I finished ‘God Emperor of Dune’ over the weekend and I’ve taken the last few days to process it. Overall I liked it, didn’t remember a lot about the book from my first read but that’s probably because … not a whole lot really happens. The book mainly focuses itself around Leto II who himself doesn’t do too much. He ruminates a lot and talks a fair bit about his plans but it’s a fairly low action story, even compared with its predecessors.
And the problem I had with the previous book, that it’s very difficult to relate to the characters, is amplified here. Leto is even less human in this book, naturally enough, having lived over 3,000 years as a kind of human/worm hybrid. But his thinking is at least as alien as his physiology, and following him as a protagonist is kind of difficult. My main takeaway is that living that long and having unsurpassed powers of prescience makes you really annoying. He’s constantly needling those who follow him, asking them questions that they can’t answer and telling them they knew the answer all along if they’d just allow themselves to know. But you’ve got to kowtow to the worm, since he’s accepted by all as essentially a deity, plus he’ll steamroll you with his massive worm body if you piss him off.
Even Idaho is hard to relate to this time. I can understand his feeling of displacement, being a man out of time, but he seems to mope around and occasionally explode at the other characters. And he seems oddly pissed off by the female Fish Speakers expressing any kind of sexual interest in him or each other. But, as is pointed out by another character, he is an “older model.”
There are funny points - Leto muses on the fact that whenever he expresses interest in taking a wife, the listener’s eyes always wander down his body in search of genitalia that no longer exists. He considers having a massive prosthetic made, just to shock people.
Anyway, I liked it well enough I suppose - felt like an interlude, albeit a 600 page interlude. But it did further flesh out the world and universe of Dune. On to ‘Heretics of Dune’!