Lightly Seared on the Reality GrillBoth Dune Messiah and Children of Dune turned out to be a lot better than I remembered. God Emperor of Dune, however, did not.
It’s certainly an ambitious book, trying to tell the story of 3500 year old entity with memories going back to the dawn of humanity, but it all falls a bit flat for me.
For me the problem with this novel is twofold.
The first problem is that not much happens. There is very little narrative in here and what we have instead is the human/sandworm hybrid of Leto II sharing his millennia-old wisdom with those around him, and then being either amused or annoyed when they fail to keep up with him.
This leads into the second problem, which is that for someone who has direct memories of the whole of humanity, his insights are remarkably similar to those of a middle aged man living in the second half of the 20th Century.
There are some interesting themes and ideas in here but, for far too much of the novel, it just feels like Frank Herbert pontificating.
https://blog.lightlyseared.online/2024/07/12/revisiting-arrakis-god-emperor-of-dune/
