Children of Dune

The third of the six Dune novels, serialized in Analog in 1976 and the last Dune book to be serialized before book publication. It follows Paul Atreides’s twin children, Leto II and Ghanima, as the imperial religion built around their father hardens into an institution that has to be either inherited or broken — and as the terraforming of Arrakis starts to destroy the ecology and the culture that made the planet what it was.

Context: the volume where Herbert’s ecological argument turns on itself: the successful engineering project is the loss. That is a useful thing for an infrastructure team to read about a long-horizon system, which is roughly why a16z recommend the sequence rather than the first book alone.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Frank Herbert — the author.
• Dune — volume one.
• Dune Messiah — volume two.
• God Emperor of Dune — volume four, which jumps millennia past this one.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.