Dune [Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6]

For the new book project, he was using a Compaq word processor since it was much faster than his customary electric typewriter. Each night he put the new machine away in a sealed “dry room” by the kitchen to prevent it from being damaged so quickly in the caustic, salty air that blew in from the ocean. By the middle of February, he told me he’d been having plot problems with the novel, but he was a little over halfway through the first draft. Only a few days later, he was interrupted by yet another of my mother’s medical emergencies, one that forced them to return to a home they still owned in Port Townsend, Washington. Choosing to stay there instead, a short distance from Seattle, they could more easily obtain the best medical treatment for her. It was the practical thing to do, though they would return to Hawaii later in the year.

By early June, they were still in Port Townsend, and Dad had the first draft completed—around 200,000 words, which would eventually be cut to 165,000. I remember visiting them at their home on the Olympic Peninsula and seeing my mother reading the manuscript. A slender brunette woman, she was seated on a dark yellow recliner in the sitting area adjacent to the kitchen, with manuscript pages spread out on the table beside her. She said the story was great, that she couldn’t put it down. Mom felt that each book in the series was superior to the one before, with plots and characterizations that were even better than Dune.

The strong characterizations of women in the series—and particularly in Heretics and Chapterhouse—appealed greatly to my mother. In fact, Dad based the Lady Jessica on her, creating a memorable literary character who had my mother’s beauty and grace. Remarkably, even though Beverly Herbert passed away years ago, she continues to live through the ages . . . a significant testimonial to the love that Frank Herbert felt for her.

It is interesting to note the progression of women in my father’s Dune novels. Female characters get stronger and stronger as the series develops, and in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, women are running most of the important planets in the Dune universe. By that time, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood is the most important political power, although it is a more austere age, without the grandeur and pomposity of the Imperium back in the days of Shaddam Corrino IV, the Emperor Paul Muad’Dib, or the tyrannical God Emperor, Leto Atreides II. The glories of the desert planet Arrakis are long gone as well, and the sandworm species has been moved off world, where it may not survive.

Thousands of years before the events described in Heretics of Dune, the God Emperor set mankind on his “Golden Path” and scattered civilization across countless star systems, as if sprinkling human seeds in the wind. But now, in Heretics of Dune, evil, supremely powerful women have emerged from the Scattering and threaten the Sisterhood. They call themselves “Honored Matres,” which is ironic because there is nothing honorable about them. Individually and collectively, they can outfight the Sisters, so that the Sisterhood—like the sandworms—seems in danger of being wiped out. The brutal Honored Matres appear to be unstoppable, and there are rumors about their origins. Could they possibly be descended from failed Reverend Mothers, making them the dark side of the Sisterhood? Or could something else be at play, something even more sinister that has been generated in the secret breeding laboratories of the fanatical Tleilaxu?

Heretics of Dune is a remarkable, cerebral excursion through the most fantastic universe in science fiction. In this novel, as in God Emperor of Dune before it and Chapterhouse: Dune afterward, the author explored layers that he originally interwove into the action of the first novel in the series, Dune—layers containing important messages about politics, religion, ecology, and a host of other interesting, timeless subjects. The last three novels he wrote in the series are intellectually stimulating, and sometimes the action almost seems secondary. Huge battles, and even one that is environmentally catastrophic, occur behind the scenes.