The "End" Of The Dune Saga Still Feels Like A Mess
Chapterhouse: Dune was the last Dune book Frank Herbert ever wrote. It still haunts us to this day.
Imagine there’s no Arrakis. Or, to put more of a fine point on it, imagine a Dune story without the titular planet Dune. Contemporarily, this is what we got in the series Dune: Prophecy, a TV show in which Arrakis only appeared in visions (and at the very end of the Season 1 finale). But Dune creator Frank Herbert invented this trick back in 1985, with the publication of Chapterhouse: Dune, the book that was to be Herbert’s final word on the Dune saga, which left the story beyond the Atreides years somewhat in tatters. Herbert’s first three Dune novels — the original book, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune — were written and published over the course of more than a decade and a half. But the last three books, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune, all came out within a few years, from 1981 to 1985.
No matter what anyone thinks of the sequels after Children of Dune, this very short period for the “second trilogy” is notable for a few reasons. First, save for maybe God Emperor, none of these latter Dune books is ever really spoken about with the same reverence reserved for the first set. Second, Herbert’s themes in the last book, Chapterhouse, are hard to really discern, meaning that if one were to read the original Dune books all the way through for the first time, Chapterhouse would not only seem messy, but also a bit of a bummer.
Frank Herbert at the premiere of the 1984 Dune film, prior to the publication of Chapterhouse: Dune in 1985.
Over four decades after its publication in 1985, Chapterhouse: Dune stands as a strange counterpoint to the overall complexity and brilliance of Dune. Yes, Herbert was ill at the time he was writing this book, and he passed away one year after it was published. But the concepts that this book grappled with are incredible — in all senses of the word. Chapterhouse: Dune is an incredible novel, with big, interesting sci-fi ideas. It’s also a story that feels less than credible, and more like a way for Herbert to keep his saga going, even though he had written himself into a corner.
The 1984 book, Heretics of Dune, ended with a group called the Honored Matres, obliterating the surface of Dune, Arrakis, desert planet, known by that point in time, as “Rakis.” The Honored Matres are in a massive struggle with the Bene Gesserit for domination, but the obvious issue with the end of Heretics is that in destroying Arrakis, the question of how anyone will get the spice is a problem left for Chapterhouse to deal with. Essentially, thanks to Sheeana Brugh — a descendant of Siona Atreides — sandworms can be controlled. Chapterhouse is largely concerned with the relocation of sandworms to the planet Chapterhouse, which is intended to be terraformed into a Dune-like planet, and become a new home for the sandworms.
Herbert’s interest in ecology cuts in several directions throughout the Dune saga, and it would be easy to read Chapterhouse as a parable about extinction and climate change that threatens to wipe out crucial biological life. And yet in Children of Dune, the idea that Arrakis was becoming more hospitable, not less, was a factor in driving the sandworms to extinction. Plus, very few characters in Dune (save for the Fremen, naturally) actually care about the sandworms because the sandworms are beautiful animals; instead, the desire to preserve them is because of the byproduct of the spice, which, of course, helps make space travel possible.
Duncan Idaho returns in Dune: Part Three, an adaptation of Dune Messiah. By the time of Chapterhouse, there have been countless duplicates of Duncan.
So, at its core, like many of the other Dune stories, Chapterhouse is about various people trying to figure out how to control spice and keep the spice flowing. However, Herbert’s solution to all of this is, in the end, to have many of the characters simply run away. Using a No-Ship, Sheeana, the latest ghola (clone) of Duncan Idaho, Scytale, and Miles Teg flee into an alternate dimension, with the goal of — what? Near the end of the book, Duncan says: “We’re in an unidentifiable ship, in an unidentifiable universe...isn’t that what we wanted?”
Herbert foreshadows that some dark secret may be harbored by the enigmatic characters known as Daniel and Marty, but where his story was headed exactly after that point remains a contentious subject among Dune fans. With the 2006 book, Hunters of Dune, Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert, and author Kevin J. Anderson, drew upon various notes to craft a direct sequel to Chapterhouse. TLDR: In that book, the cliffhanger of going to the other universe is undone, and the No-Ship returns to the regular universe to discover that Daniel and Marty are secretly AI robots who were a big deal back when Thinking Machines fought humans in Dune prehistory. While the concept of the Butlerian Jihad comes from Herbert, the fleshed-out nature of the Thinking Machines comes from curious prequel novels from the junior Herbert and Anderson.
In short, the legacy of Chapterhouse today is inexorably linked to the retcons connected to Chapterhouse that were made decades after the fact. And even if we make the very generous assumption that everything in Hunters of Dune, and later, Sandworms of Dune, was totally what Herbert intended, Chapterhouse still feels like a strange flex from the creator of Dune. He wanted to blow up his beloved planet and then try to do something even crazier by sending the characters to a different universe. But today, well after the release of Chapterhouse: Dune, one has to wonder, perhaps the saga would have been better off ending when Heretics ended, and the titular desert planet was no longer a place where sandworms could roam and spice could be had.
