31 shelved's and not a word written on this site about the most famous calamity in the history of science-fiction publishing! A travesty. Well, let me get the ball rolling with the obvious one: huh?

More crucially, what did he want for this novel? Well, that at least is easy to answer; he wanted to reconfigure his most popular work ever into the parts that he found the most interesting. Problems only arose because these parts were so very divorced from the most attractive elements of the previous work that this supposed sequel has almost nothing in common with it outside of character names. Even Herbert's style has undergone a de/re/evolution. He's become so obsessed here with politics, with double-speak and secret messages, with ghostly future visions and prescience as a cage, so very obsessed in fact that very few conversations that occur in this book really occur, or even matter at all. Two people will be, in the supposed reality of this world, 'talking' to each other, with words and the like. However, Herbert won't even bother to tell us what words they're saying, because the sounds are only a veneer to disguise the actual messages they're hoping to communicate. Herbert instead translates for us the carefully controlled sup-expressions and micro-movements of their shoulder blades, which is where the real conversation is happening. Then, five minutes later, we'll learn that everything one of these characters micro-expressed to the other was a lie, done with the purpose of manipulating them. We'll then learn that the manipulatee knew this and was only playing along to not sever the yarn of fate, which they have carefully manicured to design the least bad possible scenario from a sea of every possible decision they could ever make. Is it so hard to imagine that Herbert's prose gets a little slippery as a result? That some of his image-making can be dysfunctional? I suspect, you'd agree, that it is not.

As an example, the plot that is plotted against Paul Atriedes in this book goes a little something like this. Spoilers, if you like. I'm not tagging it because I doubt you'll remember any of the words by the time you reach the end, but if you want maximum virginal purity for the third movie this year, you're excused. Paul's cuckolded wife (Princess Irulan), a floating gas creature that represents the opposing 'Guild' (I guess just the planets that don't want to be guillotined by Mau'Dib?) + secretes the magic capacity to protect his co-conspirators from Usul's powers of prescience (Edric), the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother who originally taught Lady Jessica the tricks of the trade (I forget), and a Bene Tleilaxu (previously unmentioned) Face Dancer (i.e. shapeshifter) (Scytale) all meet in a room. Here, they engage in two conversations at once. The first conversation, the one with their hands and such, involves testing Irulan's commitment to this conspiracy (verdict... eh?). The second explains that the Bene Tleilaxu, a multi-generational super-society of genetic manipulators much like the Bene Gesserit (though their approach is more hands-on), have come across the corpse of Duncan Idaho (a close friend of the Atreides, who died saving Paul and his mother in the first book), and have transformed it into a Ghola (a living being with mechanical parts made of the flesh of a previously living thing, with no concrete memories of its previous life, though with some vague associative awareness of its past) named Hayt. This ghola is a Mentat (computer brain), possesses Zensunni thought (postcard platitudes), and wicked sword skills (we don't see them). They will give it to Paul, who, remembering his best pal Duncan, will accept it wholeheartedly, because it will be fully honest with him, up to admitting why it was given to him; but why is that? Well, here comes the catch. They've done, uh, something? To it? But Scytale won't tell the others what it is, other than that it will cause Paul to destroy himself. Naturally, they all agree that this is a great idea and part ways, leaving Irulan with the one goal of ensuring that Paul's Fremen beau, Chani, doesn't get pregnant, keeping the imperial bloodline in the hands of the conspiracy, though she just sort of eventually gives up on doing this. Eventually, of course, we discover that what was implanted in Hayt was a latent hypnotic trigger, only to be set off by the (literal) humming of another Bene Tleilaxu creation, a dwarf with the power of prescience that will weasel his way into Paul's home through his knowledge of the identity of the conspirators working against him (indeed, he will be planted as a weapon against the concpiracy to be given to Paul by a household of Fremen who are fraternising with those Fremen conspiring against Mau'Dib, though those Fremens don't know that these Fremen are actually still loyal, and these Fremen don't know that the spy dwarf they use is actually a double-agent), his noxious insistence on speaking in riddles, and a nuclear bomb which they will drop on Paul right after he picks up the dwarf, an intentionally botched assassination attempt by the conspiracy to sell out half of themselves as a distraction from their deeper plans. This planted compulsion will cause the full awareness of Duncan Idaho to emerge from within Hayt when Paul seeks comfort in him after the death of Chani during childbirth, which they know will happen, because, as mentioned, the dwarf can see the future. When Duncan emerges, he will recognise the latent Harkonnen biology in Paul and attack on sight, killing the emperor, etc. They win. However, Usul, knowing this future, is aware of all of the above the entire time, and is only allowing it to occur because he has observed that his interruption at any point in this plot, be it resulting in his death or overwhelming victory, will further facilitate the genocidal regime done in his name, making him not just a godhead but a martyr, and so he has to carefully decide a point in which to interrupt, to secure the safety of his children and sister, but also to discredit the regime sufficiently that they don't kill as many people as they otherwise would, while still allowing his sister Alia to take power after him in a setting wherein their enemies have been disempowered. Paul interrupts at the moment of Duncan's psychological emergence, reminding him that he's his pal, stopping the murder. However, this was actually the Bene Tleilaxu's plan all along (not the other conspirators, to be clear, who were executed off-screen, expect for Irulan, who agrees to nanny the kids), who intended to revive Duncan Idaho in this manner to demonstrate to Paul that they could also revive his now dead wife Chani as a ghola (Paul arranged the scenario such that Chani would die in childbirth because all of the situations where she lived were the pits). They would then use her as leverage against him and his children and control his empire, and so on. Turns out it was a bit of a crap plan, though, because even though this is the one bit Paul hadn't 100% prepared for, he doesn't bite, and has the guy who offers that to him, Scytale, in fact, killed immediately. Paul then fucks off to the desert. End scene.

So, what's the problem, right? Well, truthfully, none of it. This is the book, and it's interesting, in a retaliatory "fuck you for liking the wrong parts of my bestselling/beloved classic" kind of way. The 'problem', like, mathematically speaking, is that You, the beloved reader, also know the whole time. Not the specific details of course, or the exact result, but you know that Paul knows. So, what are you actually reading? A conspiracy thriller with an inevitable outcome? An attempt to overthrow a religious autocrat, wherein the only character designed to be sympathetic is said autocrat? A sequel about unavoidable futures and inevitable disappointments and... oh. Frank. You should have just said so if you were nervous!

There's so much rigour to the breathless 'and then and then' illogic, poetry to the circular reasoning, and an almost historic lack of book per book. It's a very fascinating curio. Don't know that I'd have picked the Sicario and Saga guys to adapt it to the big screen. I feel like they might struggle with the sensibility a touch. I do know that I'm going to have to check out the next one, which is titled in such a way that it promises to be the Muppet Babies to this book's Muppet Treasure Island.