Children of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #3) - Frank Herbert


في هذا الجزء تحدث كثير من الأمور الهامة؛ تمر تسعة أعوام على أحداث الكتاب السابق، كبر التوأم، ولازال الخطر قائمًا، يستمر حكم آل آتريديس على آراكيس ومجمل المجرة، عن طريق تحالف علياء والفريمن لكن الأمور التي تبدو هادئة للوهلة الأولى ليست كذلك حقًا من نواح عدة لعل أخطرها حالة علياء الخطرة لأنها باتت تفقد اتصالها بالواقع، ومن جهة أخرى تعود الليدي جيسيكا إلى آراكيس لأول مرة منذ تركت الكوكب إلى كالادان قبل أكثر من 20 عامًا (بعد أحداث الجزء الأول) مما يزيد من توتر الوضع، وطبعًا هناك مؤامرة من قبل آل كورينو (عائلة الإمبراطور السابق) لإعادة عائلتهم للحكم، ويستمر الصراع على إمدادات البهار وهنا تتصاعد الحالة لأن البهار على وشك النفاذ.

لدي الكثير مما أريد قوله عن هذا الجزء، عن الليدي جيسيكا التي تتذكر فجأة أن لديها ابنة ويجب أن تتدخل بحياتها بعد أن تركتها بعد ولادتها بقليل، فقط لأن قد تشكل خطرًا على طائفتها العزيزة...
وكذلك الوضع على آراكيس المتغير وغير المستقر مناخيًا وهذه التغييرات باتت تؤثر على الدودة الرملية المصدر الرئيسي المنتج للبهار، وطبعًا البهار هو أغلى مادة في الكون وكل المجرة مدمنة عليه وهي سبب أهمية آراكيس بالأساس ككوكب، تعيش الدودة الرملية في الصحراء القاحلة، تلك البيئة القاسية بلا مياه وتنتج البهار الذي يحصد ويصدر للإستخدام، لكن ظهر الماء بكثرة في الكوكب وبات يتحول إلى جنة لقاطنيه، والخضرة في كل مكان، لكن هذا لا يساعد الدودة الرملية بل سيؤدي لانقراضها في خلال وقت قصير وسريعًا سيختفي البهار، من المفترض أن هذه أخبار سعيدة صحيح؟ ستغدو حياة البشر والفريمن على آراكيس مقبولة، لكن هل يرضي هذا السلطة والمهتمين والمدمنين على البهار، بالطبع لا، نادرًا ما تأتي حياة البشر وكل ما ييسر حياتهم على قائمة اهتمامات أي أحد.
لذا طبيعي ألاَّ يسير شيء على ما يرام ويقع الجميع تحت حكم طاغية غير بشري في نهاية الأمر.

مخيف ومخيب للأمل ومن ناحية أخرى غير مستغرب، أنه لن يتغير شيء ذا بال في الحالة البشرية المستقبلية؛ نفس القرارات الخاطئة والأنانية تستمر وتتكرر لآلاف الأعوام.
ملاحظة أخيرة: بعد الأميرة إرولان، يدون خارق الأداء (الآمير فرادان) تاريخ آل آتريديس بأمر من الإمبراطور ليتو الثاني، يبدو أنه مكتوب على آل كورينو أن يدونوا تاريخ آل آتريديس حتى نهاية الزمان.

I should never have started this book just before a day that was supposed to be filled with other kinds of business. I am always sucked into Frank Herbert's universe and no matter how many times I read these books, I still have a dreadful time pulling myself away from them to do mundane tasks, such as clean house, decorate the Christmas tree and buy groceries. In fact, all those tasks had to wait a day, until this book was finished (again). I do think the first book (Dune) was the best one, but I confess to reading the whole series on multiple occasions.

Herbert's books are the reason that I knew what "Jihad" meant long before 9/11. He obviously read Machiavelli's The Prince many times. I love the intelligence of his world-building and that is what entrances me each time. The level of detail and the way all the details work so well together.

This is when I officially gave up on the Herbertverse. This was awful!!! I really do not care for the children of Mu A'dib, they're both creepy and way too articulate (kind of like Dakota Fanning) I was actually rooting for the assassins the entire book. And when the kid smears worm larvae on himself and becomes a god!?!!?!!?! Sorry folks, I checked out. I don't even care how the rest of the saga works out. No God Emperor of Dune for me, no Heretics, stop this universe, I want to get off!

Pues aquí termina mi viaje por Arrakis.
No penséis que no me ha gustado, a pesar de cualquier pega que pueda ponerle no me arrepiento en absoluto el haber llegado hasta aquí.

Los Hijos de Dune comienza 9 años después de El mesías de Dune y retoma la esencia de lo que fue el primer libro, muchas intrigas, venganzas y traiciones políticas, con unos personajes principales como jamás encontrarías en otros libros. Una pasada de situaciones que se leen muy ágilmente y que te invitan a seguir leyendo tras finalizar cada capítulo. ¿ y que ha ocurrido para no querer continuar? Un giro demasiado inesperado, demasiado impactante, demasiado de todo y un final muy precipitado donde hay tramas que se resuelven de una forma muy abrupta y otras que si siquiera tengo claro si están resueltas porque este es otro de los motivos por los que no puedo (sí, no me he equivocado de verbo) continuar, a estas alturas de la saga siento que he consumido demasiada melange y hay mucha información que he perdido en el camino o que no he logrado entender pero, en definitiva, no me veo capaz de seguir con esta desinformación.

Me quito el destiltraje y deshago mi fremochila después de haber tragado más arena que mi niña en la playa. He disfrutado del viaje pero ya es hora de volver a casa.

*** 2021 reread -

I posted the review below ten years ago after first reading Frank Herbert's Children of Dune, the third in the series, this one published in 1976 which followed Dune Messiah in 1969 and Dune in 1965. I liked it but didn't love it.

There is an old saying that you can never step into the same river twice, meaning that the water is always different. And also, you have have changed as well.

Ten years later and I have read all of Herbert's original six and many of the books about the Dune universe written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I've seen the 1984 film and the 2003 Children of Dune mini-series and am an overall fan of Dune.

I'm not sure why I didn't like it more back then but I sure do now.

Herbert's intricate attention to detail and his brilliantly complex characterization and dialogue, as well as his internal monologues are science fiction gold.

The interactions between The Preacher and the rest of the cast and Leto's beginning transformation, providing a foreshadowing of the next book, God Emperor of Dune, was a pleasure to read.

******

The third of the Dune and the slide away from the quality of the original masterpiece has begun in earnest.

Better than Dune Messiah, but only in that it is more ambitious and with a more cohesive plot. Herbert takes a more introspective narrative to prepare the way for Leto II. The concepts of shared DNA, collective memories and possession run astride a vehicle of rapid autocratic decline.

Some cool scenes, a few interesting new concepts, but ultimately Herbert's vision is starting to fray and the great bulk of his masterwork is becoming as cumbersome as the Baron's ghost.

A cautionary tale for creators of series - go back to the well too often and the water gets stale.

I kept getting these telephone calls from people asking me if I were starting a cult.
The answer: “God no!” - Frank Herbert.

I originally read the ‘Dune’ sequence in my teens when I discovered SF for the first time. Among my own Golden Age pantheon of seminal writers such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Zelazny, Farmer, Simak and Smith, Herbert exerted a certain exotic allure.

I recently reread ‘Dune’ and ‘Dune Messiah’ again, inspired by Denis Villeneuve’s superlative Part 1 movie adaptation. Now in my early 50s, I was surprised at how well the diptych stands up against the test of time and memory.

I do believe that ‘Dune Messiah’ is superior in how much layered texture it adds to its age-old monomyth, and how cleverly it subverts the narrative arc that seemed so inevitable in ‘Dune’. Yes, it is a total bummer of an ending, but it is an ending that is both psychologically and thematically astute.

(Editor John W. Campbell certainly didn’t think so, and rejected ‘Dune Messiah’ due to it being ‘anti-heroic’ – which is kind of ironic when you think how large the ideal of the anti-heroic figure looms in so much of modern SF and fantasy, especially the Hollywood superhero factory.)

Which brings me to ‘Children of Dune’, which can only be described as a gibbering hot mess of a novel. Actually, it foreshadows another trend in much modern SF – here’s looking at you, Star Wars – to not only reveal too much detail, but to focus on so much extraneous minutiae that the overall story is completely lost in a maelstrom of granularity.

A tiny example is the mythical sietch of Jacurutu, and the inordinate number of pages that Leto agonises over whether it even exists or not. When he actually arrives on its dusty, forgotten doorstep, he spends even more pages agonising over the actual reality of what he is seeing…

Well, of course ‘real’ Jacurutu turns out to be a sand-screen for the ‘mythical’ Jacurutu, which does exist, in fact, but is shrouded in even deeper mystery and obfuscation by yet another (mythical) name. It is this kind of unnecessary navel-gazing that turns ‘Children of Dune’ into an exceptionally tedious rabbit-hole of a novel that wallows in its own inflated sense of self-importance.

In a short but revealing note at the end of the book, Herbert weirdly states that portions of ‘Children of Dune’ were completed before the first two novels. And it does, indeed, read like a series of outtakes or discarded ideas strung together to make up a semblance of a plot.

‘Dune’ itself is by no means perfect, but it has a certain logic and narrative drive, not to mention pacing and attention to relevant detail (leaving much to the reader’s imagination), that makes it a much greater whole than the sum of its parts.

Sadly, ‘Children of Dune’ struggles with way too many moving parts to gain any coherence, let alone narrative urgency. For example, the culmination of Leto’s conversion process, which drives perhaps the last third of the novel, is completely botched and butchered by Herbert.

He is way too busy keeping his characters speechifying preposterously and sententiously than to pay attention to the specific narrative mechanics of such a crucial and deeply weird scene. It is one of many such missed opportunities in the book, which rattles along as mindlessly as a sandworm in the great bled.

Herbert has always been thought of as representing a ‘colonial’ approach to SF in that he portrays the terraforming of Arrakis as the end result of a just process of civilising the natives and uplifting them (more like bringing them to their senses from their barbaric ways.)

In this dialectic, a contemporary writer like Kim Stanley Robinson is perceived as the spiritual heir of Frank Herbert, tackling similar ideas of colonisation and politics, but with a much more modern approach that accounts for key, but often subtextual, influences such as cultural appropriation and authorial bias.

In ‘Children of Dune’, however, Herbert completely subverts his colonial label by introducing the jaw-dropping idea that the sand trout are not endemic to Arrakis, but are essentially an alien lifeform (where they came from and who introduced them is another story.)

Which makes the Fremen themselves a parasitic entity feeding off the lifecycle of Shai Hulud, instead of the noble oppressed savages and ‘desert power’ they were always thought to be. This plot strand is supposed to culminate in the transformation of Leto, but it peters out quite frustratingly rather than achieve the narrative crescendo it deserves.

Seeing that so much of the book is about the consequences, shortfalls and perceived pitfalls of prescience, it is perhaps fitting that chunks were completed even before the first opening salvos of the trilogy (well, it started out as a trilogy.) And while on that subject, the whole bloody Golden Path gibberish makes no sense whatsoever.

Leto is determined to remove Paul’s stranglehold on humanity by effectively un-deifying his own father. But ends up following the very ‘path’ that Paul expressly chose not to follow, thereby promising to become an even bigger monster (literally) than Paul had ever been!? What is deeply disturbing and frankly quite bizarre here is Leto’s decision to carry on the Bene Gesserit’s eugenics programme … by marrying his own sister. Ew!

Just as Paul felt himself increasingly trapped by his own prescient visions, so does Herbert seem unable to break free from the plot cycle of the first two books. You thought Paul walked off bravely into the sunset at the end of ‘Dune Messiah’? Up pops the mysterious Preacher, decrying the empty religion of Alia. And where is a good villain when you need one … up pops the Baron (literally) in Alia’s mind to pollute her consciousness with his conniving perversity.

And forget about any tender Paul/Chani moments here either. Herbert is all matter-of-fact business, describing Leto’s attraction to Sabiha (which does indeed mirror the Paul/Chani relationship) in the following totally romantic manner: ‘There was an adult beefswelling in his loins …’ Okay, time to move along.

There was a seven-year gap between the publication of ‘Dune Messiah’ (1969) and ‘Children of Dune’ (1976), which is notable for being the first hardcover bestseller in the genre. Either readers did not know what they were in for, or they were much weirder than they are today. Probably the latter, lest we forget that ‘Dhalgren’ by Samuel R. Delany (1975) would go on to sell a million copies.

Another problem is that ‘Children of Dune’ veers rather determinedly away from SF into much choppier and murkier waters. The long (and I mean long) digressions on politics, governance and the philosophy of morality (or is it the morality of philosophy?) are simply stuffed into the mouths of characters who, ironically, increasingly come across as robotic in a universe where the very notion of AI is anathema and deemed to be anti-human.

As with ‘Dune Messiah’, there are some passages of nature writing where Herbert’s singular passion for the raw environment, and his technical proficiency as a writer, combine to create such haunting passages as the below:

It was difficult to take his gaze away from the sands, the dunes—the great emptiness. Here at the edge of the sand lay a few rocks, but they led the imagination outward into the winds, the dust, the sparse and lonely plants and animals, dune merging into dune, desert into desert.

But it is too little, too late. The worm has, indeed, turned for this ambitious saga, which cannot escape its own Golden Path into repetitive dissolution.

Dune is a hard series for me to review, and I think it's because I love it so much. I get nervous talking about it. The immensity of Herbert's vision can feel a bit overwhelming at times. So, let me take a deep breath and explain why I like this one. It's really simple when I look at it this way. I like this book because I enjoyed everything about it: the writing style, the characters and the story itself. Children of Dune is the third novel in the series, one following the lives of Paul's children. One thing is obvious from the start. Children of Dune are growing up in an endlessly complex word. It is indeed suitable to call them children of Dune because their destiny is woven with those of this harsh and magical planet.

These two kids are faced with a bloody heritage and their supernatural abilities are hardly enough for them to cope with the cruelty of the universe they live in. More will be needed than the power to look into the future. Prescience is not nearly enough, because in that path lies the danger, as they can see by observing the fates of their parents and aunt. Their aunt is struggling, trying to follow in the footsteps of her epic brothers. Their aunt who is now a woman, and one that was never really a child. What about them?

These two are not copies of their parents, they see a need to make their own decision and yet they know too well how much depends on them, and this weight presses on them. It makes you almost hate their father for living them such a legacy and forget how much you sympathized with him. I loved Paul, but reading this novel, I feel a got a new glimpse into him. He didn't seem so epic anymore. In retrospective, Paul felt more human. After all, wasn't he also a little more then a child when he became the one, the man that sees in both future and past? He was also very young when he got the vision.

The twins that are the protagonists of this novel are both fascinating and disturbing. The connection they have with one another is touching. They are kids and they are not kids because they remember the past. Not having a past is precisely what makes one a child and still they posses the vulnerability and innocence of children. This makes the story even more heart breaking for me.

Herbert's writing is somewhat overwhelming, but I always keep coming back for more. It's hard to say something coherent about it sometimes. The first book of the series Dune is a monumental feat, if it was architecture it would be the pyramids, if it was a painting it would be Starry Night- it is just one of those things you can say a lot about and you have a feeling you'll never get to the core of it.

The sequels are so different- I mean I don't think that the quality of his writing diminishes. On the contrary, the sequels are just as good as the original. Every new book is a whole new world- and what a world it is. However, the first one is the first one...like the first kiss, impossible to be forgotten. Nevertheless, I do love the sequels. This one is particularly brilliant. The plot is great, the characters are masterfully portrait and the signature Dune atmosphere is there every step of the way. Highly recommended!

And I stood upon the sand, and I saw a beast rise up out of that sand, and upon the head of that beast was the name of God!

Children of Dune follows the aftermath of Paul’s decision at the end of Dune Messiah. The planet is flourishing but this weakens Dune’s greatest resource. Chaos begins to breed in the Empire and a savior is needed.

The narrative moves between several characters and their motivations, choices, and conspiracies. The pacing of this novel is much slower than the previous two books. I think this is mostly due to a large portion of the focus being placed on the internal metaphysical mechanics of the characters. But what I did enjoy about that aspect of the novel is that none of the characters are who they appear to be at first glance. Their depths are endless.

This is a worthy continuation of the Dune Chronicles and I am an invested fan.

My expectations for this were low. Love Dune, very very lukewarm on Dune Messiah, had heard similar things about this, and procrastinated continuing for more than a year. Finally the movies got me hyped, had a string of books I liked decided to bite the bullet and get it read.

In a plot twist I didn't see coming, I really really liked it. Yes the last 20% was really bizarre on it's own merits, but also it got me hyped for God Emperor. I also really liked all the new characters. I'm reading for the Golden Path, bring on God Emperor

8.4/10

I can’t do it, I have no interest in reading another half of this book beyond the quick summary from the wikipedia. Herbert completely discarded novel writing in favor of writing his philosophical musings about power. Yet his ideas are in the vacuum, completely separated from human nature and believable consequences for people who are ouside of the selected few. For example, we have a great house who wants the power of the emperor back, yet the biggest dilemma of the character in question is does he want to sacrifice his hobbies of reading books and studying to become an emperor. And then it’s just mentioned that at the moment the guy rules the whole planet. How? What do people think about it? Does his planet rules itself somehow while he's chilling in the library?

For such a big empire, and it's huge, only Paul’s jihad killed more than 60 billion humans, the whole empire consists of 100 people, most of them are related through blood or marriages. There’s no consistency in character writing at the point, lady Jessica will behave the way plot wants her to behave, who cares about internal consistency. I just don't care about anyone at this point, so it's time.

And now as I leave this world, my only hope is that my good feeling towards the first book hasn’t suffered, but also knowing where this story goes, will I ever want to re-experience its beginning, even in that better book?

Teniendo en cuenta que este tercer libro cierra bastante la historia y que cada libro me ha gustado menos que el anterior, para mí aquí se acaba la saga Dune.

I never expected to like this nearly as much as I did. Everyone who has read this series says it just gets crazier and crazier, and it totally does. But because of how much time we have spent in this world leading up to this third installment, I found even the most wild details fairly digestible. Sure, there were moments that I had to re-read because it was daunting, but it wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I expected.

In fact, I would argue that if you read Dune Messiah, then you need to read Children of Dune. Not only is it a story that calls back to the original in absolutely brilliant ways, but it also offers an ending that feels very cathartic for these first three books.

I loved how personal the conflicts were, and watching the world of Arrakis respond to a divide in the Atreides family. I did find the pacing to be rather slow in the first half, it essentially felt like more of what we had in Messiah. But once we got back to the desert in the second half, the dunes of Dune brought this story to life.