Well, I have finally finished the Dune books. I will not be the first to note that the last two books which finish of the original series started by Frank Herbert lack the depth, clarity, and precision of the original Dune. Chapterhouse ended on a cliffhanger with a very strange vision of an old couple, and for years, that was just how the series ended. But apparently Frank left an outline in a safe deposit box that was turned into these last two books.
I read the series because I wanted to see how the story finally ended. I adore the original book. It stands alone. The first trilogy is reasonably good, setting up the god emperor, while the last two original books did not work nearly as well for me. The story was supposed to end with one more book but Brian and Kevin note in their introduction that they couldn’t condense it down to a single book.
Now lets turn to what I liked about the conclusion. There will be spoilers. It drew everyone back together. A lot of the original cast is reborn as gholas. We get a bit more explanation of the face dancers, the Ixians, the emperium, Serena Butler, the Navigators and ancient history. The story ends nicely. It hints that Jessica and Leto will finally find happiness. Similarly, Paul and Chani return to Dune and start a sietch. The Bene Geseret start a “pure” sect while the modern sect forged with the Honored Matres gets its own school. And the Sandworms, with the ‘soul’ of Leto II return across the galaxy. It was a good tying together of all the story and it finally ended on a happy note—what it would have been without the Harkonens.
What didn’t I like. The reviews on Goodreads are almost unilateral in their complaints of the writing style. The books could have been easily condensed by a third. The first page of each chapter reminds us of things that happened only 10 pages ago and it is very repetitive. Yes, we all remember that Murbella and Duncan had children and she misses him so, but that her duty was to the BG. It doesn’t need to be restated every time we have her POV chapter.
Similarly, there are whole character arcs that serve almost no purpose at all. A character is introduced, they have their action, they interface with the main characters, and then are killed quickly hundreds of pages later and looking back, the whole arc could have been essentially omitted. In the final chapters, the main antagonist is simply removed in almost a Dues ex Machina move (it isn’t quite, because Serena is hinted at having incredible powers, but still… she swoops in and just removes the machine enemy to a parallel universe…). The other main antagonist chooses death. And in the final analysis, the savior, the final Kwisatz Haderach, is a character who had no business being elevated to that level. Duncan is a loyal servant to the Atreides for centuries, but how does that make him equal to the generations of genetic tinkering that the BG did to the Atreides line to form their own 3500 years ago? There is an explanation of self growth through lifetimes but I wasn’t buying it.
And now some more technical complaints. First: a recurring theme throughout the last 2 books is how the captured Sandworms are so sensitive to moisture (a theme from the original Dune) but in the climax, they are released (technically they release themselves) to the planet’s surface, and suffer NO CONSEQUENCES. The god Emperor suffered when near moisture as did his descendant worms—except for in the final battle?
Second: the robots have no fold space engines but somehow are able to traverse the immense galactic distances in moments. Erasmus simply deactivates all the face dancers across vast distances instantaneously. I am not complaining about FTL… but this has never been possible or even hinted at in any of the earlier books. There is mention of the tachyonic web, but it is never revealed how it is even possible that the robot ships could possibly be a threat without their Holtzman engines. I just found myself irritated by this sloppiness.
Anyway, my complaints about these books mirrors what I have seen elsewhere, so it isn’t anything new. If anything, it points even more strongly at how much of a genius Frank Herbert was, and how much I still love that first book. There are issues with it for a modern reader, for sure. The white savior, the treatment of women and homosexuality, to name two obvious ones. But there are strong female characters, a strong matriarchy—he was ahead of his time in some ways. But I still reel and revel in the depth of the world and the complex worldbuilding and politics. I will almost certainly never read any of the sequels again, but I will reread Dune.