Continuing the re-release of Frank Herbert’s original ‘Dune’ books, the prophecy has now been fulfilled. The desert world ‘Dune’ also known as Rakis now, is developing arable land. With Leto now dead, the order has changed. A new ghola Duncan Idaho is trying to make sense of who and what he is and his continual resurrections.

With the fifth book, Frank Herbert was going beyond the level of a messiahs leading changes in a galactic empire and showing the results of this change on its people. As such, there was a lot of re-thinking and development on passing ideas.

At a time before my original reading of this book, I had also read the ‘Encyclopaedia Of Dune’ that had catalogued and dissected all the books up to that point. Whether Frank Herbert himself had read it is debatable but he obviously felt something was wrong and did much to make that book redundant.

The manufacture of gholas, for instance, was always perceived as coming from mechanical vats but here the Bene Tleilaxu were shown to have used organic wombs connected to over-sized people.

Frank Herbert was showing us more around his reality and a development of a new phase in this reality. The Bene Gesserit were still involved in the thick of all things and ensuring that prophecy flourished.

If you really want to demonstrate your recognition of the importance of the ‘Dune’ books in the history of Science Fiction, then you really need to read these books to see how it’s done.

Frank Herbert wasn’t prepared to just permutate without change in these books and was building up to the fall of this empire which led to ...

GF Willmetts