Novel: Children of Dune

Overview
Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune continues the saga on Arrakis after the upheavals of Paul Atreides’ reign. With Paul vanished into the desert and presumed dead, his pre-born twins, Leto II and Ghanima, stand as heirs to an empire adrift. Their aunt Alia rules as regent, her authority propped up by a state religion and the Qizarate priesthood. Beneath the surface, the ecological transformation of Arrakis threatens the sandworms and the spice cycle, while factions circle the imperial throne, each seeking to shape the future in their image.

Premise and Political Currents
Alia, herself pre-born, is slipping into Abomination, increasingly dominated by the ancestral persona of Baron Harkonnen. She manages the empire through fear, ritual, and a network of sycophants, while her consort Duncan Idaho recognizes the moral rot beneath her rule. The Bene Gesserit send Lady Jessica back to Arrakis to test her grandchildren and to judge Alia’s fitness. Stilgar, once the exemplar of Fremen virtue, feels his people’s spirit eroding as water projects, bureaucracy, and comforts replace the old desert rigors. Into this uneasy equilibrium comes “The Preacher,” a blind wanderer many believe to be Paul, denouncing the cult that has grown around Muad’Dib and warning of the spiritual bankruptcy of empire.

Conspiracies and Exile
House Corrino plots from exile on Salusa Secundus. Princess Wensicia grooms her son, Farad’n, to reclaim the throne through assassination and alliance, even unleashing laza tigers trained to kill the twins. The attempt fails to eliminate them, but it drives events into the open. Leto and Ghanima, vastly mature for their age because of ancestral memories, hide their full capacities behind performances of normalcy. Recognizing that Alia’s priests and rival houses will never stop, Leto disappears into the deep desert, allowing enemies to assume his death while he pursues a plan born of prescient insight.

Leto’s Transformation and the Golden Path
Leto seeks the outlaw sietch of Jacurutu and the heart of the desert, making a fateful choice to bond with sandtrout, the larval form of sandworms. The symbiosis encases him in living armor and grants superhuman speed, strength, and endurance, beginning his metamorphosis toward a human-sandworm hybrid. Through this ordeal, Leto embraces the Golden Path, a prescient vision that demands a terrible tyranny to inoculate humanity against stagnation, complacency, and prescient enslavement. He resolves to become a ruler so inescapable that he will ultimately force humanity to scatter beyond any single prophetic net.

Reckonings in Arrakeen
As Alia’s possession worsens, Duncan maneuvers to expose her corruption and protect Jessica. Ghanima secures her own position by playing the political game with startling skill, later binding Farad’n to her through training and marriage agreements that promise stability. The Preacher confronts Alia’s regime in public denunciations, refusing to reclaim a throne or cult, and is slain by agents of the regency after his final challenge. Leto returns openly, demonstrating power that no human can match, and rides the great worms as a living emblem of desert sovereignty. Cornered by the collapse of her support and the exposure of the Baron within, Alia chooses death rather than capture.

Resolution
Leto takes the throne, formalizing a dynastic settlement that weds him ceremonially to Ghanima while she takes Farad’n as consort, uniting Atreides and Corrino lines under Atreides dominance. He halts ecological trends that would exterminate the worms, asserts control over spice, and begins the long tyranny his vision demands. Children of Dune closes with the empire subdued, the desert reclaimed as destiny, and Leto’s terrible purpose set, an empire sacrificed so that humanity may ultimately be free.