Book review: Children of Dune

Dune refers. Dune Messiah doesn't, because I haven't re-read that; I had a brief go recently but found it dull; I might try again. This is the cover I remember. Note how jarring it is: the somewhat porky blonde is completely at odds with the desert; and anyway, Ghanima is described as having red hair.

Lay that aside, and consider the story. Which is thin on plot; some things do happen, but too much of it is people talking to other people, or people talking to themselves, or people talking to people inside themselves. In this it is worse than Dune.

The cod philosophy is worse than Dune, too: indeed it is incoherent. In this it resembles the "Golden Path" that it doesn't really describe; and here we come to the heart of the problem, which is that for all the supposed intelligence of the protagonists, and their supposed ability to foretell the future, the choices they make appear to be deeply stupid, and a worse path for humanity than just doing nothing. Or leaving the Padishah emperor in place in the first place. If Frank Herbert were attempting to demonstrate how badly top-down rule works, he'd be doing well, but I fear that's not his intent.

Even more stupid is their realisation, late in the book, that the longed-for ecological transformation is... going to ecologically transform Dune. Duh. Specifically, it is going to kill off the sandworms, but how was this not totally obvious from the start? Not only that, it is going to destroy their society and Fremen way of life. Duh. Removing the harshness of the desert is going to make them soft: FFS you clowns, you need to actually think. For a book with so much talking, there isn't really any talk about whether this is desireable or not. Why not... just export those Fremen who'd like a soft life to Caladan, and leave Dune for those who want to stay?

I think Our Author is uneasily aware of governmental issues; he would be remiss otherwise, in a series so saturated with them. And yet he manages to say so little of interest. At one point (p 141 in my copy) he says "Good government never depends on laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern". Which could be a nice lead in to Plato vs Popper. But it isn't... partly because the book is inherently character-driven; special-case driven; he has no time for generic law.

Finally, a word about how implausible his concept of genetic memory is; he has Leto and Ghanima somehow able to remember conversations and incidents from an apparently infinite chain of forebears; in many cases, better than most people can recall their own lives. So this has to have been imprinted on their genes... somehow. Even if you could solve that, I doubt it works on information-density grounds. Or on info-access grounds.