I Read Books: Chapter House Dune
The Bene Gesserit are under siege from the Honoured Matres, and deeply concerned about the path their leader is taking them down. Meanwhile they have acquired the Bene Tleilax skills to create gholas (clones, but apparently there is a difference) and to awake memories from their past lives, which they are getting on with. Duncan Idaho is inventing new weapons, and also seeing strange visions of an old couple.
This novel gets a bit complicated, spends a great deal of time circling its points, then makes a final dive into strangeness and out the other into a martial arts move that uses the Honoured Matres own strengths against them; a power that won’t surrender doesn’t understand what the Bene Gesserit actually is and why they SPOILERS
This is the last Frank Herbert Dune novel and he takes the opportunity to bring in a couple of new elements, go back and think about some of the stuff from the background and lay in the foundations for a later (last novel) that he never wrote*. In other words it is not an ending in the way that the first four novels in the series all had an ending (Dune and Dune Messiah both fairly clear endings, Children and God-Emperor endings that open up the universe a bit but finish their respective stories.)
Read This: Because if you’ve made your way through all the previous Dune books, Herbert still has one or two things to do that are worthwhile
Don’t Read This: If you think the earlier Dune books were not for you
* His son Brian Herbert with co-writer Kevin J Anderson finally wrote two sequel novels, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, using Frank Herbert’s notes, more than twenty years later that tie all of this up.
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