God Emperor of Dune

Great story USELESS BOOK. My husbands iPhone shows larger photos on it's screen! If you, like me, buy hardbacks for their durability and for their font size, stay away from this particular purchase. I've never seen anything so cheap and useless. I'm going to find an older, larger copy but it won't be from the store as I'm limiting the number of purchases I make from them these days.

In the fourth volume of Frank Herbert's Dune Series, the tale goes three thousand years after the first three books. Leto, the son of Paul Atreides is still around, however, a semi-immortal who is the title character.
Paul might have been the equivalent of Julius Caesar, setting up an Empire for his successor, the Augustean Leto. Leto has established his own version of Pax Romana, creating a government that has remained in power over three millenia. The price of this peace is obvious: civilization has stagnated and many of the same institutions are still around, despite a time gap similar to the time of the mythical Agammemnon/Atreides to our modern day.
Leto is extremely powerful, not only physically and intellectually, but economically as well. His Achilles heel (speaking metaphorically as his worm-like body no longer has heels) is his simultaneous development towards worm-hood and his vague longings for his humanity. Among his allies/opponents is Duncan Idaho, the latest in a series of Idaho clones that have served Leto and have often died trying to assassinate him.
The book focuses on Leto's scheming about the human race and those who oppose him. While quite interesting and entertaining, it would sometimes be nice if Herbert's characters were a little less serious. No one speaks or does anything frivolously; it is all part of a larger agenda. Nonetheless, although different from the first three books, this is a worthy part of the series and a good science fiction novel.

I remember the first time I read through this story. It was 1982, and my daughter had just been born, and I could only get in a few pages per night. The book seemed to drag on, and on, and on. It was as though it took me 3,000 years to read it. Oh wait, that's part of the plot. The tedium of knowing the future, and living out the rote script. The ultimate boredom of an unbending future written in stone.

My original thought was that this book should have been titled "God Awfully Long Emperor of Dune". Subsequent readings have dispelled my initial impression. Like all the Frank Herbert Dune series books - an excellent read.

As I tend to re-read the Dune series every few years, my recent Dune book purchases have been in hardback. Several of my old paperbacks were literally falling apart. I'm glad that the store now carries links to sellers who have them in hardback. That "all grown up" daughter is now a fan of the series as well. Some day, she will inherit all of these well written books - in hardback.

Good book. This book is the answer to the question: What happened to the Atriedes family Legacy?
It also answers the question held by the readers of Dune, such as: what happened to the worms and the spice after the Jihad?

This was honestly the hardest of the Dune books for me to complete. I'm not exactly sure why that was, possibly because takes place so long after the previous books, maybe its the slew of new characters, I'm not sure. However, this book is vital to the rest of the story created by Frank Herbert. It is the bridge from the books of Atreides dynasty, to the post Empire story. If you're having a hard time finishing this book as I did, please just power through, it is worth it. The last books are some of the best I feel. While this was probably my least favorite of the series, it is worth the read, trust me.

This book is very interesting compared to the first 3. It makes you think a lot more and builds on the world that Frank Herbert has created showing the flaws and consequences of what he has created while eluding to the world where we live.

This represent an interesting "to be continued" for the Dune series. Unfortunately, the quality of the story is far from Dune or any other novel in the series. Its main and only quality is the belonging to Dune series."God Emperor of Dune", by itself, is quite boring. As a stand by itself novel I guess I would throw away the book after the first 50 pages (at most). The central idea is not bad, but the writer keeps the focus on Leto II, even in the short texts from the beginning of every chapter. All the rest of the novel must align with this, therefore the other characters are poorly shaped or present inconsistency or contradiction.

Very different than the previous books in the series. This was a much creepier read. I had a love hate relationship with Leto. It was clever how the Idaho character was developed into a more complete individual.

A brilliant and logical conclusion to the first 3 books, and a captivating bridge to the remaining two books in the original “Dune” series! I recommend the entire series to anyone who has read the first book entitled “Dune.”

The problem with this much loved and hated installment of Frank Herbert's six-part trilogy is not that it's deep, but rather that it isn't. For adolescent and near-adolescent science fiction readers, this novel feels altogether too "heady." However, for a mature reader the problem isn't its philosophical content, but its lack of content.

For much of the book, we're trapped with a self-hating narcissist suffering logorrhea. He goes on and on about how useless words are. He moans that he must be misunderstood as he dictates twelve volume diaries of his thoughts. Once a person knows a bit of social theory, reads a few actual social philosophers, learns some history, bloodies one's hands in political battles, Leto II's theories aren't surprising or hard to understand: they're just wrong. They're self-satisfied. They're reductive, and they fail to recognize their own dependence upon inference for their "laws."

That leaves us, then, with a very, very slim bit of action to hold up the plot. Long before the end, one is cheering for the explosives to go off.

This book is mostly dialogue with very little action. There is an exciting beginning, then things slow down and don't pick back up again until the very end. While many fans rave about this book, I just couldn't take the idea of Leto as a hybrid human-sandworm seriously enough to enjoy the book. If you're able to do this, I'm sure it's a much better read.

Having read the first three Dune books by Frank Herbert, I was excited to dig into this. For me, the first book is amazing, Dune Messiah is pretty cool but not as good, and Children of Dune was as good as the first.

This was a huge step down.

The quality of the writing itself stands in dark contrast to the complex, nuanced and mystical tones of the previous books, particularly in books one and three. In those books an entire history and language is invented, and rather than spoon feeding it to readers, Herbert challenged them to enter a universe which was filled with depth and intrigue.

In this book, the entire story is told almost exclusively through dialogue or through characters reminiscing about some previous conversation. It's such a bore compared to the complexity of the previous books, where there were included passages from other texts which existed within the universe, hints of the immense history and religious and philosophical constructs of the society within that universe. Here, it feels forced. There are too many exclamation points, too many characters that feel completely devoid of any reality.

In general, whereas as Dune and Children of Dune -- and even much more so in Messiah than here -- the universe and characters feel complete, so complete you can't even grasp it, in God Emperor it feels flat and like they're just going through the motions.

Take for example Duncan Idaho **Spoiler Alert**.

The idea of him coming back as a ghola is extremely interesting. Yet in this book he feels like a completely different character. He's rash and driven by silly desires that the Duncan of the other books never would have followed. Also, I'm confused about what he remembers -- he remembers things about Muad'dib, yet the gholas are supposedly made from the original cells of Duncan. The original Duncan died before Muad'dib existed.

Which brings me to my next frustration -- the inconsistencies. The characters, the plots, the time frames -- it doesn't match up to the first three books.

All in all I think Frank just got lazy with this one, sat down, typed it out, and called it a day. A huge fan of his work, some of the best literature around, not just in sci-fi, but those are lofty expectations to set and this one fell waaaaay short.

I see why some people stopped enjoying this series. Most of the philosophy in this novel goes way over my head, seems impractical, unnecessary, and is totally overshadowed by the fact that we're supposed to be in support of Frank Herbert's decision to make the lead protagonist be a giant Man-Worm. Look at the cover art. I'm not joking. This is a book about a Man-Worm. It's concepts like that which make Sci-Fi a less accessible genre of storytelling. There really could be a lot of awesome stuff in this book, and I seemed to read it from beginning to end, but now that a couple months have passed, all I remember is MAN-WORM--"oh gosh this is soooooo weird."