“It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?”
Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune is quite an oddity. After three incredible novels, the Dune saga jumps forward more than three thousand years along the Golden Path. Leto, now a metamorphosed human-sandworm hybrid, rules over the galaxy as a prescient tyrant, subjugating once powerful organizations under his vast rule, and forcing a bucolic, crime-free existence on his people. The novel largely consists of lesser characters prompting their god emperor into speech and introspective thought. While it is certainly lacking the typical attributes of the science fiction genre—its content is often chiefly concerned with the longevity of humanity and ideas of sociology—its contemplative subject matter is still propped up by the well developed and compelling universe that served the first three novels so well.
When I had first read the six Dune novels, God Emperor stood out to me because at times I could grasp the ideas beyond the immediate scope of the story—not because such lofty ideas weren’t present in the earlier novels, but because the lack of action in this one forced me to search for something else within its pages. Now upon reading it the second time, I was able to understand more of Leto’s purpose and his sacrifice.
Essentially, the Golden Path is the survival and fecundity of humanity. As the previous empire came to its close, humanity had become stuck in a corrupt and dissolute ruling system, which resulted in stunted culture and large-scale addiction to the spice—the substance that was crucial for many things: religion, prescience, nourishment, technology, and transportation. The sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit saw the potential of human extinction, and that is why they had launched a centuries-long breeding program to create the messianic Kwisatz Haderach. In Dune, Paul Atreides seemed to fulfil the prophecy, but was never under the control of the sisterhood. He launched a jihad to try to save humanity by cleansing it, but even after he ruled the majority of the galaxy, he ultimately could not commit to the sacrifice required of him to save his people, and chose to pass the responsibility onto the shoulders of his children. In Children of Dune, Leto is faced with the same choice as his father, and chooses to sacrifice himself, becoming the half-man, half-worm that has now been ruling the galaxy for over three thousand years, guiding humanity along the Golden Path.
Leto has broken humanity of its spice addiction by wiping out all sandworms and hoarding much of the remaining spice. Upon his death, which he refers to as his “final metamorphosis,” Leto perceives that he will dissipate into myriad new sandworms with his intelligence scattered amongst them, and the resulting worms will have the capability to survive on other planets. In order to ensure that humanity is never again ruled by tyranny, Leto himself becomes the ultimate tyrant. Throughout the millennia of his oppressive rule, Leto has Ixian machines record his thoughts, which he intends to be found long after his death, believing they will reveal his innocence and his love for humanity despite his actions which often seemed to contradict that love when viewed in the short term.
By oppressing the Ixans and Tleilaxu and severely reducing their spice allotments, Leto has forced them to become resourceful and creative. To ensure that another like him—prescient, powerful, and nearly immortal—would never again rule, Leto wrests control of the breeding program from the Bene Gesserit, and uses it to breed a new Atreides—one undetectable by the prescient gaze.
The first of the new Atreides, Siona, is part of a group of rebels who begin the novel by stealing a copy of Leto’s secret journals. Just as he did with her father, Moneo, the prescient Leto allows Siona to rebel in her youth before reining her in for his own purposes. Moneo is Leto’s majordomo, and served the god emperor as chief aide for eighty-nine years. Many of the chapters in God Emperor of Dune consist of Leto and Moneo conversing in the crypt.
“My travels in the ancestral mazes have memorized uncounted places and events which I never desire to see repeated. […] I have seen peoples and planets in such numbers that they lose meaning even in imagination. Ohhh, the landscapes I have passed. The calligraphy of alien roads glimpsed from space and imprinted upon my innermost sight. The eroded sculpture of canyons and cliffs and galaxies has imprinted upon me the certain knowledge that I am a mote.”
The umpteenth Duncan Idaho ghola travels to Arrakis to replace his predecessor as commander of the Fish Speakers, Leto’s all-female army. Once each decade, select Fish Speaker leaders participate in a religious ritual called Siaynoq, which has connotations of the Christian Eucharist, fitting well with plenty of other biblical allusions found throughout, both on a surface reading and allegorically.
Among the many other things that Herbert’s novels do better than most other books in the genre, God Emperor of Dune does not shy away from the implications of its nearly immortal main character. Coupled with his immortality is the same access to his ancestral memory which Paul and the Bene Gesserit experience, but Leto has now has had thousands of years to explore his inner lives. Intricately designed, Leto is unique in fiction. Given his expansive view of the human condition, and the myriad lives which shift his perspective of time, it is understandable why he is unconcerned with any individual, and focused mainly on humanity itself. Almost alien, his words are recorded but take thousands of years to be understood. Similar to The Lord of the Rings, where the hobbits rely on the memories of the immortal elves to tell their epic story, history in the Dune universe can be considered firsthand by its emperor. This view of history is in contrast with typical historical narratives, which are pieced together from sparse manuscripts.
Not even the Bene Gesserit Sisters could take such safaris, striking inward along the axis of memories-back, back to the very limits of cellular awareness, or stopping by a wayside to revel in a sophisticated sensory delight. […] He imagined then describing such a safari to some awestruck visitor, a totally imaginary visitor because none would dare question him about such a holy matter.
“I course backward down the flight of ancestors, hunting along the tributaries, darting into nooks and crannies. You would not recognize many of their names. Who has ever heard of Norma Cenva? I have lived her! […] And I have traversed the far wanderings of the Fremen. Through my father’s line and the others, I have gone right back to the House of Atreus.”
Long ago, Leto had lost the ability to physically love as his body merged with that of the sandworm. He still has use of his arms, and his face appears humanesque, but his legs dangle uselessly and his genitalia have long been absorbed into his worm body. Early in the novel, the Ixians send a new ambassador to Arrakis by the name of Hwi Noree, who has been genetically modified and bred specifically to impact Leto’s emotions. In Moneo’s confrontations with Leto, he is constantly aware of the signs Leto exhibits which indicate he may be losing control and becoming The Worm. Partway through the novel, after Leto has decided that he will wed Hwi, he makes a rash decision in order to protect her. Usually preferring to remain situated on a cart that carries the weight of his enormous body, Leto responds to an attack by unleashing The Worm, heaving his bulk into the fray and crushing his enemies beneath his rolling mass. This clouding of his judgement, and his willingness to sacrifice himself for humanity, leads to his death at the end of the novel.
The plot culminates in the emperor being destroyed by a plot of Siona, who operates outside of his view of prescience. “He created a new kind of mimesis,” she says, “a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures.” As his body splits into countless tiny sandtrout, he is confronted by Duncan and Siona. While his consciousness fades, he speaks to Duncan in a broken conversation “Let them scatter, Duncan. Let them run and hide anywhere they want in any universe they choose. […] I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry. […] You expected a giant and you found a gnome. Now, you’re beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. […] It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That’s the way it always is with humans.”
He passes from life having seen the Golden Path as far as he was able. In the wake of his death, The Scattering will occur as humanity is forced to diversify and evolve. No longer will safety, security, and comfort be their concerns; they will scatter physically, ideologically, and politically. The next book in the series, Heretics of Dune, takes place 1500 years after Leto’s demise, his death having led to the spread of humanity into the unknown universe.
God Emperor of Dune may read as dull to some, and I think that is a fair criticism. Compared to the complex plotlines of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, the book is much more focused on its unique central character and Herbert’s big ideas. Those big ideas might be another cause for critique. While I won’t pretend to completely understand everything that Herbert was going for, his self-styled philosophy can be rather blunt at times in its aversion to organized power, religion, and technology. I think another honest criticism is that although Leto claims he does all of these things for humanity, he is often callous toward or disregarding of individual humans. He solves the problem of their survival almost as an intellectual exercise, remaining indecipherable to his human subjects from their transient vantage like a cosmic entity from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. His origins as a human lead him to set mankind apart as uniquely sacred; he is not indifferent to them like the unintelligible planetary entity in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. Like those characters, Leto is not a true god, and is regarded as one only because he is a life form advanced to a degree that is difficult for a short-lived human to conceive. Leto is written with careful attention, and he is far from being indifferent to humanity; his longevity and prescient capabilities compel him to concern himself with things beyond the comprehension of human beings.
Like George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, Herbert was given a green light to write whatever he wanted to now that the franchise was financially successful. Unlike the director who took ample inspiration from Herbert’s novels, though, the author seemed less concerned with aesthetics, retconning, and superficial mythology, and set about writing a tome that is chiefly preoccupied with conveying his ideas about human society. As such, Herbert achieved one of the most literary science fiction novels ever written. God Emperor of Dune is Herbert at his most measured, thoughtful, and profound. His prose is considered and exquisite, and each page (and each read) gives the reader more to ponder.