Reading: Dune Messiah

It’s a delight to visit the Barnes & Noble website and see a splash of various Dune covers on a carousel header (are there any bad Dune covers? Even this God Emperor of Dune art is a sumptuous, high-saturation absurdity I’d gladly hang in on my living room wall as a canvas triptych). I’m one of many pilgrims who rushed back to the series after seeing the new adaptation.

A thought I had after reading the first one, which gains potency reading the second book: Oh, this is like what G.R.R. Martin is probably trying and failing to do with Daenerys Targaryen. Whereas we’re supposed to gain sympathy for Daenerys throughout the series because of her many rapes and the chafing of her “small, high breasts” out in the desert, Herbert takes a sharp left with a time skip that casually drops us directly into the height of Paul’s evil emperor phase:

“Ghengis… Khan? Was he of the Sardaukar, m’Lord?”

“Oh, long before that. He killed… perhaps four million.”

“He must’ve had formidable weaponry to kill that many, Sire. Lasbeams, perhaps, or…”

“He didn’t kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing — a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”

This macro-scale universe building is part of what’s so deliciously alienating and addictively nigh-nourishing about Dune — it quenches (or doesn’t) that “out-of-reach”ness that’s in all my favorite works. The Hero’s Journey uncontested flows all too naturally into ungodly power, a supermassive timeline of both humanity and psychology. Two other notions stood out to me:

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

and

Before us, instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span — often no longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty or more lifetimes never occurred to them.

(The latter, from the Bene Gesserit Creed, gives me a pleasant chill when I think of Herbert passing the series on to his son.)

But it’s one of profound, fable-like scenes in this book alone. There’s Alia dangerously overextending her abilities in training and asking why the option to do is there if one isn’t meant to strive for it. There’s the continuing of lovely landscape metaphors — But whatever comes from behind the mountains must cross the dunes.

More thoughts, more spice, more zombies and worm-gods to come.