An inversion of its predecessor Dune, Dune Messiah tells the story of Paul Atreides 12 years later, now sitting on the Imperial throne, post-universe spanning jihad, being responsible for the brutal killings of billions of people… Our “hero”.

“Some of my friends have forgotten they once were Fremen,” Paul said, speaking to Korba, but designing his words for Stilgar. “You will mark down the ones Chani identifies as Sardaukar and you will have them killed. Do it yourself. I want it done quietly and without undue disturbance. We must keep in mind that there’s more to religion and government than approving treaties and sermons.

p. %!s(int=142)

Paul was never a good, as in doing the right thing, kind of character. In Dune, his mother Jessica, as a Bene Gesserit, puts him on the path to become a manufactured messiah destined to cause the deaths of billions of innocent people. We see him fight against this destiny throughout the text but in the end he succumbs to it, takes the crown of the Padishah Emperor and begins his forceful subjugation of the known universe.

In Dune Messiah, 12 years later he’s fulfilled the destiny set out for him by the Bene Gesserit, and it’s made much more explicit that despite being a Chosen One (albeit a manufactured one), he’s not someone we should look up to or seek to emulate.

“I am not on Arrakis,” she said. “I’m a passenger on a Guild heighliner in free space.”

“There is no such thing as free space, Madame.”

She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his tone.

“Muad’dib rules everywhere,” he said.

p. %!s(int=102)

Being disappointed that some readers read Dune and thought otherwise, Frank Herbert went all the way in the sequel to really hit you on the head with Paul’s awfulness.

“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. Las beams, 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.”

p. %!s(int=138)

Frank Herbert is skeptical of the great man theory and his Dune series tackles that seriously. Having been steeped in American politics working as a speech writer for US presidents for many years seems to have given Frank Herbert more than just a little skepticism about “great” men.

If you were expecting another Hero’s Journey from Dune Messiah (even a mocking portrayal or parody of one) after reading Dune’s, expect to be disappointed because Dune Messiah is not that. If Dune was all about Paul Atreides’s rise to power, Dune Messiah is about his fall.

Dune Messiah luxuriates in the awfulness of Paul and is expecting you to root for the dissidents that are trying to bring his reign to an end despite them being just as awful as Paul (but much less powerful). I don’t think that all people in power should be torn down forcefully from their golden thrones but some definitely should and to see this portrayed in fiction, especially in a novel written so many decades ago, is great.

Other writers would have walked back some of the more subversive themes in Dune after it became such a massive hit to sell more copies instead of double downing on these ideas like he did. And the novel is much more interesting because of it.

Frank Herbert is also skeptical of groups (or perhaps he just likes to write about awful people of all kinds). The Bene Gesserit are an all-women organisation that most of the women in the novel belong to. The Bene Gesserit represent a kind of soft power that control people and influence them through relationships, lineages, genes. They are awful. It’s not just that they are partially responsible for Paul’s rise to power but at every turn they will surprise you with how low they are willing to go in their game of morality Limbo.

The Reverend Mother sighed. On the surface, it was the sigh of a prisoner bemoaning her fate, but inwardly she felt the response as a comment on Irulan. It was futile to hope the Atreides Emperor’s precious gene pattern could be preserved through this instrument. No matter her beauty, this Princess was flawed. Under that veneer of sexual attraction lived a whining shrew more interested in words than in actions. Irulan was still a Bene Gesserit, though, and the Sisterhood reserved certain techniques to use on some of its weaker vessels as insurance that vital instructions would be carried out.

Beneath small talk about a softer pallet, better food, the Reverend Mother brought up her arsenal of persuasion and gave her orders: the brother-sister crossbreeding must be explored. (Irulan almost broke at receiving this command.)

p. 104-105

Frank Herbert is not a luddite but he is concerned with technology’s ability to amplify the worst parts of our humanity. This is clearly a concern of his in Dune; refer to the Butlerian Jihad and his treatment of the “family atomics” eg. nuclear weapons. Dune Messiah expands on this theme through the Tleilaxu, who are a people with comparatively advanced technology without any pesky morality getting in the way of their technological “progress”.

This was a Tleilaxu thing. The Tleilaxu displayed a disturbing lack of inhibitions in what they created. Unbridled curiosity might guide their actions. They boasted they could make anything from the proper human raw material—devils or saints. They sold killer-mentats. They’d produced a killer medic, overcoming the Suk inhibitions against the taking of human life to do it. Their wares included willing menials, pliant sex toys for any whim, soldiers, generals, philosophers, even an occasional moralist.

p. 91-92

Like any good work of sci-fi, Dune Messiah, and the series as a whole so far, is like an onion. Under every layer you’ll find more ideas to think about and discuss than you might expect. But if you’re anything like me, you might find that most of the concerns Frank Herbert had in the 60s when he wrote these books have only gotten more concerning in the intervening decades and, thus, you might find yourself peeling back this onion that is the Dune series and finding more reasons to cry than you might have expected.