We are informed that the Bene Gesserit ‘speciality’ is “the management of procreation and all of its attendant necessities. And after this experience, I have come to the conclusion that Heretics of Dune can either be a very good book, or a soul-crushingly mediocre one depending on what you read immediately before picking it up.

The idea that sex can be so damn good with these women, that any man that has it is a slave for life made me grimace. Descended from Bene Gesserit who fled Leto II centuries earlier, I still don’t know what their end goal is. For much of this novel, we’re told about vague plans by the Honored Matres, and vague abilities the Duncan Idaho ghola possesses.It's not perfect - there are longueurs, particularly in the first half, and there is occasionally a sense that Herbert is recycling material. The Honored Matres are extremely dangerous and violent, so drunk on power that they are willing to turn entire planets into dust on any provocation.

Próbowałem sobie streścić fabułę w tym wpisie, ale brzmiało to bardziej jak wstęp do filmu dla dorosłych, niż jak epicka historia sci-fi. It's quite obvious things are made up as he goes along, and ideas conflict with earlier ideas in the previous books. In my heart, the series isn't a series at all but a single novel that ended with Paul as emperor and the knowledge of the Jihad to come.

In the previous volume God Emperor of Dune we got a close-up view of the tyranny of the man-worm himself, the god-emperor Leto II (all done for humanity’s own good of course) and also saw his fascination with bringing back his family’s old retainer, the inimitable sword master Duncan Idaho again and again in ghola form over a period of centuries. By crushing the aspirations of humans for over three thousand years, Leto caused the Scattering, an explosion of humanity into the rest of the universe upon his death.