I Read Books: Children of Dune
At the end of Dune Messiah, Paul walked into the desert [SPOILERS] blind to die. Now his sister Alia is regent for his son Leto and his daughter Ghanima. All three of them were brought to consciousness in the womb, and are haunted by ancestral memories.
Abomination is the word used when someone is possessed by an ancestor (or their memory) and all three are under suspicion. Slightly less esoteric plots are also in play; there are plots to place Farad’n, grandson of the previous emperor on the throne (of which he is only partially aware), there is a blind preacher come out the desert, proclaiming the religion that has grown up around Paul is corrupt, and Jessica, Paul’s mother, returns to Dune to find out what’s up with her daughter, her grandkids and the empire.
Dune Messiah unsatisfyingly tackled the theme of prescience, Paul’s ability to see the future, its limitations and dangers. This book is more interested in the ancestral memories and their dangers. Herbert engages with the idea of being host to a horde of ancestors in a way that clarifies the situation (and occasionally terrifies – after all many of their ancestors were villains).
Towards the end Leto is forced into taking spice essence and unveiling his powers, seeing the Golden Path of the future, the one in which humanity survives, and takes the choice that Paul could not – did not.
More successful than Dune Messiah*, it also expands on the body control powers given by Bene Gesserit training, and the sandworm biology, and [SPOILERS] links between the two. And when I say more successful I mean as a book, though as it was the first SF novel to be a hardback bestseller in the US, I guess that was pretty successful too.
Read This: For a novel that picks up some of the ideas of Dune and runs with them
Don’t Read This: If a slow start full of plotting and people worrying about being driven mad because they are haunted by their ancestors will put you off
* Less so than Dune, but that is the nature of the Dune sequels. None of them are as good as Dune.
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