[Francis Buck]

Well, my hopes for finishing the series by today were, apparently, a bit overly optimistic, due to a sudden deluge of various life responsibilities. I finished Heretics late last night, and I really, really loved it. Perhaps a little a slow to get going (possibly just a side-effect of getting accustomed to all the new characters and the time-jump), but the last quarter or so was phenomenal. Miles Teg is probably in my top three favorite characters from the series now. I was so mad that he died. His crazy "bullet-time" whirlwind of death stuff was fucking badass. I'm also really digging that Idaho now has all of the memories of all the previous gholas. I'd been hoping that might happen since reading God Emperor. It just seems like the obvious progression for the character, so I'm glad my wish came true. I can't wait to start Chapterhouse tonight.

[Wilshire]

Haha yes I loved pretty much everything about Teg

[locke]

Teg is amazing.

[Madness]

Teg taking out the Matre's bank... Awesome.

[Francis Buck]

Finally got around to finishing Chapterhouse last night. Awesome book. But goddamn, that cliffhanger. The last few chapters really did feel like the setup for a big, crazy-ass finale to the series. It's kind of depressing, but at the same time the mystery of it is cool. I read some reviews and brief synopsis of Hunters of Dune, and I really have no urge to read it. Just the synopsis alone makes it sound...not very inspired. Having a bunch of the original characters come back as gholas and stuff, "ultraspice", etc. Just not interested at this point. Maybe someday, but I do feel like I need a break of the series. They weren't what I'd call "easy reads" for me personally. Not hard in the way of like, old literature or whatever, but just kind of exhausting in certain ways. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, because I really, really did. It's probably now among my favorite SFF series ever.

The quality of the writing is, obviously, superb. And it's really incredible how ahead of its time it was in a lot of ways. It was all very unpredictable, and also very realistic feeling. The characters, their motivations, the way things played out, all came across as what would actually happen if this future existed. As of now, if I had to rank my favorite installments in order, it would probably be:

Dune
God-Emperor
Heretics
Chapterhouse
Messiah
Children

Dune and God-Emperor were amazing. GE was slow at points, but I was fascinated by Leto and pretty much every other character. Children of Dune was the only one that I found to be a bit of a chore to get through, though I'm not really sure why. I thought Heretics and Chapterhouse were both a bit slow to get going, but they also had phenomenal endings.

There's almost nothing I genuinely disliked about the series, but if I had to point something out, I guess it would be that the POV transitioning felt a little outdated and clunky at times, though at the same time I feel like it was necessary for this kind of story. I also felt like it would have been cool to hear about some more planets/cultures/factions as the series went on. It felt a little bit like, we always hear about how many civilizations and Great Families there are, and yet even after thousands of years, it mostly still focuses on Arrakis, Tleilax, Ix, and then Chapterhouse. Obviously just a minor nitpick though.

So, I guess now my question is, what the hell do people think was going on with that weird, god-like couple that Duncan was "spying" on? They were like super-advanced Face Dancers, correct? Is that what the Honoured Matres were supposed to be running from? What was the "net" they were talking about?

I'll chime in later about my thoughts on the series as compared to TDCTB.

[Wilshire]

Yeah that epilogue..........................

I think that couple was some kind of advanced face-dancer race. Somehow they control... everything?.... I don't know. At least I got the feeling that they are some super race that has taken over the scattering and have done one of two things. Either they have made it extremely difficult for those from the scattering to "come back" to the home worlds, or everything is so wonderful there that no one wants to come back.

The Honored Matra are some kind of super-geserits and they are fleeing the super-tleilax? Maybe its supposed to be some kind of inversion, where the Bene Geserits have been dominating humanity for forever back in the original worlds, the Tleilax are now in control of those in the scattering?

Not really sure, its been a little while since I've read them and I never really did come up with any definitive conclusion/theory when I had all the memories intact. I think I originally just decided to leave it mostly as an "unsolved mystery" since I knew there would be no true solution. Maybe conclusions are easier now that I forget some stuff

Also, after reading the series it was funny how many references I've seen/heard/read. Same thing happened when I read  Tolkien. Even today after so many years, these "classics" of their genre are still referenced and its fun to be apart of that in-group (though it is a quite a large group).
For example, I was reading some list on the site cracked.com, which is a site mostly comprised of satirical "top 10" lists, and it was "Watch out for rust. Rust is the mind killer. Rust is the little-death that brings total annihilation". I thought it was hysterical.

[Madness]

I heard a rumour not so long ago that God-Emperor is considered as possibly written by a ghostwriter.

Children of Dune was actually one of my favorites, especially due to the conversational conclusion with the Preacher and Leto's fish suit in the beginnings of metamorphosis.

Honoured Matres are a flerwed version of the Bene Gesserit because they choose/are conditioned by fragmented history to privilege certain of aspects of the, in my opinion, more balanced training carried out by the BG. Then, as if without tact, they choose to funnel all of those BG inherited abilities into seducing men with intimacy and women with power (a nice touch in the narrative but a poor choice on the part of the HM).

Allegedly, from the story we know about the Face Dancer HM and that these entities may have explored and utilized the BG skill-set more thoroughly (makes me wonder about the original Scytale). They would also control... the Scattering, really, which Leto/Golden Path intended to never to be possible.

Regardless, as far as I recall (I'll make it to the books about this at some time) in the final series, we'd see the FDHM hunt down the No-Ship with all the collected personages (the net could be the metaphorical hunt for them).

To be fair, has anyone read the Herbert/Anderson attempt at the final book?

[Wilshire]

To be fair, has anyone read the Herbert/Anderson attempt at the final book?

Nope. Though I read all the books straight through too and by the time I finished Chapterhouse I didn't want to ruin the feeling of greatness.

Now a few months later I might be willing to check it out, see if its readable...

Maybe if it's approached as a kind of "fan fiction conclusion" it might not be offensive

[locke]

back when the Frank Herbert computer discs were first discovered, before there was any contract for new books, Brian Herbert, I think, announced their discovery.  He talked about what they found on the discs, some rough work and a complete outline of the final book, iirc.  He mentioned he didn't think it was publishable, but he was considering writing the final book and finally explain that cliffhanger.  However, he did say he wasn't sure they could just publish the final book, based on his reading of the notes, they would have to go back and begin with a book that covered the Butlerian Jihad (which apparently there was a lot of material about it on the discs) to set up the final book.

Then KJA came in and they contracted for all the new books, writing not just a BJ trilogy (no longer a single novel, not for this cash cow!) but a prequel trilogy (milk that cow!) and then a final Duology (why do it in just one book?)  So it was a decade or more after they found the discs that they finally got around to writing the book.

So by that time, the belief goes, they had invested a decade of their own writing creating this elaborate backstory/universe and the final duology seemed to be mostly from "their" material, covering all this crap they created in the EU Dune prequels.

How I interpret things is to just look at the simplest explanation.  The characters at the end of the book have very 'old fashioned', earth normal names, like Daniel.  That makes me think they are machines from an earlier age.  The fact that Brian Herbert said they'd have to write a book about the Butlerian Jihad to explain the final cliffhanger further reinforces the idea that they are machines. 

My guess is they are sentient machines, who fled humanity after losing the Butlerian Jihad, and now, millenia later are returning.  Humanity thought they were destroyed, but they were not.  In order to introduce this new, final piece to the game, Frank Herbert had to generate some backstory he'd always left purposefully gray.  Most of his work fleshed out the events of the BJ before he planned on beginning work in Dune 7.  But he probably never intended writing a prequel novel, that was all just part of his process.  The backstory would have been sufficiently explained in Dune 7. 

Brian and KJA either never understood that, or wanted to cash in for a lot more than a final book.  They also may have thought that Dune fans would never believe the introduction of such a new major faction this late in the game.

[Francis Buck]

That's an interesting possibility. We did start to see more "machine" stuff popping up in the last two books. The one guy who flew Odrade's ship to Junction was a cyborg, which was pretty new to the series. Having machines as the big bad guys at the end would be kinda cool too, and fitting with the tone of the series.

I had no idea that Brian Herbert and the other dude wrote that many Dune books. I thought there was just one about the Butlerian Jihad and then the two sequels.

[locke]

If you take the first three Dune books as an exploration of the organic limits of human potential, and Dune 5, 6 & 7 as an exploration of the technological, with GE as the transition rule, it sort of makes more sense that the machines come in at the end of Dune 7, just as Leto becomes the worm at the end of CoD.

I don't think machines would have been the bad guys in the traditional sense of the word, no more than the worms are 'bad'.  The machines are returning, doesn't mean it's going to be a conflagration.  Leto's golden path could have been about creating a universe where a negotiated peace, or a merger of human and machine, was possible.

[Madness]

I looked up some stuff on Hunters of & Sandworms of, the Dune 7 become duology...

Machines were the big bad, leftover AI from the Butlerian Jihad.

Also, you left out like five books from that winning duo, lockesnow .

[Francis Buck]

Missed this before, but after skimming through the thread again, I think the early ideas posted (I.E. that Kellhus is more like Leto, and Moenghus is Paul), especially the connection between Meppa and Moe, are pretty spot on. I don't have my books at the moment (lent them to a friend), but how do people postulate that Moe survived the Chorae and the apparent salting? Is there some wiggle-room in the text for trickery/misdirection? I can't remember specifically.

On the topic of Kellhus/Leto and Moe/Paul, I do think that you're going to run into problems by trying to perfectly line up the characters from the two series. There's clearly influences from multiple sources, and elements of different characters are mixed up or excised entirely (along with plenty of brand-new stuff added in).

I do wonder if we'll see a parallel between Kellhus going through some type of extreme physical transformation in TUC a la Leto II, and also if there will be a Judas-betrayal of some kind (which I suppose, in a weird way, Sorweel could fit...or maybe even Proyas, in a Nayla-esque turn of events?).

[locke]

There's a lot of wiggle room for moe, but it's simpler to just assume he's gone.

there's the question of whether the Serwe that leaps for Kellhus is Serwe from the Outside or the-thing-called-serwe.  That's a pet theory of mine I haven't really outlined.

Kellhus toppled into something when he cast his spell and rent the inward, after that moment his POV is excised from the narrative, and the next time we see him it's with descriptions akin to the no-god (whirlwind etc). 

Moenghus sought out Cnaiur for his strength before being touched by the chorae

unlike all the other deaths by chorae we've seen, Moe is not inhumed more-or-less instantly, he sticks around.

blackness engulfed Cnaiur at the end. 

Kellhus stumbled on a rock/skull on the way to the final encounter, so he's more fallible than usual.

Moe's three snakes come to him after he's stabbed.

Moenghus has the Skinspies suspended over a pit and has chosen this location, deep underground, next to an even deeper bottomless pit as the ideal location to confront kellhus.  Pits have an inordinate importance in the second trilogy and seem to facilitate movement between the inward and outward.  In the preview chapter of TUC, Shauriatus suspends his circle of amputees over a pit so there is metaphysical importance to them for certain, particularly in regards to survival  (if a pit occluds the sight of gods, perhaps it also occulds the ability of a chorae to assert reality, note that chorae was more or less useless at the GATES of the the Great Medial Screw, at the bottom of a giant pit until Mimara transfigured it.  Perhaps Moenghus has found a loop-hole--literally, a loop and a hole.  It's also worth mentioning that the synthese can find any skin spy, but all their skin spies have disappeared in Kianene, Moe probably figured out that they couldn't be located when suspended over a pit.  Also, Shauriatus has illustrated the ability to self move his soul through a circuit of other bodies, so a soul can be transported from one body to another, at least in the presence of a pit.

[Madness]

It's eerie, isn't it, FB? I definitely think Bakker appropriated some character and plot arcs from the Dune Saga.

My guess would still be Achamian/Duncan, Mimara/Siona, and Proyas/Nayla for the betrayal. Obviously, as Kellhus/Leto planned .

But I definitely also think the Meppa/Moenghus, Esmenet (or Kelmomas?)/Alia, Kellhus/Leto is too interesting to ignore. Cishaurim/Preacher - I think so.

@ lockesnow - interesting read, I'm not sure it was the right thread. I am digging your theory, though, and I also wonder about masking the skin-spies from Aurang's Synthese.