A book review of #7, Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson From the list at: https://dunenovels.com/chronological-order-of-dune-books/

Characters Main characters There are several main charactersi n this book. The main character is Vorian Attreides, the hero of the Butlerian Jehad, who lead the whole Army of Humanity against the Synchronized Empire of Ominus, the thinking machine. Another main character is Raqella Berto-Aniful, rediscovered granddaughter of Vorian Atreides who was a doctor with Mohandas Suk, the founder of the Suk school of medicine but broke off to stay with the original Sorcersses of Rossak. Then, there is Gilbertus Albans, the adoptive son of Erasmus, the independent, autonomous robot and founder of the Mentat School due to his mental training in computation by his father. Griffin and Valya Harkonnen are the grandchildren of Abulurd Hakonnen who was exiled from the Corrino court for cowardice and are hunting for revenge against Vorian Atreides. Finally, there is Norma Cenva, the first Guild Navigator and first prescient person in the stories. Norma is the grandmother of Adiren Venport the head of VenHold, the leader of the precursor of CHOAM and the Spacing Guild. We follow the story of each of these, divided in the Herbert style, by time for each individual.

Sub characters There are a host of sub characters in this novel, as can only be expected in a Dune saga. The sub characters in this novel are Salvadore Corrino, the Emperor, his brother and advisor Roderick Corrino. Another sub-character is Anna, their sister who was sent to the Sisterhood for further education after being an embarrassment at court to be under Valya’s tutelage. Anari Idaho, a Ginaz swordmaster and Manford Torondo are fundamentalist, destroy all convenient machines, Butlerian fanatics who will stop at nothing to rid the universe of machines made with thinking parts. There are plenty of other sub-characters in the book that appear in their part of the story that are too numerous to mention.

Setting When The setting of the Sisterhood of Dune starts 80 years after the book The Battle of Corrin where the last of the Syncronized Worlds, Corrin, is conquered by the Army of Humanity as the final military battle of the Butlerian Jihad. The plagues are finished, humanity is starting to recover from the war. This story takes place on Rossak for the Sisterhood, Parmeinter for the Suk medical schools, Salusa Secundus for the Emperor, Kepler and Arrakis for Vorian Atreides and Kolhar for the VenHold (precursor of the Spacing Guild). The Spacing Guild has not yet reached the point where they use Heighligners but they are using old warships and rehabilitated Machine warships as merchant vessels. The Empire, at this time, has thousands not millions of worlds at its command. It is a time of unsettled spirits but the founding of the empire and all of the different functional parts of it.

Where The story takes place in several different places (plantets) depending on which character you ar following at that moment. Vorian Atreides’ action takes place on Kepler, Portrin (the slave planet), Salusa Secundus and Arrakis, depending upon which part of his story you are following. The Corrinos’ story line takes place mostly on Sulasa Secundis and, then Rossak while Raqella’s takes place almost completely on Rossak. All this while Torondo and Idaho are traveling around the Empire destroying any hint of machines that make conveniences in life through automation from their homebase on Lampadas. Gilbertus Albans is also homebased at Lampadas where he is taking the backing of Torondo for his school at the price of hosting many of Torando’s fanatics as students. Finally, the “Free men” of Arrakis come into the story and their beginnings are further elucidated for us.

Plot Main Story The main story of the book is about the founding of the Mentat, Sisterhood (Bene Gesserit), Guild Navigator and Suk schools on their various planets. The book is, of course, the first of a trilogy called “The Schools of Dune” so ”Sisterhood” is, again, the founding story of the Bene Gesserit, which at this point remains unmentioned. It goes from the time sister Raqella Berto-Aniful is transformed into a Reverend Mother by being, first sick in the plagues 80 years before and recovering due to the help of a misbegotten offcast. She has since that time been trying to replicate the experience for other sisters with fatal or catastrophic results for any candidate taking poison to duplicate the near-death experience. She has absolutely no success with her experiments, however, another sister, a chemist, compounds a new substance and tries it on herself with success and makes several more Reverend Mothers. Then the fun begins.

The now, Reverend Mother Dorothea is a Butlerian fanatic who has discovered a sisterhood plot to sterilize the Emperor and also, by the way, uses computers, the worst and most deadly sin of the times. It will cause distruction of the computers and death of the users my Torondo and his crazed mob. So, she snitches on Raqella to the Emperor about all the plots and usages. The Emperor decides to destroy the sisterhood after finding the computers, which were well hidden by the sisterhood, so he could not find them. He kills the sisterhood’ group of Mentats and disperses the whole school back to their home planets, taking only the traitorous Dorotea faction with him. Thus Raqella has to found a new home for the Sisterhood, or at least her part of it, and she does on Wallach IX.

Sub plots As is typical in a Dune saga book, there are plenty of sup plots, ”wheels within wheels within wheels” One of them is the hunting of Vorian Atreides by Griffin and Valya Harkonnen and even more deadly by Andros and Hyla the half-machine offspring of Agamemnon, Vorian’s father. They kill Griffin and several “Free men” and Vorian is exiled from Arrakis, cannot go to Salusa Secundus or Kepler, thus, must wander. Another sub-plot is Gilbertus Albans avoiding the discovery of Erasmus’ logic core that he is hiding in the Mentat school by the Torondo fanatics that share the planet with him. He is successful at a great cost to him and his school. A further sub-plot is with Norma Cenva, the first Navigator and how she gets both the Navigator school and VenPort Holdings onto the pathway to becoming the Spacing Guild and CHOAM through direct action at presciently observied times to get the best results. Of course, this being a Herbert novel, there are more sub-sub-plots and lots of other action in the background.

Point of View This is a third person point of view, I think it would be overwhelmingly confusing if the authors tried writing this novel from a first person point of view. Since the whole story is broken up into four or five main stories where the author jumps between the stories based on what is happening at the same time in different places, it can only be done in the third person omniscient point of view. This is also interesting because it gives you an inside view of the mental thought processes of the characters. In some cases, this point of view will give the crazy characters a voice that distills the craziness until it smacks you in the face. Overall, it is the only point of view that can get the novel’s story across adequately.

Theme The whole theme is the conflict between Reason and Faith. Vorian, Raqella, Gilbertus, Rodrick and Norma represent the reasoning side of this conflict while Manford, Anari and Emperor Salvador represent the faith side of the battles. The theme seems to be that reason will finally defeat faith in the battle to determine the fate of humanity and that nobody should ever surrendure to the circumstances they find themselves in without being totally crushed by the opposition. So for reason, if there is a will there is a way and you will win. Faith does not get treated so well by these authors as with Frank Herbert.

My conclusions In light of the whole Dune saga, I thought this was an interesting book. All of the later books of the saga refer back to this time period as in the mists of time where everything is forgotten. History may look as if decisions were made in the haze of a fog, but every decision had some point in particular to solve some particular problem. The decisions did not just pop out of thin air, they had to be prompted by something in particular in a particular person. This book is showing what happened 10,000 years before the circumstances of Dune and who made what decisions for what reason. I enjoyed it.