Dune Messiah

Dune Messiah was serialised in Galaxy magazine in 1969 and published by Putnam the same year, as the second of six novels in Frank Herbert's Dune sequence. It is a short book compared with the one that precedes it, and its reputation has moved a long way since publication: readers who expected a second adventure story were disappointed, and the novel is now usually described as the argument that the first book's triumph required. Herbert wrote it partly in response to readers who treated Paul Atreides as a hero.

The novel takes place entirely inside the machinery of empire. Paul's visions show him the cost of every decision available to him, and the book is about a ruler who has already won and is now trying to reduce the damage. The conspirators include the Bene Gesserit, who want their breeding programme back; the Spacing Guild, which wants the spice supply secured; and a ghola, a body grown from a dead man's cells and trained to be the weapon that kills Paul. The desert, the Fremen and the worms that make the spice are all still there, but the story's centre is a city and a court.

A third novel, Children of Dune, followed in 1976, and Herbert added further volumes until his death in 1986. Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were adapted together as a television miniseries in 2003, and Denis Villeneuve's films made from the first novel have extended the series' audience. The second book is short, bleak and necessary, and it is not a good place to start.

It is the shortest novel in the sequence and the one that changes what the rest of it means, which is why the later books assume the reader has come through it.