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Children of Dune is a science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, third in a series of six novels set in the Dune universe. The novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1977. It was originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1976, and was the last Dune novel to be serialized before book publication. The novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were adapted into a well-received mini-series entitled Frank Herbert's Children of Dune by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003. In 2002, the Science Fiction Book Club also published the two novels in one volume.

At the end of Dune Messiah, Paul Atreides walks into the desert, a blind man, leaving his twin children Leto and Ghanima in the care of the Fremen, while his sister Alia rules the universe as regent. Awoken in the womb by the spice, the children are the heirs to Paul's prescient vision of the fate of the universe, a role that Alia desperately craves. House Corrino schemes to return to the throne, while the Bene Gesserit make common cause with the Tleilaxu and Spacing Guild to gain control of the spice and the children of Paul Atreides.

Context

Dune traces the rise of Paul Muad’Dib, a young nobleman in an interstellar feudal empire who takes control of the single critical resource in the universe — the lifespan-enhancing, consciousness-expanding drug spice melange. As the first book closes, Paul has triumphed. His scheming, evil enemies are dead or overthrown, and he is set to take the reins of power and bring a hard but enlightened peace to the universe.

Herbert chose in the books that followed to undermine Paul’s triumph with a string of failures and philosophical paradoxes; Dune was a heroic melody, and Dune Messiah was its inversion. When the second novel, Dune Messiah, opens, Muad’Dib’s religion has sent his fanatical soldiers on an interstellar religious rampage, leaving billions dead. His vision of peace is being corrupted by dogmatic religious bureaucrats, and his once-noble desert tribes, the Fremen, are fat and wealthy on the spoils of war and the de-desertification of Dune.

Synopsis

Muad’Dib has become an old man damaged by forced overdoses of spice essence and dependent on an assistant; he is rousing the populace against the priestly apparatus and its ruler — his sister Alia, who has since lost the battle with the memory personalities she contains, and is possessed by the persona of her grandfather and Atreides enemy, Baron Harkonnen.

Despite numerous enemies, Muad'Dib's children Leto and Ghanima survive concerted attempts to eliminate them. Leto undertakes a transformation by allowing sandtrout to bond to the surface of his body, making him immensely strong and fast and beginning his transformation into a human-sandworm hybrid. The subsequent deaths of Paul and Alia lead to the virtually immortal Leto grasping control of the Known Universe.

Over and over, Herbert shows how his characters' triumphs contain the seeds of their own destruction, and how their personalities and ideals keep them on the track of destruction, even if prescient vision proves to them how they are doomed. Frank Herbert said later in life that he conceived all three of the first Dune books as a single story from the start, and that he simply produced that one complete tale in three separate volumes.

References

1. Herbert, Frank. Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. 1st SFBC Printing edition (2002), 592 pages. ISBN 0-739-42399-1.
2. "Of course there are other themes and fugal interplays in Dune and throughout the trilogy. Dune Messiah performs a classic inversion of the theme. Children of Dune expands the number of themes interplaying. I refuse, however, to provide further answers to this complex mixture. That fits the pattern of the fugue. You find your own solutions. Don't look to me as your leader." Frank Herbert, "Dune Genesis"

• 1976 novels
• Novels by Frank Herbert
• Dune novels