If you've made it this far, to Book Four, you're surely aware of the sprawling, whafuck miasma that constitutes Herbert's original vision of Dune. This reached its zenith in Books Two and Three when the reader is confronted with sad-sack main characters whose primary function is to KNOW EVERYTHING that will ever happen. What a conceit! And yes, it only works about half the time since such power granted to one central character is actually kind of boring while at the same time infinitely impenetrable. But we move on from Muad'dib eventually, thank God, 'cause that fellow's just way too wishy-washy, especially considering that he knows everything that will ever happen.
So we come to his kids. Book Three, the weakest so far, focuses on them, their travails, and some other crap. Then you get to the end and Leto II, Paul's son, turns into a goddamn sandworm-human hybrid and gains freakin' superpowers. Oh yeah, and he knows everything, too.
Thus, Book Four. 3000 years later Leto "Big Worm" Atreides pretty much holds sway over everyone. The spice doesn't flow and the Ixians and Bene Tleilax, Skynet and Clone War-folk, respetively, are out to even the playing field. There is much to love here. Duncan Idaho, now in his 4,637th reiteration, gets dragged along. There's all kinds of weird plans, prophecies, and machinations by Big Worm. It's confusing and hard to follow...until you get about 3/4 of the way through and suddenly the whole goddamn mess of this Dune saga starts to make sense. And it's pretty sweet! My favorite entry since the original.

A lot of a big worm saying “I’ll tell you later”

The Dune series is an interesting one. It starts out as a somewhat traditional adventure story following the hero’s journey and progresses to be something far more philosophical that begins to span worlds and centuries. It’s funny because I always heard that the series wasn’t very good after the first book, but I think that comes from the shift in tone and how . . . well, weird that the novels get rather than their actual quality. At least while Frank Herbert was still the one writing them. It remains to be seen if the books are any good after his son took over.

In God Emperor of Dune, we finally get the conclusion to The Golden Path that was started so early in the series. The philosophy has been doubled down on but there is a little action here and there and there are some truly great moments that stand out as some of the most interesting in the entire series. There is a level of tragedy in the end that I found to be some of the strongest that I’ve ever read. It’s a great read that brings a form of closure to the series (despite quite a few more books to go) and that concludes Frank Herbert’s initial premise for the series. It can be a bit much at times, but if you’ve gotten to this point in the series then you know what you are in for by this point and it’s absolutely worth reading so that you understand what the point of this entire series has been.

I do plan on continuing the series eventually, but this serves as a nice conclusion for now and I think that I would like to take at least a little break before I move on to the next era of the story.

For a book with such a great title, I sure am less than whelmed with God Emperor of Dune. I’m certain Leto Atreides II, God Emperor of the known universe for thousands years, would chide me for my inability to fully understand the truths that he pontificates on…

So just call me “stoopit!”

That's what most of this book is: Leto pontificating and berating people for being too "stoopit" to understand his prescient brilliance.

This is a book I can’t possibly review properly. I’ll need to re-read it once or twice more to really get it. Too bad the SciFi/SyFy channel didn’t produce one of their wonderfully cheesy and camptastic miniseries for this book, as they did for “Dune” and “Children of Dune.”

Alas, we’ll never get to see what their vision of a cheaply-made CGI giant worm/demi-god who speaks English with a heavy, non-specific European accent would have looked like.

Things I learned from this book:

1) An all-female army is superior to an all-male army because there’s no infighting or hierarchical structures among women.

(My childhood as the oldest of five kids—the first four females—attests otherwise. I recall a lot of hair-pulling and nail-scratching during my early years among us girls. But the God-Emperor sayeth, so it must be.)

2) It’s easy for a beautiful, female human being to fall in love with a neutered giant human/worm hybrid—who, quite frankly, is a bit of an asshole—so long as you were bioengineered just for that purpose.

3) A woman can come to the most intense orgasm of her life simply by watching a virile male climb up and down a mountain using nothing but his bare hands.

4) To prevent evil despotism that crushes human vivacity and freedom from ruling for millennia, one must become an evil despot who crushes human vivacity and freedom, and rules for millennia.

3 weird stars

*** 2021 reread -

Paul M’uab Dib: Son, I’m going to break all the rules and then provide a new order to the galaxy. I’m going to change everything and establish a revolution that will affect tens of billions of people and then when that’s done, I’m going to be a prophet of what went wrong and institute a theological framework for the continuation of our rule.

Leto II: Hold my beer.

This is the greatest reversal of opinion about a book I’ve ever had.

There’s an old saying about how you can never step twice into the same river, because both you and the river have changed. Wonder if that’s what happened here. I reviewed this in 2011, giving it a two star, and taking a break from the Dune series and even from Frank Herbert for over three years. In the past ten years, I’ve grown more comfortable with my love of all things Dune, and maybe matured some in my appreciation of fantasy literature.

I’ve reread Dune several times, reread Dune Messiah a couple years ago and then Children of Dune this year, enjoying Herbert’s writing more and more. As I turned the last page on Children, as Leto is demonstrating his superhuman powers, I looked ahead knowing that I had rung up a 2-star rating on the next book.

Critics of God Emperor, and I was one, compare this to the original, even lamenting the absurdity of Leto’s transformation into a near worm. Herbert was too good for such a continuation; in Leto he crafted a character unique in SF literature.

Leto as Superman.

As great a character as Superman is in the DC universe, and in our superhero mythos over the past 80 years, becoming an iconic image of all things symbolizing truth, justice and the American way, critics have correctly lampooned that he’s too perfect, god-like in his power and invulnerability. Garth Ennis, in his brilliant anti-hero satire The Boys, made up Homelander, a hero much like Clark Kent except he is twisted to evil. Ennis poses the delicious question, if superman is bad, what are you going to do?

As Children of Dune ends, Leto has become a symbiosis of man and sand trout, becoming something else. He demonstrates his new powers to the Fremen, revealing that he is inhumanly strong and seemingly invincible.

Hold my beer.

More than three thousand years later and he has transformed the known universe as completely as his appearance. He is a massive creature, more worm than man, and possibly immortal. THREE THOUSAND AND FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. It would be like if an Egyptian pharaoh began to rule in 1500 BCE and is still in power! All the world a vassal under his sandaled feet.

Herbert describes the Pax Leto, an enforced tranquility where Leto is worshipped as a god, supreme in his power and influence.

And here is where Herbert demonstrates his genius: this is a character study, a glimpse into ultimate power. The galaxy is ruled by the iron hand of a single entity, a thing who is both man and woman and neither, having a complete recall of millennia of collective memories and a prescience of future events.

There is a scene where Leto discusses with one of his most trusted servants about how the man, already elderly, is a mote in the god Leto’s eye, his long life a mere speck in the measurement of a being who had lived more than thirty times as long and without a definite life span ahead.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Herbert, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame member, and winner of the Nebula and Hugo awards, then reveals in Leto a lost humanity. He laments his lost manhood and weeps for love and intimacy that he can never realize.

Leto and Duncan Idaho.

When I first read this over ten years ago, I found some comic relief in the endless parade of Duncan Idaho ghola clones who came to serve Leto from the axolotl tanks of the Ixians. When one Duncan dies, usually at the hands of Leto, his replacement arrives soon thereafter, recalling his death in the pages of the original Dune and not understanding the world in which he lives nor the master he now serves. This time around I see that Herbert uses Duncan not just as a tie in to the earlier story, but as a grounding vehicle for Leto, Duncan is his connection to his humanity, and from the perspective of as voyeur his surrogate.

Duncan’s relationship with Hwi Noree is all the more poignant when considering this odd love triangle.

Leto and The Worm.

Many characters in the book note that Leto is a composite of man and worm, even distinguishing behavior associated with Leto and other, more bestial and unpredictable and dangerous, as that of the worm as apex predator. In this way Herbert evokes the duality of man allusion from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hide. Stephen King noted, in Danse Macabre, that Stevenson’s 1886 work was a fundamental template upon which much of the horror genre was based. Storylines and themes as divergent as werewolves and The Incredible Hulk all share horrific foundations of man and monster, of man losing control of the thin veneer of civilization to quickly and irrevocably become beast. In Leto, Herbert has envisioned the culmination of this concept – man to god, man to devil – and we can also consider an association with Arthur Machen’s 1890 publication the Great God Pan as Leto is referred to as wild and threatening, a hulking killer.

And of course a sand worm has special significance in Frank Herbert’s Dune world building. Leto has become that time’s Shai-Hulud.

So, my opinion of this great book has been radically changed. Not the weakest link in a great series, but a brilliant work in its own right.

Pre-review:

The God Emperor of Dune, is also a match maker! LOL

Premise: 3000-plus years after the events from Children of Dune, Leto II has been the God Emperor for eons, he rules the known galaxies through his iron-fist control over the enchanted spice and under his ruling, the known galaxies has been 'stabilized' and everyone is living in 'peace', but as you can imagine life in general can be...really boring. Plus there are still a plenty of powerful groups and races plotting to bring Leto II down. Among those rebels and conspirators, there is Siona, a young woman of the Atreides bloodline...

Reading the later parts of this series is increasingly like reading William Shakespeare in Space, with LSD, superhuman power, weird obsession with breeding programs, ecology etc etc. LOL

This book is a good character study for Leto II both as a tyrant and a strange, inhuman and immortal being, it is rare for an author to write a godlike character and make them actually look, sound and feel godlike.

On the other hand, I don't think I know Siona, the other main character well, I spent a lot of time with Leto and Idaho, but not enough time with Siona. I do like the trial Siona went through with Leto, but I don't feel like I know much about how Siona became who she is now.

The topics of immorality, tyranny and religion are brought up repeatedly throughout the story, I can imagine not everyone is gonna love these, I also have mixed feelings about these fictional tyrants (e.g. Leto II, the Lord Ruler from the Mistborn series) who have a hidden good intention/agenda for good, you know. The tyrants we see in real life are hardly that noble nor philosophical.

Plus the author Frank Herbert had brought a number of discussion on gender roles and the difference between the male and female sexes into the story, so far I don't really know what to think about it but I'm NOT saying he shouldn't bring the gender topics into his own book neither.

Plus I'm intrigued by how Leto II was written, and there is even a bit of romance!

Not as enjoyable as the first 3. I think it’s time to quit the series.

I'm going to write two reviews for this book, they are both true.

God Emperor of Dune is a rambling mess and a waste of time. About half this book is people talking with Leto, and him just interrupting them with cryptic vaguely related questions which they don't really answer, so he interrupts them with yet another cryptic vaguely related open-ended question. The idea of the Golden Path is inherently compelling, and sometimes caused it to be page turning as I kept reading to try and find out more about it, but like it just kept feeling like it was spinning it's wheels as a concept, and the novel and Leto kept promising me answers and not delivering, which made it feel like it was thin, a veneer pretending at greater understanding. Also, Frank Herbert had some weird things going on in his head about gay people, everytime anything related to homosexuality comes up I prepare myself to absolutely cringe, and I needed that preperation every time. Aside from just being icky, it breaks the illusion that this is the words of some ancient being, or some author who really has humanity figured out and makes you wonder how much of this is just the nonsensical shower thought of some dude while he was high.

2.5/10


Second review:
God Emperor of Dune is the first Dune sequel that feels like it has truly escaped from under the shadow of Dune. Incredibly ambitious in scope, and worldbuilding, this is an extremely idea's-based novel that drops fire conversation after fire conversation. The Golden Path is presented in such an engaging way, giving us very little information without earning it, causing me to be constantly investigating, trying to put pieces together, which lead to a really engaging, nearly addicting read at time despite the very very slow plot. There are some weird lines that didn't age well, but that is overshadowed by a towering achievement of a novel that only Frank Herbert could have written.

9.1/10



I guess I will average them out and write 3 stars

HOW is this by the same person who wrote Dune? It's terrible. Truly, awful. The concept is awful, the gender politics are awful, the eugenics, the homophobia, the endless, tedious monologues.
The beginning held so much promise: a rebel on a treacherous race through the woods, carrying the stolen diaries of a god-emperor-tyrant who sent his 10ft wolves after her. And then it's just hours and hours of Leto making these points over and over again to different, but often the same, members of the cast:
1) The Golden Path is the Way
2) To get there, I must install a pharaohic order for 4 millennia. Then, when everyone is happy I will cause a war and humanity will remember how to survive wars and so be good at everything again.
3) Obey the plan, I know best
4) Nothing surprises me, except when it does, which I enjoy
5) Women are easy to manipulate but don't have a whole lot to prove, so they won't try and rebel in the army and are. good at maintaining order
6) Naturally I also make sure they are horny af and rent them out as prostitutes to keep things in order in other ways
7) They're also pretty gay. Which is awful but good for an army.
8) I don't have genitalia
That last one shows up far too often. The Hwi character and him together made me a bit sick. It wasn't just the fact that they were by all definitions different species but also that he has 3-and-a-half thousand years on her and she was a supremely innocent, sweet young woman. The whole thing felt gross.
Also the homophobia from Duncan was really really weird and came out of nowhere in the first 100 pages, only to disappear and rear its ugly head at the end.
And the book's greatest sin is that it's really boring. The last 15 or so pages have some very limited, albeit surprising action, but it just made me feel like this whole thing was for nothing. Who edited this? Why didn't it get cut by at least 2/3rds? How on earth will I finish the last 2??

Also Brian's introductions are basically just an advert for Brian. ugh.

Please, make it stop.

Palyginti su trimis ankstesnėmis dalimis, kažkoks kognityvinis disonansas. Arba aš čia per durnas suprasti tą beveik 450 puslapių pilstymą iš tuščio į kiaurą ir rašymą taip nieko ir nepasakant arba, su visa pagarba, autorius rašė biškelį apsiniuhinęs. Kažkokia baisiai keista, nutylėjimų, nutrūkusių minties gijų bei nesusipratimų kupina knyga.

Once again a straight forward plot with an interesting idea that makes up the equivalent of a twist, kind of? Philosophical components and some dialogue interactions are the most interesting elements. The actual plot is deceptively simple for the page length. Not that much actually happens. It’s there to further the things being explored. But so far the second book did both much more masterfully than any of the others, in my opinion.

The problem with these notions being explored is that, while very interesting, their foundation shows distress in modern times. So many sociological components are outdated and when it demonstrates this, one wonders what else is prone to collapse. An army of bi/lesbian warriors without a voice.

Queerness as a cultural component is completely misunderstood and miscontextualized. It doesn’t feel like this could possibly be the future in any real sense because the only firm things it holds in its grasp is philosophy. Meanwhile for thousands of years people take drugs and have orgies and the most powerful weapon is a lasgun. And they display no awareness whatever of gender roles beyond the role ascribed by the empire.

As people, they lack compelling aspects. As cogs working to propel the plot and the exploration, they’re nearly perfect. But how much value is that when without this withholding of selfhood? Something great always deters this fiction from complete enjoyment, immersion, and ‘greatness’, for lack of a better term.