Total agreement. Did you know they actually brought back Paul Atreides as a ghola? My jaw fell to the floor when I read that on Wikipedia.
Mine, too. I liked him way out of proportion to his father, whose prescience made him a completely ineffectual jellyfish who simply coasted along the streams of fate instead of doing something about it. Now, Leto is more an anti-hero than a hero (after all, he’s a multimilennial autocratic dictator who locks humanity into a cultural stasis in order to prepare them for a prescience-free future), but still more sympathetic than Paul.
Well, the Golden Path has two parts. One is to cure humanity of their messianic impulse (the desire to have a Chosen One lead all of humanity into a paradise of peace and prosperity), because that will lead to humanity’s stagnation and eventual extinction. He does this by giving humanity all the messianc peace they can stand, and then some - 3500 years of brutally enforced quietude under the heel (well, if Leto had a heel) of a God Emperor. He wants to make the memory of a universal peace under a single Chosen rule so hated among humanity, and that hatred so ingrained, that it will never happen again. He explicity says so in Children when talking to Ghanima, I believe. That’s the thing that Paul refused to do - become the necessary tyrant.
The second part is to destroy the prescience that made his (and his father’s) messiah-hood possible, and to prevent the possibility of it happening again. So, when Leto’s inevitable death and return to sandtrout comes (which he knows it will, he just doesn’t know when, which is why Siona’s plan to kill him works), humanity will never even follow a Chosen One who promises to unite all of humanity into a golden age, and a new prescient messiah (who is the only one who has a chance at doing such a thing anyway) can never arise again, since there will always be Atreides descendants that such a messiah can never see and thus account for.
“Dune Messiah” was actually part of the first Dune book, and was split off at the urging of the publisher. “Children of Dune” is overlong for the story it’s telling, but I always thought “God Emperor of Dune” was a necessary cap for the themes Herbert was exploring in the series.
But Heretics and Chapterhouse really really didn’t need to exist.
You know, I will admit that I’m biased against the “prequels” and other Dune extensions that Herbert-fils and Anderson cooked up because I’m a disciple of The Dune Encyclopedia, which the non-Frank Dune books contradict at every opportunity.
One more thing that the Golden Path seems to have done is to give humans actual Free Will. As noted several times throughout the books, prescience was a trap – once you’ve seen the future, you’re unable to escape the oracular vision. By creating Siona’s invisibility to prescience, Leto II gave her freedom from that oracular trap.
Because of this thread I just spent some time perusing summaries on wiki… looks like they brought back everyone as a ghola. Some multiple times. Some mind-bogglingly stupid stuff in there.
Oh, GOD! On the one hand, it’s nice to know that MY personal prescience that the Dumbassic Duo was going to completely destroy Frank Herbert’s mythology was spot-on. On the other hand…OH, GOD!
Me too, I’ve always considered the Dune Encyclopedia as canon. It’s especially well done in that it was written just after God Emperor, and it still matches up well with the later Heretics and Chapterhouse for good background meta-history material.
God Emperor is my favorite of the books, Leto is a wonderfully sympathetic anti-hero. Paul, on the other hand, always seemed too whiny and emo.
I always pronounce it ben, but I think in the movies it was ben ee.
I loved all Herberts Books in the Dune series (hell I like most if not all of his stuff I have read) and while I managed to choke down a couple his son did they are total drivel. Where the Father explores 6 complex themes simultaneously the son produces standard hack fiction bordering on the criminal. its not even decent fiction.
The compiler, Willis McNelly, was a long-time friend of Herbert (the DVD for the Sci-Fi Channel’s first Dune miniseries has an extensive interview with McNelly where he talks about Dune and his friend), and was apparently shown early manuscripts of “Heretics of Dune” (which was published the same year as the Encyclopedia), and so it has mentions of the Scattering and details of no-rooms.
I’ve always admired both the epic nature and the minute detail of the Encyclopedia, made possible by McNelly’s group of academia pals who all were Dune fans and wrote entries based on their own areas of academic expertise. My particular favorites are the gag about the “real identity” of the playwright “Harq al-Harba”, and the thousands-of-years-later expose that “Muad’Dib” couldn’t really have been Paul Atreides.
The best day of my fannish life was when I found a copy of the Encyclopedia in a used bookstore during college, for ten bucks.
Wikipedia quotes a Herbert biography as saying “Bene Gesserit means ‘that it may be borne or accomplished well,’ and is derived from the hortative subjunctive of the Latin verb gero, meaning ‘to bear or carry away’ in its root sense, but also ‘to conduct oneself in society.’”
If so, it makes sense to pronounce it as a Latin phrase - though someone who knows more Latin than I do will have to figure out just what that is!
That’s what you get when your collaborator is Kevin J. Anderson.
I think I need to go nosing around for a copy of the Dune Encyclopedia. I used to own one, but it got lost (or “borrowed”) at some point. I really want to browse the thing again.
I’m curious how much of the crapitude is really Brian Herbert’s fault. Kevin Anderson is a definite space opera hack, so I suspect that his is the overriding narrative voice of the prequels.
Frank and Brian wrote Man of Two Worlds together, which I really enjoyed, but it is very obvious in the novel where Frank had the narrative dominance and where his son did. Brian’s writing wasn’t bad, but it was much more light and fanciful, bordering on Tom Bombadil flavored prose.
Well, they had supposedly found Franks lost notes for Dune 7 at some point. Except it took them 2 books to totally screw it up.
I had apologized for the prequels but there is no way to justify, what were they called, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune?
That whole Duney babies thing was insipid and insulting. On the other hand they did support my notion that Duncan was the most important person in the Duniverse.