
The Tleilaxu have altered the ghola to bring its physical reflexes up to modern standards. The Bene Gesserit intends to use a Tleilaxu-provided Duncan Idaho ghola to gain control of this sandrider, and the religious forces of humanity who they know will ultimately worship her.

On Rakis, a girl who can control the giant worms called Sheeana (later revealed to be a descendant of Siona from the previous novel) has been discovered. The most powerful of these forces are the Honored Matres, a violent society of women bred and trained for combat and the sexual control of men. However, people from the Scattering are returning with their own peculiar powers. With Leto's death, the complex economic system built on spice collapsed, resulting in a period of famine followed by trillions of people leaving known space in a great Scattering.Ī new civilization has risen, with three dominant powers: the Ixians, whose no-ships are capable of piloting between the stars and are invisible to outside detection the Bene Tleilax, who have learned to manufacture spice in their axlotl tanks and have created a new breed of Face Dancers and the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order of subtle political manipulators who possess superhuman abilities. Sandworms have reappeared on Arrakis (now called Rakis), each containing a fragment of the God Emperor's consciousness, and have renewed the flow of the all-important spice melange to the galaxy. Much has changed in the millennium and a half since the death of the God Emperor.

Only the Bene Gesserit perceive the Golden Path and are therefore faced with a choice: keep to their traditional role of hidden manipulators who quietly ease tensions and guide human progress while struggling for their own survival, or embrace the Golden Path and push humanity onward into a new future where humans are free from the threat of extinction.

Now, some of those who went out into the universe are coming back, bent on conquest.

By crushing the aspirations of humans for over three thousand years, Leto caused the Scattering, an explosion of humanity into the rest of the universe upon his death. 13 hardcover fiction best seller of 1984 by The New York Times.įifteen hundred years have passed since the 3,500-year reign of the God Emperor Leto II Atreides ended with his assassination humanity is firmly on the Golden Path, Leto's plan to save humanity from destruction. Heretics of Dune is a 1984 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, the fifth in his Dune series of six novels.
