Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Although Dune was meant to be a trilogy originally, Frank Herbert has masterfully been able to extend the series. The way he does this is that both book 4 and 5 recalibrate the entire series.
On the one hand, this book lacks the energy from the previous novels. Yet it is able to clarify what’s at stake for the other books. At first I had thought this was about utopia — in fact the first three books seemed so. But then the 4th book showed us that utopia isn’t it since Leto II had already presented us the picture of what it meant to have it; again it was politics and power as usual.
Here, Herbert shows us what is at stake. Raising human consciousness. Not just physically but the correct adaptability. He shows us also, corruption, incredible corruption that comes with humans trying to achieve the sublime so that the world becomes degraded into nothing but struggles for novel sensations.
Much of the book seemed to wander though, and while there was the understandable politics that comes with Dune, this seemed beside the point; tiresome. Unlike the first few books where we cared more about the characters in this, we start to get a glimpse of what it means to build a world… it means that we define new subjectivities. It means we have to outline the process by which this comes around. And although there is no perfect way, the destruction of Rakis as the release of humankind from a concentration of power was what Leto II was after; this is the truth of being human. Rather than the technology and power view of what a perfect world is, Herbert shows us the way for us is to choose freedom, to let others grow and develop, so we too shall grow and develop.
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