Dune Messiah

I am NOT a "Dune" (or sci-fi) fanboy. I like a well written book with a good plot, but am not genre specific. I am 36 years old and read "Dune" for the first time a month ago. It is a very good book. The Greatest Sci-Fi novel ever? I'm sceptical of that claim, but I would recommend it to anyone who likes a very good, intelligent, action-packed adventure novel.

"Dune Messiah", on the other hand, is almost a travesty - MASSIVELY underwhelming. There is virtually no action in this one. Just a bunch of crusty middle aged people talking...and talking...and talking. Though the ending is satisfying, and there is something almost resembling action at about the 250 page mark, it is otherwise devoid of excitement.

Reading this book was like being the only sober college student in a room filled with pot-smoking philosophy majors. The same points get repeated over and over again, until you can bearly stand it. There ARE some interesting ideas in this book (particularly about how extraordinary men and their actions are twisted to serve the purposes of their warped followers, a la Jesus Christ), and dozens of wonderful lines to quote, but not nearly enough to justify it's 300+ page length. It is almost necessary to read, since it does complete the story of Paul Atreides, but it would have been so much more bearable if it had been half the length.

I will NOT be reading any more Dune books, as the general consensus is that each sequel is progressively worse than the one before. I believe it now.

Dune Messiah, the second volume in Frank Herbert's most famous science fiction series, is the shortest of the six published books and therefore is a quick read. It has the most intricate plot of them all, which some deem impenetrable. Quite a few other fans, however, have reported it to be their favorite in the series. Even if you are numbered with the majority in the former camp, you must read Dune Messiah if for no other reason than to pave the way into the rest of the series. Either way, a devotee of or an antagonist against Dune Messiah, your efforts will be repaid.

Herbert pressed multiple agendas in Dune, one of the most important being to illustrate the psychology of the mythic hero. Paul Atreides was a charismatic character essentially marching in lockstep with the algorithmic formula for guaranteed superhero production delineated by Joseph Campbell in Hero With a Thousand Faces. We readers were virtual participants in the process, and so by the end of the book Paul's triumphs were our triumphs. We shared in his heroic victory and could readily dismiss his own misgivings about what he had done and what he foresaw would be done in his name in the future.

But Herbert was always interested much more in historic cycles than in the myth of steady linear progress, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Dune series, where history is better conceived as an ever-expanding spiral set against the background of infinite spacetime. Herbert assumed that the universe must always escape any structured attempt to understand it and cage it, and that the infinite reality awaiting beyond our collective ken must always recoil to bite us every time we conclude we've got the world figured out. The very setup for Paul's successes in Dune, then, must be viewed with suspicion. Indeed, Herbert conceived of the myth of the hero as a doomed trap lurking within the murky basements of human consciousness alongside the rusty machinery of our wish-fulfilling hopes and expectations. Reality has a way of obliterating all conservative definitions and assumptions; a simpler way of putting it: what goes up must come down. Thus everything we'd been led to assume to be true in Dune must find its antithesis in Dune Messiah in order for Herbert to teach us his lesson that the collective subconscious adulation for the hero is a toxic recipe for disaster. This is the whip that instructs in Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert's version of a Shakespearian tragedy.

I myself am less concerned with Herbert's upending the myth of his superhero in this novel than I am with the plot mechanics by which that upending is achieved.

It's helpful to understand that Herbert had already written some sections of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune before Dune itself was published. He knew where he was going, but not necessarily how to get there. Dune Messiah was a difficult novel for Herbert to write. Not only did it have to stand on its own merits as an independent novel, but more importantly to the greater myth-structure that Herbert was designing, it had to serve as a sort of switching station between the first and third books, which were more interesting to him. Herbert knew that by tearing down the character of Paul Atreides he would seriously disappoint many of the readers of Dune, who yearned for a hero who would continue to perform nobly and heroically, advancing steadily up a progressive linear history. But to accommodate the as-yet-unwritten third book, his readers' expectations must be subverted. Herbert envisioned Dune Messiah as a sort of necessary evil, an unpleasant medicine that must be quaffed before he could arrive at the next phase of the story cycle. Perhaps by understanding it in this light we can judge this novel to be more successful than we have any right to expect.

To accommodate all these complex, warring goals, in Dune Messiah Herbert creates not a single conspiracy to accomplish Paul's downfall, but a tangle of multiple, competing conspiracies whose players harbor conflicting goals and ambitions. Brilliantly, Herbert never openly reveals this to be the case: the reader alone is left to do the legwork in this detective story without a detective. This is another reason many never fully appreciate this novel: an endless diet of action-adventure stories tends to condition us to expect that the author of a novel will spoon-feed us all the appropriate whos and what-fors in precisely the way life never works at all. Herbert declines to pander to these banal expectations. The main competing factions are the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Tleilaxu, and the Qizarate. I leave it to the reader to piece together how their competing motivations coalesce and harmonize into the drama of the book: I've given you the most important clue by pointing out that multiple simultaneous conspiracies exist, which is more than many readers ever successfully discern.

If you like it, 'nuff said. If Dune Messiah isn't your cup of spice coffee, press on through, because the next two novels (at least) will blow your socks off.

Bob R Bogle
Author of Frank Herbert: The Works

This book was a very long and mostly boring brood-fest in which the protagonist finds himself trapped in an unhappy and inevitable fate. This fate being the jihad to be carried out by his followers. I just don't buy it. Why can't he stop it? I think that Frank Herbert wants us to be so impressed with the over-complex under-explained dialogue that we feel like we are too small to have a valid opinion. The protagonist is just so inhumanly smart, so vastly more intelligent than us, we cannot possibly know of his problems. But then Paul Atreides doesn't exist, there is only Frank Herbert, and he is only human. To me it just smells of BS.

The first book (Dune) was good. But like the Earth's Children series, I think it ends there. If you read Dune and want another Frank Herbert, I recommend picking up "The White Plague". Not the best book, not even top ten but intriguing and original.

God characters ruin stories. Since Paul is the prototypical god character, he can ruin a good plot line. If someone is untouchable and perfect, where's the story?

This book solves the problem by limiting the scope of Paul's prescience. It also deals with the god character by reminding us of Paul's humanity in a way that I don't think I really like. Paul has a vision he does not like but is unable to avoid it. In the process of trying to avoid this future, he basically destroys himself physically, mentally, and emotionally.

One can argue that the universe does this to him, but whether he does it to himself or fate has him locked into personal destruction doesn't matter to me. Either way leads to the dimishing of the Dune franchise.

While I like the plot and I love the writing style, I felt like this book set the series in a course that became as inevitable as the vision Paul was trying to avoid. In the first book, philosophy was omnipresent but was beautifully intertwined with the adventure. In this book, we see the philosophical begin to control the story. In each subsequent book, the plot drives the book less and philosophy takes control.

I guess the golden path was unavoidable.

Dune Messiah is overall a decent book. It concludes the story of Paul Atreides and the implications of becoming a God/Emperor. However, I felt like some of the philosophical aspects of the book were overdone. Although I appreciate an intellectual book, it felt like Herbert kept trying to drive the same point over and over at times, and it was not necessary. Also, I felt like the tragedy of some of the moments of the book were lost on me because of all the moments spent on philosophical musings and not on the "real" events. However, Herbert's writing is still moving and he has a great talent for creating an amazing world and a good plot.

Love it!! Turns out I already have a copy of this so I ended up donated this one.

The Dune books are all so great. Frank Herbert was a genious. A+++

Excellent Book

Great binding and quality of hardcover copy. Don't buy the library binding edition which is small by size and has poor binding.

I love the first Dune. LOVE it, it is a fantastic book, amazing storytelling - it's great. This sequel? Not so much. I see that a lot of others really loved it, which is great. I think it's potentially hit or miss, and for me, it got too creepy with Alia, and Paul grew unlikable, so I stopped reading it. I really, really wanted to like it, but I'd rather just remember the awesomeness of Dune and not force myself to like the sequel and ruin it.