Próbowałem sobie streścić fabułę w tym wpisie, ale brzmiało to bardziej jak wstęp do filmu dla dorosłych, niż jak epicka historia sci-fi. Jest jak jest.

Linkerson for filmson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0sPw...

75/100
Un libro di satelliti, interlocutorio, senza le grandi figure che contraddistinguono gli altri testi. Insomma, senza gli Atreides... a parte Miles Teg, che però ha un ruolo da comprimario. Anche alla rilettura, a metà libro faticavo a ricordare come Herbert avesse districato la matassa, specialmente dei "pov" (che non sono pov perché è in terza persona) di Taraza, che sono insopportabili. Le ultime 50 pagine, veramente epiche, secondo me, portano il libro a 3 stelle e mezza. Ma non di più. Nettamente il peggiore dei 6, ma si sapeva.

7.5/10

Spoilers for Dune 1-4

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”

Thoughts


Heretics is an interesting novel as it is a follow-up to God Emperor of Dunes which felt like the true ending to the Saga. How do you follow up a masterpiece that is GEoD. Well, no matter it was always going to disappoint if I had those expectations however I did not, so I didn’t feel disappointed. If anything, I was surprised by the additions to the series. As it gives a more in-depth look into behind the scenes of the series in particular with the Bene Gesserit. We have been wondering so much about their involvement, but now we are understanding their upbringing, procedure, and general thought process of this sisterhood. What surprised me most was probably the character work displayed for the sisterhood.

I really enjoyed reading about Taraza and Odrade in particular. These two individuals are particularly close. This creates this interesting dynamic because of what we know about the sisterhood and their stances to certain emotions in particular love. It's interesting how Lady Jessica actions in pre-Dune have significantly impacted the way BG, how they condition its members. Jessica is that living reminder of love being a bad thing as from that Paul came to power then Leto II which was the tyrant dictator that was not pleasant for them to say the least. Even though this is not a sequel in a traditional sense, the effects of Leto II reign can still be felt throughout the galaxy. One thing the other Dune sequels never provided is seeing how Leto reign would impact other civilisations we see small glimpses here. They a reason why I think Herbert is the second-best world-building in fiction behind Tolkien and continues that trend. The sense of the history of Rakis, the culture that developed that grew or regressed in certain elements like God emperor is awesome to read upon. We not only get much more development of BG but furthermore, we get the deeper motivations of Tleilax. Which is the knowledge we wanted to know since Messiah to God Emperor what is their goal. I would probably admit this is probably the weakest POV character (well second or 3rd weakest) by far in this book. I didn’t care about Master Waff compared to every other POV character. However, that stated Waff has some interesting conversations with BG and Honored Matres.

Though I readily admit I was disappointed with the Honored Matres I did not care about them. Like their motivation and power can come across as juvenile even BG consistently calling them whore lol. Unsure what Herbert mindset was when developing these figures, they obviously pose a big threat but feel like the biggest jokes on occasions. I think the empathises of sex being their weapon just came across as silly.

Anyways talking about reoccurring faces well Duncan is back and I enjoyed his plotline once again. I do think this time Frank has addressed a certain criticism of Duncan character consistently gets in this instalment which I enjoyed.  Regarding the resetting of character development, it's tiring to see this really well-written character getting reset already twice. This is basically addressed when all the Duncans personalities- memories fuse so Messiah-Children and God-Emperor Duncan is one person.

Teg is probably the best-written character in this novel which is funny as it's basically a Leto. Throughout the Dune Saga, the idea of free will is consistently being debated especially with Prescience. With the character of Teg and Odrade, the idea of free will is explored quite throughout especially with the two-character backstories of what is pre-determined and what is free will. They are also political topics its addresses which get boring for this review but I liked the way it handles certain topics. Leadership however I talk about briefly it's interesting to see how leadership portrayed in the Dune Saga we talked as a general monarchy to slowly transitioning to something else.

Anyways let's briefly discuss character work. This is a particular field I expected to be quite bare-bones and straight-up bad. However, It's Dune and Frank is a good writer so he great at making distinct characters quite fast. Odrade introduction this is the most apparently you already feel for the character pretty early on with discussions. Anyways I hope to talk about each individual character, but I just state it better than I suspected. However, that said I believe Dune 1-4 has superior character work. One advantage those novels had is well it's one story, so they are reoccurring faces this is a start to a new story altogether. Another Strength is politics, the Dune Saga tackles this with extreme care. The first 40% felt like the original Dune in that regard. It was probably my favourite section in Heretics which was the scheming. Frank is amazing at doing it. Those plans within plans and intelligent characters trying to outwit or outclass the other. It can be boring for some, but I love it.

Though I think it's best to be aware this novel is far more space opera than philosophy science fiction as Dune 1-4. Of course, it still has that intact but it's a more straightforward narrative than any of the Dune novels. I don’t think it’s a bad thing just it's very different. The Cons to this type of storytelling for me is that I never been the biggest fan of Herbert action sequences. Like I love the novels but how action is described never really grabbed me. Except one sequence in Dune and I love the beginning of God Emperor. That said like the other novels its still minimal but more action than the rest of the series.

You're probably curious about the flaws of the novel. Well, I already highlighted some like the Honored Matres and regarding the use of sex for them. But my biggest one has to come to the climax of the novel.  The secret thing inside Duncan and the legit climax of the novel is fucking an Honored Matres. I wish I was joking but that literally, the climax of Duncan arc in this novel is fucking an Honored Matre. I guess it's been building up a 16-year-old body Duncan is going to screw someone but it's just so odd to me. Furthermore, the Duncan story is good just it's been done better in Messiah haha though Teg getting Duncan memories was well done.  To end with positive I think the ending is excellent and fitting.

Conclusion

In Conclusion, over time I have kinda been back and forth but ultimately this is a good novel. Unsure if this is the sequel that people wanted but I liked my time being in this interesting world. Though God Emperor felt like an ending this does follow up God Emperor nicely by being quite distant to not undermine that story. In certain ways, it's more of a sequel than I expected but, in another sense, it's also a different story altogether. Maybe the word would be it’s a thematically a sequel? I know this is a first of an incomplete trilogy but honestly If you are coming in knowing that you should be fine. I think this novel alone is worth reading just because how it enhances the stories before and the one its telling is compelling.

7.5/10

Herbert lost me on this one. I still will finish the series just to see how things play out, but if they continue in the same direction, I'll be miserable reading it.
There are so many things I just did not understand. Main ones being  Duncan and the Golden Path.
The whole Duncan thing feels absolutely atrocious to me. They use him as a puppet over and over and over again. He's not his own person any more. I feel so sorry for him both as an adult woken up to a whole life that happened eons ago and as a child raised like a kettle and woken up not just to one previous life, but all of them. What's worse, I still don't see the point in all that. All these breeding eugenics stopped making sense for me a long time ago.
Since the Golden Path was first mentioned, I was wondering what it really means. I got the (an?) answer at the very end of Heretics: What was his Golden Path but a vision of sexual forces at work recreating humankind endlessly? . Seriously? That felt like a real downer to me. Without raising sex into a status of maniac religion the humanity wouldn't survive? Or am I missing something?
The other thing that bugged me a bit in the previous book and a lot in this one is technology.
Dune - ships, 'thopters, cars, suspensors.
Emperor of Dune, 3,500 years later - no-ships, 'thopters, cars, bigger suspensors.
Heretics of Dune, 10,000 years later - no-ships, 'thopters, cars, holographic menus.
How though? The planet goes through basically a complete terraformation twice, but technology stays basically the same?
And don't even get me started on the vaginal pulsing stuff?

I know, you are like, wait, 5 stars? Really? And I am, like, I really enjoyed this book. I mean, I learned about much of the Dune universe that was never mentioned in the first four books (sex, Ix, the Tleilaxu, the Bene Geserit proscription of love...) and I really liked Teg and Odrade and even Lucillle and the new ghola. The action was great especially at the end (even if Teg’s capture of the Honored Matre’s no-ship was frustratingly fast-forwarded). Philosophically, there was a LOT to chew on and the tech was probably the most diverse and interesting of all the Dune series since the first one. On to Chapterhouse!

[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

The guards ushered Frank into the office. As usual, the Reverend Publisher was seated at her desk, writing.

So many lives touched by her decisions, he thought.

"Well?"

She looked up. He had promised himself that he would not flinch before the fire of her gaze, and once more he broke his promise.

"It is... almost finished."

"Almost." Her irony was palpable, a force. "Almost is not enough. You know that, Frank. When will it be done?"

"I think... a month. At most two. I am working as hard as I can, Reverend Publisher. I am... not well."

He hated himself for his servility.

"So, why then did you found a dynasty? Your son can assist you. He will continue when you are gone. There are many books left to write."

His throat was suddenly dry. But of course there was no pitcher of water. It would have been unthinkable.

"I am... preparing him. He will be ready in time."

She glanced at him again, and again he flinched.

"There is a transcriber on that desk. Write a page now. I want to see how you work."

He sat down, and fed a sheet of paper into the machine. His lips moved soundlessly. She knew what he was saying. By now, the Litany was stamped deep into his psyche, impossible to eradicate. She smiled secretly to herself. The training was brutal, but it was effective. She watched his mouth, as it formed the words it had spoken so many times before:

n  I have no taste.
Taste is the sales-killer, the hesitation that brings total profit meltdown.
I will conquer my taste.
When I have stamped it out, I will look at what I have written.
I will read through it from start to finish.
There will be nothing left of a great series.
Only crap will remain.n

Seria trochę wróciła do swojego rytmu po bardzo przegadanym poprzednim tomie. W tej części jest o wiele ciekawiej - mamy znów perspektywę większej ilości bohaterów, a do tego całkiem sporo - jak na Diunę - akcji przy końcu książki. Niemniej nadal ta część stoi GADANIEM - intrygami i spiskami wszelkiej maści i kategorii. Zakończenie bez efektu "wow", ale wciąż jestem ciekawa co dalej.
Dalsze tomy nie robią już takiego wrażenia jak pierwszy, ale mimo to ta seria ma w sobie coś wyjątkowego i nie umiem jej nisko ocenić. Po prostu podziwiam, nawet gdy jest słabiej.
Widzę też, że już do końca serii będę się zastanawiać co ta historia w sobie ma, że mimo że często wiele rzeczy jest dla mnie niezrozumiałych, a drugie dno czy istotne szczegóły przelatują mi między palcami (to nieustanne uczucie przy czytaniu Diuny) to jednak cały czas jestem wciągnięta w lekturę. Fascynuje mnie styl pisania autora - elektryzujący - i jestem bardzo ciekawa czy jego syn choć w połowie daje sobie tak dobrze radę (pewnie nie).

I had no idea that ‘Sandworm’ is a nickname for Unit 74455, a notorious Russian cybermilitary outfit. Sounds just like the kind of thing that would have pounced on humanity from the darkness of the Scattering.

By the way, this idea of the Scattering – an edge of the known universe where criminality, smuggling, rebellion, deviance, illicit tech, ideas, and people flourish – is one that both Star Trek (DS9) and Star Wars (Han Solo) have capitalised heavily on. While a lot of attention has been paid to the influence of the original ‘Dune’ on the genre, it is clear that even with ‘Heretics’ in 1985, Herbert was still planting the seeds of ideas that would impact the next generation of SF writers and artists.

If you look at the ratings and review tally for the books on Goodreads, you will see a marked drop off from ‘Children of Dune’ onwards. Yes, the sequence does technically conclude with ‘Dune Messiah’, which is a perfect point at which to stop reading if you want closure on the Paul/Muad’Dib saga. While ‘Children’ was a bit of a hot mess, it did set up what is arguably the best half of the six books. And if you look at each book, they are all uniquely different.

However, it is highly unlikely that every reader of ‘Dune’ will persevere through to ‘Chapter House’. Which is a great pity, because in my view ‘Heretics’ is the best of the sequence up to this point, a tautly plotted sociopolitical thriller that, strangely, largely consists of extended verbal jousts between the wonderfully diverse cast in a range of exotic locations, from desert to snow, and even the beguiling world of Chapter House itself. But it makes for utterly compelling reading.

This makes me think that Herbert might well be the Henry James of SF, because ‘Heretics’ is such an inward-looking chamber piece of a novel, where the sporadic bursts of violent and bloody action are all precipitated by words, glances, gestures, and the hidden intentions behind unstated meanings.

With ‘God Emperor’, the question was how to write an entire book focused on a man-sandworm hybrid that rules over the Duniverse with a tyrannical flipper. And to transform it into both a love story and a tragedy. ‘Heretics’ poses an even more interesting question: How on Rakis do you top that premise?

The opening sentence of ‘Heretics’ is one of the most arresting in the entire sequence to date: “Taraza told you, did she not, that we have gone through eleven of these Duncan Idaho gholas? This one is the twelfth.” (In my Gollancz paperback, this is preceded by a three-page Prologue that I see is excluded in the e-version, and which contains the famous aphorism: ‘In the name of the Bene Gesserit Order and its Unbroken Sisterhood, this account has been judged reliable and worthy of entry into the Chronicles of the Chapter House.’)

Referencing the precise number of Duncan gholas to date (the character played by Jason Momoa in the 2021 adaptation of ‘Dune: Part One’ by Denis Villeneuve, for visual reference) is a neat trick of Herbert to indicate the considerable passage of time that has passed since the events of ‘God Emperor’. So much time that common names like Arrakis and Caladan have been shortened to ‘Rakis’ and ‘Dan’ respectively.

Also, the mysterious sandworms that roam the reconstituted desert of the former planet, said to each contain a pearl of the mind of Leto II, is now known as the Divided God. Sandworms, of course, are at the heart of the mythology of ‘Heretics’, which features some of Herbert’s most lyrical writing about these evocative beasts.

It also seems like we have waited five books for him to use the sentence: “Let sleeping worms lie”, which is particularly apt as a range of factions seek “to meddle with the worm-bound remnants of the Tyrant.” Chief among these is the hidebound priesthood that adopts the seer Sheeana, whose lineage can be traced back to Siona in ‘God Emperor’ (and even further back to the aristocratic Atreides themselves.)

Sheeana, it seems, is able to communicate with the sandworms of Rakis, in accordance with an ancient prophecy from the days of Leto II about the appearance of a mysterious ‘sandrider’. You would think that everyone in the Duniverse would have had their fill of ancient prophecies by now, but alarmingly this is not the case, and so the juggernaut of history rolls on.

But the Bene Gesserit, given their secretive and reclusive nature, know a good bit of religious propaganda when they see it, and set out to investigate the claims, which sets in motion a remarkable domino of events.

If it happens to be true, they will simply incorporate Sheeana’s genes into their breeding programme, referred to memorably as a Stud Book at one point. If she proves to be a fake, then it will be equally simple for the Bene Gesserit to dismiss her and trundle along their seemingly diminishing version of the Golden Path.

This would not be ‘Dune’ without it being creepy or over the top, or both. ‘Heretics’ begins with a rather queasy scene on Gammu, the former Giedi Prime, where the Reverend Mothers Schwangyu and Lucilla debate the potential sexual awakening of the latest Duncan ghola, who is on the cusp of manhood, as it were.

Another key character we are introduced to early on is Reverend Mother Superior Taraza, whom Herbert wastes no time to highlight has already borne 19 children for the Bene Gesserit, an ‘essential service’ we are pleased to learn has not ‘grossened’ Odrade’s flesh, whose full mouth “promised a passion which she was careful to bridle.”

Remember how Reverend Mother Mohiam was referred to as a ‘crone’ and a ‘witch’ in ‘Dune’? Well, now Herbert has gone full circle just like poor old Leto II, and gives us a supremely seductive Sisterhood that counts its sexual wiles as a key weapon in its feminine arsenal, as dangerous even as the Voice. And probably even more pointed than the Gom Jabbar.

We are informed that the Bene Gesserit ‘speciality’ is “the management of procreation and all of its attendant necessities.” There is a wonderful scene near the end where Sirafa gets Lucilla’s hackles up by trying to disguise her as “a fifth-stage adept in the Order of Hormu.”

“Do I presume that you need no explanation of sexual variations?”
“A safe assumption,” Lucilla said.

Indeed, not only can Lucilla administer ‘vaginal pulsing’, she can control genital temperature, and arouse the 51 excitation points (the sequencing plus the combinations number 2 008), in addition to the 205 sexual positions.

Sirafa was clearly startled. “Surely, you don’t mean – ”
“More, actually, if you count minor variations. I am an Imprinter, which means I have mastered the 300 steps of orgasmic amplification!”

There you have it. If you are thinking that poor Duncan has no idea what is, er, coming for him in terms of his sexual awakening at the hands of the Bene Gesserit, you are partly right. The fact that the Bene Tleilax have produced so many gholas to date must mean that they are after an elusive something in their own breeding programme, just as the Sisterhood (accidentally, mind you) ended up with a Kwisatz Haderach …

The Bene Gesserit are so sanctimonious in the unquestioned presumption of their own moral authority that at first they do not even comprehend the existential threat posed by the Honoured Matres, who return from the darkness and chaos of the Scattering to, well, wreak havoc. And fuck around a lot.

The fact that they might be seen as an unbridled force of creative and enabling passion leading to ultimate destruction is kind of undercut by Herbert’s dodgy sexual politics coming to the fore when he has the Sisterhood constantly deriding the Honoured Matres as “Whores!” (Herbert even makes liberal use of the exclamation mark to emphasise this point.)

Apart from weaponising sex, the Scattering has also resulted in a lot of really weird tech filtering through into the Duniverse, much of it copies of, and yet infinitely superior to, Ixian manufacture. By now the monopolies on space travel by the Guild and on spice by Rakis have long been broken by technology itself, which has flowered to its full maturity in the secrecy of the Scattering, and in ways that the old Butlerian Jihad days could only have dreamed about.

And so the stage is set for a classic confrontation in the wild sands of Rakis, a confrontation that will (again) determine the fate of the known universe.

Softly, she called down to him: “Hey! Old worm! Was this your design?”
There was no answer but then she had not really expected an answer.

Dune dizisinin beşinci kitabı yeni bir başlangıç sayılabilir ve bu haliyle dizinin ilk kitabının yarattığı etkiyi yaratabilir.

Ovaj peti deo Dine odlikuje ubedljivo najbrza radnja u citavom serijalu do sada.
Navikao sam da Herbert u jednom pasusu lomi radnju i pravi znacajne obrte ali ovoga puta kada to radi deluje da ne drzi sve konce u rukama i da po malo i nasilno stvari tera ka konkluziji. I pored toga ovo je jedan neverovatno dobar deo, a koji to nije, Hronika Dine i sa velikim zadovoljstvom ali i po malo tuzan prelazim na poslednji deo ovog malo je reci monumentalnog serijala.

Chyba najbardziej „filmowa” część. Oficjalnie moja ulubiona zaraz po „Diunie” i „Dzieciach Diuny”. Trochę się boję, że będę płakać z powodu braku zamknięcia serii, gdy już przeczytam „Kapitularz Diuną”.

[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.