to happen while secretly grooming Siona to become another of his instruments. Siona knows this, and knows that the God Emperor doesn’t want her dead. That, of course, makes one wonder what the point is about the whole thing.Next to Leto and Siona, the rest of the characters are few and uninteresting. There were a couple of them in particular that were a bit interesting in the beginning, but my interest in them quickly evaporated into thin air. And when you don’t have any characters that are fun to read about, the book gets terribly boring after a while.This book is actually not as bad as it sounds. The story was intriguing at times (not often, mind you), the great writing of Frank Herbert is still present, and the fourth book is just as much of a lesson in power and politics as the first three books. But the point is that compared with Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, three of the greatest books ever written, this one is a disaster.
—Markus
Since the last hundred or so pages of Children of Dune, I have slowly seen decline in the plot of the Dune series. Or at least, from the end of Children of Dune throughout God Emperor of Dune. There was something quite over the top about Leto II's slow transformation into a sandworm and his eventual three and half thousand year reign over the Universe - as a sandworm/human hybrid. I think I found it hard to visualise the being he slowly transformed himself into - although the plot of God Emperor of Dune did not help matters either. From an interesting first half of the book, explaining what had happened for three millennia, the second half grew dry, with all the characters philosophising about consciousness, the nature of life and the universe they inhabit, and what it means to be a god, a god who eventually ends up falling in love but unable to consumate his relationship because he has no 'appendage' to do so. Leto II's 'Golden Path' that his prescience guides him into starting at the end of Children of Dune, something that Paul Atreides rejected, makes the whole of the planets and societies in the Dune Universe peaceful, negates conflict between the great houses portrayed in the first trilogy (well as far as I could deduce, he has all but wiped out House Corrino and Harkonnen), his army of Fremen are now replaced by Women warriors - Fish Speakers - and it seems as if he has created an matriarchal society. Dune also has been terraformed, with hardly any desert remaining, which explains the rationing of spice and no fremen culture that gave Dune its raison d'étre. The rebels that do exist end up eventually in his household working as his entourage.I found the last half of the novel hard going. Frank Herbert still retains the politics, religion, philosophy of the first three books in the series, but it is a lot more heavier and hardly any real action breaks it up until the last thirty or so pages. I hear Heretic of Dune is better, so I still hold out hope!
—Kevin
