God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After the first three books of Dune, I was unsure of what else Herbert could do. In a way, this is a new beginning, one that is able to adequately build from the first three and yet usher in the end of a given line. Herbert is brilliant as he grasps the very beginnings of the series and is able to draw a line to this fourth installment so that its conclusion shifts the first three texts and makes room for this fourth.
The dialogue as always, as is his political and social thoughts, magnificent in their brevity. Stunning in their conciseness. Herbert proves himself a statesmen in his understanding of the human animal.
Like the other books, the mysteries of the future guide the grievances of the past. In this however, Leto II in his 3000 year reign, finds the presence of the future to be very much on his thoughts as it shapes his actions. I found puzzling his easy acceptance of the present, his readiness to die, and also his generous understanding of the troubles of the future. In this, Leto II seems too willing to allow the horrid creature he has become to mismatch the humans around him. He builds himself up to hide the monstrosity he has become. This seems like a blindspot, but I am sure that Herbert will find a way to patch this in the next book.
In a way, with each text, Herbert is able to outline the increased requirement for clarity of purpose, one that exceeds a general lifespan. In a way, the demand he outlines for his characters, in this case, shown by the mechanizations of Leto II on his descendants, lies in educating them about the nature of their own rational being by subjecting them to the rigor of discovering who they are and how they can exist with their place in humankind.
Herbert has thus designed a mythic-o fascist state for the Empire of Leto II, one that exceeds terrestrial bounds by keeping humans savage, ignorant and calibrated for continual furtherance of the species. In this case, the militarization of women, not only as a force of socialization but also as breeders. For his own end, Leto II has kept his family as a nobility to be educated as administrators to keep humankind on the narrow path of continuance.
Perhaps not ironically, this aristocracy of a split humanity in which we have the keepers who service the ignorant commoners so the commoners can remain ignorant and live their lives in human perpetuance mirrors our current situation now, as we have administrators who form a government in bureaucratic perpetuance and the worker bees who continually struggle to maintain their slippery hold in the economy as workers stratified along technologically driven lines of production.
Herbert again has highlighted in stasis what it means for us to be an organized people. This horrific vision of Leto II is intuitively against our sense of humankind as a people reaching self enlightenment. In this vision, only a few are able to see the trap of being one of the nobility is one that is tied to a servicing of a mob that is too ready to believe in the stupid myths of their own service, when in fact they are the ones that have the ability for change. This dialectic reversal is the fear (and hope) that has driven politics of the 19th century founding both fascism and marxism kinds of revolution in the early 20th century. So far, Herbert has traced our development into this 4th text into the stagnation of today, in which production and abundance rules as the imagery by which we are all enslaved.
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