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.
