More thought experiment mindfuck than Space Opera spectacle (as it's predecessor was), Dune Messiah imagines the whys and wherefores and whatabouts concerning prescience with a power that seems definitive and, in that way, inhibiting to all prescience tales that have followed it and are still to come.

It's the same mechanism as what Back to the Future has done to the way we think about time travel. Generations of audiences -- at least a couple, so far -- believe in inevitable paradoxes within time travel, that ripples in the time stream will change everything, that people, places and things will disappear under the influence of the smallest interferences. They are sure of it to the point that "new" imaginings of time travel (and even older imaginings of time travel, like The City on the Edge of Forever) are criticized as "breaking the rules" of time travel or "failing to make sense."

Of course, time travel is entirely theoretical. Any story that includes time travel is, by its nature, a thought experiment and nothing more. There is no time travel, therefore there can be no right or wrong (so long as it maintains its internal logic) when it comes to time travel (at least not until there is time travel and we can actually start to understand its actual "laws").

The same applies to prescience, and I am sure that Frank Herbert's masterful imagining of what prescience may be must inform the way all those familiar with his work will imagine prescience from the moment they put down Dune Messiah

Muad'dib's prescience is so fully imagined that I find it hard to imagine, at least now that I've reread the text after thirty-five+ years, what elements of prescience Herbert might have missed. If some day, some one, some where can foresee the future, I imagine prescience playing out in precisely the way Herbert imagined it would manifest in Paul Atreides (so there is me, fooled by a great thought experiment).

Whatever shortcomings this book has (and there are a few), they are eclipsed by the fierce creativity behind Herbert's imaginings of foresight. He does for Sci-Fi prescience in Dune Messiah what he did for Sci-Fi ecology in Dune -- shaping others' narratives for years to come. It's an impressive feat. He may not be my favourite Sci-Fi writer (not even close), but his brilliance has my respect.

This felt more like an extended epilogue to Dune rather than a sequel.

It’s often said that in order to understand the meaning of Dune, you also need to read this sequel, but I don’t completely agree. We get further confirmation on the expansion of the war that Paul started in the first book, and just how deadly this war was to the universe of Dune. I actually found the first book to capture this well, but it was told throughout this epic scifi journey. Dune Messiah tells a similar tale, without the scale of the first, and because of this the sequel feels incomplete.

At the same time. The story that’s told is fascinating as hell. Taking Paul’s power of envisioning the future—a multitude of futures—and turning that into his crux was brilliant and developed perfectly throughout the story. The new characters introduced were okay, some of the main characters from the first book took a major step back, but the few major players in Messiah took very interesting and unexpected arcs.

I still think I’ll read Children of Dune because I’m very interested to learn more about how this world moves forward. But I wasn’t blown away by this sequel, so we’ll see.

Secondo romanzo del ciclo di Dune.

Dodici anni sono trascorsi. I Fremen hanno dato seguito alla loro profezia ed hanno massacrato mondi interi. Il nome di Muad'dib è tuttora, nella galassia, sinonimo di morte.

Gli intrighi politici e le cospirazioni svolgono un ruolo primario nella vicenda, Muad'ib una figura scomoda e da eliminare. Tutto è molto più ragionato, lento e introspettivo, poco spazio all'azione.

Paul rimane al centro della narrazione pur lasciando spazio a nuove "e vecchie" forze che vanno ad opporsi al suo dominio. La sua vita continua ad essere sempre in pericolo e quello che le sue visioni gli mostrano lo terrorizzano e lo portano a prendere una dura soluzione.

Herbert inizia il suo lungo percorso nelle visioni di Paul di un futuro incerto per la razza umana. Lo kwisatz haderach sarà in grado di fronteggiarlo?

Un romanzo dominato dal tema religioso e della scelta. Essere schiavi del proprio mito.
Romanzo che approfondisce la figura di Muad'dib all'interno della saga, ma attenzione, ricopre solo un tassello, Dune è molto più.

-----------------------
Second novel of the Dune series.

Twelve years have passed. The Fremen followed through on their prophecy and massacred entire worlds. Muad'dib's name is still synonymous with death in the galaxy.

Political intrigues and conspiracies play a primary role in the story, Muad'ib an inconvenient figure who needs to be eliminated. Everything is much more reasoned, slow and introspective, with little room for action.

Paul remains at the center of the narrative while leaving room for new "and old" forces that oppose his domination. His life continues to be in danger and what his visions show him terrify him and lead him to make a harsh decision.

Herbert begins his long journey into Paul's visions of an uncertain future for the human race. Will the kwisatz haderach be able to face him?

A novel dominated by the theme of religion and choice. Being slaves to your own myth.
Novel that delves into the figure of Muad'dib within the saga, but be careful, it only covers one piece, Dune is much more.

ależ zakończenie :D

I don't normally look at reviews of a book prior to writing my own take on it, but sometime I just draw a blank after finishing a book. Some books are harder to review than others, sometime because I feel ambivalent about them, sometime I don’t fully understand them, and sometime I don’t know the reason, they just are. After finishing Dune Messiah I feel like I need some kind of launching pad to start off the review, some inspiration or perhaps I will resort to simply ripping off somebody’s review wholesale (unfortunately Cecily has not reviewed this one yet so I'll pass on the last option ;)

Dune, as you are undoubtedly aware, is probably the most famous sci-fi novel of all time. Dune Messiah is like Frank Herbert’s equivalent of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” album in that it has to follow up a once in a lifetime mega hit and is doomed to come up short. Having read the book I do not get the feeling that Frank Herbert was feeling under pressure to match Dune’s success. Perhaps authors are not subject to the same level of pressure as pop stars.

At around 340 pages Dune Messiah is about half the length of Dune, it is also very different in tone and pacing. It starts off twelve years after the events of Dune. Our literally know it all hero Paul "Muad'Dib" Atreides is now Emperor of the known universe and is having a suitably heroic melancholic time of it on account of the jihad which caused billions of death in his name. In the meantime powerful enemies are ganging up to snuff him out because he is too powerful, he is literally a know-it-all thanks to his oracular powers, and nobody likes a smartass. His wife concubine can not have a baby because his legal wife slipped her some contraceptive (and oracular powers apparently do not cover food additives). To make matters worse (or perhaps better) his dead teacher Duncan Idaho is returned to him as a sort of clone (ghola) with a suspicious mission and a new highly ominous name of Hayt. With all the odds stacked against him how can he survive? With panache of course!

The first third of the book is very interesting with all the aforementioned odds being piled up against Paul, then the pacing of the book begin to sag with a lot of ruminations and philosophizing by the major characters and my mind drifted off to parts unknown. After a rather dry 100 or so pages the plot revives quite a bit and the climax is quite thrilling (if not exactly unpredictable).

This book clearly has a lot of depth, themes and subtexts, unfortunately its profundity mostly escaped me as profundities tend to do. One of the Amazon reviewers mentioned that the book is so profound wh8ile reading it he frequently had to stop to think about what Herbert was really saying. The stoppages I made are mostly to do with thinking about my options for lunch and other mundane things.

The two central characters are less compelling than they were in the previous book, Paul is all broody and miserable, his sister Alia goes through mood swings between being supernaturally sage, overly shrill and a teenager with a crush. Hayt/Idaho is pretty cool though, is he or isn’t he? Of course he is!

For me Dune Messiah acts as a slightly dull (but not too shabby) bridge to go on to the original trilogy’s grand finale Children of Dune which is brilliant by all accounts and I am looking forward to reading soonish.

Segunda entrega de la extraordinaria saga de Frank Herbert, Las crónicas de Dune, considerada una de las más importantes sagas de CF de todos los tiempos.

Una joya memorable y atemporal que será siempre el desierto de Arrakis.

El mesías de Dune continúa la historia de Paul Atreides, mejor conocido – y temido -, bajo el nombre de Muad’Dib. Como emperador del universo conocido, posee más poder del que jamás debió ejercerun solo hombre. Venerado como ídolo religioso por los vehementes Fremen, Paul se enfrenta a la hostilidad de las castas políticas que desplazó cuando asumió el trono, así como una conspiración dentro de su propio círculo de seguidores.

Aunque la Casa Atreides ya comienza a desmoronarse a su alrededor por las intrigas de sus enemigos, la verdadera amenaza para Paul vendrá de su concubina, Chani, y de su hijo nonato, heredero de la dinastía familiar.

El mesías de Dune tiene un tono y un estilo completamente diferente al de Dune. Dune estaba lleno de aventura e incluso una arenosa esperanza, todo un grupo trabajando, dispuesto a morir para transformar y cambiar el entorno.

Además, Dune tenía un montón de personajes muy fuertes. Por el contrario, el mesías es más político y emocional.

El tono en este ha sido más oscuro que el de Dune y no tan inspirador y filosófico. El final del mesías fue un poquito decepcionante, todo lo contrario del final de Dune.

O yo tengo el primero en un pedestal y todas las comparaciones son odiosas. Miedo me da el tercero que he leído que para muchos fue algo innecesario.

No es tan épico, es casi como un western con muchas intrigas políticas y con referencias a ciertos acontecimientos, pero muy poca acción por no decir inexistente.

La sensación del libro es como un preludio de lo que viene después, el tercer libro para mi será la verdadera secuela de Dune.

Para los fans de Dune, sin duda, y realmente necesitáis haber leído Dune para conocer a los personajes y tener una idea sobre la compleja e intrincadamente detallada construcción del mundo de Herbert. No deja de ser una genial lectura de lo más entretenida ya que volver a Dune es siempre una idea cojonuda..✍️

While it wasn't as grand (or as long) as Dune, I would say Dune Messiah was a very important part of the Dune series. This is the link between Paul and his becoming Muad'dib and his children's rule over Arrakis. Even though it was shorter, and we were already familiar with this dune world, there were many important things that took place. This is a must read for Dune fans.

Now, the reason for the three stars...Dear God I hate Herbert's writing style. Blah, blah, blah, gibber jabber. It felt at times to be a rambling mess. You had to read at a macro level skimming at times just to understand. Paying attention to the details only weighed you down and you had the potential to forget what the characters were even talking about.

If you can get past the blathering dialogue, then I highly recommend this to science fiction fans and especially those who read Dune and opted to treat it as a stand-alone.

if I was prescient and knew how my partner and I would die, I would simply not do the things that lead to our deaths. RIP to Paul but I'm different

‘I live in an apocalyptic dream.’

When the wheels of fate are churning, can you escape without being crushed beneath its wheels. Frank Herberts set up an amazing and complex political universe and sets it to explode, sending us off on a trajectory picked up by Dune Messiah. Set 12 years after the events of Dune, we find Paul Maud’dib on the Emperors throne and the Jihad has ‘killed sixty-one billion, sterilised ninety planets, completely demoralised five hundred others’ all in Paul’s name. Messiah has vastly expanded mechanics yet resides in a much smaller scale than its predecessor, being almost a parlor drama of ‘plots within plots within plots’ as before but with a more focused proximity to really feel the tension creaking through the narrative. Expanding on themes of the ways religion and politics are manipulated for power and diving deep into ideas of fate and freedom with a touch of Friedrich Nietzsche along the way, Dune Messiah is a tense and psychological thriller that really drives home the ideas left open at the end of the previous novel and charts a course for incredible new directions for the larger narrative.

While the original Dune plays out on epic proportions, Messiah feels more like a Greek tragedy. Withing a few chapters of the opening we see the plot drop into the chamber and be fired off with a pretty clear indication what it leads, yet every step of the way still feels fresh and thrilling. This is in keeping with the story as well, seeing as Paul foresees much of what is coming but after a decade of winning and no surprises, a psychological challenge that could be unexpected is what he craves. ‘He felt chained to a future which, exposed too often, had locked onto him like a greedy succubus,’ Herbert writes, and Paul, feeling isolated from even those he loves due to his prescience while increasingly speaking with Alia on their shared struggle, begins to wish for a way to escape his all-knowing fate. This becomes increasingly tragic when he can see great loss before they happen and the only advice his sister can give is ‘we must not grieve for those dear to us before their passing’

The story feels a bit more loose and less tidy in this one, an obvious difficulty when constructing a narrative around prescience. Yet the political tensions and plottings keep it sharp and direct, and where Herbert really excels is getting into character’s heads during discussions and seeing the internal mastermining going on. This is especially exciting with Scytale, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer that can shift into any body because if Bene Gesserits weren’t enough, this shapeshifting class only hinted at before is now on full conniving display to remind you that the Dune universe is terrifying and awesome. It is a tight cast, with less than a dozen primary characters including the return of Duncan Idaho as a clone, or ‘ghola’, also going by the name Heyt. Which, as expected, becomes an issue with the Fremen who see technology such as this as potentially blasphemous. Scytale warns ‘reason is the first victim of strong emotion’ and much of Messiah is mental chess full of strong emotions to throw Paul off his game. It’s pretty dark, considering he knows Duncan has been sent to probably kill him and it’s his friend yet not his friend at all as boisterous Duncan is now a stoic and pensive intellectual.

‘Truth suffers from too much analysis.’
-Ancient Fremen Saying

Messiah seems hellbent on reminding you that the events of Dune were not a heroic and great thing but a pretty twisted political contest of colonialism, manipulation and mass murder. Like murder on the galactic scale of genocide. The Jihad is not awesome and people are starting to talk about that. The opening pages are an intense interview with a historian about to be executed for writing a critical historical analysis of Paul and his rise to power, and he tells the Fremen ‘you learned early to call the truth heresy.’ The ruling powers dismiss anything not in keeping with their narrative, one held firmly together by the glue of religion. ‘Religion, too, is a weapon,’ Herbert writes, and asks us ‘what manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?’ We begin to see the religious gaslighting to keep a strong and obedient population ready to kill. ‘They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.’

What seems most dangerous is the knowledge of what is to come and the lack of freedom to escape fate. This novel delves deeper into ideas of memory as well as looking to the future with characters like Alia that have memory accessible in her cells to converse with the ancestral past. It becomes very existential, with question if there is any agency to truly make choices, locked into political decisions as well as the awareness of the future. Paul is set up much like the Nietzschean Übermensch yet in this novel he rejects it and wishes to escape it. ‘My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly,’ he says, which also feels a nod to Nietzche’s concept of Eternal Return. What unfolds is brilliant and becomes an excellent example of refusing the body for the myth. While the end is sad and tragic, it is also a cementing of immortality as the eternal Maud’dib, now more legend and legacy than ever before.

Messiah is a shorter sequel that packs a lot of power on the smaller scale while managing to make the universe vastly larger and more complex. There is much distrust stirred in this book, with distrust in rulers, history and religion being a major purpose for Herbert. In an essay by his son, Brian Herbert, he mentions how his father saw the Watergate scandal as a positive: ‘By amplified example, albeit unwittingly, the thirty-seventh president of the United States taught people to question their leaders.’ This message of questioning leaders, especially ones who impose moral codes through religion and seek to dismiss critical historical perspectives as execution-worthy heresy is at heart in Messiah. Legacy and fate are critical themes, as well as breeding schemes that will determine the future ruler of Arakkis. This is an excellent passing of the torch that slingshots us towards the next book, and the Dune series marches on.

4/5

'If you need something to worship, then worship life - all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!'

I liked this mostly but it doesn't hold a candle to Dune. There were certainly some very intriguing decisions and things to come, but also some.....weird ones. I definitely didn't love it the way I love Dune but I'm going to continue and see where the story takes me.

4.5/5.
Nie pozostaje mi nic innego jak dalej zachwycać się tą serią.

Having re-read Dune (and reviewed it here on GR) recently, I figured I should continue and read at least the initial trilogy with Dune Messiah and Children of Dune to get a better idea of the world that Frank Herbert created. I am glad that I read Dune Messiah. It is an excellent novel about destiny and fate and how much of it we can control. We get more insight into the Navigators - here I noticed that, unlike in Dune, we actually meet a Navigator (one of the three primary conspirators against Paul Maud'dib) which means that David Lynch most have read this book as well before making his cult classic movie of the first book. We also learn more about the Bene Geserits and the Mentats. I found it particularly fascinating that the Butlerian Jihad, which takes place a few hundred years before the action in Dune and Dune Messiah, was actually, if I understood correctly, a war of humans against machines which the humans won. Following this victory, computers were banished from the known universe and instead Mentats and Navigators (inspired by melange made from spice) were bred to be human computers for political and financial strategy in the former case, and for navigation in space-time for the latter. This fascinated me because I have read and watched so much science fiction where the machines win (or are winning) such as in Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, or Blade Runner, or Hyperion and Dune is one of the rare universes where humans won and yet, at what cost? Banning machines seems to have brought humans back to a medieval society with its aristocracies (House Corrino, House Harkkonen, House Atreides) and oppression and genetic manipulation (Bene Gesserit). And once the Fremen rally around Paul to destroy two of the three houses and install Paul as the new Emperor and as the Dune Messiah, is this new regime really a new start for humanity or just another autocratic regime. It sure looks like that latter and we get inklings of this as the Fremen go spread the Gospel of their Maud'dib and subsequently spilling not just a little blood. All of these things continue to torture Paul as they did in Dune and yet he is inevitably driven forward by this messianic destiny. Enter the conspiracy of a Bene Gesserit priestess, a rogue Navigator and a strange Face Dancer who want to topple Paul's regime, well more specifically kill his Fremen wife and force him to sleep with his sister Alia (ewww!!) so as to continue the genetic engineering project and re-install the old regime over which each had more control than under Paul. Another piece of the puzzle here is the reappearance of Duncan Idaho, mentor and friend to Paul as a Zensunni master which has unintended consequences. Zensunnism in itself is a fascinating blend of Sunni Islam and Zen Buddhism that also is followed by the Freman. In essence, Herbert created a universe where classic monarchal hegemonies come into conflict with religious fanatics - in a sense we can see the Fremen hordes as marauding Zen Buddhist priests in ancient Japan fighting the Emperor, well that is one image that came into my mind anyway, so as not to wear out the old Western capitalism vs Islamic obscurantism trope.

While perhaps less expansive and mind-blowing than the first Dune, Dune Messiah still delivers punches as a great plot with convincing characters and lots of philosophical questions. On to Children of Dune!

I have since finished the whole canonical series and enjoyed all of it.

[UPDATE] I am looking forward to Denis Villeneuve's Dune in October 2021. The previews I have seen so far seem to be quite coherent with respect to the book. I was a fan of Lynch's Dune and am curious to see what Villeneuve does with this one. Feel free to comment below.

Fino's Dune Reviews
Dune
Dune Messiah
Children of Dune
God Emperor of Dune
Heretics of Dune
Chapterhouse: Dune