3 Stars

The Book – God Emperor of Dune

For a book with such a great title, I sure am less than whelmed. I’m certain Leto Atreides II, God Emperor of the known universe, would chide me for my inability to fully understand the truths that he pontificates on… so just call me “stoo-pit.” That’s what most of this book is: Leto pontificating and berating people for being too stupid to understand his prescient brilliance.

This is a book I can’t possibly review properly. I’ll need to re-read it once or twice more to really get it. Too bad the SciFi/SyFy channel didn’t produce one of their wonderfully cheesy and camp-tactic miniseries for this book, as they did for “Dune” and “Children of Dune.” Alas, we’ll never get to see what their vision of a cheaply-made CGI giant worm/demi-god who speaks English with a heavy, non-specific European accent would have looked like.

What I Learned From God Emperor of Dune

1) An all-female army is superior to an all-male army because there’s no infighting or hierarchal structure among women (My childhood as the oldest of five kids—four of us female—attests otherwise; I recall a lot of hair-pulling and scratching during my early years. But the God-Emperor sayeth, so it must be.)

2) It’s easy for a beautiful, female human being to fall in love with a neutered giant human/worm hybrid who’s, quite frankly, a bit of an asshole, so long as you were bio-engineered just for that purpose.

3) A woman can come to orgasm by watching a virile male climb up and down a mountain using nothing but his bare hands.

4) To prevent evil despotism that crushes human vivacity and freedom from ruling for millennia, one must become an evil despot who crushes human vivacity and freedom, and rules for millennia.