sity of writing. A student of psychology, he understood the subconscious, and liked to say that Dune could be read on any of several layers that were nested beneath the adventure story of a messiah on a desert planet. Ecology is the most obvious layer, but alongside that are politics, religion, philosophy, history, human evolution, and even poetry. Dune is a marvelous tapestry of words, sounds, and images. Sometimes he wrote passages in poetry first, which he expanded and converted to prose, forming sentences that included elements of the original poems.

Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again. A neat trick, and he pulled it off perfectly.

As his eldest son, I see familial influences in the story. Earlier, I noted that my mother is memorialized in Dune and so is Dad. He must have been thinking of himself when he wrote that Duke Leto's "qualities as a father have long been overlooked." The words have deep significance to me, because at the time he and I were not getting along well at all. I was going through a rebellious teenage phase, reacting to the uncompromising manner in which he ruled the household.

At the beginning of Dune, Paul Atreides is fifteen years old, around the same age I was at the time the book was first serialized in Analog. I do not see myself much in the characterization of Paul, but I do see Dad in Paul's father, the noble Duke Leto Atreides. In one passage, Frank Herbert wrote: "Yet many facts open the way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he held for his son…" Late in his life, Dad responded to interview questions about my own writing career by saying, "The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak tree." He often complimented me to others, more than he did to me directly. To most of his friends he seemed like an extrovert, but in family matters he was often quite the opposite, preferring to retire to his study. Frequently, his strongest emotions went on the page, so I often feel him speaking to me as I read his stories.

Once, I asked my father if he thought his magnum opus would endure. He said modestly that he didn't know and that the only valid literary critic was time. Dune was first published in 1965, and Frank Herbert would be pleased to know that interest in his fantastic novel, and the series it spawned, has never waned. An entire new generation of readers is picking up Dune and enjoying it, just as their parents did before them.

Like our own universe, the universe of Dune continues to expand. Frank Herbert wrote six novels in the series, and I have written a number of others in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson, including the dramatic final chapter in the Dune series. Frank Herbert was working on that project when he died in 1986, and it would have been the third book in a trilogy that he began with Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune. In those novels he set up a great mystery, and now, decades after his death, the solution is the most closely guarded secret in science fiction.

By the time we complete those stories, there will be a wealth of Dune novels, along with the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch and two television miniseries-"Frank Herbert's Dune" and "Frank Herbert's Children of Dune"-both produced by Richard Rubinstein. We envision other projects in the future, but all of them must measure up to the lofty standard that my father established with his own novels. When all of the good stories have been told, the series will end. But that will not really be a conclusion, because we can always go back to Dune itself and read it again and again.

Brian Herbert

Seattle, Washington





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Published by Berkley

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 1969 by Herbert Properties LLC

"Introduction" by Brian Herbert copyright © 2008 by DreamStar, Inc.

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

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A shorter version of this book appeared in Galaxy magazine for July–September 1969. Copyright © 1969 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

Ebook ISBN: 9781101157879

Berkley edition / September 1975

Ace mass-market edition / June 1987

Ace hardcover edition / February 2008

Ace premium edition / June 2019

Cover design and illustration by Jim Tierney

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.



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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by Brian Herbert

Excerpts from the Death Cell Interview with Bronso of Ix

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Epilogue





INTRODUCTION

BY BRIAN HERBERT

Dune Messiah is the most misunderstood of Frank Herbert's novels. The reasons for this are as fascinating and complex as the renowned author himself.

Just before this first sequel to Dune was published in 1969, it ran in installments in the science fiction magazine Galaxy. The serialized "Dune Messiah" was named "disappointment of the year" by the satirical magazine National Lampoon. The story had earlier been rejected by Analog editor John W. Campbell, who, like the Lampooners, loved the majestic, heroic aspects of Dune and hated the antithetical elements of the sequel. His readers wanted stories about heroes accomplishing great feats, he said, not stories of protagonists with "clay feet."

The detractors did not understand that Dune Messiah was a bridging work, connecting Dune with an as-yet-uncompleted third book in the trilogy. To get there, the second novel in the series flipped over the carefully crafted hero myth of Paul Muad'Dib and revealed the dark side of the messiah phenomenon that had appeared to be so glorious in Dune. Many readers didn't want that dose of reality; they couldn't stand the demotion of their beloved, charismatic champion, especially after the author had already killed off two of their favorite characters in Dune, the loyal Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho* and the idealistic planetologist Liet-Kynes.

But they overlooked important clues that Frank Herbert had left along the way. In Dune, when Liet-Kynes lay dying in the desert, he remembered these words of his father, Pardot, spoken years before and relegated to the back reaches of memory: "No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero." Near the end of the novel, in a foreshadowing epigraph, Princess Irulan described the victorious Muad'Dib in multifaceted and sometimes conflicting terms as "warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man." And in an appendix to Dune, Frank Herbert wrote that the desert planet "was afflicted by a Hero."

These sprinklings in Dune were markers pointing in the direction Frank Herbert had in mind, transforming a utopian civilization into a violent dystopia. In fact, the original working title for the second book in the series was Fool Saint, which he would change two more times before settling on Dune Messiah. But in the published novel, he wrote, concerning Muad'Dib:

He is the fool saint,

The golden stranger living forever

On the edge of reason.

Let your guard fall and he is there!



The author felt that heroic leaders often made mistakes . . . mistakes that were amplified by the number of followers who were held in thrall by charisma. As a political speechwriter in the 1950s, Dad had worked in Washington, D.C., and had seen the megalomania of leadership and the pitfalls of following magnetic, charming politicians. Planting yet another interesting seed in Dune, he wrote, "It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness." This was an important reference to Greek hubris. Very few readers realized that the story of Paul Atreides was not only a Greek tragedy on an individual and familial scale. There was yet another layer, even larger, in which Frank Herbert was warning that entire societies could be led to ruination by heroes. In Dune and Dune Messiah, he was cautioning against pride and overconfidence, that form of narcissism described in Greek tragedies that invariably led to the great fall.

Among the dangerous leaders of human history, my father sometimes mentioned General George S. Patton because of his charismatic qualities-but more often his example was President John F. Kennedy. Around Kennedy, a myth of kingship had formed, and of Camelot. The handsome young president's followers did not question him and would have gone virtually anywhere he led them. This danger seems obvious to us now in the cases of such men as Adolf Hitler, whose powerful magnetism led his nation into ruination. It is less obvious, however, with men who are not deranged or evil in and of themselves-such as Kennedy, or the fictional Paul Muad'Dib, whose danger lay in the religious myth structure around him and what people did in his name.

Among my father's most important messages were that governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions. Years after the publication of Dune, Richard M. Nixon provided ample proof. Dad said that Nixon did the American people an immense favor in his attempt to cover up the Watergate misdeeds. By amplified example, albeit unwittingly, the thirty-seventh president of the United States taught people to question their leaders. In interviews and impassioned speeches on university campuses all across the country, Frank Herbert warned young people not to trust government, telling them that the American founding fathers had understood this and had attempted to establish safeguards in the Constitution.

In the transition from Dune to Dune Messiah, Dad accomplished something of a sleight of hand. In the sequel, while emphasizing the actions of the heroic Paul Muad'Dib, as he had done in Dune, the author was also orchestrating monumental background changes and dangers involving the machinations of the people surrounding that leader. Several people would vie for position to become closest to Paul; in the process they would secure for themselves as much power as possible, and some would misuse it, with dire consequences.

After the Dune series became wildly popular, many fans began to consider Frank Herbert in a light that he had not sought and which he did not appreciate. In one description of him, he was referred to as "a guru of science fiction." Others depicted him in heroic terms. To c