Book Review: Heretics of Dune

The fifth book in the Dune Saga by Frank Herbert: Duncan’s dick saves the galaxy!

Honestly I thought I’d hit the peak weird of the Dune Saga with God Emperor of Dune and that the final two books would be dealing with the fallout while coming back down the mountain. But like a car salesman slapping the roof of an old jalopy, Heretics of Dune is where Frank Herbert confidently declares that there’s plenty of weird in this baby yet. Only, this time the series pivots from the philosophy of governance and religion, to… * checks notes * mind control through sex!? Hmmm.

Blurb

From Dune to Rakis to Dune, the wheel turns full circle. From burning desert to green and fertile land and on again to burning desert ... the cycle is complete.

The people of the Scattering are returning. Amongst them, mysterious and threatening, are the women who call themselves the Honoured Matres, adepts of an ecstatic cult.

And on Rakis, become Dune, an ancient prophecy is fulfilled with the coming of the she-seer, Sheeana

Review

As the Dune Saga goes on, Frank Herbert’s writing style changes significantly. I’ve touched on this before in my previous reviews. The effect is very . By the time we reach Heretics, the fifth book, the prose is a lot stronger, the pacing is better, and the action is somewhat clearer. But crucially we don’t lose the depth of the philosophising that made the earlier books great. Everything is tighter. It’s a marked improvement across the board in terms of the reading experience.

For the plot, thousands of years later the galaxy is still feeling the aftereffects of God Emperor Leto’s Golden Path. Humanity left the confines of the core worlds of the old empire and spread out further, taking customs and traditions with them. In that time, those customs drifted and became new cultures. Now, the people of the Scattering are starting to return and the Honoured Matres threaten to conquer the core worlds with their mastery of sex. It’s incredibly strange. It truly did not go in the direction I thought it would, even the foreshadowing in the first two thirds of the book didn’t prepare me for the final act. Where God Emperor left me with the feeling that I had experienced something that has latterly grown on me as a masterpiece, Heretics leaves me feeling less so. The criticisms are more numerous with this one.

Firstly, there was a lot of time given to major characters who turned out to have rather bland purposes by the end. Sheeana in particular I found to be a little bit pointless. While her story and abilities were initially captivating, I expected her to do something a lot more significant with them than what we got by the end. Also, given how young Sheeana is in the book, the descriptions of her Bene Gesserit education in the last act made for very uncomfortable reading.

Miles Teg was a brilliant character, I thoroughly enjoyed his point of view chapters. Frank Herbert clearly tried to replicate the ending of Children of Dune with him, and it absolutely could have achieved that very well, but then it essentially came to nothing. Just fell flat.

It was interesting being in Taraza’s head, as well as Odrada and Lucilla. The Bene Gesserit are always very interesting, and their ending was the only part that didn’t fall flat.

Duncan Idaho, though… The entire book builds up this mystery as to what the Tleilaxu have secretly done to this latest Idaho ghola, and I can’t tell whether the reveal worked or not. It was so strange. He had become some kind of sex assassin. And his big scene was so ridiculously over-the-top it was like something out an anime—where two rivals compete seriously over the most insignificant thing. Like with Sheeana, his story was thoroughly compelling right up until the big reveal where it just totally derailed.

Open for Spoilers

The Honoured Matres and Bene Gesserit both use sex to "imprint" men and make them subservient. For the Bene Gesserit this is for their breeding programme, but for the Honoured Matres this is for mind-control and conquest.

An Honoured Matre tries to imprint Duncan with her "mastery of the orgasmic arts", but this unlocks the secret ability that the Tleilaxu had embedded within him: the memories of all previous Idaho gholas over the millennia, which allows him to become a male Imprinter (the original purpose of this was for him to imprint Sheeana so that the Tleilaxu could control her, and thus control the sandworms of Rakis).

So mid-coitus, Duncan turns the tables on the Honoured Matre and imprints himself on her instead, giving her an orgasm so strong she turns into a gibbering mess and is now sexually dependent on him.

In this manner, Duncan's dick saves the galaxy!

It felt like the whole point of the book was for Frank Herbert to engineer a way to get one of Leto’s worms off of Rakis. Everything else that happened around it was fluff. There’s a lot of very explicit sex talk in the book and it’s all handled in that typical Dune overanalytical style. It’s not trying to be titillating and is instead going for philosophical commentary on the nature of sex and the human condition. Which is fine, even if it was meant to be sexy. I’m no prude. But there are some extremely uncomfortable scenes that really did not need to be in there. The reveal about the nature of the Tleilaxu axolotl tanks where gholas are produced was great, though. Very disturbing and very well foreshadowed.

So overall, while the reading experience was excellent, and reading it was worthwhile to see the fallout from the Golden Path, Heretics of Dune definitely wasn’t as good as God Emperor and I feel like it’s one of the weaker entries in the series generally in terms of plot. If you’re already this far into the saga, there’s no point in stopping now. See it through. Onto Chapterhouse.