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A review by deimosremus
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
5.0
Dune is one of my absolute favorite books— I read it for the first time about 8 years ago, and it instantly enamored me. I had put off reading the sequels for a long time, as I wasn’t as interested in them as I could’ve been at the time. But, now that I’ve finally read Messiah, I can safely say that it’s just as great its predecessor, perhaps surpassing it in some key moments.
Herbert really knows how to craft a world that feels immersive and real while still retaining a sense of creativity and strangeness that separates it from other, more generic works of science fiction and fantasy. But beyond that, he understands the machinations and subtly sinister underpinnings of politics, religion and philosophy to such an acute degree… injecting that knowledge into his fiction is what makes Dune such an enthralling, fascinating and terrifying universe.
The corruption of and criticisms surrounding the notion of leadership and heroism was a theme central to the first book, but it’s taken to much greater depths here, which allows the reader to really re-examine the series’ iconic characters not so much in a new light, but in a much more defined and ultimately subversive one— gone is the ‘hero’s journey’ structure of Dune, which is what makes the sequel so brilliant in that rejection of tradition.
Herbert really knows how to craft a world that feels immersive and real while still retaining a sense of creativity and strangeness that separates it from other, more generic works of science fiction and fantasy. But beyond that, he understands the machinations and subtly sinister underpinnings of politics, religion and philosophy to such an acute degree… injecting that knowledge into his fiction is what makes Dune such an enthralling, fascinating and terrifying universe.
The corruption of and criticisms surrounding the notion of leadership and heroism was a theme central to the first book, but it’s taken to much greater depths here, which allows the reader to really re-examine the series’ iconic characters not so much in a new light, but in a much more defined and ultimately subversive one— gone is the ‘hero’s journey’ structure of Dune, which is what makes the sequel so brilliant in that rejection of tradition.