Just Finished Reading Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

Heretics of Dune is the fifth of six books in Frank Herbert's Dune science fiction series, published in 1984.  When beginning one of these books, you never know exactly what the time setting will be...it can get pretty erratic from book to book.  Book two, Dune Messiah, begins 12 years after the end of the first book...and then 9 more years elapse until the beginning of the third book, Children of Dune.  But that's nothing...a full 3,500 years pass before the events transpire in book four, God Emperor of Dune.  And then on to the book I just read, Heretics of Dune, with another 1,500 years gone by.  It's kind of hard keeping up with the changing characters in this series, although one of them, Duncan Idaho, appears in all of them either as his original self or as a repeatedly regenerated clone called a ghola.  Now I've just begun to read Herbert's final book that he wrote by himself for this series, titled Chapterhouse: Dune...and its beginning picks up right when the previous book ended with no elapsed time at all!

The sentient galaxy is ruled by opposing political factions that work hard to outmaneuver one another for their own survival and advantage...just like the nations in our current world jostle about with their ideologies, intrigues, and occasional wars.  As a reader I've come to dislike all of the groups and find their leaders morbidly rigid, selfish, and devious.  That's not to say that in Heretics of Dune there aren't any appealing characters: the bold, spunky girl on Rakis called Sheeana who talks to giant monster worms that obey her but destroy everyone else, Idaho's noble and honest character, and Miles Teg, a brave old soldier working for the women-dominated Bene Gesserit faction, are all very likeable and made reading this story less of an ordeal than it could have been.  The dominant story line in this book (beware, here comes a series plot spoiler) is that a rival women's group called the Honored Matres, much larger in number and ambitious and brutal in their aims of galactic domination, are returning from the "scattering" instigated by Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune (book four) and are attacking planets which are under the influence of the Bene Gesserit.  Rakis, formerly called Arrakis or Dune, is threatened as is the home planet of the Bene Gesserit, called Chapterhouse.  The climactic scene at the end of this book directly affects the beginning of the next...

In reading the Dune series, I wanted to get a sense of how humanity is progressing through the years, looking to the various characters along with those factions I referred to find any signs of accumulated wisdom and benevolvence...sadly, I've found nothing positive.  In book five, the forces are just as cruel and self-centered as the ones in book one, with only a few noble characters scattered throughout the series.  There is a lot of stilted dogma according to which each political faction adheres, and in my opinion the author goes way overboard in presenting it, making reading through this stuff an exercise in tedium.  Yet Frank Herbert's Dune series has been highly acclaimed critically and has consistently topped the bestseller lists.  I might have been more sympathetic toward it had the story stuck with the original "hero" of Paul Atreides instead of leapfrogging through time and characters.  Well, I've gone this far and plan to stick it out to see what happens at the end...