God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert (Dune #4)

Yes, it’s got a big fuck off dick on the cover

Yes, it’s Dune 4 aka God Emperor of Dune aka 4une aka A Dune Hope aka Leto The Bodies Hit The Floor aka Dune But Not Forgotten aka the Dune book where (spoilers from this point, nerds – though are you really a nerd if you’re reading a blog post by a once-trendy 30-something (I don’t know how old I am any more and it sadly doesn’t matter) about God Emperor of Dune before you’ve read the actual novel???) absolutely everyone from Dune 1-3 is dead except for Paul Atreides’ son Leto (the one who bonded himself with loads of sandtrouts (the babies of the creatures who turn into the giant spice-producing sandworms, if I’m remembering Dune 1 correctly (there’s no “previously on Dune” type recap here)) at the end of Dune 3) who is now well over three thousand years old and now far more worm than man physically, but much less worm than man than is depicted on the cover of the paperback copy I read (because the way Frank Herbert describes Leto, the titular God Emperor himself, is much less dick-like and much weirder than a worm’s body with the face of a man (e.g. he still has functional hands, he has weird stubby flaps where his legs used to be, he’s not a massive giant tho he is bigger than he would have been as a human) and the raunchy, saucy, rumpy pumpy Rupert Campbell-Black of science fiction, Duncan Idaho, who Leto has had cloned – and killed/had killed – thousands of times across the centuries by the people who cloned him in Dune 2, because Leto – and all of the ancestor-consciousnesses he is in communication with internally cuz of all the spice in his system, right – they all bloody love having Duncan Idaho around.

Everyone likes having Duncan Idaho around, and no one more so than Frank Herbert.

Every time the clone (or “ghola” in Dunespeak) is brought to life, his memories resume from where he died physically waaaaay back in Dune 1.

By dropping the reader into a far far future a far far future away from the far far future of the previous three books in the series, Duncan Idaho (someone who almost always gets the full name treatment (because his name is Duncan Idaho)) becomes the reader-avatar… this place is nearly as strange to “us” as it is to him: he is a probing, questioning voice where elsewhere there is always certainty, because in this universe in this novel, there is a God Emperor who not only can see and know all – that he chooses to know – there is a rigid militaristic system set up to maintain the status quo of Leto’s bad regime.

And so and so and so this is a novel partly about the organisation of rebellions seeking to overthrow a tyrant, partly about the seeking of technology that can be used to undermine (i.e. hide from) Leto’s melange-powered past/present/future presience, is partly about the hypocrisy of authoritarian regimes and the inevitable corruption that is created by absolute power.

God Emperor of Dune is also about the promise and the failure of technology, about the impossibility of escaping from oppression when one is conscious constantly of the oppression one is seeking to have escaped…

It is part desert adventure, even though Arrakis has been mostly terraformed into a green green grass of home type green and pleasant land with a tiny pocket for Leto – because all the actual worms are dead – to play in with the “Museum Fremen” who copy all of the rituals of the desert-dwellers of early Dune books but with none of the peril, none of the meaning, none of the risk, for now there are rivers on Arrakis, now there are trees, now there are farms and gardens and no real danger other than Leto’s government and Leto’s guards. Oh, and also the people rebelling against Leto, which includes the Tleilaxu Face Dancers (who are the characters who copy the physical identities of others. (There’s a big massacre of them halfway through the novel, tho, so their threat doesn’t become part of the neat, tight, very well-constructed dénouement (that means ending). (I told you there would be “spoilers”.)))

What else is in here?

Conversations around AI and computational technologies that remain bleakly relevant today, over 40 years since Herbert published this… e.g. on p175, Leto asks “Is automation synonymous with conscious intelligence?” A lot of people right now seem to be claiming that it is!

It’s an exciting, swashbuckling, philosophical novel that discusses religion and faith and politics and power, that explores control and corruption and economics and war and human relationships. It’s great!

And then, on the final two pages, which are written as if from even more thousands of years in the future and following all of the events that Leto mentioned in conversation and his journals that he predicted would happen (inc. the total collapse of all the universe-wide society and “the Scattering”, which is an evocative tiny phrase): “We of the Minority must remind the political censors that the poor sandworms in their Rakian Reservation cannot provide us with an alternative to Ixian Navigation Machines, nor are the tiny amounts of Church-controlled melange any real commercial threat to the products of the Tleilaxu vats. No!”

So, in the end, it was all for nothing. Melange stopped being important. The Atreides no longer rule everything around them, people are separated, freer – or are they?

One thing that does remain, though, in the far far distant future is that everyone is still – as we are, too – deeply interested in the history of the Atreides. Maybe that is one of the few human traits that will always persist…