Just Finished Reading Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

Chapterhouse: Dune is the sixth and final novel written by science fiction writer Frank Herbert for his Dune series, recording his imagined future of humanity as it populates the galaxy over millennia and undergoes all sorts of crises through different factions and movements.  There's no doubt that Herbert had not intended it to be the last volume...it came out in 1985 and he died the next year, leaving readers suspended wondering what would happen after the inconclusive ending of this book.  Some twenty years or so later, his son Brian collaborated with Kevin J. Anderson to write two more books, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, that supposedly continue and wrap up this series (with the use of the original author's notes).  Guess I'll have to read these, too...

Many thousands of years into the future...and many more thousands of years before the events transpire in the first Dune novel...there is a galactic-wide revolution against the use of computers as the perception takes hold that they are supplanting humanity.  As a result, there is a regression in science and space travel and more emphasis placed on developing the human mind and its potential.  The Bene Gesserit is composed of women who are able to incorporate the complete memories of all past Bene Gesserits.  Some humans have been genetically modified to guide starships through faster-than-light travel...both they and the Bene Gesserit heavily depend on the mind-altering spice mélange to accomplish their aims.  And mélange has been produced solely by giant sandworms on the planet Dune, or Arakis.  Now a plot spoiler for this series (cover your eyes if you want to read Dune from the beginning): at the end of the fifth book, Heretics of Dune, Arakis has been destroyed...but one surviving worm has been spirited away on a ship to the Bene Gesserit's home planet of Chapterhouse.  But the Bene Gesserit are being wiped out by a much larger and more powerful sisterhood, the Honered Matres...what will happen as they try to recreate the desert world of Dune that allowed the mélange-producing worms to flourish?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out...

There are other groups whose existence is at stake in this sixth book, including the mysterious Bene Tleilax who can regenerate copies of the dead (called "gholas")...with the ability to recover old memories.  Many of the Tleilaxu were "face dancers", able to assume the appearance and mannerisms of others to an uncanny accuracy...their ultimate fate is completely in the hands of Tleilaxu survivor Scytale at the "end" of this series.  And then there are the Mentats, humans who have an innate ability that enables them to reason like the computers that are no longer available.   Notable characters are the gholas Duncan Idaho and Miles Teg, Darwi Odrade, Murbella, and Sheenana, to name the more significant.  The Honored Matres have invaded from the "scattering", caused by the earlier tyrant Leto II...but are they really just invading or are they being pursued by something out there?  That question is left hanging at the end...twenty years later, hopefully, Brian Frank and Kevin J. Anderson have provided a suitable answer and series conclusion with those two books I mentioned...