Dune: Messiah - Is It Any Good?
Reviewing a book from 1969 in 2025.
Spoilers for Dune: Messiah.
A previous Dunepost can be found here.
Introduction
Dune is one of my favourite books ever, for many reasons. There is just something about Frank Herbert’s gloomy, retrograde vision of the future that really resonates with me. It’s pessimistic, it’s deterministic, there are moments of triumph and heroic accomplishment, but ultimately it’s a tragic story. Dune is about individuals snared by forces beyond their control, struggling to exercise volition in the face of plans within plans. Our heroes (if they are heroes) contend with the forces of history, circumstance, and heredity, which all conspire to deprive them of the free will which is, in the view of Herbert (and the Bene Gesserit), the distinction between human and animal.
Dune is a captivating window into a distant future that is distinctly alien, but at the same time made very believable by the care and attention with which Herbert cultivates his setting and characters. Herbert is in many ways like a little boy who loves lasers, machinery, and above all sword fights, but he’s also a very thoughtful and well-read scholar, whose detailed approach to the intricacies of war, politics, commerce and religion often makes Dune feel more like a history than a work of fiction.
So, having loved Dune so much, it was only natural for me to have high hopes for its sequel, Dune: Messiah, which I have now read twice, once long ago, and again this winter. The book is still well-liked among Dune readers, and very understandably - there are certainly good bits in it, and it bears all the characteristic features of Dune1, yet for me Messiah always left something to be desired. It is much shorter than Dune, making it more focused but also much narrower in scope, and the greater focus does not necessarily result in a tidier narrative.
To give a brief outline of the premise, Messiah takes place twelve years after the end of Dune, at which point Paul takes the Imperial throne and unleashes his Fremen legions across the galaxy in a war of religious conquest. Paul is now thoroughly sick and tired of war, feels the weight of countless deaths on his conscience, and sees his empire rapidly becoming a nightmare of mindless bureaucracy and blind faith, a process that he feels powerless to stop. He and his sister Alia are both seen as living gods, and feel trapped by this status, unable to live their own lives. Meanwhile, a group of conspirators from various factions2 have got together to depose Paul.
This all sounds very sexy and cool, and often it is. However, there are a number of issues throughout Dune: Messiah, which can make the reading a little strange, particularly for those who were looking for the same intricacy and attention to detail that Dune spoiled us with.
Here, I aim to take a balanced approach, not wishing to give the inaccurate impression that I hate this book, though I am still looking at it from a critical point of view. To that end, I will be noting some of the things that I do love in Messiah at the bottom of this post.
Issue 1: Duncan Idaho
Dune: Messiah introduced the concept of the ghola, a dead person who is reborn from the ‘axolotl tanks’ that the Bene Tleilax (or Tleilaxu3) have on their homeworld. This concept, while initially intriguing, would be misused in future Dune books4, which notoriously brought back every dead character imaginable, many of them more than once.
Messiah does this with Duncan Idaho, Paul’s (outrageously named) mentor and friend who died defending him in the first book. Duncan is resurrected as a ghola called Hayt, with mechanical eyes and no memories of his former life, who is gifted to Paul by the Tleilaxu, who of course have ulterior motives.
The Tleilaxu plan is to use Hayt/Idaho to distract Paul with painful thoughts of the old days, and they also hope that he will unlock the secret to restoring a ghola’s original memories. The ghola has been conditioned to assassinate Paul when the word is given, but the Tleilaxu hope is that instead of doing this, the ghola will experience an emotional crisis that will trigger the return of his memories. So, basically, the whole point of the Idaho ghola, around which his role in the story revolves, is his history and emotional connection with Paul, and as such Hayt/Idaho shines most as a character in his scenes with Paul.
Unfortunately, Herbert gets a bit carried away with how incredibly cool and sexy Idaho is as an independent being, being reputedly the greatest swordsman ever, a ‘lover of many women,’ and also a mentat now5. The thing is, none of these qualities that allegedly make Idaho so interesting are particularly relevant or impressive in the context of his role in the story.
Take his swordsmanship, for example. After a certain point, basically everyone in Dune is introduced as an elite swordsman, so Idaho is the best sword fighter in the universe, except Paul, and perhaps Alia, and maybe Lady Jessica, and allegedly Count Fenring, and maybe Stilgar, and probably Gurney Halleck. I am very much reminded of the gaming term ‘power creep’. If everyone’s a great fighter, Idaho’s credentials come into question, especially since we never see him fight in Messiah.
The ‘lover of many women’ bit, meanwhile, leads to Hayt/Idaho’s affair with Alia, which would be less weird if she wasn’t fifteen. Herbert is kind of a proto-George R.R. Martin, in this and other respects (and by other respects, I mean incest; we’ll get to that). Alia has always had access to the memories of her ancestors, so was never really a normal child, but in Messiah it’s made pretty clear that she is still emotionally and intellectually immature. The fact that Idaho’s courtship of Alia involves proving his intellectual superiority in debate, and even calling her ‘child’, makes the age gap pretty integral to their dynamic and impossible to gloss over. Also, none of this has any relevance to Idaho’s connection with Paul, which is kind of his purpose in this book, so I think it’s fair to say it could all have been omitted.
As for Idaho being a mentat, well, they don’t make mentats like they used to. Dune featured two very memorable mentats, who were important to the narrative and contrasted with each other in every way: Thufir Hawat, the Atreides mentat, and Piter de Vries, his Harkonnen counterpart.
Thufir is a severe and conscientious man, steeped in the Atreides code of honour and fealty, and he is used very effectively to illustrate the limits of mentats’ deductive abilities: he is extremely self-critical, wanting to resign in shame after a single failure, and later falls for a Harkonnen ruse and becomes wrongly fixated on the idea that Lady Jessica is a traitor, to the exclusion of all other possibilities. For all his intellectual brilliance, his emotional human nature and tendency to tunnel-vision are his undoing6.
Piter, meanwhile, is a ‘twisted mentat’ created by the Tleilaxu, who is basically evil and sadistic by nature. It’s implied that his twistedness is the source of his genius as a strategist, as he is able to think the unthinkable, and therefore to come up with unpredictable plans. Whereas Thufir is selfless, and concerned only with the greater good of House Atreides, Piter is entirely driven by selfish, animalistic motives, which feeds into the deeper conflict between Atreides and Harkonnen. Thufir is the superego, Piter is the id.
In short, Dune’s mentats were shown to be cognitively different not just by their abilities, but also by their extreme personalities, in a way that distinguished them from others, and their mentat-status was essential to their role in the story and the fictional society they inhabit.
In Dune: Messiah, on the other hand, Hayt/Idaho’s mentat powers are mostly redundant in terms of the plot and his actual role at court7, although his mentat-status comes up constantly: the word ‘mentat’ appears fifty-seven times in the book, mostly in scenes where Hayt/Idaho verbally spars with Paul and Alia, and Idaho’s mentat identity seems to be more a method for the author to validate the character’s anti-government views (which chime with Herbert’s own) as mathematically correct. It would almost have been more interesting if he wasn’t a mentat, but only pretending to be, as many of his criticisms addressed to the Atreides siblings are presented as ‘mentat reasoning,’ but could be said by any opinionated person hiding behind jester’s privilege8.
Unfortunately, between Idaho’s politics and his cool and sexy guy status, he seems to be an author mouthpiece and idealised alter-ego, a kind of futuristic James Bond. This gets him a bad reputation in later books, in which Idaho not only continues to overstay his welcome with too many additional ghola resurrections, but also voices the author’s homophobic sentiments, the nature and extent of which are too well-documented to be worth going into here.
Issue 2: The timeline
The timeline of Dune: Messiah is problematic in that much more time seems to have passed outside the Atreides household than within it.
We see this in the ages of characters, which are not always what they should be. Several of Paul’s Fedaykin bodyguards from the first book re-appear, except they are now without exception withered old men with cataracts, liver-spots, and grown-up children. Just over a decade ago, these were the best hand-to-hand fighters in the universe, strong men in their physical prime, and now they are all at death’s door.
What happened?!
Paul also recognises the wife of Otheym (one of said bodyguards), who is likewise now much older:
So, Paul remembers Dhuri ‘as a child’, between twelve and sixteen years ago (the first book takes place over four years), but she is now almost an old lady.
We could read the Fremen bodyguards as being prematurely aged by their hardships during the Jihad, as many are described as having scars and debilitating injuries to go along with their disillusionment9, but it doesn’t seem like Dhuri has ever left Arrakis, so that can’t apply to her. Also, spice famously extends human life10, and the Fremen have the most spice-heavy diet in the universe; the Fedaykin veterans are also very rich in water, the most valuable currency on Arrakis, which should also have implications for health and longevity. Their haggardness does serve a dramatic purpose, as Paul is shocked to see how much his followers have deteriorated while fighting in his name, and as such their nostalgic yearning for the old days, before Paul’s arrival on Arrakis, carries a certain weight.
However, the possibly-dramatically-justified (if not literally justified) agedness of the Fremen isn’t the only area where Messiah’s timeline is sketchy. In only twelve years, Paul has built a palace that is the biggest man-made structure ever, which is said to be bigger than a dozen cities, in spite of thousands of years of space travel and space imperialism. Given the technophobic nature of Dune’s society11, most of this would have to have been built by hand. Again, there is a narrative point to this, as it illustrates the extent to which Paul has been deified by his followers, shows how far the Fremen have strayed from their nomadic roots, and gives the reader a sense of the unimaginable scale and resources of Paul’s empire (which we never see, because the story is confined to Arrakis). So, it’s also in the possibly-justified category, and may not merit nitpicking on its own, but it’s part of a pattern.
The third and most glaring timeline issue, which confirms the pattern, is Chani’s pregnancy, the entirety of which takes place during Messiah, which appears to happen over a few weeks or months at most. This is supposed to be an unnaturally accelerated pregnancy, as it’s explained that she has to consume more and more spice to support it. This is very much not how spice works, and seems to be an unheard of anomaly in-universe12.
I can’t help but think of Padme in Revenge of the Sith, who tells Anakin that she is pregnant at the start of the film, and is ready to give birth to twins a few days later. At least Herbert has an in-universe explanation, unlike Lucas, but the in-universe explanation does kind of read as if he’s making it up as he goes along, which is technically how you write a novel, but it should never seem like you’re doing that, nor did it ever seem that way in Dune, which had a very sensible timeline with reasonable time skips in which military campaigns, pregnancies, and training montages could comfortably take place.
(I have to say, I have no idea what Villeneuve’s planning to do about all this; not only does movie Chani need to speedrun pregnancy, but she also needs to somehow reconcile with Paul, having broken up with him at the end of Dune: Part Two in a pretty final and definitive way.)
Issue 3: Change vs stagnation, and closing the open ending
One of the most compelling things about Dune is the ambiguous nature of the novel’s ending: just as Paul is prescient, and can see many different possibilities for the future, so too can the reader see the potential for both good and evil futures in Paul’s victory over the Emperor and the Bene Gesserit.
This is done in a very clever way, as throughout the book Paul is haunted by forebodings of the dark future that his victory will almost certainly bring about. Yet at the same time, it is very clear both to Paul himself and to Leto before him that the Imperium was corrupt, unjust and stagnant, and that upheaval was needed to renew and revitalise humanity, and could not be avoided.
(This is a probably a good point to plug my previous Dune post, one of the first articles I shared here, which looks at Leto in detail, and dissects his dissatisfaction with Imperial society and his hopes for Paul’s future.)
As such, it’s very hard for the reader not to share in the triumphant enthusiasm of the Fremen at the Emperor’s defeat - it is the victory of a maligned rebel over the devious regime that schemed against him, and of the subjugated Fremen over those who tried to exterminate them. The fact that we share in the Fremen’s hero-worship of Paul at the end of Dune does help to convey Herbert’s message (‘beware of charismatic leaders’), because having shared in the Fremen’s exultation we also feel complicit in the bloodshed that results.
Still, the overwhelmingly negative picture that Messiah paints of Paul’s new regime seems to undermine key aspects of Dune, specifically its critical picture of the stagnant feudal Imperium, and of the scheming Bene Gesserit, for whom all change was bad, because any social upset jeopardised their breeding program and their control over the noble houses. In this context, Paul’s rise to power can be seen as a kind of revolution, and potentially a force for good, overturning the corrupt old order of things and making way for something new.
Messiah firmly rejects this potential, puts Paul in the wrong, and places the burden of guilt on his shoulders, though he was himself a victim of the violence and injustice of the old regime, as were his Fremen supporters, and circumstances left him with very little choice but to seize power.
Of course, there is a lesson here, that remains as relevant as ever - revolutions tend to replace one form of tyranny with another, and yesterday’s victims are often tomorrow’s oppressors. Messiah is also a firm rejection of the eugenics-like ideology that gave rise to the Kwisatz Haderach - for all Paul’s special abilities, he is ultimately a fallible human being, and far from the ideal ruler he was supposed to be.
But if stagnation is bad, and change is also bad, then where does that leave us? There’s always a danger of a cautionary tale being read as centrist apologia for the status quo, which we do see a lot of in popular fantasy media. Messiah doesn’t quite fall into that category, being more a work of pessimism than centrism, but there are commonalities.
Issue 4: Paul/Alia
The Bene Gesserit are really desperate to get Paul to have sex with either Irulan or his own teenage sister, per their increasingly convoluted breeding program. Paul refuses, because he’s a) faithful to Chani and b) not insane. Irulan’s main objection to the Paul/Alia scheme is that she won’t get to sleep with Paul herself, which must be one of science fiction’s wildest takes13.
There is precedent here, as the Bene Gesserit’s practice of arranging incestuous pairings is mentioned very early in Dune, and is one of the key things about their religion that repulses Paul. So, his continued resistance and rejection of the Bene Gesserit’s methods and goals is one way in which Paul continues to be a heroic and sympathetic figure, for all his failings as a ruler.
However, Herbert seems a bit too into the possibility of incest, in the way that George R.R. Martin is a bit too into what he writes about - you can usually tell when an author has thought about something too much, and that’s very much the impression one gets from certain scenes with Alia. Herbert would revisit this theme with Paul and Chani’s children in the next book, who also discuss the merits of incest.
Personally, I could have lived without it, or rather I think it could have been handled more tastefully.
Closing thoughts
To end on something positive, as I do feel that Messiah is still worth the reader’s time, I will note here a few things that I liked in Dune: Messiah:
The Bene Tleilax are a delightfully nasty new addition to the universe, being an insular, morally repugnant, high-tech race of mutants, who clearly don’t respect any of the mainstream culture’s technological taboos, but get away with it because they’re so useful14. They are not subject to too much exposition here, so remain mysterious and intriguing.
Their shapeshifting face-dancer assassins are also a great new addition, being as devious as their masters, yet also following a code, according to which they have to allow their victims some means of escape.
The conspiracy to transplant sandworms to other planets and thereby break the Fremen’s spice monopoly is a good concept, and adds to the sense of a living, changing universe, where nothing is set in stone and the existing geopolitical conditions are subject to change.
The mechanical eyes offered by the Tleilaxu, and the Fremen’s superstitious (but possibly justified) rejection of them.
The stone burner, an illegal radiation weapon that destroys the eyes of anyone nearby when it activates. This weapon is part of one of the book’s most compelling and memorable sequences.
Paul being able to ‘see’ even after the loss of his eyesight, because he is living through events he has already foreseen in perfect detail, and therefore so long as he can ‘see’ he is trapped on a certain path and can’t deviate.
The Fremen cultural phobia of being implanted with distrans devices, as ‘a man’s voice should be his own to command.’
The scathing critique of bureaucratic government.
In short, there is still a lot to enjoy in Dune: Messiah, being full of interesting inventions, court intrigue, and believable imaginary cultures and scenarios, as is characteristic of the series. However, the sequel is not as tidy as its predecessor, and definitively changes the way we read the first book, ruling out possible interpretations of Dune’s ambiguous ending.
I give Messiah three guild heighliners out of five.
(political intrigue, social commentary, verbal and literal sparring…)
The Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Bene Tleilax.
They are horrible little bio-engineers from the planet Tleilax. I quite like them, they’re one of the cooler additions in Messiah.
Especially those by Brian Herbert.
Mentats being humans with computer-like powers of deduction, who they decided to start training after AI got a bit too out of hand.
(Can you tell that he’s my favourite Dune character?)
He has one important mentat revelation, very late in the book.
I am very aware of the irony of talking about opinionated jesters hiding behind claims of objectivity on Ashlander Analysis.
There is probably a Vietnam connection, as the book was published in 1969.
By ‘years to decades’, according to Messiah - years hardly seem worth the trouble! I think that Herbert quite regularly forgot that spice prolongs life, as very few characters are mentioned to have more than typical lifespans. In the whole of Dune, the only long-lived characters seem to be the Emperor himself (who looks about 30 years younger than he is), and the Yuehs (who are in their 100s, but Wellington looks like a middle-aged man with black hair).
Artificial intelligence is strictly prohibited, and only very crude robots exist, so labour is laborious.
The result is two incredibly spice-charged babies who are cognisant from birth and can perform insane feats of telepathy (as Leto, the boy, does at the end, allowing his blind father to ‘see’ through his eyes).
It’s also 100% why they picked Florence Pugh to play Irulan, bringing her femcel credentials from Midsommar.
They’re a bit like the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Good review. I appreciate your pointing out the illogical timelines. Technically Hayt and the awakened Duncan Idaho are separate characters and it's unfair to lump them together, but I thought Duncan in Children of Dune made more sense. I had the opposite opinion of the stone burner, which seemed like an obvious plot contrivance; a nuclear weapon that's not a real nuclear weapon, and that somehow destroys eyeballs but leaves the rest of the body just fine. The real problem with the book, IMHO, is the mix of bleak tone and slow pace. I've never heard anyone say they skimmed it or read it in a few evenings ;-)
Back in my day, being a Mentat meant something. But in Paul Atreides's Empire, everyone's becoming a Mentat just to work at Starbucks.