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pensnfeathers 's review for:
God Emperor of Dune
by Frank Herbert
Althought I've enjoyed each Dune book so far, my experience with the previous three was that each was somewhat worse than the one that came before it.
That's why I'm so pleased that this was my favorite of the Dune sequels so far. This is a major step forward both in time and in scope for the Dune series. Suddenly we are 3,500 years beyond the events of the first three books, and it would have been very easy for the story to go completely off the rails at this point.
Instead, we get a beautiful novel about collective memory, the evolution versus preservation of culture, and a philosophical treatise on the morality of power. The characters -- old and new -- are more compelling than they have been in any of the other sequels, and the narrative moves from A to B with the most clarity.
It's not a flawless novel. Like the previous two sequels, God Emperor of Dune suffers from being slow, sometimes painfully so. And like the entire series there are some questionable takes on gender and sexuality -- questionable in that it's hard for me to tell if Herbert was being misogynistic and homophobic, or if he was trying and failing to satire misogyny and homophobia. Whatever his intention, the result was somewhat jarring.
An excellent book on the whole, nonetheless. If Dune was a 5 and Messiah and Children were 4s, this is a pretty clear cut 4.5 for me.
That's why I'm so pleased that this was my favorite of the Dune sequels so far. This is a major step forward both in time and in scope for the Dune series. Suddenly we are 3,500 years beyond the events of the first three books, and it would have been very easy for the story to go completely off the rails at this point.
Instead, we get a beautiful novel about collective memory, the evolution versus preservation of culture, and a philosophical treatise on the morality of power. The characters -- old and new -- are more compelling than they have been in any of the other sequels, and the narrative moves from A to B with the most clarity.
It's not a flawless novel. Like the previous two sequels, God Emperor of Dune suffers from being slow, sometimes painfully so. And like the entire series there are some questionable takes on gender and sexuality -- questionable in that it's hard for me to tell if Herbert was being misogynistic and homophobic, or if he was trying and failing to satire misogyny and homophobia. Whatever his intention, the result was somewhat jarring.
An excellent book on the whole, nonetheless. If Dune was a 5 and Messiah and Children were 4s, this is a pretty clear cut 4.5 for me.