Reading Dune Messiah and Children of Dune
Dune Messiah & Children Of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Goes like this. Tense situation implied. Everybody has heightened awareness. Prescience, spice sense, Bene Gesserit, Tleilax, mentat. Think think think about current problem. Something happens. Switch to next scenario. Repeat. The problem is that writing about sitting at the top of an empire of this magnitude and complexity is just hard. Feels inert even when something is trying to happen. I admire the ideas. Have waited since the 60s to reread Dune Messiah; hated it when I was young. Never read Children of Dune. Now that I am reading them, I find myself mostly in awe of the scope, the layers of ideas one after the other, but the books are a slog. If Paul and Leto were female characters they would be Mary Sues. Always seeing, seeing, thinking, thinking, always right. At last some action comes. Doesn’t quite save the books. But I will always admire this universe and am looking forward to the newest movie version of Dune.