Real boats rock, and other life lessons Dune taught me

It's done. I've completed the Dune series. And I just realized I read the last 5 books of the series in 2011. Wow. I'm addicted.


Chapterhouse: Dune, the sixth and final chapter of Frank Herbert's Dune series, focuses in on the Bene Gesserit. The Honored Matres have been massacring Bene Gesserit controlled planets and are poised to take over everything. Or so they think. The Honored Matres are brash and violent where the Bene Gesserit are reticent and calculating. The Honored Matres crash around while the Bene Gesserit concoct plans within plans.

Did I mention they are all women? It is a war of deadly women.

In previous books, the Bene Gesserit were always around, genetically choreographing futures for people, but Chapterhouse gives the reader an intimate and multi-faceted new perspective of these complicated women. You see behind the veil of their strength and wisdom; you see the machinations (and feelings) of the puppet masters.

This is a book of sisterhood and learning. And wisdom: "Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty."

So, at the end of it all, in the midst of a tumultuous final battle, after six books...how does one end such a momentous series? Herbert doesn't disappoint.

In a series that spans thousands of years, there is no tidy loose end tying finish. Instead, there is satisfaction that The Golden Path is still followed and the characters readers know and love are still out there living their (fictional) lives. Just as they will live on in my mind (and when I re-read the series because...obsessed).

Until next time Dune.

"We witness a passing phase of eternity. Important things happen but some people never notice. Accidents intervene. You are not present at episodes. You depend on reports. And people shutter their minds. What good are reports? History in a news account? Preselected at an editorial conference, digested and excreted by prejudice? Accounts you need seldom come from those who make history. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are subjective forms of special pleading. Archives are crammed with such suspect stuff."
Frank - critical thinking - Herbert

Only fools prefer the past

At some point, I'll run out of Dune books to read and I'll stop talking about it. But that time isn't now.

I've finished book four: God Emperor of Dune. A couple thousand years have gone by and Leto (the son of the main character of the first book) is now almost completely a giant worm. He's created an empire where he is the godhead. There aren't crimes, but sins. His army is made up of only women. Computers are banned. So is interplanetary travel. Where dunes were, water and foliage now reign. Oh, and he keeps bringing Duncan Idaho back over and over and over again.

He has sacrificed and done all of this to create year after year of "Leto's Peace."

To save life as they knew it, Leto had to follow the Golden Path which meant 1. turning into a worm and 2. being a peace despot.

And in the end? Leto's fate is to be killed with water (wicked witch = worm), which will start the process of bringing sandworms (mini-Leto's) back to Dune and re-making it the Dune we all love. And both Leto and the reader know this the entire time.

So when Leto falls in love? You're all: how many sacrifices does he have to make? And...she is marrying a giant WORM. Also, his army is kind of upset because Leto has been telling them they are his only "brides." Uh oh.

But he is a god, so he can do that?

Per Dune usual, there's lots of talk about power, fate, choices, and what a god is exactly.

The reader also got to see the domestication of men at the hands of women. As Leto says, "Domestication is a thing that females know from eons of necessity...To tame, to fit into some orderly survival pattern. Women learned it at the hands of men; now men learn it at the hands of women."

I feel evil laughter coming on.

Now, wherever you fall on the is-Leto-a-divine-being-or-not debate (he dies...can you kill a god?), there is no doubt that he shaped the universe (as emperor of bunches of planets). It makes one consider how each of us has been manipulated by un-payed-attention-to sources: "...and holding people planetbound keeps them out of mischief. It does something more important that that. It fills them with a longing to travel. It creates a need to make far voyages and see strange things. Eventually, travel comes to mean freedom."

Reading the Dune series is more than just reading. It is swimming around in another world made by words that have snuck off the page and created rolling dunes as far as the eye can see.

"If we deny the need for thought...as some do, we lose the powers of reflection...if we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe."
Frank Herbert via Leto