Dune Messiah (SF) - Frank Herbert ***

In the sequel to his massive 1965 hit Dune, Frank Herbert widens his canvas considerably. Published four years later, Dune Messiah is nowhere near as good as the original - it's almost like a filler between Dune and the books that were to come later, feeling distinctly as if it was thrown together rather quickly.

[SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW]

The additions here include a whole new set of players in the Bene Tleilaxu, some of them 'face dancers' who can magically transform their body to any appearance, but who also provide technology such as artificial eyes that are treated suspiciously by others. A major character killed in the first book is brought back to life by this group as a 'ghola' - initially his regrown body with a new mind, but somehow endued with the original personality and memories by pushing him to a crisis. (Once again, emphasising how much the Dune series was science fantasy, not science fiction.) At the same time, we get added details on some of the players - so, for example, it's in this sequel that we first see the distorted figures of the Guild navigators in their spice chambers.

However, perhaps the most dramatic developments for the future of the series are those that happen to the main character Paul, losing his eyes but somehow continuing to see the world through vision until his children are born. This is Herbert both bringing a long-standing tradition of a tragic hero losing his eyes - from Oedipus to Corwin in Zelazny's Amber series - and also providing the model for others to come, notably Neo in the Matrix films, who also loses his eyes but continues with a mystical ability to see nonetheless.

It's not, then, that nothing happens in this book - but it's almost all establishing requirements for later novels. There's relatively little action and an awful lot of cod philosophising. It's essential to read this book if you are to complete the Dune sequence - but it's certainly something of a low point for the series.

Dune Messiah is still solidly in print - but for entertainment's sake, the cover shown here is the decidedly flashy one from my 1972 New English Library copy.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Search This Blog