Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm a huge fan of Dune, and I'm a philosophy major. You'd think I'd love "God Emperor". But it's just not a very good book in my opinion. I get that this is a divisive topic, so fans of the book can go away and be happy, but I think this book is meant for a niche audience. The plot: Fans will tell you this book covers an unimaginable amount of time, that it delves into such deep issues over millennia... but the actual plot focuses on maybe a week or so of time, focused into a handful of days. References are made to things that happened thousands of years ago, but that's not unusual for a Dune book. The original Dune is set at least 10,000 years into the future. So really, to my mind, the "new" part of this book only encompasses a few days in the life of God Emperor Leto II, son of Paul Muad'dib, following his ascension to the throne at the end of Children of Dune. You can't really say much more about the plot without spoiling it, because there's so little of it. It is quite weird and philosophical, so if you didn't like "Messiah" or "Children" because of all the musing, you won't like this. Wait what happens: Not much. Leto II has joined his body with sandtrout so he's become a sort of proto-sandworm. This allows him to live forever, be near invulnerable, and to have near perfect prescience... as Larry Niven said, the future can be really boring because people are too safe to create much mortal peril. So the story has to try again and again to invent some tension. If that sounds too weird for you, again, it's okay to stop reading the Dune series. Children of Dune wraps up the life of Paul-Muad'dib. God Emperor was really meant as a bridge to a new series but Herbert died before he could finish the new series, so it's fine if you want to stop at Children, or even back at Dune. The themes: Did you ever read John Locke and Thomas Hobbes in school, particularly Hobbes' Leviathan? I feel like the people who say they love this book didn't take a decent course on Locke and Hobbes before reading this. Leto II has become a very literal embodiment of the Leviathan - even changing his body to look more like the nautical beast of the metaphor. Characters spend page after page circling around this issue over and over. In short - Humanity will destroy itself unless someone can embody such a terrible threat to humankind they they will forever after be united in their hatred of that great evil. That's it. The rest is discussion which you can get from any debate about Leviathan - like who has the right to inflict the violence necessary to taking that leadership role? How can we prevent the Leviathan from becoming a mere despot rather than benevolent leadership? I had that discussion on Hobbes in my Philosophy 101 course, so I don't see anything new here. Should you read God Emperor: If you've never had a decent class on Locke and Hobbes, or the foundations of Western government, perhaps God Emperor is an interesting way to introduce those themes to a new audience. For me though, virtually all of the dialogs which make this book famous are characters being willfully obtuse about concepts that should be incredibly obvious to anyone who's had a good political science course. It's like that scene in Good Will Hunting where the pretentious man is trying to appear intelligent, but Will Hunting reveals the man is just following a series of lectures which are widely known in that field of study and anyone who's completed the course would have the same (trite, obvious) conclusions. The later Dune novels also scrap Leto's whole enterprise - this isn't really a spoiler, but humans will go to war again in the future, so Leto's Golden Path doesn't actually even work in any comprehensive manner. For me, this book is mostly pointless. Should you continue reading past God Emperor: I can't understand how much more than a niche audience would want to read past this in the Dune universe. All the characters you knew and loved are dead, and (if we were to believe Leto's Golden Path) the future of Humanity is secured. What is there to be excited about? As you might expect, Herbert will just resurrect characters from the past (as ghola) and throw new threats at humanity anyway. Following this to its conclusion is also going to mandate reading Herbet's son's attempts to finish his dad's books... and that's a topic for another day. Personally? I say it's fine to stop at Dune. Stop at Children if you want to know more of Muad'dib. Stop at God Emperor if you have any sanity left. If you keep going - abandon hope, ye who enter here.