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Frank Herbert, eh? Maverick author, apparently a terrible dad, political oddball, and simultaneously the genius creator of the Dune series and the franchise’s own worst enemy. If you want to moved beyond the various movie or television adaptations of Dune (David Lynch’s version having been previously covered here) and delve into the books themselves, you need to accept that sooner or later, a decision Frank Herbert made will ruin the series for you. It might come early, it might come late, it might even not really take effect until his death, but it will happen.

Dune as a series of novels has one jumping-on point and a plethora of jumping-off points. Although masses and masses of prequels have been published by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson after Frank Herbert’s death, I don’t think anyone seriously expects you to tackle them unless and until you’ve read the first book. And assessing the first book becomes even easier when you realise it was originally published as two distinct serials – meaning that there’s even a jumping-off point partway through the first novel. Although I’m working off the book version here, I’m going to review the original Dune by looking at its constituent serials as two distinct episodes, because there is a stylistic shift between them – and then I’m going to keep going and going all the way through the series until I mash this handy button and eject from this out-of-control ornithopter!

Dune World

In the distant future, humanity’s galaxy-spanning interstellar Empire is held together by the spice melange – an awareness-expanding drug used for all manner of purposes, most pertinently by the Spacing Guild which uses its curious form of prescience as an essential component of space travel. The spice has only one source – the desert world of Arrakis, or Dune – which has until recently been assigned to the cruel House Harkonnen to manage on behalf of the Emperor.

Now the Emperor has transferred the legal title to Arrakis to House Atreides, led by the charismatic and just Duke Leto. This is not out of kindness; the Emperor is jealous of Duke Leto’s popularity among the Landsraad, the assembly representing the Great Houses of the Empire, and by making this offer puts Leto in an impossible position. If he refuses the order, he makes an outlaw of his House, who will have to go renegade and flee into uncharted space; if he accepts it, the vile Baron Harkonnen (who has always hated Leto) will be able to engage in the well-regulated but generally accepted art of kanly, through which feuds between Great Houses are fought, with covert aid from the Emperor to tip the scales.

Leto is doomed – but House Atreides is not without its own hidden advantages. The Lady Jessica, Leto’s consort (never his wife, since political advantage could be gained if others thought it possible they could reach an alliance-by-marriage with the Atreides) is one of the Bene Gesserit, the order of witch-priests that cultivate a range of potent abilities as they pursue their own far-reaching agenda. Leto’s son, Paul, has had certain skills cultivated in him by Jessica and trusted aide Thufir Hawat because he apparently has the potential to become, like Hawat, a Mentat – a highly-trained “human computer” who through eidetic memory and logical training can devise grand strategies and complete detailed calculations without the need for electronic computers (the more advanced forms of which were wiped out long ago in the Butlerian Jihad).

Yet Jessica believes that Paul has the potential to be more than that. She dares hope that he may be the Kwisatz Haderach – the ultimate goal of the vast eugenics program the Bene Gesserit have been perpetrating on the galaxy. The Fremen of Dune – the most tightly-embedded and enduring human population of the world (and therefore the closest thing to an “indigenous” population the world has, given how tenuous the term is when applied anywhere other than Earth) – also have high hopes invested in Paul. And why shouldn’t they? The Bene Gesserit have a policy of seeding Messianic prophecies in human populations around the galaxy – superstitions which a talented Bene Gesserit can leverage to advantage when the situation demands it. And when the Harkonnens activate their traitor in the Atreides ranks, Jessica and Paul will need every advantage to survive the Dune World…

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It’s often forgotten that the first three Dune novels are fix-ups, compiling material originally serialised in science fiction magazines of the day. A case can be made that the first Dune trilogy represents the last really major fix-up series that science fiction yielded, with the additional literary kudos the genre acquired through the embrace of Dune and other New Wave works during the 1960s paving the way for more material to just go straight to book form. Dune itself is a compilation of two stories originally serialised in Analog from 1963 to 1965 – Dune World and Prophet of Dune.

Of course, what you get in the book isn’t exactly what you get in the serialised versions. The appendices and map were newly-prepared for the book version, and a recap at the start of Prophets of Dune was cut since it was only there for the benefit of anyone who’d not read Dune World or had already forgotten what happened in it. There are other edits – extensive compilations of them have been made by fans – but these largely are just little excisions here and there of redundant exposition which improve the flow. This extra level of polish is perhaps the best justification for the fix-up approach, the serial publication effectively being a beta version of a more definitive telling of the story later on.

Dune World, retitled simply Dune, forms the first of three sections of the novel; Prophet of Dune became the next two sections, Maud’Dib and The Prophet. If you’ve seen David Lynch’s movie adaptation of the novel, the Dune World segment of the movie is the one which holds together the best, taking in material from the Atreides’ preparations to come to Arrakis through to the devastating Harkonnen attack (backed up by the Emperor’s elite Sardaukar units) and Paul and Jessica’s escape into the desert, with the dawning of Paul’s precognitive powers hinting at what’s to come at the end.

It’s no surprise that the remainder of Lynch’s movie then becomes somewhat incoherent – he’s trying to stuff two thirds of the novel into a movie that’s already had to cover the first third. In addition, Dune World is the most immediately approachable section of the novel, in keeping with the job it has to introduce us to Frank Herbert’s conception of a far future humanity that’s simultaneously regressed to feudalism and devised startling new skills, both in the realm of the hard sciences and in psychology and ecology.

Comparisons to Foundation are tempting, and almost certainly intentional. At the time Herbert kicked off the series, Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke were the three colossi of science fiction, and the Foundation trilogy occupied the throne which Dune would soon oust it from. The concept of a vast space empire where the conventions of old-timey aristocracy have reasserted themselves and big brainy clever-clogs plans unfold using an advanced grasp of history and psychology maps onto Foundation and Dune equally well; the one is inescapably derived from the other.

The major difference is that Dune actually bothers to follow through on its axioms, in a way that Foundation flagrantly doesn’t. Remember how bothered I was that Foundation keeps reverting back to the Great Man theory of history even though the underlying concept ought by rights to be a refutation of it? Even if as a stretch you are willing to see Hari Seldon’s grand plan as requiring the emergence of Great Men at specific points in history to make sure the Foundation jumps in the correct direction, you would expect the society depicted in Foundation to be set up in such a way as to cultivate Great Man candidates so that at the right time one will step up to the plate. The Kwisatz Haderach thing is, of course, a huge Great Man motif, but guess what? It’s a Great Man that there’s an entire social hierarchy set up to create!

Moreover, Herbert realises the extent to which Great Men tend to be bottlenecks (something Asimov sort of came around to with the Mule stuff in Foundation and Empire); if your grand plan for the destiny of the galaxy hinges on your Great Man making the right decisions, all bets are off if he decides to go a different direction. The Bene Gesserit plan was always to ensure that the Kwisatz Haderach was fully under their power, but between Jessica jumping the gun and Paul leveraging the Mahdi myths of Arrakis, that’s not how Dune pans out, and we’ll see in the sequels how things get weird once Paul decides he’s not going to follow the plan.

The Bene Gesserit, then, are kind of in the position of the Second Foundation in Foundation – though unlike Foundation, Herbert properly addresses the possibility of competing factions, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, competing to influence the future, rather than one blandly always-right super faction getting its own way all the time. The parallels go further than this; the Bene Gesserit, like the Foundation, use the veil of religion to conceal their true knowledge, and in Foundation, the Second Foundation are given the secrets of hyper-advanced psychology and psychohistory, which is also the basis of a lot of Bene Gesserit techniques.

The difference, again, is in the execution. When Asimov actually wrote Second Foundation, he gave them a combination of blunt brainwashing and full-on telepathy, because John Campbell as editor of Astounding was a sucker for that. (Enough of a sucker, in fact, to provide a crucial early platform for L. Ron Hubbard to promote Dianetics.) Astounding, of course, became Analog in 1960, and Dune was arguably Campbell’s last great discovery of his editing career, and the mystic trappings of the Bene Gesserit and the precognitive properties of spice probably appealed to him – but almost everything the Bene Gesserit are shown to do in Dune World can be accounted for as being the result of hyper-advanced training in observation and psychology, from the capacity to discern when people are lying to the Voice with which Jessica and Paul can toss commands at people which evade the critical parts of their mind altogether and prompt unthinking obedience. Even the future-seeing stuff could, conceivably, be the result of inferences from massive amounts of subconsciously collected information figuring out the range of possible alternatives.

Jessica is also a good example of something else Dune bothers to do that Foundation is quite bad at: having women involved in the story from the very start. In fact, there’s several significant women involved in Dune Planet beyond Jessica; Reverend Mother Helen, who administers the famous hand-in-the-box test to Paul, is another significant Bene Gesserit figure, many of the quotations from future literature about Paul and his rise to power are written by Princess Irulan, the Emperor’s eldest daughter, and one of the first allies Jessica makes on Arrakis is the Shadout Mapes, a Fremen who serves as head housekeeper in the Imperial Residence in Arrakeen where the Atreides family make their headquarters. It’s Jessica out of all of these who ends up the best-rounded character – effectively a co-protagonist alongside Paul – but the fact that there’s multiple women among the supporting cast really helps.

As well as remembering to include women, Herbert also includes opposition – proper antagonists who pose a serious and enduring threat to the heroes, rather than strawmen intended to be defeated within the span of a single story, as Asimov’s baddies tend to be until he arrives at the Mule. Where Asimov’s strawmen typically get outright destroyed over the course of a brief novella, Baron Harkonnen is actually allowed to win some battles. He’s also allowed some layers of nuance, like the part where he realises he’s going to have to let the Sardaukar see the messy circumstances of Duke Leto’s death (as a result of Leto’s last-gasp bid to take down the Baron) and that’s going to hurt his standing with the Sardaukar and the Emperor.

(Also, even if writing Baron Harkonnen as melodramatic and boastful man with an unquenchable appetite for natural resources, food, cruelty, and sexual assault meant he was a strawman at conception, the subsequent rise of Donald Trump has made him look terribly realistic.)

Even Asimov cited (in The Hugo Winners, Volume 5) Dune alongside the Dorsai series as works which he was pleased to see had “improved on” Foundation. “Improved on” is putting it mildly; from the richness and depth of the setting (paper-thin in Foundation) to the use of actual characters as opposed to cardboard cutouts to the way it engages with its ideas, Dune is streets ahead of Foundation when it comes to more or less anything both the novels are trying to do. Much like Varney the Vampire was doomed to be largely a trivia question and a text read by hardcore vampire literature buffs after Dracula comprehensively stole its thunder, so too does Dune eclipse Foundation. In a world where Dune is available, there is simply no further need for Foundation save as a footnote specifying what science fiction sources Herbert was influenced by, and this is the case right out of the gate.

That is not to say that the Dune World segment is perfect by any means; Herbert has his flaws as a writer, and whilst they would become far more evident in later volumes, several are apparent here. Most glaring is the way Baron Harkonnen is not only a fatphobic caricature, using antigravity to float about because he’s just that chubby and lazy, but is also depicted in a starkly homophobic manner, preferring to impose himself on teenage boys.

In addition, there’s a gender essentialism that creeps in here and there that never entirely goes away over the span of the series, though Herbert’s ideas about men and women are at least eccentric enough that they don’t easily slide into traditional categories. In particular, the fact that Jessica is a woman who’s secretly incredibly powerful and commanding, to the point where she could compel Leto to marry her if she wanted but she opts not to because she doesn’t want to reduce him to a puppet is not only made plain, but presented like it is totally cool and awesome.

That’s fair enough, though there’s going to be times in the series where Herbert pushes the whole “very powerful women” thing hard enough that it’s a case of The Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish. (Stillsuits, used in the desert to conserve the body’s moisture, may be another example of this; skintight futuristic bodysuits which capture all your sweat, eh?) In later books we’ll encounter the Honoured Matres, and if you’ve spotted how close that phrase is to “Dommy Mommies”, well, stick a pin in that because we’ll get back to it later.

Another aspect that may prove a stumbling block is the extensive use of a range of religious concepts from a wide range of traditions, all kind of mashed up together, with a particular emphasis on Islamic concepts (and Islamic mystical and esoteric traditions in particular). Often these are not used the book in the same sense they are in real life, but the Fremen being an insular ethnicity living in a desert ecosystem that happens to also be home to a natural resource that is the key driver of an economic system extending well beyond the Fremen’s home… Well, the parallels to real-world petroleum politics are obvious.

That said, Herbert does go some way towards alleviating this by making sure more or less every reference to a religious philosophy in the book is either something he’s invented out of whole cloth or explicitly a mashup of two or more religious traditions which today we’d regard as being wholly distinct. For instance, the Fremen will ultimately turn out to be descended from the legendary pilgrims known as the Zensunni Wanderers, the name suggesting a confluence of Buddhism and Islam, and one of the most widely-read and quoted religious books in the setting is a universalist syncretic work that more or less all the setting’s religions dip into (thanks in part to the Bene Gesserit’s manipulations). It’s called the Orange Catholic Bible, and if you have even a mild level of knowledge about the Northern Ireland conflict you’d know that “Orange” and “Catholic” are terms which really don’t go together – at least not today. The message is plain: so much time has passed that basically every religious movement we know today has transformed and merged and split and changed beyond recognition, so we are on notice not to jump to too many conclusions.

So we’ve covered what Dune World does that Foundation doesn’t, and we’ve looked at the bits which aren’t so hot (or are, at best, an acquired taste); what of the stuff that distinguishes it from Foundation? Well, for one thing there’s a wonderful planetary romance aesthetic to a lot of it, sometimes with a hard science fiction concept backing it up, sometimes for the sheer devilment of it. The use of “ornithopters” – flying vehicles with wings which flap like birds and insects – might be implausible compared to simply making better fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters, but it’s certainly a fun image. The personal shield technology, impervious to high-velocity projectiles but vulnerable to anything moving at the speed of a fencing thrust, are blatantly an excuse to have a world where people still have sword fights rather than going pew pew at a distance – and to make the Baron look more dastardly when he eschews all that and just shells Atreides positions with artillery. The sandworms may have their implausible features – where the fuck do they get all that biomass from? – but they’re undeniably an astonishingly cool image. It’s no wonder that the material has attracted highly visual directors like Jodorowsky, Lynch, and Villeneuve over the years.

The main thing which distinguishes Dune from previous works of planetary romance is how serious it takes itself. Between the aristocratic politics, the depth of development apparent in the wider galaxy (with all sorts of other worlds not merely namedropped here, but associated with specific things), the attention given to economics, and particularly Herbert’s keen interest in ecology, expressed through the character of Dr. Kynes and the planet Arrakis itself – all these show a level of thought that outstrips your typical sword and planet fare.

Frankly, I love it – even the flaws (minus the hardline homophobia) are part of the charm. It’s this rich, corrupt, decadent, horny, baroque work of vivid visuals, intricate schemes, dark passions, and mystical philosophy. You don’t have to ethically endorse it to aesthetically admire it, and it connects with me both in its highbrow intentions and its raw id. And all that just in the first third!

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• You just plain don’t like Dune as a concept and think the very premise of the thing is stupid.
• You are simply not at home for stories about societies with strongly defined gender roles, even if women turn out to have more power than they appear at first glance.
• The evident homophobia and fatphobia around the depiction of Baron Harkonnen is a dealbreaker.
• You’ve spotted the horny and decided it’s totally soured the flavour for you.

Read This If: You are at all curious about Dune and the caveats I’ve thrown in above aren’t dealbreakers for you.

Consider Stopping After This If: You’re not enjoying yourself in the slightest. If you get to the end of this and discover you simply dislike this setting or positively do not care about what happens to Paul or Jessica and have no appetite to see Baron Harkonnen get what’s coming to him, it’s more than fair enough to stop at this stage.

Prophet of Dune

The Harkonnens have reclaimed Arrakis, Duke Leto has been slain, and Paul, Jessica, and House Atreides’ key advisors have scattered to the four winds. Yet the Baron does not have things all his own way; his nephew Feyd-Rautha, his intended successor, may turn into a strategic mastermind on the Baron’s level in the long run, but before that he’ll need to have the patience to stop plotting the Baron’s demise.

Meanwhile, the Sardaukar’s encounters with the Fremen have left the Emperor concerned. The great secret of the Sardaukar is that they are not, as believed, recruited from the regular levies raised for the Empire by the various Houses, but consist of those who have managed to survive on the hell-world of Salusa Secundus, the Imperial prison planet. Has Arrakis have proven an environment challenging enough to foster a force who can beat the Sardaukar at their own game, given equipment and training?

It has – and Jessica and Paul are finding that out at first hand. For their flight into the desert has led to them meeting up with a Fremen group led by Stilgar, who the Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho had been cautiously trying to cultivate friendly links with. Far more technologically adept and sophisticated than anyone gives them credit for, the Fremen might be the allies Paul and Jessica need to survive in the hostile terrain of Arrakis – and between Jessica’s Bene Gesserit training and Paul’s careful education, the two Atreides survivors have a range of skills and expertise which, combined with the Fremen’s own capabilities, might just make them unstoppable.

But is this what Paul wants? For his dawning prescience show two major paths open to him. One of these would require him to seek refuge with Baron Harkonnen himself, for he and Jessica have revealed they are descended from him, Jessica’s mother having been a Bene Gesserit agent sent to seduce him (despite his preferences) as part of the wider Bene Gesserit eugenics program. The idea of coming before the Baron and calling him “Grandfather” out of loyalty is not something that Paul can stomach (though the Baron’s succession issues suggest it might have worked). The other path leads to a religious jihad pouring out across the entire galaxy, making the Atreides banner a sign of terror and genocide…

Prophet of Dune is the serial which would become the back two thirds of the original novel (Maud’Dib and The Prophet). This is where all the Hero’s Journey business set up in the first part comes to fruition, but whereas other science fiction and fantasy works of the era played all that Joseph Campbell stuff straight, Herbert is constantly giving you little reminders of just how artificial that structure is. The fact that it cuts so close to a well-known formula is probably why the first Dune novel is the most approachable part of the series, and provides guardrails which prevents Herbert going into the weeds to the extent he eventually does in the later sequels.

The thing everyone remembers about this section of the novel, and which even Lynch’s highly truncated adaptation somewhat captures, is how Paul has to undergo all these trials to become accepted by the Fremen as one of them and establish his credentials as their “Lisan al-Gaib”, the messiah figure of their folklore. What’s frequently forgotten is how the whole thing is rigged; not only has the Bene Gesserit primed the ground ahead of time for Paul to be accepted as such a figure, but the capabilities they have bred into him give him an unfair advantage via his precognition, essentially allowing him to exercise skill beyond his training by simply “remembering” stuff he hasn’t actually been taught yet.

This is despite the fact that Herbert is regularly telling you what characters are thinking. His use of italicised text to indicate a character’s inner thoughts may at first seem intrusive, but the necessity of it by now his very apparent: the Dune universe is one where people rarely act without some unspoken motive or hidden scheme involved, and whilst Herbert can keep his cards close to his chest from time to time, on rereading it’s apparent just how much he’s tipping his hand to the reader.

We get a deeper look at the precognitive abilities gifted to Paul, the Bene Gesserit, and the Guild by the spice here, as well as the reveal of what the Kwisatz Haderach is meant to be; Reverend Mothers get to be the way they are because the spice to an extent cultivates a sort of group telepathy, to the extent where Fremen communities have a “tau” to them, a sort of all-pervasive vibe that arises from everyone having this deeper awareness of each other as a result of the widespread use of spice.

When a Bene Gesserit attains the status of Reverend Mother, as she does here, she has a moment of communion with her predecessor and awakens to the memories of all Reverend Mothers stretching back into eternity. Thus, as well as unlocking the capacity of “Other Memory” which allows the newly-minted Reverend Mother to access the memories of her ancestors, she also gets all the genetic memories of the previous Reverend Mother and every Reverend Mother in the chain going back.

This explains why the Fremen have a Reverend Mother along them, and perhaps also why they are so ripe for manipulation – rather than the Missionaria Protectiva coming and leaving, it seems like they set up a line of Reverend Mothers to supervise the Fremen, who under the influence of the chain of Reverend Mothers in their memory would take the agenda forwards.

Here’s where we get a big dose of Herbert-brand gender essentialism – the sort that’s guaranteed to be way, way stranger than the regular variety but can still make odd and off-putting statements about the universal and immutable characteristics of men and women. The Bene Gesserit version of genetic memory includes a gap – an entire source of information which they can’t integrate, and which they suspect that only a man could explore. The Kwisatz Haderach is meant to be a man capable of accessing genetic memory and reaching into this place – but Paul tells Jessica that in doing so he’s somewhat transcended the categories of “men” and “women”, suggesting that even as Herbert was writing this gender essentialist setting he was also seeing the limitations of such an approach.

(In later books, the most advanced user of Other Memory will turn out to have unlocked memories stretching way back to the emergence of biologically modern humans – raising the interesting possibility that the regular version of Other Memory is based on nuclear DNA whilst the advanced version is based on mitochondrial DNA, since the former version is much more mutable from generation to generation and so perhaps is subject to more “noise” and the latter is passed down essentially identically down the matrilineal line.)

I’ve explained the genetic memory stuff in fairly direct terms, but this isn’t how it’s presented in the book, where it represents the deepest dive into mysticism. Readers would need to wait to later volumes for Herbert to fully unpack what is going on here, though Herbert does a reasonable job of sowing the seeds here; as with a lot in Dune, Herbert’s intended reading is there, and often to overlook what he’s going for is to cherry-pick and ignore aspects of the text. (Death of the Author does not extend to Death of the Text, after all.)

The cohesiveness of Dune and its immediate sequels probably stems from Herbert having worked on bits of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune even when he was putting Dune itself together; you can accuse a lot of authors of just sort of improvising and not playing the long game, and by the end of the series there will be better basis to claim that Herbert is making shit up as he goes, but that isn’t the case here.

In fact, perhaps the biggest error made by the David Lynch version of Dune is to treat the original novel as a complete story in itself, rather than the first few acts of a story which only truly comes to fruition later on; in particular, it’s really in Dune Messiah where Paul actually ends up coming to terms with the consequences of his actions and the forebodings of doom he keeps having throughout Dune finally come to pass. If there’s one thing Herbert could have done to make sure people did not misinterpret the climax of this novel as an unabashed victory and a moment of cathartic triumph for the forces of good, it would have been to tack TO BE CONTINUED on the end as a firm warning that the story has not quite run its course.

Still, one can understand being swept away by the excitement of the novel’s conclusion. With the Fremen having shattered Rabban’s hold on Arrakis and anarchy beckoning, Paul launches a nightmarish assault on the forward on-world base of the Empire – the Emperor himself having been strongarmed by the Spacing Guild into taking matters into his own hands. Cutting off the Emperor and his retinue’s means of escape offworld, and with Baron Harkonnen having already been killed by Paul’s weird little sister Alia (of whom more later), Paul engineers a confrontation with the Emperor to discuss terms.

This is where the iconic knife-fight with Feyd-Rautha plays out, but whereas the Lynch version makes this the climactic moment of the movie (for obvious reasons – it plays well to cinema), in the novel this is just part of a ruthless process in which Paul strips away support from the Emperor bit by bit. He compels the Guild to back off by threatening to set off a chain reaction that would eliminate all the spice, kill all the worms, and bring the Guild to utter ruin; he brings the Bene Gesserit to heel by exhibiting a command of the Voice so firm that it can intimidated even a Reverend Mother wise to its ways (in the process affirming his credentials as the Kwisatz Haderach). With these acts, two of the institutions that prop up the rest of the Imperial power structure are neutralised with mere words.

The Emperor tries to send Thufir Hawat, the former Atreides Mentat who has been leveraged by the Harkonnens into working for them, to eliminate Paul, only for Hawat to off himself instead out of loyalty to the Atreides. His duel with Feyd is not some emotive matter – the two have never met each other, after all – but serves the dual purpose of further shattering the Harkonnen power structure and demonstrating that he is a man of greater honour in personal combat than Feyd is.

In particular, he specifically refuses to use a Bene Gesserit code word that Jessica guesses that Feyd would have been brainwashed with – the Bene Gesserit making a point of doing this to nobles they regard as dangerously violent – which would have rendered Feyd defenceless. Earlier, we see Feyd showing off in the Harkonnen combat arena by killing a slave-gladiator who hadn’t been drugged into helplessness as usual, but who had sneakily been brainwashed with his own “go limp” code. Witnessing this was Count Fenring, a trusted agent of the Emperor and one of his few friends, who is also right here because he’s the Emperor’s personal assassin – the Emperor ordering Fenring to finish the job Feyd wasn’t able to, once Paul is exhausted.

And Fenring refuses, for an absolute pile of reasons. His wife, Lady Margot, is a Bene Gesserit who has brought him in on what the sisterhood is actually up to, which he supports – in part because he himself was a failed branch of the eugenics effort and he wants to see someone else succeeding where he didn’t. Not only does Paul demonstrate repeatedly in this encounter that he is the Kwisatz Haderach, but he also offers this indication that he is a square dealer – for Margot was most likely the one who imprinted Feyd with the code word and would have probably told Fenring this had occurred. When Paul notices Fenring, he realises that almost all of the potential futures his prescience allows him to foresee has Fenring killing him; by the time Paul’s bravura performance has played out, Fenring would sooner disobey his lifelong friend than kill Paul.

The political dismemberment of the Emperor in this final sequence is all the more shocking for how sure of himself the Emperor seems when we first encounter him. Although Shaddam IV does not directly come onstage for most of the book, we have been primed with what to expect of him through quotes from Princess Irulan’s subsequent memoirs, which are well-represented among the quotations from in-universe sources which serve as chapter headings. Shaddam goes from a figure who can cause Baron Harkonnen himself to cover like a meek lackey into someone whose life has been comprehensively destroyed in the space of minutes by a lad who has all the leverage, and who caps it all off by sending him to exile on his own prison planet as a pretext to tidy the place up and make it a soft, gentle home fit for a retired Emperor (and thus destroy the Sardaukar’s means of recruitment) and marrying Shaddam’s eldest daughter for good measure.

In a typical fantasy story, the bit where the hero defeats all the baddies and win the hand of the beautiful princess would be an uncomplicated moment of cathartic victory. It is not so here. In this scene Paul is compared to his grandfather, the old Duke who was killed in a bullfight when he took his eye off the bull to play to the crowd. We don’t know much about Grandpa Atreides beyond that, save a sense that he was a bit of an old tyrant – but perhaps here Paul is able to call on his political prowess thanks to his Other Memory.

Either way, Paul cuts a cold and alienating figure in this climactic sequence – understandably so, because he has just received word that his infant son Leto, born to Stilgar’s daughter Chani who has become Paul’s consort, has been killed in a Sardaukar raid. Even though he would still prefer to avoid the cosmos-wide tyranny he’s on the cusp of unleashing, he’s also half-tempted to destroy the spice and inflict chaos just as damaging out of sheer spite. Paul might only directly come to blows with Feyd in the big showdown, but really he’s fighting the Emperor as a matador would fight a bull, with a death by a thousand cuts.

In his duel against Jamis, the Fremen who refuses to accept Paul’s presence among them, Paul is chided by others for giving the impression of toying with the man, though in fact there were extenuating circumstances there. Here, Paul isn’t exactly toying with the Emperor – each blow to the Emperor’s standing is clearly necessary to shatter his grip on the levers of power. But there’s a certain sardonic cruelty to the way he does it which is hard to stomach.

This is, of course, the point – Herbert is confronting the Great Man theory of history by thinking about what it would be like if a Great Man who really could usurp the pillars of society and grab the levers of power at a whim arose, and how monstrous that would truly be. We see this too in Fremen society, where Paul goes from being this teen going through this whole bildungsroman process as he becomes accepted among them to someone who can impose significant cultural changes on them to impose his will, as when he flatly declines to duel Stilgar for the leadership of his clan.

That part should not be overlooked, because it makes it clear to us that there is a consequence for doing such things. Towards the end of the book, Fremen culture and the personalities of the characters around Paul become oddly flattened and hollowed out, and this can’t just be written off as Herbert’s writing chops failing him because Paul notices this is happening. In refusing to fight and kill Stilgar, Paul evokes a metaphor where Stilgar is his right arm, doing his bidding; even though the intention is clearly to underscore how important Stilgar is to him, this still rhetorically reduces Stilgar to being an extension of his will, and Stilgar takes this to heart in a way which reduces him. (Much as Duke Leto would have been damaged had Jessica used her Bene Gesserit abilities to force him to marry her, in fact.) Later, Paul worries that the same thing is happening to the Atreides warrior-bard Gurney Halleck.

Having been told that doing stuff like this to cultures and peoples breaks and weakens cultures and people in such ways, we would be fools to ignore the fact that Paul does similar things in a manner which will have Empire-spanning effects in the final scene in the book. Even as inattentive readers cheer an apparent happy ending, the attentive ones will realise that this confrontation has not merely shattered the Emperor, but it has broken the Empire wide open to reshape.

And really attentive readers will have spotted the ways in which Paul has become like Baron Harkonnen.

Set aside the Baron’s self-indulgent pleasures and his inefficient cruelties, and the feature of him that stands out the most is the way he reduces the people around him as tools to be made use of, and this is exactly what Paul has resorted to doing. He is not doing this out of entirely unsympathetic reasons; he really doesn’t want this galaxy-wide holy war to happen in his name, and he’s trying to find a way to survive the bind he’s in whilst still stopping the crusade. But he still does it, and in doing so he reveals he really isn’t so different from his grandfather in his methods, the motivation and ends being the important difference.

Herbert is criticised from time to time for his handling of women in the book, and there’s aspects in which that’s entirely fair. Chani, in particular, loses out here. Jessica had all that development in the Dune Planet segment to lay the groundwork for what she does here, and has some marvellous moments, but Chani has this thing where she shows up as a badass who reveals she’d have had the drop on Paul had he acted against Stilgar in their initial encounter and then becomes more and more ancillary.

In this respect she’s a casualty of Prophet of Dune‘s use of time jumps to progress the plot; after she and Paul initially pair off during the spice orgy following Jessica’s ascension to Reverend Mother status, Herbert opting to put most of the other major landmarks in Paul and Chani’s relationship into the time skips. Leto Junior’s death and Chani witnessing Paul emerging from the spice trance as a fully realised Kwisatz Haderach are the notable exceptions there, and both of those are really about motivating Paul; of course, by the end of the novel everyone’s lives have become oriented around Paul, but Jessica manages to keep a semblance of independent motivation more than Chani. The main respect in which Jessica gets short-changed is that after the critical encounter with Stilgar in which it turns out she’s this ultimate martial arts badass who can take any of his crew out without breaking a sweat, she basically doesn’t get to do anything like that again, though thanks to her Bene Gesserit command of subtle influence she doesn’t particularly need to.

The main respect in which Herbert’s general depiction of women falls short is the way any woman who has power and influence is either in the Bene Gesserit or has a friendly Bene Gesserit giving her a hand, and the Bene Gesserit’s methods are, shall we say, rather distinctive. People say derisory stuff about the Honoured Matres’ sex stuff in later books – and don’t worry, we’ll get into that in due course – but the idea of mind controlling people through sexual brainwashing is directly raised here.

The whole Bene Gesserit thing is basically is the old trope of “women try to control men through emotional manipulation and sex”, it’s just that this time it’s written by someone who clearly believes that being controlled by women via emotional manipulation and sex is on at least some level wicked cool and awesome. Many writers, of course, throw in this sort of thing, but leaven it by having their femme fatales take the fall in the end, or get redeemed, or cast in wholly villainous roles to retain an air of disapproval about the femdom subtext at play.

Frank Herbert knows writers who do femdom subtext, and he thinks they are all cowards. For all his faults on this front, Herbert clearly isn’t interested in using the Bene Gesserit for the purpose of providing some titillatingly domme-coded villain figure who’ll turn out to be essentially evil and wrong in the long run and who might even switch for the hero. (Now, the Honoured Matres… well, we’ll get to them.) With the Bene Gesserit, he’s much more interested in making them this mystical order of ascended, enlightened priestesses who are also the dommy mommy Illuminati who manipulate the Empire using the unstoppable force of Horny, and he really sells you on the idea that this is cool and good. He takes a light hand with it here compared to later books in the series, but it’s undebiably here.

Perhaps the most interesting developments for Jessica and Chani happen at the end, which shows that they have retained more in the way of personal volition and independent thought than many who come into Paul’s sphere of influence. This sees Chani show more doubt in Paul than she’s shown at any point prior when she expresses the understandable worry that Paul will lose interest in her after he married Princess Irulan to cement his hold on the Empire, Paul assures her that the marriage to Irulan will be strictly and solely political, and Jessica offers some sage advice.

The “history will call us wives” bit is a hell of a line to close the book on, bringing back all of Jessica’s feelings about Duke Leto that we’ve been acquainted with since the beginning and ensuring that the actual end of the book isn’t Paul’s victory, it’s Jessica finally coming to terms with all that.

What’s more widely overlooked is that just before that’s said, Paul specifically gives Chani and Jessica responsibility for the marriage negotiations, an act which inherently gives both of them significant power over the arrangements made and expectations set and the way Paul is going to give his life going forwards. Chani doesn’t initially appreciate this, because this is Great Houses politics stuff which it’s established that the Fremen don’t have any direct experience of, but it does seem like a bigger deal than it’s given credit for.

Specifically, it means that Jessica and Chani are the only people left in the room that actually get to interact with Paul as people, rather than vassals, and part of this stems from the way he’s given them real, substantive power over him rather than dictating terms. It’s good that he has these two links to something resembling humanity, but terrifying that it’s just these two links. The next novel will address the question of whether Paul can come back from this precipice.

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• The gender essentialism is already too much for you to tolerate.
• The repeated use of religious terms from real-world faiths is a big ick to you, even though (or perhaps because) they are largely divorced from anything like their original or modern-day contexts.
• You find the prescience stuff ridiculous.
• You think Chani was unacceptably short-changed.
• You think it’s not really plausible that the Empire wouldn’t be open to polygamy given the advantages that might provide to the Bene Gesserit breeding program.
• You’re already annoyed by how horny Frank is about the Bene Gesserit.

Read This If: You enjoyed the first third of the book and want to see what happens.

Consider Stopping After This If: You want to cling to the idea that this is a happy ending.

Dune Messiah

It is twelve years after the events of Dune. For all that time, Paul Atreides has ruled as Emperor – but an Emperor in a very different style to the dynasty he has deposed. With his incredible gifts of prescience, he can outmanoeuvre almost anyone – and between those powers and the way the Fremen have been culturally primed to embrace him, a cult has sprung up around him which he cannot simply disavow without shattering the loyalty of those whose support he relies on.

Thus his death commandos have surged across human-inhabited space, and coming their wake is the priesthood of the Qizarate, many of whom are veterans of the crusade who find turning to the priesthood a rewarding way to spend their retirement. His sister Alia, in turn, has become a cult figure, as a result of having been awakened to Reverend Mother status in the womb. The work of changing the ecosystem of Arrakis, expanding the habitable region and creating a biosphere that will capture enough water to turn the desert green whilst keeping a moisture-free band around the equator for the sandworms to live in and make their spice, is underway, whilst Arrakeen has become a city of unseemly wealth, Paul’s palace an unthinkably vast complex.

But Paul isn’t getting it all his own way. Some of the Fremen dislike the new direction the culture is taking; a few reactionaries have gone so far as to revert to traditions from before Liet-Kynes’ time, including sacrificing human beings to the sandworms. The Qizarate is far more convinced of his godhood than he is, and in his name 62 billion people have died at the hands of the Fremen holy war and multiple planets have been scoured of life.

And on the world of Wallach IX, a conspiracy is being drawn up against him. Naturally, Relevant Mother Mohaim of the Bene Gesserit is involved, for her order badly wishes to bring the bloodline of the Kwisatz Haderach back under control. Essential to the plot is the presence of Edric, a Steersman of the Guild who has reached the apex of Navigator mutation under the influence of the spice – for he has the prescience of all Steersmen, and one of the secrets of precognition is that one individual with prescience cannot directly foresee the actions of another. There is also Scytale, an agent of the Bene Tleilax or Tleilaxu – specifically, one of their Face Dancers, engineered with the ability to shapeshift.

And there is Paul’s wife, Princess Irulan…

Dune Messiah is by some distance the shortest of the original six Dune novels. In the editions I’m working with, Dune itself weighs in at nearly 450 pages, Dune Messiah at a slim 160-ish. The remaining books are all in the range of 300-360 pages or thereabouts. Serialised in Galaxy in 1969 before the book release in the same year, it opens by directly telling us what to expect: that the crusade Paul feared has come to pass, that he is the ruler of almost all the human-settled universe, and that his moment of victory concealed within it the seeds of his failure. We are told that an assassination plot will unfold, and even told who to watch, and we are also offered an interesting idea: that prescience, by its very nature, ends up becoming lethal to the person that practices it.

It’s the last part that is key; this is the sequel which is primarily about prescience; the mysteries of Other Memory are more central to Children of Dune, as the past comes back with a vengeance, but this is about the future, about legacy. Paul and his empire have gone way out on a limb, but things already seem to be going awry. It seems like such an explosive growth and massive cultural shift all built around one man is going to be very vulnerable to how that man ends up departing the throne. Paul’s big problem over the course of the novel – though you only realise that it is the core problem at the very end – is to end his reign in a manner which cements his legacy and leaves him with a system to bequeath to his kids, rather than in a way which will lead to rapid collapse once the organising principle of his prescience is no longer available.

In tandem with this is Herbert’s process of expanding on how prescience actually functions in practice, and the huge implications of this. For instance, as mentioned prescient individuals aren’t able to predict the movements of other prescient folk and people closely associated with them – presumably because if two people who can both predict the possibility-space of the future are trying to predict each other’s moves, you get into a feedback loop which drowns the signal in noise because each prescient can change their actions to take into account their own predictions, which means the predictions change, which means the response changes, and so on and so forth.

This prompts some interesting questions about free will. One might think that precognitive individuals would enjoy an enhanced level of freedom compared to others who do have the same faculties – anyone who can predict your actions perfectly can control you, after all. At the same time, Paul’s precognition leaves him profoundly aware of just how limited his freedom is, because he is more aware than others of where the boundaries of future possibilities lie. In a way, then, Paul is only truly free in those few moments where his prescience cuts out entirely, denoting a situation where the future is absolutely wide open.

Here, then, is another rebuttal to the original Foundation trilogy and the Second Foundation’s monopoly on psychohistory, deemed necessary by Asimov because multiple psychohistorical factions active at once would wreck the predictive capabilities of all of them. Asimov was following the science lab approach of minimising variables; Herbert, in contrast, embraces the chaos that arises from multiple competing interests, finding this a more compelling concept than a simplistic good-vs.-evil narrative (which Dune itself flirted with being only to undermine the notion).

Take, in particular, the conspiracy against Paul, which by bringing the Tleilaxu onstage further enriches the setting by adding another faction. The Tleilaxu were mentioned in passing in Dune as being the source Baron Harkonnen used for “twisted” mentats who used their abilities in particularly ruthless ways. Now we learn more about them: they’re a technological powerhouse, they don’t necessarily have the same taboos as the wider galaxy, they’re rather secretive and creepy, and they make themselves indispensable thanks to the unique things they have to offer, from artificial eyes through to “gholas” – clones grown from dead people; the Tleilaxu don’t yet have a good method for unlocking their memories of their former selves, but Scytale has plans on that front.

As for the rest of the conspiracy, we met Reverend Mother Mohaim and Princess Irulan before; Edric is new, but the description of the Steersman and the encounter tank he floats in is clearly the source for the “Third Stage Guild Navigator” who shows up to chat with the Emperor at the start of David Lynch’s version of Dune. For that matter, that character was probably meant to be Edric, since Lynch was planning to do Dune Messiah as the second movie in a projected trilogy – likewise, the doctor who’s tending to Baron Harkonnen’s cosmetic diseases when he’s introduced in the movie is rumoured to have been Scytale, and I suppose it makes sense that the Tleilaxu would have been interested enough in what the Harkonnens were up to to have a Face Dancer agent infiltrate them.

What’s particularly interesting about the conspiracy is that it isn’t a simple matter of a mastermind and some lackeys who are along for the ride; everyone here has an agenda of their own they want to follow, and it means their plans don’t necessarily coincide with one another absolutely. Edric, in fact, seems to be somewhat in over his head – he needs to be on point so his prescience obscures Paul’s and gives the other conspirators a penumbra in which they can operate, but that also means the other conspirators’ interactions with Paul are obscured from Edric by Paul‘s prescience, which means he’s vulnerable to them striking their own deal, as both the Bene Gesserit and the Tleilaxu attempt.

For their part, the Bene Gesserit just want their breeding program back on track. Irulan, naturally, wants this to be via her – in part because that would be handy for the Bene Gesserit’s own purposes, in part because in the long run it might assist in the restoration of House Corrino, in part because it nags at her ego that she’s Paul’s WINO (Wife In Name Only). Reverend Mother Mohaim, however, is more pragmatic; if it can’t be Irulan, she’d accept it if Paul goes full Egyptian Pharaoh and ends up siring a child with Alia, and she tries to nudge Irulan into arranging that particular bit of ick (though thankfully Paul shows no sign of being especially vulnerable to this gambit). Either way, the Bene Gesserit don’t actually want Paul to die until that part is sorted out.

(Incidentally, here Herbert seems to have amended his setting to keep up with new accomplishments in medicine. One might ask “why don’t the Bene Gesserit just take gene samples and engineer a Kwisatz Haderach directly?”, and the Doylist answer is “because Frank Herbert wasn’t thinking about IVF when he wrote the first book”, but by 1969 the topic was heating up so he offers an answer: it’s because such things are taboo, artificial pregnancies and tampering with the human genome directly having been banned in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad. This not only makes good use of existing setting elements – if you already have one major setting event which throws up a bunch of technological taboos, may as well tap it when you need one – but also implies delightfully horrid things about the state of the world that led to the Jihad.)

The Tleilaxu, meanwhile, show every sign of being able to live with Paul’s survival… provided that survival results in him being physically or emotionally dependent on the gifts they can offer, like the gholas or the artificial eyes which can replace those burned out by the exotic radiation emitted by a “stone burner” weapon. One of the conspiracy’s first moves is for Edric to present Paul with a ghola of Duncan Idaho, the Atreides family swordmaster from the first book. The rest of the conspiracy believes that the ghola will act as a sort of Manchurian Candidate, primed to assassinate Paul when the moment is right, and that’s true enough – but Scytale reveals that the true purpose was to see if Idaho’s adamant loyalty to the Atreides would override Tleilaxu conditioning and give him access to his full memories, because if full memory can be restored through an appropriately judged trauma, this offers the door to a much more fateful offer.

It’s this book where the character of Duncan Idaho comes into his own. Only a fleeting (but significant) presence in the first book, here he shows up with a few more strings to his bow than “sword guy”; as well as his ghola status and his struggle to recover his locked memories, he has also been trained as a Zensunni sage and a mentat, giving him a capacity to come out with gnomic koans or stark analysis at the drop of a hat. These qualities make him an intriguing advisor – often infuriating, but very interesting to debate with – at the price of him being a Tleilaxau product and therefore dangerous as a result. The “ghola” technology, and the breakthrough in this novel, allows for an essentially unlimited supply of Duncan Idahos, and as a result he ends up being a constant presence over the whole series, even when we have unfathomably vast time skips.

Of course, the more interesting Duncan is, the more interesting the Tleilaxu are in turn, and it’s Scytale who to me is the standout character among the conspirators. In particular, Scytale’s scheme ends up being one of the perfect examples of nested plans in the Dune series – Herbert’s like to talk about plans within plans within plans, but only a few characters actually come close to fully exploiting that. Paul is one – so is Scytale.

Specifically, the conspiracy is not built solely around one singular attempt to assassinate, subvert, or otherwise neutralise Paul, but this ablative series of attempts – a sequence where if one level works, well, it’s worked, but if it doesn’t it helps set up the circumstances that gives the next attempt the best possible shot. From the stone burner attack to the offer of artificial eyes to the programming and unleashing of the Duncan Idaho ghola to the awful pact Scytale is able to offer as a result of the proof that gholas can recover the memories of their former selves, the plan clicks into place like a finely-arranged domino run.

It’s thwarted only because Paul has anticipated everything anyway, and has laid his own dominoes – he might not be able to see Edric and those under his protection directly, but he can see the signs of their passing. Paul being blinded by the stone burner exacerbates the problems the Fremen conservatives have with him, for instance, but his decision at the end of the book to abdicate and walk into the desert to die in accordance with Fremen tradition heals the division between the reactionary Fremen and those who have embraced his new ways, healing a faultline which would have otherwise shattered his empire.

He has counters to everything else, and a lot of them involve being far more willing to accept negative consequences and emotional pain than expected of him. Scytale mentions that the Tleilaxu actually made a Kwisatz Haderach of their own once – but he turned out to be unstable and ended up killing himself. This is both the basis of Scytale’s plan and its weakness, because it doesn’t account for Paul having deeper reserves of mental resilience as a result of both his physical training and ordeals in the desert and his philosophical outlook.

What I found most notable about Paul’s storyline on rereading here is how much George Lucas drew on it for Revenge of the Sith. In both cases you have a central character who has a pregnant wife, who has a precognitive vision of their beloved dying in childbirth. (In Chani’s case, the contraceptives that Irulan had been dosing her with have caused odd metabolic changes which means that her pregnancy, when it finally happens, ends up being unusually fast, consequently putting a higher demand on her physically.) In both cases, these visions come to pass, resulting in the birth of twins, one by and one girl, who will possess incredible powers inherited from their father. In both stories, the father’s actions drive the plot of the story and have massive political ramifications for the galaxy.

However, George Lucas is not as much of a hack as he’s often made out to be, and Revenge of the Sith saw him unusually on form, so he ends up telling a different story. In that, Anakin desperately tries to avoid the future he foresees for Padme, in order to find the means to save her and their children alike, but his desperation to do so causes him to become a monster and a tyrant. Here, in comparison, Paul realises that every future he can foresee in which Chani lives ends up being worse – not because of any of her doing, but because there is no good way to save Chani which won’t lead to greater horrors being visited on her or the galaxy at large, at least as he envisages it. It is this fatalism which is the awful prison of prescience, and it is in accepting that he’s going to have to occasionally accept life’s painful turns of events that Paul finds the route to stepping down – but equally, the guilt he takes on himself in keeping the secret is stunning.

It would be even better if Chani were more of a rounded character; as it stands, she spends the novel in a state of wanting to get pregnant, being pregnant, or being dead (cause of death: excessively pregnant). It’s not great, especially in a book where almost all the other women are very interested in the subject of pregnancy too. The closest thing to an exception there is Alia, but there’s issues with her depiction too; she’s in her mid-teens here, and part of the conspiracy involves the Duncan Idaho ghola potentially making a rift between her and Paul because she’s of an age where her body is going to start having sexual cravings and it seems likely she’d crush on Idaho, and there’s a whole scene where she’s training naked and Herbert gets all hot and sweaty describing her getting hot and sweaty through this sexual frustration sublimated into terrifyingly dangerous combat practice.

This is at its creepiest when Herbert lets slip that because of Alia’s Other Memory, she vividly remembers being Jessica giving birth to her, being an ancestor having sex with another ancestor, and so on and so forth. This isn’t the first time the Dune series has been horny, of course, but it’s the creepiest it’s been about being horny so far. The mitigating circumstance here is that I am fairly sure this is meant to seem fucked-up and creepy; we are not meant to look at Alia and go “oh, what a well-adjusted young lady”, we’re meant to see her as being deeply strange in all the ways you’d be strange if you spent your earliest years of childhood as a weird little god-child assassin in the desert and then hit puberty as a weird god-girl assassin in a ridiculously huge palace.

And in the next book we’ll see just how fucked up she gets. The nice thing about the Atreides siblings here is that Herbert can have his cake and eat it: he can show us one of them giving up the accolades, reverence, and power of being Emperor, and the other one embracing them. Dune Messiah concludes with a series of red flags; having become Regent for Leto and Ghanima, Paul’s kids, Alia decides to use the Duncan Idaho ghola for prurient, horny reasons (just as the conspiracy planned), and executes almost the conspirators despite Paul wanting them to be spared, a sign of the tyrant Alia is about to become.

Only Irulan is spared, because she’s been so psychologically broken by the collapse of the conspiracy that she’s fully denounced the Bene Gesserit and become religiously devoted the memory of the late Paul, who’s definitely, positively dead. Except, of course, we were reminded in the first book that if you don’t see a corpse, you shouldn’t count on someone being dead…

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• The aura of horny around Alia is unacceptably icky to you.
• You think Paul is an uncomplicatedly good hero and messiah figure and you don’t like seeing him lose.
• You think Paul comparing himself to Hitler is tasteless and crass.
• Chani dying in childbirth is an absolute dealbreaker for you.

Read This If:

• You liked Dune and would enjoy it even more if it had an actual, proper denouement rather than just stopping immediately after the climax.
• You want to see what Paul’s reign was like.
• You’re curious about where David Lynch got the idea for the Guild Navigator from.
• You want Herbert to properly unpack what Paul’s powers of prescience actually entail.
• You want more in the way of palace intrigue and don’t mind having less in the way of desert survivalism.
• You want to understand why Duncan Idaho is considered such an important character by fans of the series when he’s barely in the first book.
• You think the Harkonnens and Bene Gesserit in Dune weren’t creepy enough and you want to see a truly horrifying faction come onstage.

Consider Stopping After This If: You strongly feel that the story of Dune is the story of Paul’s political rise and fall and you have no interest in seeing what happens to his empire next.

Children of Dune

It’s some eight or nine years or so since the end of Dune Messiah. Blinded, Paul Atreides has disappeared off into the desert. Alia, his sister, rules as regent for Leto and Ghanima, Paul’s children, and has married the Duncan Idaho ghola. The Imperial structure established by Paul has, under Alia’s management, kept pushing further and faster; the cult of Maud’Dib is more fanatical than ever, the division between traditionalist and modern Fremen is widening, people across the Empire wear garments which superficially resemble stillsuits but don’t have the functionality because stillsuits are associated with Arrakis, and thus are associated with power.

This is a situation which cannot last. The greening of Arrakis has continued apace, to a point where it is coming close to a tipping point after which the sandworms risk going extinct – and with them, the spice. (Some nefarious folk have plotted to capture sandworms and take them to other worlds, to get the spice cycle working there, but without success.) The Imperial twins are as uncanny in their own way as Alia was at their age – for they, like Alia, awoke to their Other Memory in the womb – and Fremen and Bene Gesserit alike speculate about the terrible possibility of Abomination, in which someone with Other Memory ends up possessed by a malevolent ancestor. Jessica, in fact, has come back from Caladan to look for signs of this horror. She, Leto, and Ghanima all have their suspicions: that Alia has become an Abomination, having fallen to the influence of none other than Baron Harkonnen himself.

Yet Alia is not the only danger. Jessica and the Sisterhood will hatch their own schemes to both deal with Alia and to test the twins for this horror – and eliminate them should they fail. Farad’n Corrino, grandson of Shaddam IV, is being groomed by his mother Wensicia to lead the house – and Wensicia has devised an astonishingly cruel and audacious plan to eliminate Leto and Ghanima and pave the way to a Corrino restoration.

And whilst they have eschewed the spice overdoses which would awaken their prescient powers – fearing that the loss of control from spice intoxication would open them to possession – the twins have used the vast knowledge they possess thanks to their ancestral memories to analyse the situation of the Empire and humanity as a whole, diagnose the terminal illnesses afflicting the long-term health of both, and settle on a bold plan for the salvation of humanity as a whole – the Golden Path. But the price they’ll have to pay to bring it to fruition is abhorrent and astonishing.

Meanwhile, the Preacher, a mysterious rabble-rouser, has emerged from the desert to speak out against the excesses of the current regime and give voice to the people’s discontent. Blind, ravaged by unknown ordeals, it is whispered that the Preacher is none other than Maud’Dib, come to destroy that which he built by his own hand…

In some respects, the title of Children of Dune must be interpreted as a sardonic joke. Psychologically speaking, there’s no children here; being born with a slew of adult memories has denied Alia, Leto, and Ghanima alike of any prospect of a normal childhood and an ordinary process of learning about the world around them bit by bit. To an extent, this seems like a dodge; Herbert doesn’t strike me as an author who’s particularly interested in writing plausible eight-year-olds, so by having the Atreides twins be millions of years old in terms of memories even though they’re physically less than 10 years old by the end of the novel he can just write them as weird adults.

On the other hand, I’ll give Herbert this much: he’s fully aware of how creepy this whole setup is, and leaves you in no doubt that this is meant to be creepy. You’re not meant to embrace this as cool and awesome; Leto and Ghanima here are just as unsettling as Alia was when she made her debut towards the end of Dune, and by the end of the novel Leto is seriously worrying.

When Children of Dune was published in 1976 (getting a serialisation in Analog before the standalone book release), the reviews were rather mixed, and I suspect part of that is because the book is thoroughly disinterested in playing up to audience expectations. In some respects, it’s going over familiar ground – you have young protagonists who are under threat and must experience a perilous adventure in order to come into their inheritance and make their mark on the world, like Leto is in Paul’s role in Dune, Ghanima is his understudy, and in yet another Star Wars parallel… somehow, Baron Harkonnen returned.

This is all the sort of thing which we’ve seen before in the series, and is also fairly common in the wider science fiction and fantasy field (especially if you take the surface-level reading of Dune and gloss over all the bits where it’s flagging that you’re not meant to uncritically embrace the whole Hero’s Journey thing), so you can see why people would bounce off it when the titular children of Dune turned out to be these uncanny, off-putting figures who talk like grown-ups and philosophise like academics, and when the Hero’s Journey this time around has even more uncomfortable moments and red flags for what it means for the future than Paul’s did.

Among attentive readers who clocked to the fact that restatement of theme with further elaboration is a legitimate and useful artistic technique which Herbert is using here might be startled by the restatement Herbert chooses. Before Children of Dune actually came out, it would have been entirely understandable to expect it to end the trilogy on an uplifting, triumphant air – you begin with Paul doing his flawed, muddled version of the Hero’s Journey, compromised as it is by the demands of pragmatic necessity and the fact that he’s breaking new ground in terms of the human experience, you move on to show how one or both of these kids manages to iron out the flaws in Paul’s Hero’s Journey and brings enlightened rule to the galaxy, boom, done.

And sure, that’s kind of what Herbert does from some perspectives – if those perspectives are utterly, impossibly warped beyond belief. Leto and Ghanima’s Golden Path involves one of them – Leto drawing the short straw – reaching a bizarre union with the sandtrout, the larval forms of the sandworms, using their Bene Gesserit-esque control of their own internal chemistry to reach a symbiotic relationship with them in order to become an impossibly long-lived, super-strong, near-invulnerable human-worm hybrid, the better to shepherd the Golden Path along its way and ensure the long-term survival of humanity. The problem with long-term plans, they’ve realised, is that you just can’t count on a multi-generation process to stay the course when each new generation is going to second-guess the conclusions of the previous one.

It gets grimmer. We don’t get much of what the Golden Path actually entails here – Herbert is saving a lot of that for the next book – but we get fairly strong hints that part of it involves weaning humanity off the instincts and tendencies which keep nudging it into needing authoritarian systems in the first place. The solution to this? Leto needs to be an absolute tyrant for thousands and thousands of years to beat it out of us.

It’s exactly the sort of plan you might expect to be arrived at in consultation with a range of ancestors which stretch back to our most awful and atavistic past. At the end of the book, Leto confesses to Farad’n that, actually, he’s kind of become an Abomination of a sort – one voice has become pre-eminent among the ancestors within Leto, and it’s heavily implied this is the man who founded the Pharaonic system in ancient Egypt, and he’s a cruel, authoritarian type of person. Although the end result of the Golden Path will be a humanity that doesn’t need Leto’s rulership, until then his mastery will be a heavy yoke indeed.

(I suppose he could have chosen a worse ancestor to be his lead memory-advisor. What could Baron Harkonnen possibly teach Leto? How to be a malevolent tubster who rules with an iron fist and treats people like tools to advance his schemes and needs to be toted around on suspensors because he’s bulked up too much for his regular human limbs? Actually, put a pin in that, we’ll address that further in the next book.)

Also, in honour of that whole Egypt deal he’s going to marry his sister.

Don’t get too excited! Early on in the novel, Leto and Ghanima make a firm promise to each other that they are not going to have sex with each other, despite all the pressure which will be put on them to do exactly that by the Bene Gesserit and others. The wonder twins are aware of the dangerous power of Horny in the Dune universe, and they both try to avoid it to the extent that they can. People make fun of the narration referring to Leto’s “adult beefswelling” when he is in the midst of an erotically charged vision, but I’ll offer two mitigating circumstances for that: firstly, I don’t care how many lifetimes you remember, the bit of aging where your sexuality wakes up and tests out the equipment is always embarrassing and weird so phrasing it that way is true to the experience, and secondly this is the last beefswelling Leto will experience because the sandtrout will eat his dick and balls and leave him like a Ken doll down there, come on gang, let have his moment.

For that reason, Ghanima and Leto can’t get particularly Pharaonic with it; the marriage is, like Paul and Irulan’s, a purely political measure, in this case to ensure no child of Ghanima can be presented as a potential heir to Leto. Leto is going to get weird about it, however – he nudges Ghanima and Farad’n into marrying each other (a serious enemies-to-lovers turn on Ghanima’s part) because he’s decided he’s going to run the Bene Gesserit breeding program from now on, since one individual with a lifespan of thousands of years can stay on course far better than generation after generation of personnel.

In that light, even though Leto and Ghanima have avoided being pressured into a horrid incest arrangement, the outcome here doesn’t feel like a good outcome. In comparison to Dune, Children of Dune has a much better sense of denouement, during which Herbert more directly flags how Leto’s reign is going to be an absolute horror show, as he’s flagged throughout the novel. He did this with Dune, of course, but in that Paul kept telling himself he could avoid what he foresaw; Leto steers into the crash instead.

At the same time, it’s quite evident that Herbert’s got God Emperor of Dune on his mind even as he works on this one. This is the first time I reread Children of Dune since my first encounter with it, and the first time I feel like I had a hope of understanding it, so I don’t remember much of my initial reaction, but I am fairly sure a lot of it went over my head because I didn’t know what was coming in God Emperor. Now that I am finally revisiting it, I think it is as essential to setting up God Emperor as Dune was for setting up Dune Messiah – in fact, I think they are more inseparable, because you can follow Dune by itself without taking in Dune Messiah but reading Children of Dune without God Emperor of Dune robs you of almost all the real payoff.

All that said, Children of Dune is less of a smooth read than Dune Messiah; where that book was a roller-coaster ride through Paul’s downfall, Children threatens to meander. I don’t think it does meander – I think everything in there is in it intentionally as part of a carefully-planned structure, which mostly executes well – but it can take a while to see how a lot of it falls into place, and some parts land better than others.

At its best, Children of Dune offers a slow, contemplative journey through its setting to explore philosophical ideas and give one last look at Arrakis before the time jump between novels sees the entire galaxy transformed, with some exciting new ideas seeded here and there. For instance, there’s Leto and Ghanima’s conclusion that the sandtrout – and therefore the worms – were introduced to Arrakis deliberately, and may have been bioengineered, and the later blink-and-you’ll miss it reveal that sandworms produce massive amounts of oxygen. Take those two together and it suggests that sandtrout and sandworms are biologicial planetary engineering devices, intended for use in creating dry land and a breathable atmosphere on planets which initially don’t have any.

Other bits are more elusive and nebulously depicted, including some other plot-critical bits of sandtrout biology. For me, the bit where the novel almost loses me is the sandtrout transformation, which is a little too out of left field. Not the fact that it happens – on this reread I picked up some foreshadowing I hadn’t previously – but that it has the specific effects it has. Part of the problem is that Herbert hasn’t really described the sandtrout up to this point, and I kind of suspect he intended to, but either didn’t get around to it or the part where he did was cut, because revealing that the sandtrout are just kind of blobs which Leto can smear on himself like liquid latex feels like something that should have been established earlier than the transformation scene itself.

In addition, the effects of the fusion are just bizarre. The longevity I get; it’s mentioned earlier in the book that the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit actually could, if they wanted, make themselves immortal and ageless through adjusting their body chemistry, but they don’t because if people realised they could do that, suddenly you’d get the entire galaxy trying to kidnap and dissect Reverend Mothers. Leto’s already adjusting his body chemistry in order to achieve the union with the sandtrout, so it makes sense that would end up being part of the package. Likewise, the ability to stand before a worm and not get eaten absolutely follows – it’s completely believable, and already established, that the sandworms and the sandtrout have an interrelationship which means sandworms will veer back from masses of sandtrout because they’d associate them with moisture, which is a problem for sandworms.

The bit which I don’t get is the super-strength. Once he’s got the sandtrout covering him, Leto is basically bouncing around like Goku. I get it, I get it, the sandtrout are amplifying his muscular power… but how? Why? It feels like Herbert must have an answer for that, but if there is one he doesn’t share it, he just springs it on you from utterly out of the blue. There’s some benefit to it – it adds to the disorientating nature of the transformation, which in turn knocks how you feel about Leto into flux, a suitably receptive state for the revelations to come in the rest of the novel.

There are other bits where Herbert relies on something he hasn’t actually explained to you; for instance, I’m not sure what Farad’n’s indoctrination by Jessica into the Bene Gesserit worldview was meant to achieve (though I do have theories on that which I will get to later), and more broadly I think we needed a bit more on what Jessica’s actual goals were; we get a lot of what she claims her agenda is, but despite visiting her interior thoughts reasonably often we don’t often see where she’s going, and while you can infer a lot about what she’s been doing after the fact, we don’t get much of a sense of whether she thinks her plan worked or not. Her comparative absence from the denouement, which largely plays out between Leto, Ghanima, and Farad’n, denies us the chance to get a sense of how she feels about Leto’s ascension.

As well as failing to adequately cover some bits, there’s also the odd moment where Herbert has seems to be changing his mind about stuff on the fly. For instance, he has some of the city Fremen who’ve embraced the new ways leering at some off-world dancers, a sign of their drift from the old ways in which men and women in the sietches were on a more egalitarian footing. The problem with that is that we’ve seen a bunch of stuff, particularly in the previous books, where that clearly isn’t the case; in particular, we’ve never heard about men having to be claimed as husbands by women who kill their partners in duels, but that absolutely does happen with women, and of course the Reverend Mothers among the Fremen represent a clearly gendered tradition of spiritual leadership.

The whole thing smacks of Herbert regretting some of his earlier writing and wanting to redress the balance a tad, but running into issues due to his existing worldbuilding to date. In fact, there’s a few aspects here where his approach to gender genuinely seems to be pushing in right direction – gently, subtly, but still usefully. For instance, there’s Rajia, a minor figure who shows up as one of Stilgar’s lieutenants. She’s not a prominent figure, but in context she’s clearly a political leader of militaristic bent, and given that 1976 was an era when many authors would default to writing such a character as a man that’s something. Representation among the major cast is of course important, but occasionally having a small background character who could just as easily have been a man – and, considering the role they’re in, you’d usually expect them to a man in something of this era and by this author – actually be a woman is quite positive.

Another positive development is the bit where Ghanima (I think, I might be misremembering and it’s Alia) is thinking about her early life among the Fremen and the way Fremen culture recognises the threat of Abomination and regards women as being especially prone to it and ponders, very very briefly, whether there might be something inherently sex-based there, or whether on the other hand it’s more a matter of cultural expectation. In fact the idea it might be sex-based is framed as a brief speculation that seems like the less likely option, rather than being the Real Actual Truth, and that goes a fair way towards counterbalancing the gender essentialism of earlier books. It’s a small thing, for sure, but merely saying “a lot of this may well be cultural rather than biological, you’re allowed to read it that way” goes a long way.

Of course, back in book one the best bit of female representation was offered by Lady Jessica, whose absence was sorely felt in Dune Messiah. She’s back here, and she’s great – flawed and self-doubting enough to be relatable but still using the capabilities available to her to the hilt. Her entrance is fantastic: her ship touches down and she and her aides come out to be greeted by Alia and this massive crowd, then at a gesture from Jessica, Gurney Halleck and a bunch of his goons fan out among the crowd and take out a bunch of people Jessica has marked as being up to no good.

That’s the first of several clashes for dominance between Jessica and Alia, each of which is a major highlight of the book – but as in the original Dune, Jessica is also good at turning things around when she’s in a tight spot. Duncan Idaho at one point spirits her away to Salusa Secundus to seek sanctuary with House Corrino, at the behest of the Preacher (who, being Paul, knows how to pull Idaho’s levers), and bit by bit she ends up moulding Farad’n in the manner of her choosing, as mentioned above, even though he and his aides are fully aware this might happen.

They even warn him that she might try to seduce him – it doesn’t happen (or if it does, it’s kept off-stage), but Herbert makes sure we’re aware that, even as Alia has been dabbling in the forbidden Bene Gesserit immortality techniques, Jessica has aged like a fine wine, because you can’t spell “Reverend MILF” without “Reverend Mother”. (Come to think of it, “Reverend Mother” is about as close to “Dommy Mommy” as “Honoured Matre” is… add that to the pile of stuff we’ll address later.) It’s an outbreak of horny for sure, but in a novel which mentions in passing plots to make small children marry each other and an eight year old boy’s momentary beefswelling, it’s reassuring that the most sustained and heartfelt horny is directed at this older woman who’s got it going on.

As for Farad’n’s destiny… Herbert continues the series’ gimmick of, instead of having chapter numbers, having quotes from in-universe documents leading off the different chapters. A lot of them this time around hail from one “Harq al-Ada”, which we find out at the end is Farad’n himself, having been appointed Royal Scribe by Leto and encouraged to write his histories under that nom de plume. In this, Farad’n is following in the footsteps of his Auntie Irulan – a Corrino scion nudged into a political union with the Atreides family, at the behest of an Atreides Emperor.

At the same time, Farad’n is an inverse of Irulan in many respects. Irulan’s situation was a sexless marriage to Emperor Paul, who makes no secret of the fact that Chani, as his head concubine, is all the woman he wants. Here, Farad’n is not going to get to marry at all – he’s in the concubine position to Ghanima, whose marriage to Leto will be (thank fuck) sexless, but who will be expected when she is grown up enough to bear kids with Farad’n as part of Leto’s eugenics project (and oh, what a mighty and majestic cuck chair will be needed to accommodate Leto…).

Likewise, Irulan and Farad’n’s texts end up taking entirely different angles. Irulan’s are hagiographic – perhaps at first out of calculated flattery, but by the end of Dune Messiah it’s all right, everything is all right, she’s won the struggle with herself and she loves Big Paul with the zeal of a convert. Farad’n’s writings as Harq al-Ada, however, are much more ambiguous. Many of the quotations are cited as “After Hard al-Adn”, suggesting he was influential enough that a swathe of later works imitated his style or extensively paraphrased him (and perhaps were even attributed falsely to him), but the direct quotes from his work find him attempting to work in a factually-oriented style in which he’s not exactly critical of what’s going on with Leto, but is setting his information out in a way which suggests he’s not buying into the religious pomp and ceremony around him.

This may be on purpose. I said before I have only a fuzzy idea of what Jessica wanted to achieve with Farad’n, but I think her overall aim was to nudge him into being someone with a similar ethical sense to Paul – and, specifically, Paul before his rise to power ran out of his control – so that he could be someone who could act, if not as Leto’s conscience, then as a reminder of how Leto is diverging from Paul’s vision. This seems to be what Leto himself wants; he doesn’t want a sycophant like Irulan who’ll feed his own bullshit back to him, he wants a historian of the early days of his reign who will push back at him in private and refuse to be entirely spellbound in public. Again, the point of Leto’s reign as God Emperor is to make humanity so utterly sick of singular authority figures that they’ll never try for anything similar again after he dies – not least because his route to power is so weird that nobody could imitate it.

Perhaps the best way to think of Children of Dune is that it’s the part of the sequence which is best placed to being adapted as an anime – you have Leto going super saiyan once he becomes one with the sandtrout, you have a very intense brother-sister relationship, you have Ghanima being very tsundere about Farad’n, you have characters all trying to steer events so that they go according to keikaku, and you have this rich vein of horny which keeps cropping up. Specifically, it would be suited to the sort of anime adaptation where you save on the budget by spending long episodes focusing on a character’s personal ruminations with minimal animation. It’s hardly the most immediately exciting and gripping Dune book, but it’s worth the struggle, and particularly worth paying attention.

The next book is what happens if Junji Ito becomes the art director of the anime in question…

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• You absolutely, positively cannot get over “beefswelling”.
• The sandtrout muscle amplification thing seems like a ridiculous asspull.
• You absolutely do not want to think about eight year olds being betrothed in aristocratic weddings, even if there is an understanding there’s not to be any action until the eight year old is of age.
• Eight year olds being written like adults is something you can’t get over.
• You’re not in the mood for a story that’s simultaneously more pessimistic and more Messianic than Paul’s.
• You think the tiger plan is unforgivably silly, and don’t think “Wensicia is meant to be kind of an incompetent conspirator” is a sufficient excuse.

Read This If:

• You’ve heard that God Emperor of Dune is some absolutely wild shit and want to be ready to tackle it.
• You want to see Paul die, for real this time, no takebacks, there’s a body and everything.
• You wat to see Alia kill Baron Harkonnen again, kind of.
• You want to dig into the ancestral memory stuff more.
• You were annoyed that Dune Messiah focused mostly on conspiracy and politics and much less on philosophy and mysticism of the desert, and want to get the balance between the two back again.

Consider Stopping After This If:

• You want to regard Leto as a hero.
• You are utterly disinterested in all this Golden Path business.
• You’re happy keeping your exploration of the setting to Paul’s lifetime.
• You’re a snivelling coward who fears the worm.

God Emperor of Dune

Good morning, Worm, your honour! It’s 3500 years after Children of Dune and Emperor Leto has become a larger-than-life figure – literally. The sandtrout he’s merged with have, as sandtrout will tend to do when they merge together in a single colony organisation, metamorphosed into a proto-sandworm, turning Leto into a human-worm hybrid who’s got that husky Harkonnen bod dialled up to 11. Leto spends most of his time riding about on his Royal Cart in the tunnels deep beneath his Citadel at the heart of the Sareer, the last desert of an otherwise-terraformed Dune, now known as Rakis. Authentic Fremen culture has more or less entirely died out; a small population of “Museum Fremen” live in the Sareer in a pitiful LARP of the true Fremen lifestyle.

Since Rakis has been transformed, the sandworms have died out – save for Leto, whose control of the spice supply is based on holding massive stockpiles on Rakis (and the fact that as a worm he poops the stuff). The Guild, the Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu – anyone who wishes access to the spice and its unique properties must receive rations doled out by Leto himself. In this fashion he has kept an iron grip on power, aided by the Fish Speakers – his massive army of religiously zealous and highly muscular women. Other important members of his court include Moneo Atreides, Leto’s majordomo and consigliere, and a steady line of Duncan Idaho gholas, the Tleilaxu being only too happy to mint a new one whenever the previous one breaks.

Such breakages happen often, because Duncan Idaho, as a loyal and trusty believer in the virtuous example set by the Atreides of his day, sees Leto as a nightmarish abomination. He keeps trying to kill Leto; Leto keeps killing him. The cycle continues. But now a new, bold rebel has emerged to galvanise the resistance behind her leadership – Siona Atreides, Moneo’s daughter, who just led a desperate heist to steal a range of top-secret documents from the Citadel, including Leto’s secret diaries, with which she hopes to expose him as the monster he is. What she does not realise is that Leto allowed her to do this, for he wants to see if her heart can stand the shocking facts about the God Emperor of Dune…0

Emerging in 1981, God Emperor of Dune was a hell of a move. The David Lynch movie and the boom in interest that would bring about hadn’t come out yet, and so Herbert wasn’t on as sound a financial footing as you might expect. Taking his signature series and adding a novel this alienating and strange to it – even after the disquieting Children of Dune – took some guts. The make or break question about the book is “Do you think Leto as depicted here is a fascinating portrait of someone who’s turned himself into a bizarre abomination for motivations which only cohere towards the end and which you have to be paying close attention to puzzle through, or do you think he’s a tedious windbag that Herbert uses to push a political agenda that is faintly obnoxious?”

For make no mistake: if you read God Emperor, you are going to spend a tremendous amount of time in Leto’s company. Herbert did his first draft of the novel entirely from Leto’s perspective before amending in the revision process; the Stolen Journals obtained by Siona loom large, as does the framing story where it’s centuries later and someone just excavated the Ixian “no-room” where the original journals were kept. Many chapters boil down to Socratic dialogues between Leto and one of the other characters; whenever Leto isn’t in a scene, all the other characters are talking about him.

The downside of Leto is that he’s very much used as a vehicle for the philosophical case Herbert wants to make with the novel. Frank Herbert was, politically and philosophically speaking, an odd duck. A libertarian by instinct, Herbert went on the record as believing that John F. Kennedy’s presidency did bigger damage to American culture than Richard Nixon’s – because JFK was a martyr, but Nixon, through Watergate, forced American citizens to come to terms with the fallibility of their institutions and to realise the president absolutely could be a crook.

Leto’s Golden Path, it turns out, is an exercise in teaching the Nixon lesson writ large. The whole point of his 3500 year dictatorship is to put humanity under intolerable pressure – the sort of pressure which drives technological and evolutionary adaptation. He describes himself, in fact, as a predator – in the sense that prey animals evolve to evade predators, so by acting as this tyrant on such a long scale he drives humanity to develop means of resisting exactly the sort of tyranny he’s perpetrating.

Thus his indulgence of Ix, who’ve been mentioned since the start of a series as a world which keeps flirting with the technological limitations imposed after the Butlerian Jihad if not outright breaking them; by the end of the novel they have created “no-rooms” which create spaces immune to prescient perception, and through that end up producing navigational computers which allow for effective FTL space navigation without the use of spice; this coincides with Leto’s own genetic breeding program giving rise to Siona, who has the special ability that she’s invisible to prescience.

As we’ll see in subsequent books, if you put together a no-room and an engine you have a no-ship, a vehicle where no precognitive entity can predict where it goes and which, thanks to the new navigational computers, doesn’t need spice to go there. Thus, when Siona pulls off the assassination of Leto – the surprise he’s been yearning for, because the accomplishment demonstrates he has fully succeeded in creating people he can’t predict – it kicks off the Scattering, a sudden expansion of humanity from the already multi-galactic scope of Leto’s empire into a diaspora which it is implied at the very end of the book spans multiple universes.

The outcome, then, is the ultimate security for the human race – because now humanity can keep exploring and spreading throughout such a vast range of space (and other dimensions) that no crisis could possibly be large enough to take us out as a species. In addition, the invention of technological alternatives to spice brings to an end both to Leto’s system of government and the system which persisted for 100,000 years prior to his reign – which is rule was, in essence, an accelerationist parody of. A system which is reliant on spice renders people reliant on those who control access to the spice, which is inherently vulnerable to tyranny as a result.

Anyone anti-authoritarian now has the ultimate bogeyman they can point to in support of their argument, whereas anyone who’s trying their hand at being a dictator will forevermore have the disadvantage that they’ll seem like a pathetic, weak imitation of Leto, who set a standard for tyranny no subsequent regime could possibly mimic. (He’s also changed the very nature of the sandtrout and sandworms, by virtue of being the last survivor of the species who disintegrates into a mass of sandtrout at the end, which suggests that anyone trying to imitate his rise to power in future is doomed to failure because the Leto-shard in each sandtrout won’t cooperate.)

Taken as a whole, God Emperor of Dune advances an argument that true freedom is based on three things: privacy, freedom of movement, and freedom from reliance on a central authority that controls access to essential resources. (Had he lived long enough, Herbert would absolutely have become that sort of Linux Guy.)

This is the sort of thing which is lovely in theory but has its issues in practice; in particular, whilst it makes absolute sense in a universe where access to space travel becomes widespread, nobody needs to stick around in a bad situation, and if you are short on a particular resource you can just set forth and find some planet which has it to spare and go to town on it, the whole thing seems positively Utopian.

On the other hand, you can question how applicable this political philosophy is to a situation where humanity is confined to one planet, if the ecosystem gets fucked up enough we all die, we do not have infinite resources, and fast and easy space travel to get more resources does not seem to be particularly feasible in the medium to long term. We all need access to water, it is both a massive waste of resources and a recipe for trouble if everyone tries to improvise their own water access, and whether the water company is run by the government or private enterprise you still have the potential for that “hydraulic despotism” the novel talks about. A one-ecosystem species cannot exercise the level of independence from one another Herbert dreams of and which Leto basically abuses the human race into accepting.

What saves the novel from being Frank Herbert using his perfect golden god as a mouthpiece to jabber his political ideas at you is that, precisely because Leto is a figure who is meant to be ultimately rejected and moved beyond, it is an absolutely fair reading of the novel to decide that the Golden Path is something Leto hit on because he decided inflicting one set of nightmares on humanity was preferable to the alternative nightmares off the path, and that what Leto has done to the cosmos is a monstrous obscenity, and all it is going to do is produce a rapidly diversifying and highly traumatised humanity which will, out of that chaos, birth a whole new range of obscenities. Your reading would then be supported by the next two novels in the series, where in order to have some conflict Herbert is forced to conclude that actually some really bad shit happens as a result of the Scattering.

It also helps that regardless of whether or not you agree with what Leto is trying to do, he’s the sort of car crash person you can’t look away from. One of the weirder aspects of the David Lynch Dune movie is that the Atreides are toting a pug around – Patrick Stewart memorably carries the pug into battle at one point. A rather fun interpretation is that the pug represents Paul – the result of a long breeding program that was meant to make a pliable lapdog but instead made a funny little freak. If Paul is the pug of the franchise, Leto is the long furby – an artificial monstrosity that could only be the product of a sick mind. And the mind in this case happens to be his own.

Put it this way: Leto makes Baron Harkonnen seem jolly and avuncular in comparison. Think on that.

That isn’t to say Herbert has an alibi for everything that’s going on here. The Fish Speakers are certainly something; fanatical warrior women rippling with muscle to rival a Rob Liefeld character, they feel like an odd mirror of the Bene Gesserit – overt and physically aggressive where the Bene Gesserit prefer soft power (even though they absolutely can kick ass when the situation depands it), and tools of the breeding program’s true messiah instead of being is puppetmaster.

The one thing they have in common with the Bene Gesserit is that Frank Herbert is quite horny about them. At least, unlike the Reverend Mothers and Honoured Matres, the Fish Speakers don’t have a faction name or rank title that lands close to “Dommy Mommy”, but don’t be fooled – that’s the air they take with more or less anyone other than Duncan Idaho or Leto, and much emphasis is put on their skintight uniforms and how they eagerly get stuck in whenever they are directed to do a bit of on-the-spot eugenic pairing with someone.

Duncan Idaho (the newly-decanted one) receives a bit of that treatment, but in the long run ends up with this thing going on with Siona where they’re both kind of tsundere towards each other. By the time they warn towards each other you’ve been made aware that even frail old Moneo, Siona’s dad, can kick Idaho’s ass without really trying because of having had 3500 years of genetic super-soldier selective breeding and new breakthroughs in training as an advantage over him, and Siona has the exact same edge and is in the prime of life. We aren’t at the apex of Frank injecting his femdom fetish into Dune, but we’re getting there.

It gets odder. Nayla, the Fish Speaker manipulated by Leto and Siona alike into assassinating Leto, gets off on watching Duncan Idaho climb a wall. Leto’s worm entity includes a sort of fleshy hood which can cover his head, making him resemble a giant uncircumcised cock even more than he already does. In the book’s mandatory dose of desert survivalism, Siona goes on a long stroll through the Sareer, accompanied and observed by Leto, who nourishes her by letting her suckle spice-infused moisture off his hood and rocks her to sleep in the ridges of his worm body. This is clearly meant to be incredibly disturbing, but it might be too much for some readers.

The biggest flaw in the novel is the really odd injections of homophobia and strange approach to gender. Leto apparently made the Fish Speakers an all-female army because he has decided that an army of men is too prone to rape, turning on its own citizens, and homosexuality – ideas which seem outrageous to Duncan Idaho when Moneo explains it to him. Leto believes (and it seems likely Herbert at least somewhat entertained the notion) that women are less prone to violence against innocents due to the maternal instinct, and that there’s nothing particularly wrong with homosexuality among women – there’s a bit where Idaho sees two Fish Speakers smooching and he absolutely flips the fuck out.

Now, to be fair, the explanations for all this do all come from Moneo, rather than being expounded upon by Leto directly – and one of Moneo’s memorable and rather endearing character traits is that he doesn’t understand Leto at all; whenever he’s talking to Leto he worries more about his own safety from Leto’s occasional violent outbursts than what Leto is saying. As a result, it’s wholly possible that the explanations Moneo offers are garbled misrepresentations of Leto’s actual intent.

Even so, the visceral disgust with which Duncan Idaho reacts to the mention of gay sex between male soldiers and the sight of lesbian displays of affection between Fish Speakers feels rooted in Frank Herbert’s real homophobia – the same homophobia which ruined his relationship with his younger son Bruce Herbert. It’s a firm “this is wrong!!!” reaction coming from a character who is positioned to be the chap who asks the questions the reader has (seeing as he recalls the era of the novels we are familiar with but is unaccustomed to this bewildering new era of the setting), and who is cast in an essentially well-meaning and heroic role. The Idaho gholas’ regular breakdowns and assassination attempts against Leto are, after all, meant to be signs of how far his regime has strayed from the Atreides ideals we’ve been primed to root for so far.

Another sign that Idaho is meant to be essentially good is that he falls in love with Hwi Noree – the Ixian ambassador who was grown in a lab in a no-room, designed to be a sweet little cuddlemuffin of perfect goodness and scientifically optimised kawaii-tude. An odd figure in her own right, she and Leto also fall in love, even though he patiently explains that the sandtrout ate his dick aeons ago – their impending marriage creating the opportunity for the successful assassination. Hwi comes across as truly saccharinely sweet – deliberately so, because that’s how the Ixians designed her – and may be infuriating to some readers, though she does play a significant role in really illustrating how Leto presents very different sides of himself to different people. The Leto who reveals himself to Hwi – patient, polite, protective, jovial, and friendly – is stuffed with qualities that don’t come out in his conversations with others, and once you spot that it’s all the easier to see how he adjusts how he presents himself depending on his interlocutor.

God Emperor of Dune is far from perfect – it’s a challenging read, in an unusual format, and there’s aspects of it like the homophobia which I can’t really defend. But it’s utterly original in a way that Dune itself isn’t – a novel which could only arise from the three volumes of context that the previous books set up, and which is dedicated to taking so many different aspects distinct to Dune in as extreme a direction as possible.

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• You hate the idea of Duncan Idaho being a massive homophobe. (Frank Herbert being homophobic was already covered back in the first novel.)
• You find Leto unacceptably boring.
• You find the political stance taken by the novel odious, even though you aren’t necessarily meant to fully agree with Leto.
• You’re sick of Frank’s femdom fetish.
• The Fremen are your favourites and you don’t want Dune without them.
• Leto’s wormhood nauseated you.
• Hwi Noree is too twee for thee.

Read This If:

• You’re keen to listen to a bunch of political philosophy you’ll almost certainly disagree with great swathes of, but which is expressed interestingly and thought-provokingly.
• You want the punchline to Children of Dune.
• You’re into a big dose of body horror with your Socratic dialogues.
• You’re into big muscular women who are horny for worm horrors, Duncan Idaho, and each other.
• You want the Ixians to finally do something.

Consider Stopping After This If: You like the idea of the Empire on the cusp of the Scattering with Siona and Duncan Idaho as the leaders of one significant but not unassailable faction as an end point for the setting, and are disinterested in further developments after this point. This is, in fact, where I stopped reading back when I was originally reading the series as a teen – and on rereads I tended not to go past Dune Messiah. But now I’m in for the long haul, but not before a quick stopover at…

The Dune Encyclopedia

Emerging in 1984, just before Heretics of Dune, this expansive setting guide was compiled by Willis E. McNelly, with articles written by dozens of Dune enthusiasts and the benign approval of Frank Herbert himself.

In fact, Herbert did more than just approve of it. Herbert and McNelly were pals, and McNelly was Herbert’s hand-picked expert to lead the project, telling his publishers he believed nobody else could do it justice. Herbert gave McNelly some sneak peaks at developments in God Emperor of Dune to aid the process of bringing the project together and wrote a foreword. Rumours have long swirled that he wrote some of the material under a pseudonym, and even if he didn’t he had a significant influence on the content, with him and McNelly having extensive conversations about it; some information first emerging in the Encyclopedia would end up being fully canonised in Frank’s final two Dune books.

Thus, even if Herbert never wrote a word for the Encyclopedia beyond the foreword, it’s hard not to regard him as a critical collaborator in its development. It’s frustrating, then, to see the Herbert estate suppress it so totally after Frank’s death in 1986, despite the fact that as an in-universe document based on material compiled by Leto – a concept which Frank himself pointed out could cover for any contradictions between it and other material, seeing how Leto was a manipulator and propagandist extraordinare. It would be simplicity itself to make it available as a non-canonical but still interesting text, but Brian Herbert won’t do it, probably because the shite he hires Kevin J. Anderson to write for him would look even worse compared to the Encyclopedia. After all, if Dune material written by hands other than Frank Herbert can be as true to the tone and spirit of the seties as a whole as the Encyclopedia is, what the fuck is Brian and Kevin’s excuse?

Frank Ruins It For You Here If: You think letting other people write Dune stuff set a bad precedent for later on.

Read This If:

• You want a big heap of Dune fan writing given Frank’s seal of approval.
• You want a handy reference for a bunch of Dune facts for your own fanfic or RPG projects.
• You want to stick it to Brian.

Consider Stopping After This If:

• You were fine with Bene Gesserit, you were fine with Fish Speakers, but if Herbert adds one more faction of dommy mommies you’re going to lose your temper.
• More generally, you’re done with Frank’s horniness and absolutely don’t want to get to the bit where he gets out of control.
• Even more generally, you think Frank Herbert’s stuff is best when it’s filtered through a sympathetic sounding board – whether it’s his wife Bev, who he brainstormed a lot of the first four novels with, or McNelly – and the idea of “unfiltered Frank” fills you with foreboding.
• You think the technology outlined in the Dune Encyclopedia is neat and cool but it would break your suspension of disbelief if the setting suddenly had genetically engineered animals to take the place of simple furniture.
• You’ve had enough Duncan Idaho content.
• You’re either bored of the Bene Gesserit, or enjoy them but don’t need to know the actual details of their sexy sex secrets.

Heretics of Dune

It is 1500 years after the death of Leto. Ixian no-ship technology and navigational computers, combined with chaos in the wake of the God Emperor disintegrating into a horde of sandtrout, has catalysed the Scattering. Now humanity is spread among a swathe of different universes, with numerous factions heading out into the great unknown.

The Tleilaxu discovery of a worm-free process to synthesise spice, alluded to at the end of God Emperor of Dune, now vastly outpaces Rakis’ production of the stuff, rendering the world an economic backwater notable mainly for being the centre of Leto’s priesthood; even the Fish Speakers have abandoned it, and the terraforming efforts have been abandoned, the verdant zones now limited to belts around the poles as the sandworms reclaim the planet. Now the Bene Gesserit have heard curious whispers from Rakis: Sheeana is a worm rider, Sheeana is a worm rider, Sheeana is a worm rider, yeah!

Specifically, Sheeana is a young girl from an impoverished desert community – not Fremen, that way of life is extinct now – whose family all died when a sandworm ate her home village. Understandably upset, Sheeana went to tell the worm off, fully expecting it to kill her too – but then it listened to her and then allowed her to ride it to the city of Keen (as Arrakeen used to be called). Sheeana is a descendant of none other than Siona – could the fragment of Leto that exists in each worm be responding to that? Either way, it prompts the curiosity of the Bene Gesserit, who step up a little project of their own – the care and rearing of a young Duncan Idaho ghola.

To bring the Idaho project to fruition, Mother Superior Taraza, the ultimate leader of the Bene Gesserit, summons Miles Teg, a military commander of the Bene Gesserit so steeped in their service that he’s close to mastering some of their techniques for himself. Teg is to take control of Duncan Idaho’s security, as well as teaching him the way of the warrior; in addition, as a descendant of the Atreides line, Teg is well-placed to apply the trauma necessary to reactivate Idaho’s hidden memories. Joining Teg will be Reverend Mother Lucilla, a Bene Gesserit Imprinter who knows their secret arts of binding people to their service through sexual pleasure, who will be molesting the boy when the time is right in order to Imprint him. All this must take place on the world of Gammu, where the original Duncan Idaho had his childhood – for Gammu is the new name for the former Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime, now rejuvenated and rendered somewhat more wholesome at the hands of “Danian” settlers from Caladan.

Meanwhile, other factions are at work. The Tleilaxu are also interested in developments on Rakis – a world they would dearly like to gain control of, since that would give them a monopoly on the spice. They are also perturbed by a mysterious document which is circulating – the Atreides Manifesto – which cuts close to certain philosophical and religious positions the Tleilaxu Masters hold dear. Thus, the Master Waff is going to go forth on an investigation of his own. The Rakian priesthood who worship Leto as the Divided God may be the sort of religious zealots that the Bene Gesserit are experts at manipulating, but the different opinions among them as to Sheeana’s significance risk breaking out into violent conflict.

The Bene Gesserit themselves must deal with internal factionalism. Taraza is working towards an audacious goal, and not everyone within the Sisterhood agrees it is for the best. Reverend Mother Schwangyu, overseer of the Bene Gesserit Keep on Gammu, has reservations about the Duncan Idaho project so severe that they may lead her to compromise it. And Taraza must send her most trusted ally, Reverend Mother Odrade, to Rakis so oversee things there – trusting that Lucilla and Miles Teg will handle matters on Gammu.

And then there’s the new faction that has taken the field – a group returning back to the Old Imperium from the depths of the Scattering. Led by women whose eyes turn a strange shade of orange when they are angry, the group has characteristics in common with the Bene Gesserit, suggesting they’re descended from Bene Gesserit cells that went off in the Scattering and resorted to strange new methods to compensate for their lack of access to the spice. They are shockingly aggressive, they seek to openly dominate all that come before them, and they are gathering forces for their big push to become the preeminent faction of the Old Imperium. They are… the Dommy Mommies! Whoops, sorry, I mean they are… the Honoured Matres!

Actually, maybe I was being more accurate the first time, because this is where Herbert stops bothering to even disguise his fetishes. This is the horniest Dune novel so far, and given some of the action that’s come before that’s setting a high bar.

The thing about letting your fetishes guide your writing is that it’s kind of an all or nothing prospect. People have three basic responses to other people’s kinks: “wow, that’s kind of hot, tell me more”, “ew, that’s sick and disgusting, stop that”, and “well I’m glad you enjoy that but it just seems rather silly to me”. So the more you centre the stuff that gets you off, the more audience members you drive away as a result of the second two impulses – and it’s still possible to fumble it with the people who dig the idea of what you’re doing if the execution is jarringly clumsy.

In this instance, the Bene Gesserit/Honoured Matres feud reads strongly like Frank Herbert trying to comment on the philosophical tussle between second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and the new wave of self-described sex-positive feminism that emerged after that. Men deciding they’ve got the answer to some big feminist debate risk making themselves look like absolute asses, of course, but in principle Herbert was well-placed to have a stab at this, having spent thousands of pages establishing the Bene Gesserit as a faction controlled by women with a particular interest in controlling reproductive and sexual behaviour and establishing his credentials as a writer who can take nuanced and intricate approaches to his subject matter.

That isn’t quite how it lands. We don’t learn very much about the Honoured Matres this time around – the next book will go deeper into their affairs – but we do get some basic ideas of the differences between them and the Bene Gesserit; just as the Bene Gesserit are called “witches” a lot in the series, they in turn call the Honoured Matres “whores”, and not lightly.

The main thing we are given to understand here is that whilst the Bene Gesserit are dommy mommies with an emphasis on “mommies”, what with their breeding program and all, the Honoured Matres are dommy mommies with the emphasis on “dommy”. Although they can and do manipulate people from the shadows, the Matres don’t want to stay there; infiltration by their forces is a mere prelude to them taking power overtly and openly, with maximum violence and terror tactics, and they have weaponised their sexual techniques and deployed them on a widespread scale in order to enslave men they find useful. In particular, they do all of that brazenly and openly, to cow populations into submission and to cultivate a willing network of collaborator simps hoping to get the whole “sexual brainwashing through ultimate pleasure” treatment.

Let’s be clear – the Bene Gesserit do that kind of sexual brainwashing too, they just keep it secret. The much-quoted section of this novel about “vaginal pulsing” isn’t about Honoured Matre techniques – it’s Lucilla arguing for her capacity to disguise herself as a Honoured Matre and pass as one of their expert sex-havers through her exhaustive Bene Gesserit training. That’s deeply silly, even in context, and is one of those moments where Frank is probably revealing a bit too much about his own experiences and fantasies. The truth hinted at in this section is all too evident: dear Bev Herbert learned Kegel exercises, and it absolutely blew Frank’s mind.

This is where the horniness of Heretics of Dune reaches back and highlights the horniness in the rest of the Dune series – for remember, it’s at the climax of the first novel that Jessica reveals to Paul that Feyd has almost certainly been Imprinted by a Bene Gesserit agent and tips him off about the trigger word that would make Feyd go limp if used, and even in that context it was clear that this was done through sexual techniques; right from the start of the novel, there’s stuff about how Jessica could have made Leto obey her absolutely, but she opted not to because that’s not the sort of relationship she wanted. Herbert was always clear that the Bene Gesserit were covert femdom witches – it’s just that Heretics is now being startlingly direct about the mechanics of how that works, and it’s deeply ridiculous.

Where the Bene Gesserit/Honoured Matres distinction really works is in the consideration of covert power vs. overt power – and how the Honoured Matres’ pursuit of violent, dictatorial control over all they survey is a recipe for trouble. The Bene Gesserit are horrified by the Matres’ use of sexuality not because they don’t think you should never do that to men – there’s passing references here of the Reverend Mothers having harems of toyboys they use to practice techniques on or let off steam – but because they think if you’re too blatant and direct about the pursuit of power you’ll inevitably invite a backlash which will destroy you and bring about major collateral damage into the bargain.

This is the dual threat the Honoured Matres pose to the Bene Gesserit: there’s the direct emergency caused by their violent incursions, but there’s also the risk that the inevitable pushback won’t make fine distinctions between Bene Gesserit or Honoured Matre and just target any mommy who seems too dommy. This is, perhaps, where the most useful story about tensions between different generations of feminists could happen, with the Bene Gesserit standing for an older generation keen to conserve the victories won and cautiously aware of how bad things can get, and the Honoured Matres as a younger generation impatient to accelerate and push forward the progress of change.

By the end of the next novel, the two organisations end up merging, and though Frank Herbert’s death denies us his vision of what would have resulted from that, it feels like he’s setting up a well-signposted trajectory early on here (much as a lot of what happened with Paul Atreides or Leto McWormbody was telegraphed well ahead of time). My hunch is that Frank’s conclusion to the trilogy would have focused on a sort of Hegelian dialectic of femdom where the thesis of “dommy, but mostly mommy” meets the antithesis of “mommy, but mostly dommy’ and gives rise to a synthesis of perfectly balanced dommy mommies.

If the horny in the novel were largely restricted to two femdom factions disagreeing over political philosophy as the men caught between them must decide which side they’re going to sub for, this would be fine. You’d end up with a book which would seem silly if the fetish stuff weren’t relevant to your interests, and pruriently exciting if it were, and that would make it a fairly inferior sequel to a series that’s made its name on dwelling on broader and bigger ideas than that.

However, one aspect of the novel is seriously distasteful, taking its treatment of sexuality outside of the realm of “fun fantasy” into “Frank, please, settle down“. This is the Duncan Idaho ghola, who’s in his early-to-mid teens and under what we’d understand as being the age of consent for much of the novel but ends up targeted for abuse first by Lucilla and later by Murbella, a Honoured Matre who captures him before he turns the tables on her.

On the one hand, Lucilla doesn’t actually force herself on him; on the other hand, it’s made clear that she probably would have if Miles Teg weren’t there, and whilst Teg is a loyal servant of the Bene Gesserit order in general, it’s very clear that Taraza commands his ultimate loyalty and so he’s not to be swayed by Reverend Mothers trying to get him to ignore the Mother Superior’s orders.

Murbella very much does force herself on him; this, however, is after the memories of the original Duncan Idaho get reawakened in him; the whole “these people who are physically children have more knowledge and recollected experience of sexuality than kids ordinarily have because of the storehouse of memories in them” thing has come up in the Dune series before, most particularly with Alia, Leto, and Ghanima, but at least in those instances nobody tries to molest them like that – it was something which made these characters who had child-aged bodies and unthinkably ancient memories seem weird and uncanny and off-putting.

Here, Herbert actually makes sex stuff happen to teen Duncan. It is, at least, meant to be a bad thing – a moment of supreme danger where it seems like all is lost – but it’s still a deeply reprehensible way to introduce Murbella, a character who the next book will expect us to warm to, and the whole thing is described in a way which comes across as more steamy and horny than alarming and abusive. I’d like to think that Herbert simply forgot that Idaho was physically underage in this scene – once his original memories come back he keeps writing Duncan like he’s the adult Duncan, after all – but there’s a scene in the next book which suggests otherwise.

And, of course, even if Duncan weren’t physically underage, what is going in that scene is pretty clearly rape. The way it’s narrated feels like it’s meant to be a cool sexy fantasy from the perspective of the recipient – the reader is meant to identify with Duncan Idaho and experience this fantasy of being sexually dominated by a lethally strong warrior woman, and I get it, Frank, I have plenty of inappropriate thoughts about Rhea Ripley, but a fun pretend fantasy for one audience member can be an awkwardly romanticised depiction of an abusive sexual attack from a different perspective. I can see why some readers would stop reading right there, and absolutely wouldn’t blame them for doing so; sexy fiction about non-consensual sexual situations is the sort of thing which shouldn’t be sprung on unsuspecting readers, and I don’t think your typical Dune reader comes to the series for that.

Anyone who did stop reading once they got to the molestation scene will miss the bit where it flips from being Frank uncomfortably oversharing to Frank throwing in the silliest plot twist in the entire series. See, when Murbella molests Duncan using the Honoured Matres’ version of Imprinting techniques, it activates the super secret hidden programming the Tleilaxu put into him, the nature of which has been a mystery hanging over the entire book.

In a fun twist, the hidden programming is encapsulated in the memories of the other Duncan Idaho gholas, who the Tleilaxu have been carefully harvesting samples from for this purpose over the millennia, so even as Duncan awakens to his new abilities he’s slammed with flashbacks to being murdered by God Emperor Leto over and over and over again. It’s the new abilities themselves that seem goofy: the idea is that he’s been invested with the ability to resist Imprinting and a compulsion to assassinate Bene Gesserit who try to Imprint him.

He doesn’t kill Murbella – she’s not Bene Gesserit so that part of the reflex doesn’t activate – but he does resist her Imprinting and turn the tables on her with his Tleilaxu-given special advantage: the most excellent sexual technique in the galaxy, giving him the capacity to switch mid-intercourse and prompt his partner to switch in turn. He’s the Dicksatz Haderach – the Cock Emperor of Dune!

Not only does this make the whole “taking over the universe through super-sex” angle seem even sillier than it already is, but it’s also a humilation of the Honoured Matres in one of the two fields (fighting and fucking) which they are meant to be absolute gold star galaxy-leading prodigies. There’s two other times when the Honoured Matres try to seduce one of the male characters, and these are also failures – Waff assassinates the one who tries to corrupt him, as does Miles Teg. This has the unfortunate effect of making the Honoured Matres seem absolutely rubbish at the whole femdom sexual brainwashing thing, because we get one full attempt at it and two preludes to it and they fail every goddamn time.

Sure, sure, they have these men around them who seem pretty loyal – one of them gets sent to the next room for a quick reward at one point, and if you were working a job where you got a blowjob break whenever you hit performance targets you’d probably be fairly motivated too. However, we encounter none of these characters before the Honoured Matres worked their sexual mojo on them, which means we don’t really have much sense of how absolutely they can turn you into their puppet should they decide to fuck you instead of kill you.

Weirdly, this is one area where I think Herbert was not horny enough. If he’s already being this horny elsewhere in the book, why not throw in a scene demonstrating how successful sexual Imprinting at the hands of the Honoured Matres is experienced by the recipient? For that matter, we probably need a few scenes of Honoured Matres absolutely decimating skilled fighters (rather than that struggle happening somewhere out of sight), to better sell us on the idea that they’re these ultimate badasses.

Miles Teg slaughtering his way through a building full of them and their agents is one thing – he’s a high-grade super-soldier in his own right who, for reasons I’ll go into later, has ended up going Super Saiyan, but Waff is a weird little gnome-man who’s able to get the drop on them, which makes the Matres seem kind of pathetic. With such onstage humiliations to their name, they need to have some corresponding spotlight time showing them getting their own back for them to seem like the terrible adversaries of the Bene Gesserit they are meant to be.

This problem is especially acute in a book where they’re offstage a lot of the time – it’s in the next book which we get more insight into what’s going on with them. Initially, I thought that Herbert was doing something interesting – introducing them early on as a weird enigma, then largely focusing on other matters as there’s distant hints that they’re up to something, and then having them attack in force and seeing all hell break loose. As it stands, they’re largely underwhelming until the Earth-shattering – or, rather, Rakis-shattering – end of the book, where they subject Rakis to total planetary ecosystem destruction because Miles Teg and Duncan Idaho upset them that much.

Part of the issue is that when the big Honoured Matres push happens, it’s a little muddled and confused. A lot of this unfolds on Gammu, which we are told has become a sort of regular stopping-off point for people coming back from the Scattering with tremendous wealth and whatnot, except we’re not shown much of that and the locals of Gammu – including the Bene Gesserit – don’t seem to learn much of anything of what it’s like out there in the wider Scattering from these returnees.

I think the idea is that the Honoured Matres have been gathering power bit by bit on Gammu, until suddenly the world is being run by them without anyone necessarily realising that anything very fundamental has changed. There’s a big probnlem with that, though, and that’s that Gammu has a very significant Bene Gesserit presence – they have a whole Keep there, Miles Teg is involved enough in planetary defence that the Sisterhood seems to be either responsible for that or is at least a big enough presence onworld to have a say, and so on.

And they’ve been here for generations – the Tleilaxu keep hatching them Duncan Idahos, then those Duncan Idahos keep getting assassinated before they come of age (presumably because the Tleilaxu don’t want the anti-Imprinting stuff to be discovered until they decide it’s time to unleash their anti-Bene Gesserit weapon), they’ve been present there for at least long enough for a bunch of Duncan Idahos to come and go – the one who’s around in this novel is the twelfth, so the project has probably been going for well over a century. In addition, we know from God Emperor of Dune that the Bene Gesserit were active on Giedi Prime back then, where they play a key role in uncovering a cult that worships Alia, so they’ve probably been about for at least that long.

Here’s the problem: if the Bene Gesserit have been on Gammu for generations running this project, you’d expect them to have a much tighter handle on what’s going on with the local government than they seem to. Their influence ought to be pervasive, and they should be twigging to the Honoured Matre infiltration of key institutions much earlier on. If it were a matter of the Matres recruiting Bene Gesserit defectors, that would be something, but as it is it really comes across as the Bene Gesserit (and Miles Teg as their security guy) utterly dropping the ball with what’s happening onworld to a truly unusual extent. They should have the planetary government finely-tuned to their specifications, they should twig to outside influences fucking with that with uncanny easy, and they should know way more intelligence on the people who are coming back from the Scattering in general than they seem to do.

Then again, that would require Frank Herbert to have arrived at firm ideas as to what it’s like out there among the Scattered worlds, and he doesn’t seem to have any ideas for major Scattering factions here beyond “regular factions from the Old Empire, but tweaked a bit”. Fundamentally, the Scattering was a cheque too big to cash whilst still making the series feel meaningfully of a piece with what came before. By rights, the scions of this universe-hopping diaspora should be transformed in ways which are utterly unexpected, to the point where they no longer appear tonally or stylistically appropriate to the Dune universe specifically because they’re from other universes. Instead, we get “what if there were a dommy mommy who was as muscular and aggressive as a Fish Speaker and subtle and clever as a Reverend Mother, and she wanted to spank you on the butt and sexytimes you into willing slavery?” or “what if there were people who came back who were a bit like Tleilaxu, maybe, but different, but I’m not specifying details on what’s different about them yet?”

This gives the impression that Herbert is desperately mirroring and reconfiguring and retconning bits of his universe in search of something to hang a plot on and unable to find one which definitively breaks from Dune and the spice, which surely, surely, must be the whole point of God Emperor of Dune if anything is. Here we get to the basic problem with Heretics of Dune – the one which would still be there even if Herbert dialled back on the horny. Ultimately, this is a book which Herbert never intended to exist. The original trilogy told a story he’d been workshopping as far back as the first novel; God Emperor of Dune offered as comprehensive a capstone to that as could be. Heretics, on the other hand, smells of being the book you write when there’s a big movie coming out of your work and the publishers will offer you generous terms for yet another sequel.

At a stretch, I suppose you could argue that the point of Heretics of Dune is “failure to launch”; the truly vital and dynamic forces of humanity left on the Scattering and never looked back, and what’s left is the husk of the Imperial culture left behind due to an inability to imagine a life away from the established pattern, or because their institutional structures were too closely tied to stuff only available in the Old Empire like the spice, and now the Bene Gesserit’s faildaughters who couldn’t hack it out in the wider multiverse and have come back to old haunts for want of better options.

That would certainly track with other stuff going on with the setting. The main body of the Fish Speakers have declined to the point where they are essentially vassals of Ix, suggesting that Herbert didn’t really have much idea for what to do with them post-Leto – something of a letdown given the potential they had under Siona and her Duncan’s leadership. By having them fade away and join Ix, Herbert is basically signalling that they’re never going to be all that important, because I think by this stage he realised on some level that despite teasing Ix since the first book, he was never actually going to bother to do very much with the place; Hwi Noree and her plotline in God Emperor of Dune is the most Ix content we get, and this tells us startlingly little about Ix, probably because Herbert just didn’t detail it very much.

If “failure to launch” is the big theme, this puts Heretics in the position of casting the wheat aside to focus on the chaff – a challenging prospect to make a compelling story out of. Perhaps the best way this angle could have been developed would be to set aside the big galactic politics stuff entirely – commit to having the Old Empire be a true backwater where events of major interstellar importance simply don’t happen any more because all the action is out in the Scattering, and do a doomy little coda focused on Rakis and its priesthood as they scrabble to find meaning in a world where their God has literally disintegrated. It would be much more personal in scale than Heretics, but it would be just as apt a farewell to Rakis as the storyline we get here.

Beyond a concept like that, if the spice-focused Old Empire’s way of doing things has run out of road there’s not much more to tell about it beyond depicting its final fall, which this takes altogether too long to get around to. In its earlier sections, the novel does provide more of an inside look at the scheming of the Bene Gesserit and other factions than we’ve had before, with Rakis as an important but not sole field on which this game plays out, rather than Dune being utterly central and the factional stuff colouring what goes on there; that, at least, offers novelty. On the other hand, spending a lot of time on the finer points of conspiratorial logistics that past novels would have glossed over is a good way to eat up page count and offer the impression of plot progression whilst concealing how thin that plot actually is, and how short the novel is on truly new ideas or substantive developments of prior concepts.

Likewise, the last section of the novel is highly action-packed – there’s more exciting fights in this than there are in the last three books by quite some margin – but just as the conspiracy and politicing feels like the sort of stuff that past novels would have got through substantially more briskly or kept offstage, here the action sequences seem to be catering to spectacle to make up for the lack of substance. In the original Dune, we didn’t get the blow-by-blow account of Paul’s forces’ advance on Arrakeen, we got time jumps to the really important bits of the conflict; an awful lot of Heretics feels like the sort of thing which would have been delegated to a time jump in prior novels, an exercise in Herbert offering us spectable to make up for a lack of substance.

Some of that spectacle is rather interesting. In parallel with Duncan getting molested, poor Miles Teg suffers his own torture – captured by agents of the Honoured Matres, he’s subjected to an interrogation device known as the T-Probe (no, not the T-Probe!), a sequences which again ends up weirdly kinky when they start putting electrodes on his dick. The experience unlocks super-abilities of his own – not implanted by the gholas, but the product of his Atreides heritage, including super-speed and a sort of prescience which can overcome the Siona gene and perceive no-ships (which suggest it works on a somewhat different basis to that exhibited by prescient characters prior to this).

That’s all a bit silly and grimdark, but it also leads into some cool action sequences, and between Teg’s journey incognito to try and find allies on the mean streets of Gammu and Duncan and Lucilla’s own fugitive experiences, we get a sense of Herbert exploring the idea of big city deprivation as an ecological force that does damage to its inhabitants. At its worst, this feels a lot like the sort of scaremongering around big multicultural cities common on the right, but at its best this, plus the greater embrace of technology in the setting due to the old taboos fading, makes this feel like Herbert flirting with having a go at this whole cyberpunk thing the kids seem to be into these days.

And that’s another example of an alternative, better novel which Heretics of Dune suggests but doesn’t quite deliver on – alongside the low-key story about a gradually failing community of Leto cultists on Rakis I mentioned earlier, Herbert could have given us a standalone non-Dune erotic cyberpunk novel about characters on the run from a shadowy femdom conspiracy in a grimdark city. It’s not exactly a highbrow literary concept, but if you put mirrorshades on the Honoured Matres they could strut into any of William Gibson’s sprawl novels without looking out of place in the slightest.

Such a book could also be a chance for Herbert to exorcise some of the other impulses that creep in here. The concept of “chairdogs” showed up in Herbert’s non-Dune novel Whipping Star and also appear here, and they’re exactly what they sound like: genetically engineered doggos who serve as chairs. This just feels like an unearned exercise in weirdness for the sake of it, without in-universe justification. At least the suspensor chairs of previous volumes had the advantage of being able to adjust their height to suit the user, but there’s no convincing advantage offered for using furniture which presumably needs to eat and poop from time to time.

On the other hand, I was quite interested in some of the revelations we get about the Tleilaxu here, in which it turns out the inner circle of the Tleilaxu have been using the ghola memory recovery technique to perpetuate themselves for millennia, and are a hidden sect of “Zensunni Sufis”. Just like the Bene Gesserit outwardly appear to be some manner of religious order but are actually atheistic scientists who treat religion like a tool, the Bene Tleilax outwardly seem to be irreligious scientists but are secretly a cult that cleave closely to their religion.

Given how the Tleilaxu Masters all look like horrid little goblins and talk like supervillains, this would seem Islamophobic except everyone in Dune ends up talking like a supervillain sooner or later, and because it’s evident that despite the way they bullshit themselves they clearly haven’t maintained the integrity of their religion in the slightest. For one thing, they can’t have been using the ghola memory recovery technique before Dune Messiah, because that’s the story where that breakthrough is discovered in the first place, which means the very basis of their leadership has changed in the past 5000 years; for another, they truly believe that God Emperor Leto was not God, but his Prophet, which means that despite their Zensunni and Sufi philosophical roots they are not Muslims by any widely-accepted definition (and Leto, if he knew about their inner beliefs, would have probably thought they were total idiots who were failing to learm the lesson he was beating into humanity).

And then, of course, there’s the big reveal about their axlotl tanks – which it turns out are women reduced to the status of breeding equipment, in a deeply horrid body horror fashion. This is another idea which is so horrid that I can see why people would flinch back from it, but on the other hand it does at least have some manner of thematic and narrative logic to it; one thing which has been fairly consistent about the Tleilaxu across the series is that their technology has this whiff of dehumanisation about it, and that takes the idea to a horribly logical conclusion.

Further, it really underscores the differences between them and the Bene Gesserit – who, recall, have retained the Butlerian Jihad’s taboos against certain types of reproductive technology. This in turn plays into the theme woven throughout the novel of these mirrored opposites; you have the ancient Mentat warrior Miles Teg trying to reawaken the memories of the child Duncan Idaho who hides the memories and skills of an ancient Mentat warrior within him. You have the Bene Gesserit and the Tleilaxu, the Bene Gesserit and the Honoured Matres, and the Tleilaxu and the Honoured Matres all being odd mirror images of one another. You have the Harkonnen homeworld cleared of Harkonnens and setttled by the folk of Caladan with all their Atreides heritage, only for them to slide back towards Harkonnen ways. The idea that there is something of ourselves in our opposites is emphasised constantly.

But for every bit of Heretics of Dune where you think Herbert is doing something elevated and clever, there’s another bit where he’s doing the goofiest fucking shit you’ll ever see in this series. There’s even a joke about “three P-O” being a term for the sort of person who “surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances”, which is delivered in such a belaboured and heavy-handed way that Frank might as well be waggling his eyebrows at you and poking you in the ribs and going “eh? Eh? You get it? Because Star Wars sucks and stole my best ideas and dumbed them down, right?”

Well, Frank, maybe George Lucas did do that, but he won’t need to dumb things down all that much from where they are here. Heretics of Dune feels like the lowest common denominator 1980s action movie of the franchise for half of its page count (there’s even a bit where Taraza visits Miles Teg to lure him out of retirement, as in countless 1980s actioners from Commando to the Rambo sequels), and for the other half it feels like Herbert spending interminable amounts of time setting up something to happen later, rather than just getting on with it. I’d say “why would Lucas even bother stealing anything from this?”, but hey, he gave Amidala and Anakin that meetcute in The Phantom Menace when Anakin is absurdly too young for her, so maybe he borrowed creepiness around underage kids from this, that’s fine.

Look. It’s quite clear why Heretics of Dune is the way it is. Bev Herbert, who had been Frank’s regular sounding board, source of encouragement, manuscript typer and general collaborator and supporter during the writing of the previous novels, was terminally ill. Where she’d have previously been providing all that help, as well as I imagine saying “Settle down, Frank…” when he started getting too horny in his writing, instead Frank was obliged to divide his time between beavering away on Heretics of Dune and caring for Bev as her condition deteriorated. In an afterword to Chapterhouse: Dune, Herbert would allude to there being some matters of personal care that Bev couldn’t bear letting anyone other than Frank helping her with, which kind of tells you all you need to know about how grim things were getting.

Under such circumstances, it’s totally forgivable if someone ends up off their game; it would be very unusual if someone turned out their best work at such a time. That said, understanding the conditions the novel was written under doesn’t magically make it better.

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• You find the Tleilaxu crypto-Muslims much more offensive than the Fremen crypto-Muslims and the axlotl tank reveal is too sickening for you to stomach.
• You don’t want to read about an underage teen boy getting molested by an Honoured Matre.
• You’re not keen on a faction based around what is, from an in-universe perspective, pretty undeniably rape.
• You prefer Dune books where stuff of substance actually happens throughout the novel, instead of all in a rush at the end.

Read This If:

• You just can’t get enough dommy mommies, you wish the Bene Gesserit were less coy, and you’re willing to take the Honoured Matres stuff as a horny fantasy that doesn’t reflect things you think should actually happen in real life.
• You want a glimpse of how Frank was adapting to the cyberpunk era.
• You’re as big of a Duncan Idaho fan as Frank Herbert is and want even more Duncan stuff.
• You’re genuinely fond of the Bene Gesserit for non-fetish reasons and you want a story which puts a lot of spotlight on them.
• On reading ahead in this review you’ve decided you want to give Chapterhouse: Dune a go; unfortunately, Heretics of Dune is the essential homework you need to do if you want to fully enjoy the genuinely good bits of Chapterhouse.

Consider Stopping Here If:

• The Honoured Matres stuff ruins it for you.
• You outright dislike the characters; many of them will be coming back next time.
• You’re satisfied with the conclusion of this one as an ending that’s full of exciting possibilities for the future but also draws a line under the saga of Arrakis/Rakis.

Chapterhouse: Dune

It is around ten years after Heretics of Dune. Rakis has been destroyed, but the spice endures: one surviving worm was smuggled off-world by Odrade and Sheeana, and brought in a no-ship to Chapter House, the hidden headquarters planet of the Bene Gesserit. Now, for the sake of securing their own source of the spice, the Sisters have converted the worm to sandtrout and unleashed them on the planet, accepting that its ecosystem will ultimately become like that of Rakis as the worms encapsulate moisture and produce worms.

The no-ship has been parked onworld, now a secure containment facility for certain individuals who cannot as yet be allowed to roam freely. There’s Scytale, who apparently was promoted from Face Dancer to Master somewhere along his chain of ghola lives, and who is now the last of the Tleilaxu after the rest were genocided by the Honoured Matres. There’s Murbella, the Honoured Matre defector, who has established a fierce mutual sexual bond with Duncan. And there’s Duncan himself, who cannot leave the ship because as a clone of someone from 5000 years ago he lacks the Siona-derived gene which would render him invisible to prescience – so if he left the no-field, the Matres’ enslaved Guild Navigators would find him, and lead the Matres to Chapter House.

And that’s a problem, because the Matres are intent on destroying the Bene Gesserit – ideally after extracting their secrets from them. In the face of the Matres’ violence, which acknowledges no limits and spits in the face of the Great Convention, the Bene Gesserit have been pushed to extremes of their own. Already they have gained the secret to making a viable axlotl tank from Scytale, and have used this to make a ghola of their own – a ghola of Miles Teg, their ultimate military commander, who when his memories awaken will have crucial intelligence on the Matres as well as the Guild planet of Junction, where the Matres have made their headquarters.

Presiding over these grim tasks is Odrade, who is now Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit. Yet when she was on Rakis, Odrade found a hidden cache of spice left behind by the God Emperor, in which he also hid a last taunting message for the Bene Gesserit warning them that if their order did not find a higher purpose for itself than mere survival, it risked irrelevance and extinction. So even as Odrade advances her audacious plan to bring the Matres to heel, she takes time to observe the little things and savour the last days of Chapter House’s old way of life, which between the changing climate and the political upheaval which will occur if Odrade’s plan comes to fulfillment will be lost forever…

This is the first time since the original trilogy that there isn’t a millennia-long time skip and a near-total turnover of characters from novel to novel, which makes the shift from Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune all the more extraordinary; whereas Heretics saw Frank’s horniness escaping containment and running riot in a story where he was stacking up too many characters and narrative strands and really giving sufficient nourishment to any one of them to allow them to thrive, Chapterhouse represents a marked improvement.

It’s not un-horny – it wouldn’t be Dune if that were so – but the horniness is deployed more sparingly and more thoughtfully (except for one seriously bad decision which I will get into later). It’s still got tons of characters – almost everyone of significance who was alive at the end of Heretics of Dune comes back here – but Herbert does a better job of triaging who gets focused on and who’s a supporting figure. This helps make the plot seem more focused, particularly since Frank actually has a core thematic thrust he wants to build the novel around here and which is well-served by the character he chooses to focus on.

Specificially, Chapterhouse: Dune is primarily Odrade’s story; we primarily follow her, cutting away to a few other viewpoint characters in alternating chapters but with Odrade as the through-line carrying things through to the end. Even after her death towards the end, she remains a presence thanks to the Bene Gesserit pooling of Reverend Mother memories – dubbed here the Sharing – which means that “Odrade Within” stays on to guide Murbella in her new role as joint Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit and Great Honoured Matre, having won the former office by saving Odrade’s last memories in her dying moments (and being confirmed in the position by the council) and the latter by killing the previous Great Honoured Matre, because leadership of the Matres basically works on Sith rules.

And leadership is the theme here – specifically, it’s an exploration of how leadership can be exercised in a way which does not elevate the leader above the community. The latter is both the mistake the Honoured Matres make and also the thing which Leto II was trying to force humanity into veering away from; the former is the Bene Gesserit ideal which Odrade attempts to live, as she works to find a purpose for the Bene Gesserit amounting to more than merely perpetuating the survival of the Bene Gesserit.

This, then, is another political philosophy novel from Herbert, though it’s also one where he seems to be taking a broader view than the right-libertarian leanings he expressed in real life and which colour God Emperor of Dune. After all, the Bene Gesserit here are absolutely not a libertarian organisation, and the idea of checks and balances he explores here is rooted in the idea of the community exercising continuous observation of and commentary on its leaders, up to the point of challenging their leadership. (There’s one bit where Odrade has to face a leadership contest, for instance.) As well as selecting people for her Council who are willing to argue with her and push alternative views, Odrade is just as subject to panopticion-like surveillance as the prisoners of the no-ship.

What results isn’t democracy as such – there’s communities which are collapsing bit by bit as the spread of the desert transforms the ecology of Chapter House, the people in there aren’t Reverend Mothers and don’t get to vote Odrade or her policy out, they just have to accept it and adjust or join one of the Bene Gesserit groups heading out into the Scattering (Odrade sending waves of these in case the main body of the Bene Gesserit gets wiped out).

It is, however, a fascinating thought experiment in how the Bene Gesserit would actually govern themselves, given what has been established about them in prior novels, and a deeper dive into the core of the organisation than we’ve received yet, and a story which emphatically places women at its centre without either excluding sexuality or making it excessively prominent (even given the basic premise of the Honoured Matres). It’s like The Name of the Rose for the Bene Gesserit – not in the sense of there being a murder mystery, but in the sense of providing a snapshot of a way of life that’s on the verge of either total transformation or utter extinction.

That’s fascinating for several reasons, none of which require you to agree with or even engage with Herbert’s real views – all flavours of political philosophy sooner or later run into the problem, repeatedly stated here, that regardless of whether or not you believe power corrupts, it’s hard to argue with the idea that people who like the idea of abusing power will tend to try and seek it, and if you can’t filter that out or convince them to change their priorities then whatever system of governance you plump for is going to go awry. The Bene Gesserit have options here we don’t have access to, of course, but the thought experiment is still valid.

Lest anyone think that Chapterhouse: Dune is solely about highbrow questions of political philosophy, I should cover the horny aspects too. In this case, a lot of it is based around the Honoured Matres, but not all of it; Murbella and Duncan Idaho are now in a conensual relationship and that involves a lot of scenes where they discuss stuff pre- or post-coitally, and also focuses a lot on the idea that the Bene Gesserit don’t entirely trust love and tend to encourage members to tamp it down a bit, what with Lady Jessica’s love back in the day having spawned first Muad’Dib who in ithe Tyrant Leto.

In contrast, the Honoured Matres not only give full reign to their emotions, they’re basically ruled by their desires – if they want something, they take it, if someone thwarts them, they get angry about it and react with excessive and horrible violence. Remember how I told you their leadership succession works on Sith rules? Well, the idea that the Jedi don’t go in for emotions whilst the Sith are a dizzy whirlwind of unfettered emotions is lifted directly from here – which, being published in 1985, hails from well before that idea was really baked into Star Wars. I can only assume that George Lucas looked at that “three P-O” joke and decided that if Herbert was going to accuse him of stealing, he may as well steal for real.

The thing Lucas didn’t steal was Herbert’s Barely-Concealed Fetish, not really concealed by this point. The Reverend Mothers speculate that the Honoured Matres may have gained some of their Bene Gesserit techniques by enslaving a Reverend Mother through the forbidden technique of hot lesbian action. Eventually, we learn that the Matres were the result of an alliance of Fish Speaker and Bene Gesserit-derived factions in the Scattering, which means that by the end all three of Herbert’s dommy mommy factions have been fused into a new Sisterhood under Murbella, Domme Empress of Dune. All of this is combined with genuinely interesting thoughts about the nature of power and politics and collective consent and whatnot, so it’s not like the story is solely about Herbert’s kink, but you can see how it can’t be entirely overlooked.

That’s particularly the case when you consider what’s going on with Duncan Idaho, who having been given secret Imprinting-resistance instincts by the Tleilaxu has now been teaching male Bene Gesserit agents his secret cock-fu technique, so they can go forth into the wider galaxy as secret agents the Matres can’t flip. How does he teach them, Frank? It’s not genetically instinctual in them the way it is in Duncan, it’s a skill they need to learn. I know they go to Sheeana to polish their skills, but I feel like they’ll need some, ah, hands-on training from Duncan before they’re ready for that. But you won’t ever admit that, you bitter old homophobe, just like you’ll die without reconciling with the son you exiled for being gay.

The nadir of the sexual content in this novel – and, I would submit, all the Frank Herbert-penned books – is the bit where Duncan Idaho decides he doesn’t want to awaken the ten year old Miles Teg ghola’s memories of previous lives through emotional abuse, like Miles Teg did to him in the previous book, but decides it’s kinder to get Sheeana to attempt Imprinting him, since he’s theorised that Miles’ original mother gave him some anti-Imprinting training of her own to protect him from Bene Gesserit politics. It works, but only after a scene in which a bunch of characters get together to watch a child get abused by one of the other characters.

This is just horrid, especially since it’s framed as somehow being the kinder (but, it is emphasised, still cruel) way to do it compared to the regular way. This indulges in the sort of nudge-nudge, wink-wink double standard applied when boys of a certain age get taken advantage of by women in circumstances where if the gender of one or both of the individuals in question were flipped, people would rapidly recognise something exploitative and unacceptable had happened. For crying out loud, Frank, fucking South Park was able to recognise that double standard and unambiguously call it out without both-sidesing the issue, what the fuck is your excuse?

To add insult to injury, Frank Herbert died before tying off all of the loose ends in this one. The action closes in the earliest stages of the Bene Gesserit and Honoured Matres merging, so we don’t really have Frank’s version of what that would look like. Sheeana, Duncan Idaho, Miles Teg, Scytale (who’s concealing a canister inside himself containing the samples necessary to make gholas of Paul Atreides, Chani, Stilgar, and all manner of other characters from earlier in the series), and a bunch of Bene Gesserit who aren’t keen on the new order take off in the no-ship to realms unknown – we don’t know where Frank was going to have them end up, and whilst Chekov’s Ghola Cells suggests that he was probably going to have Paul and Chani reborn, we don’t know what he was going to do with them.

Most of all, we don’t know what the deal is with Daniel and Marty – two elderly people puttering about in their garden that Duncan Idaho can somehow perceive through his perception of a mysterious energy network pervading the cosmos, with which these entities try to catch the no-ship when it leaves Chapter House only for Idaho to use his perception of the net to evade them. Their inclusion is deeply, deeply odd; one could almost imagine them as a metafictional cameo by Frank and Bev Herbert, it’s so strange. (I’d call it Lynchian, like the old couple who seem to be pulling the strings in Mulholland Drive, except the bits of Lynch it reminds me the most of are all stuff Lynch made comfortably after Chapterhouse: Dune came out.)

Still, we do have some fairly major hints as to what Daniel and Marty’a origins are, even if we aren’t yet sure how they are able to exert such apparent power behind the scenes: it’s quite evident, both from Idaho’s observations of them and the conversation they have in the final chapter, that they are ascended Face Dancers who got free of the control of the Tleilaxu Masters and turned the tables on them. It’s been strongly hinted throughout the book that these are the Ones of Many Faces that the Honoured Matres are fleeing from – for the Matres, as well as conquerors, are refugees, fleeing back to the Old Empire to avoid these foes.

(These hints include the Futars – buff catboys apparently genetically engineered to hunt Honoured Matres, which is the sort of thing which would be in the Tleilaxu wheelhouse. The Great Honoured Matre keeps some pet catboys she fucks to show off how she can control them, because Frank has got to add a bit of horny to all his ideas.)

My personal theory is that Daniel and Marty aren’t even baddies or particularly hostile to the rest of humanity. We’ve been told over and over again, through this book and Heretics of Dune, that one of the Bene Gesserit objections to the Matres is that if they keep using excessive violence all the time like they do they’re going to provoke an inevitable backlash. My headcanon here is that Daniel and Marty are using the Old Empire as a containment unit – exiling unwanted trash from the Scattering there to get them out of the way of the Scattered peoples, and cultivating the remaining cultures in the Old Empire in the hope that they’ll be able to be transplanted into the wider universe in due course.

Either way, it’s irritating that in the sequel books they wrote, allegedly based off Frank’s notes for Dune 7, that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson decide to ignore all of those hints and make Daniel and Marty personas used by secret robot survivors of the Butlerian Jihad. It’s in keeping with the pulpier, less philosophical, and generally more sci-fi action take on Dune the Brian and Kevin books apparently go with, but it’s still an annoying development, not least because of the extent to which it’s contradicting Herbert’s own hints.

Generally speaking, Frank Herbert is a writer who plays fair with the audience, at least in terms of not wasting their time with outright red herrings. A particular plot thread might not develop the way you expected, but if it does take a sudden turn it will either do so because stuff already established in the story cause it to change course, or because a previously hidden factor has arisen. If Frank was setting up Tleilaxu, then all the precedent of the preceding six novels suggests that his intention was Tleilaxu, not General Grevious’ dullard cousins.

Of course, it was always going to be the case that the post-Frank Dune books were going to be miserable; that was locked in once Brian Herbert decided to go with Kevin J. Anderson as his “collaborator” (I generally assume Anderson writes everything working off bullet points jotted on a napkin by Brian.) Kevin, with the best will in the world, is a perennial tie-in fiction guy who got his name in the industry by being able to reliably churn out more or less acceptable Star Wars stuff – it’s obvious he’s going to veer towards turning Dune into a pulpy Star Wars adventure, and equally obvious that he’s not going to think too hard about the underlying themes or philosophy of the series because he’s used to working on franchises where other people do that, they just need him to rattle out page-turningly readable prose for unfussy readers to skim through.

I’m not saying that to be horrid – that’s a legiitmate style of writing and a perfectly cromulent way of making a living. But it’s not the CV you want for someone to write Dune novels – if you want to replace Frank Herbert, you want an absolute weirdo who’s unafraid to wave his freak flag high and has a knack for making it sound terribly deep and intelligent to do so. A guy whose mostly prized for his ability to produce commercially viable candyfloss fiction that won’t spook the horses is absolutely not the person you call to fill that hole.

So ultimately, the big problem with Chapterhouse: Dune from a structural perspective (the molestation scene, whilst terrible, could be substituted with something else without doing significant damage to the structure) is that it’s got these dangling threads that don’t get resolved… but that was also true of all the prior books in the series, at least two of which (Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune) were initially meant to be the conclusion. There’s entire stories to be told about what the God Emperor-era Duncan Idaho and Siona got up to after that novel, or how Ghanima’s life played out during Leto’s early rule, which Frank outright glosses over in time skips; even though he was toying with notes for a Dune 7 which directly followed this, we don’t know that he wouldn’t have changed his mind and done another thousand-year time skip after this novel.

And ultimately, I think Chapterhouse does make a lot of sense as a final novel. Sure, we’ve got very weird stuff going on out in the Scattering, between Daniel and Marty on the one hand and Sheeana and Duncan’s renegade no-ship in the other, but by this point I think it makes much more sense to leave the Scattering as this big, vast mystery, an unknowable gulf where people go to have adventures beyond our ken, rather than actually exploring it. And yes, the Bene Gesserit must fundamentally change here, but for precisely that reason I think it makes sense to say farewell to the Old Empire at this point, now that the Bene Gesserit are going to transform into something fundamentally different from the outfit we were introduced to back at the start of the first book when Reverend Mother Helen showed up to get Paul to stick his hand in her box.

Gollancz package God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune in a big handsome compilation they call The Second Great Dune Trilogy, and you can kind of see them as a trilogy – God Emperor of Dune is about a very masculine type of strongman autocracy, Chapterhouse: Dune is a meditation on a very female-coded type of collective self-governance, and in between Heretics of Dune evokes the morass of chaos which happens when different factions pull in all different directions – suddenly, there’s a point to it after all!

Perhaps the biggest achievement of Chapterhouse: Dune is that, now that I’ve read it, I don’t regret reading Heretics of Dune. Heretics is a pain to get through, but establishes essential context and character background without which I think Chapterhouse would be much harder to tackle – and bar for that one scene with Miles Teg being abused, I think Chapterhouse is an excellent way to end Dune. When did Frank Herbert ruin Dune for me? Well, he came close with Heretics, but then he saved it – so he didn’t ruin it at all. At least, not during his lifetime…

Frank Ruins It For You Here If:

• You think it was bad taste for him to die before he tied off the loose ends here.
• You find the scene of Teg being molested by Sheeana unforgivable.
• You think it’s kind of silly that with every other religion having been syncretised to the point of being near-unrecognisable in this utterly far future, there’s suddenly a hidden community of Jews whose practices basically haven’t changed for hundreds of millennia, when in real life Judaism has evolved significantly even within recorded history.
• You don’t mind that bit, but you do mind that the Jews turn out to be so ancillary to the plot that I could do the entire review without mentioning them; seriously, you could cut them out entirely and provide another avenue for the storehouse of Reverend Mother memories to get to Murbella and it would make absolutely no difference.

Read This If:

• You don’t mind that it ends on a cliffhanger that would be resolved in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s horrible sequel novels – or you’re willing to reinterpret it as a full ending.
• You’re willing to grit your teeth and brush past the Teg molestation scene.
• You want to go deep inside the Bene Gesserit and meditate upon their ways.
• You want to read about an epic struggle between the dommy mommies we’ve known and loved since the first book and another faction of dommy mommies whose leader fucks big muscley catboys to show off how dominant she is.

Consider Stopping After This If: You have the slightest shred of self-respect.

The Idle and Unimaginative Cash-Ins That Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Have Shat Onto the Market

Fuck off, I’m not doing these.

Frank Ruins It For You Here If: You think, correctly, that he should have included a clause in his will forbidding his estate from putting out new Dune works.

Read This If: Your standards are so low and your Dune fandom is so high that you’d eat pigshit from the gutter so long as it was packaged as Pigshit of Dune.

Consider Stopping After This If: You realise it’s time to get help.

Lower Decks has gone the way of all Alex Kurtzman Star Trek shows – getting cancelled before it can undertake the sort of epic hundreds-of-episodes run that Star Trek shows enjoyed back in the 1990s. As Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy walk step by step towards their ordained conclusions – the former at least having had sufficient warning to craft a conclusion, the latter reportedly due to end its second season on a cliffhanger which it will never have a chance to resolve – and with Kurtzman’s contract up at the end of the year, it seems likely that Paramount is preparing to move on from Kurtzman-led Trek altogether.

Of the various shows Kurtzman got an executive producer credit on, Lower Decks seems to have the most unambiguously positive reputation. You can find haters of any Star Trek show, of course, even The Original Series or The Next Generation, but the rest of the new-Trek slate represents a much patchier track record. Discovery, Starfleet Academy, and Picard seem destined for the Enterprise treatment – all four of those being examples of contentious shows which have their defenders and are notable for attempting a tonal shift which wasn’t able to persuade a sufficiently large critical mass of the Trek fandom over their span to win people over like The Next Generation eventually did. Strange New Worlds runs into similar reactions with some of its episodes, with season 3 in particular apparently leaning heavier on the whimsy than some prefer. Prodigy is like the Animated Series of this era – a cartoon which a lot of people slept on because they assumed it was kiddie stuff and then disappeared from view.

Lower Decks, on the face of it, should have been destined for a similar fate to Prodigy – “Star Trek animated sitcom” is as much of a left-field proposition as “Star Trek animated kids’ show”, after all. But the Warp Drive Five and their fellow Cerritos crew members seem to have escaped that fate. All the new-Trek shows got their share of award nominations and wins – sometimes, admittedly, in very niche categories – but Lower Decks is the only one to land a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), which in turn means that it’s kind of the only one to conquer the sort of territory which any Star Trek show ought to at least get some traction in.

So what are we to do, now that Lower Decks is over and a more general Trek hiatus seems a real possibility? Why, we plug the gap in our soul with tie-in media! Here’s a cross-section of the Lower Decks spin-off books and comics I’ve been enjoying…

USS Cerritos Crew Handbook

Written by Chris Farnell and lavishly illustrated through a combination of solid graphic design, shots from the show, and some new bits of art here and there, this is presented as the actual in-universe handbook given to new members of the Cerritos crew, which Captain Freeman has tasked Boimler (now he’s a Lieutenant Junior Grade) with revising. Of course, Boimler commits the wrong version to the replicators for publication, so you also get all of the comments on the document from the various Lower Decks characters, as well as Mariner’s instances of outright vandalism like the bit where she deletes Admiral Picard’s address on the subject of the Prime Directive in favour of presenting her top four excuses for breaking the Prime Directive.

Star Trek has a long and honourable history of spin-off books written as though they were in-universe documents, dating as far back as 1975’s Star Fleet Technical Manual. Naturally, the Crew Handbook is a very Lower Decks take on this sort of concept – much less dry, with a rich appreciation of the sillier side of Trek, whilst at the same time respecting the established setting enough that it actually makes more sense than expected a lot of the time. It’s a quick read and a fun little souvenir of the show, but if you want more substantive new stories then there’s always…

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Lower Decks (Limited Series)

Released in 2022 in three issues before being compiled in 2023, this limited-run comic series sees the Cerritos bridge crew on an unusual first contact mission to a world where the course of technological development had gone on a different track from typical, complicating the usual Prime Directive issues. For instance, the people here haven’t developed warp drive yet, but outside of the realm of transportation their technology has leapfrogged the Federation, and they do have spaceflight-capable ships which can equal or best a Federation ship in a fight.

Meanwhile, Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford are spending some R&R time on the holodeck. Boimler gets anxious when the team opt for the Sherlock Holmes simulation, given the whole Moriarty situation that infamously happened on the Enterprise-D, but the others try to reassure him that there’s safeguards to stop holodecks spontaneously generating self-aware supervillains. To reassure Boimler, they get the computer to spawn Dracula and try and give him free will and genius-level intellect, to demonstrate that it’s impossible. Then the Cerritos encounters a freak energy field in orbit around the planet they’re visiting, and wouldn’t you know it, the holodeck safeguards fail…

IDW tapped Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics, to write this, and this was a genius move. North’s writing is as perfectly matched to Lower Decks as Chris Fenoglio’s art is here. One of his regular gimmicks on Dinosaur Comics is indulging in whimsical thought experiments about the implications of some philosophical axiom, scientific concept, or aesthetic idea like the use of public domain characters and how legally you can just have Dracula or Sherlock Holmes show up in any and every story you tell; one of Lower Decks‘ recurring tricks is taking something set up elsewhere in Star Trek and seeing what happens when you extrapolate that in ridiculous directions. The compatibility between these approaches pays off here, where a lot of both the comedy and the science fiction in this sci-fi comedy mashup comes from the Dracula thought experiment.

Meanwhile, the away team mission the bridge crew are on sees them faced with an interestingly original dilemma, in which they are accused of breaking this planet’s own equivalent of the Prime Directive. As with Lower Decks itself, it nicely finds a balance point between the jokes (like the bit where an alien realises he’s a furry after the sight of Dr. T’Ana awakens something in him) and an actually viable Star Trek story. On the whole, the limited run series is a great proof of concept, demonstrating that Lower Decks absolutely can work in a comic book format – enough so that IDW would eventually follow it up with a monthly series, initially also written by North. But before they launched that, they let him undertake an ambitious little project called…

Warp Your Own Way

It’s 2381 and the start of another duty shift on the USS Cerritos, travelling through space somewhere in the vicinity of Lower Decks season 4. (We can tell this because the main cast have been promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade and now have more private quarters, and T’Lyn has joined the crew but hasn’t yet become the core character she would by the end of the show.) Technically speaking, Mariner’s not on-duty for this shift, but she wakes up anyway when Tendi’s alarm clock goes off. (Given that at this point in the show they have separate quarters and yet Mariner is clearly waking up in Tendi’s bunkroom, there’s only one conclusion: yes, 32nd Century archaeologists, they were roommates!) When Mariner can’t go back to sleep, she decides to get up, replicate herself some caffeine, and go bother one of her crewmates.

Since this is a choose-your-own-adventure sort of deal you, the reader, will get to make the call of what Mariner drinks and who she bugs – but whatever call you make, the folk she encounters will turn out to be involved in some sort of scrape or another, those crises will turn into full-blown no-win scenarios, and Mariner will die a gruesome, agonising death. What the fuck is wrong with you, reader? Why can’t you keep Mariner alive? Well, maybe that’s because something is wrong with this whole situation. Maybe if you replay the adventure enough you and Mariner can team up to break out of this loop and figure out what’s going on. But the path to the truth leads through a whole lot of dead Mariners…

This graphic novel gamebook, once again with artwork by Chris Fenoglio, is 100% North’s wheelhouse since he’s previously teamed up with a swathe of webcomic artists to produce some rather good gamebooks inspired by Shakespeare. Those, however, were still largely prose-driven works with the art as illustrations; here, North adapts the style to a graphic novel presentation. This means some artwork gets recycled here and there in sections which play out with only minor variations – but the book is still fairly expansive and varied, and those variations usually pay off extremely well.

In fact, there’s an underlying puzzle structure permeating the entire thing which reveals itself remarkably well. As you play and replay the book you’ll see Mariner die a lot – that much is inevitable. Exploring different paths just lead to different deaths – but deaths where tantalising clues as to what’s really going on can be spotted here and there. Eventually you’ll hit on ways to give Mariner options that weren’t available to her before, in the process changing the nature of the interaction between you and her, and the final truly difficult puzzle requires you to combine information from multiple playthroughs in order to arrive at the endgame.

What emerges from that is a rather clever exploration of the gamebook format in general, coupled with genuinely thoughtful design that’s a bit more experimental and involved than expected. In that light, I’d compare it to the gamebook output of Chuck Tingle; Lower Decks has a similar mix of playfulness and sincerity as the Tingleverse, and both Tingle and North try to do something a bit more involved with the medium than the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure books which influenced them managed.

Another key ingredient of Lower Decks is its engagement with Trek canon, and the way it can flip from playing it for laughs to offering genuinely clever extrapolations of Trek lore to creating real-seeming stakes for the characters at a moment’s notice, and that’s certainly the case here. The “real” story involves a fresh villain who’s exploiting established aspects of Trek technology in a chilling new fashion, with the endgame combining a genuine sense of accomplishment with some bittersweet notes, whilst the initial section where you’re looping around various different crises allows North to showcase skewed takes on various classic Trek stories (because they’re being used as the basis for the false realities Mariner is contending with).

You want Borg, Khan, all the hits? You’ve got that. Have you ever wondered what would happen had Lower Decks tried to reconcile the Alien-inspired Gorn biology of Strange New Worlds with the more Arena-inspired design for the Gorn that Lower Decks stuck to? Oh, you get that here and it’s horribly adorable. You want an Original Series deep cut which asks “if we saw Apollo in Who Mourns For Adonais?, what was Dionysus like?” You’ve got that too, and I was delighted when I saw it because in the Star Trek Adventures campaign I’m in we’ve just played through a couple of adventures featuring Dionysus.

Each of the surface-level scenarios in the book before you penetrate to the next level of the story is a Ryan North love letter to some cool thing from Trek past, but because you have the original underlying story justifying the presence of all these callbacks it avoids being a simple nostalgia trip and ends up being a blast of a journey in its own right, which is exactly what a Lower Decks gamebook comic needed to be. Between this and the Lower Decks supplement for Star Trek Adventures, fans of new-Trek‘s most lovingly irreverent show really are eating well when it comes to Trek gaming Cerritos-style.

Lower Decks Volume 1: Second Contact

With Warp Your Own Way – which feels very much like it was a Ryan North passion project – out of the door, IDW could then turn their attention to launching the monthly comic. The regular series shifts gear a little compared to the limited run series; whilst the former was set in the earlier part of Lower Decks, the ongoing comic moves the timeline forward to the later seasons, where T’Lyn has joined the core cast (completing the expansion of the Warp Core Four into the Warp Drive Five), and it feels like it naturally exists somewhere in the later stretches of season 4 – before Boimler started growing out his beard, but otherwise at a point when the main cast are maturing into full-fledged Starfleet heroes despite themselves.

In addition to the change in setting there’s a change in format, switching to two-issue story arcs instead of stories that run for three issues. This does mean North doesn’t have the opportunity to really wallow in the implications of his premises like he does at points in the limited edition run, but his writing style is suitable for rapid-fire, fast-paced stories which compress the storytelling here and there through witty quips so it more or less works.

The first story is – after a few false starts – The Ocean of Infinity, illustrated by Derek Charm, in which North plays about with the two-issue structure by essentially doing an A-plot/B-plot thing, with the A-plot largely covered in the first issue and the B-plot in the second. The A-plot is a sequel to The Time Trap from The Animated Series, and in a nice touch the Cerritos crew review archival footage from Kirk and company’s encounter with the titular cosmic bubble, which makes extensive use of shots from The Animated Series.

It’s fun, but ultimately turns out not to have too much to it, so it’s fortunate that North had a B-plot to deploy for the second issue. This one is another sequel to Kirk-era stuff – specifically, The Savage Curtain, the one where the rock people make simulacra of Abraham Lincoln and various other figures from galactic history and make Kirk and Spock team up with them to fight historical baddies.

Here it’s a “contest of mentorship”, and a chunk of the fun comes from which simulacrum of a Star Trek favourite the Warp Drive five get paired off with. T’Lyn gets T’Pol, Tendi is assigned to Jadzia Dax, Rutherford’s paired with Scotty, Mariner is thrilled to be working with Janeway, whilst Boimler is matched up with Picard – specifically the grumpier, sterner one from season 1 of The Next Generation. It’s all quite neat, though it’s still covering for the fact that North is trying to fill two issues of the comic with two separate stories which don’t quite have enough legs to do it.

The second story, Natura Abhorret, is perhaps the strongest of the three in this collection. Here, North hits on a model for two-issue stories like this which more or less works: spend the first issue on setup, then in the second issue throw in a twist and then bring things to a resolution. Issue 3 does the setup here, with the Cerritos running into a false vacuum collapse scenario – the unravelling of the universe as a result of a shift in the nature of the vacuum of space itself. (Meanwhile, Jack Lawrence takes over the art, and will handle it for the rest of the collection.)

Here, the twist that comes in issue 4 is that the new universe displacing the old is animated by a sort of wise-cracking hive mind that can possess people – primarily working through Rutherford and Tendi in this issue. This forces the duo, whose minds have been shunted into the ship’s computers, to do what they can to protect their universe, whilst still holding true to their values and trying to find a way out that doesn’t involve just genociding the other universe (which ends up collapsing because its inhabitants wouldn’t heed Tendi and Rutherford’s warnings about the consequences of their bid to accelerate the expansion).

Being tangentially involved in an act of cosmic genocide weighs on Tendi and Rutherford somewhat – understandably, given their status as the sweetest cinnamon rolls in Lower Decks and possibly the entire Trek canon – which sets up North to throw in a delightful little coda which really captures what the Warp Drive Five mean to each other.

The last story in this collection is Desperate Times, in which Mariner becomes suspicious that the senior staff are up to something weird, her meddling leading to herself and the rest of the Warp Drive Five getting dragged into a Department of Temporal Investigations matter in which the timeline is being manipulated by a mysterious trickster.

This resolves itself eventually, in the process further underlining how much the Lower Decks friend group really do need each other, and brings North’s tenure on the Lower Decks comics to a dignified close. I think the limited run series and Warp Your Own Way represent the best of his output, but these three stories are pretty decent in their own fashion and establish an approach which IDW would turn to other hands to refine further.

Lower Decks Volume 2: Mixed Signals

The most recent compilation collects the first six issues of Tim Sheridan’s stint as lead writer on the series. Sheridan’s style is less gag-a-minute than Ryan North’s, but on the plus side this does give more room for plot and characterisation to breathe, so the stories are still recognisably Lower Decks in spirit, just with a mild shift in the balance between jokes and narrative.

Sheridan’s first story is Yesterday’s Beta Shift, illustrated by Robby Cook, in which after Mariner’s latest scrape Captain Freeman ends up reminiscing about an incident she encountered when serving as an ensign onboard the USS Illinois. This sets up an encounter with none other than Doctor Pulaski from season 2 of The Next Generation (with suitable gags about why she ended up leaving the Enterprise, like “I heard their android got her fired”). This is fun, but involves minimal use of the regular Lower Decks characters – the most prominent being Freeman herself, but this is a fifteen years younger version of Freeman who we’ve never met before. This is possibly on purpose to give Sheridan a chance to get his head in the game before he tackles any characters we’re especially invested in.

Next up, with art by Vernon Smith, is A Pound of Flush – a Tendi-focused story in which Star Trek canon’s best Orion finds herself chased by Ferengi debt collectors, having signed a dodgy loan agreement to get transport out of Orion space so she could enrol in Starfleet Academy back in the day. It’s basically a stab at student loans, and a Star Trek-ish Utopian dream about everyone clubbing together to help save you from them, combined with a genuine enjoyment of the Ferengi in all their incarnations, from the Rules of Acquisition-quoting deal-makers of Deep Space Nine to the cackling electrowhip-toting weirdos from early Next Generation.

The last story in the collection, Again With the Whales (art duties shared between Philip Murphy and Jack Lawrence), is an exercise in the Lower Decks tradition of “what if someone had to go back and sort out the dangling thread left by a previous Star Trek story?” In this case, the story is The Voyage Home and the dangling thread is that two humpback whales in no way constitutes a viable breeding population. George and Gracie’s kid is terribly lonely, so the Cerritos has been assigned to go find him some humpback ladies keen on getting it on in a future world where whaling is banned and the seas are less polluted – and the Cetacean Ops crew of Matt and Kimolu, the adorable beluga whales who work in the aquatic section of the Cerritos. (Specifically adorable and constantly horny beluga whales, but that’s dolphins for you.)

This is more of an ensemble piece than the previous two stories, and find some of Sheridan’s best jokes, like the fact that the Cerritos crew can beam down to a busy street in the 1980s and… it’s absolutely not a problem, because it’s the 1980s and everyone’s too self-obsessed to notice. (The second best joke is probably the bit where Ransom, left in charge of the Cerritos in orbit, encounters a Klingon raider ship… which turns out to be absolutely no threat because their weapons technology is some four centuries or so behind the standard the Cerritos is built to.)

The shift in author takes getting used to, but whilst I think North’s material is mildly stronger than Sheridan’s, at the same time I think Sheridan’s hiring is perhaps better for the long-term prospects of the comic. An in-demand writer like North isn’t someone who’s necessarily going to be able to commit to writing a long-term monthly series for years on end, and with a three issue limited event series, six regular issues, and a graphic novel-length gamebook to his name, he’s already done plenty. North was always going to move along sooner or later, and the ongoing comic’s long-term viability hinged on other hands being able to take up the baton.

Over his first three stories, Sheridan seems to be growing in confidence, and he’s particularly good at capturing what makes the Lower Decks cast so endearing – not just the Warp Drive Five, but the entire supporting cast at that. I don’t think the regular comic series has quite hit a story which hits the heights of the limited event series or Warp Your Own Way, but I think Sheridan has a shot at getting there.

Pin a fresh sprig of celery to your lapel, it’s time to check in with the Fifth Doctor’s audio adventures again! The Key 2 Time concept might have been a bit weak in its own right, but it did pioneer the “mini-season” approach Big Finish would take with their monthly range in one form or another until it came to an end. No weird one-off companions that Big Finish would love to turn into a spin-off series here – we’re going to be focused on televised companion line-ups, though not always in the form you might expect…

Castle of Fear

The Doctor has decided that a nice Christmas in Stockbridge is called for; opting against going to the 21st Century to avoid awkwardness after her encounter with Andrew in Circular Time, the duo instead swing by the village in 1899, where they catch the local mummer’s play. Such things often have little local variations to the formula handed down over the years; for instance, the Stockbridge variant does not merely include the stock mummer’s play character of “the doctor”, but invests him with characteristics that clearly allude to the Doctor himself!

700 years prior, Earl Hubert of Mummerset (Joe Thomas) has returned home from Crusade, with a Saracen manservant Yavuz (Teddy Kemperer) and a claim to Stockbridge Castle. When he returns to his ancestral lands, however, he finds things are far from how they should be. The castle is shut up tight, and the local yokels claim it’s infested with demons. When the Doctor and Nyssa arrive to investigate why the mummer’s play seems to be referring to them, they end up drawn into Hubert’s struggle – and discover that the “demons” are all too familiar…

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This one was written by Alan Barnes, whose long Who career has also involved him being a regular contributor to the Doctor Who Magazine comic, so it’s no surprise that the sleepy rural village of Stockbridge which was such a cornerstone of the Fifth Doctor comics should make an appearance here (having already had a small revival in Circular Time). In fact, this mini-season could be thought of as the “Stockbridge trilogy”, since each tale unfolds in the vicinity at different points in the timeline.

Inspired as it is by mummer’s plays, it’s no surprise that there’s a campy, pantomime air to several stretches of this – though this is counterbalanced by moments of genuine fear and peril when the alien plot at the heart of the story comes into the spotlight. It turns out it’s the Rutans at work, which I suppose is reasonable enough – Rutans showing up in history to take up residence in some local bit of architecture and do horrible things has precedent from Horror of Fang Rock, after all.

At the same time, mummer’s plays have some fairly off-colour features which Castle of Fear should probably have challenged rather than going along with. For one thing, there’s sod all parts for women in them, and indeed other than Nyssa (who is passed off as the Doctor’s pageboy at some points, like Vicki in The Crusade), there’s only one female role, that of Maud (Susan Brown), with a running joke that she’s known as Maud the Withered to distinguish her from Maud the Strumpet. Her role is largely to be a cackling hag who talks up how she used to be one of the late Earl’s sex workers, and honestly, if Barnes can’t come up with a role for women in the medieval era other than that then maybe he shouldn’t have bothered after all.

For another, Yavuz is clearly the model for the “Turkish knight” of the mummer’s play – an actual stock figure from the cycle, and one which is unfortunately associated with a certain amount of brownface in some performances, and Teddy Kemperer (who I don’t think is Turkish) seems to lean into that approach, putting on a pretty outrageous accent in a drama where the accents are already quite thick. Caricature and its unkindnesses are part of the fabric of the mummer’s play format, and the fact that the rural villagers and Norman knights don’t come across particularly well in this either doesn’t make up for Big Finish’s continued willingness to embrace dodgy casting practices, but it is at least something.

On the whole, Castle of Fear is an enjoyable story with a bunch of aspects which make me cringe in the same way that mummer’s plays where the performers don quasi-blackface make me cringe. Yes, that is part of some plays, and though the usual excuse given by performers is that it’s for anonymity rather than racial caricature other mummer’s companies have made the wise decision to either do without or shift to more fantastical colours for their makeup. In other words, it’s par for the course for something which is interested in rehashing the format of the mummer’s play without being particularly critical about it.

The Eternal Summer

At the end of Castle of Fear, the Doctor and Nyssa were trying to get the Rutan ship away from Stockbridge so that it would stop exerting a baleful influence on the locals, only to discover that the engines are suffering a critical failure and are about to explode – a disaster which could wipe out half of England. The Doctor and Nyssa desperately struggled to stop it, and then…

…oh, then everything’s alright! They’re back in Stockbridge and all is right with the world, more or less. Oh, sure, the police box in the village is just a police box, not the TARDIS, Nyssa has somehow landed a regular job as the postmistress, and the Doctor’s been renting a room at the Green Dragon pub for the past few decades. That might not be intrinsically dangerous, but it’s certainly weird – like the way the date seems to be somewhere between 1950 and 2009, people are living entire lifetimes in a day, married couples are taking it in turns to widow each other in preparation for returning to life, and nobody can leave the village. And only the Lord and Lady of the Manor know why Stockbridge has become trapped in The Eternal Summer…

Penned by Jonathan Morris, this is the Stockbridge trilogy story which lands closest to the era we’re used to encountering Stockbridge in – in fact, the span of years encompassed by the time bubble comfortably encompasses all the eras when past Stockbridge stories in the comics took place. Morris therefore takes the opportunity to incorporate an old favourite character: Maxwell Edison, Stockbridge’s resident UFO expert, who first encounters the Fifth Doctor in Stars Fell On Stockbridge and by this point had enjoyed subsequent comic encounters with the Eighth and Tenth Doctors.

Here, Big Finish’s casting process comes up trumps by picking Mark Williams for the role – still a few years before he’d show up as Rory’s dad in Series 7, Williams makes his Who debut here, and his earnest-but-befuddled delivery makes him a perfect fit for the character. It’s no brief cameo either; Maxwell is essentially a secondary companion for this story, and his chemistry with the Doctor and Nyssa is an absolute delight.

This is not the only casting surprise. The Lord and Lady of the Manor end up being played by Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton – because they are impossibly, unthinkably ancient versions of the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, dark mirror images created by the same forces that created the time bubble, and who now rule over this Groundhog Day version of Stockbridge in return for the gift of cyclical immortality they’ve given the residents.

We kind of already got the dark version of the First Doctor back in An Unearthly Child when he was contemplating bashing that caveman’s brains out. The idea of a malign Second or Third Doctor is so incongruous as to be not worth considering (Salamander in The Enemy of the World isn’t so much a mirror image of the Second Doctor as he is totally orthogonal to him outside of looks), but we kind of see a negative Fourth Doctor in The Face of Evil; the Sixth Doctor’s televised run was topped and tailed with the theme of the Doctor turning evil, between him assaulting Peri in The Twin Dilemma and the Valeyard’s true nature being exposed in The Ultimate Foe, and of course the Seventh Doctor was the dark version of the Seventh Doctor.

Now Davison gets to offer his own take on a Fifth Doctor gone bad, mashing up a gothic, campy performance with a twisted sense of his motives: this is a Doctor that’s taken responsibility for Stockbridge for so long that he’s become fully convinced he knows what is best, his initially benevolent custodianship having become cloying and suffocating with the passage of time. Likewise, Nyssa has become a creepy entity in her own right, the two of them feeding on the memories and emotions of residents for whom the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth had become wearying.

All these twists and more are developed bit by bit, in a neatly structured story which expands in scope bit by bit until the final crisis, which leads into…

Plague of the Daleks

Flung through the aeons by the collapse of the time bubble, the Doctor and Nyssa find themselves in a disused building – Stockbridge’s church. Exploring further, they find that they some 2500 years in the future, and Stockbridge has become a domed environment preserved as a sort of tourist attraction; with Earth having otherwise become uninhabitable, Stockbridge remains as a time capsule allowing visitors to experience what a British village in the early 21st Century was like.

Most of the inhabitants are nothing more than low-grade clones – too rudimentary in their design to improvise beyond their provided dialogue, and with strictly curtailed lifespans due to the extent to which they’ve been recloned and recycled over and over again. But there are two human keepers – Isaac and Lysette Barclay (Keith Barron and Liza Tarbuck), a father and daughter team who are trying to keep the whole thing running despite it becoming deeply unpopular. Why, there’s only three tourists visiting today – fussy Alexa Linfoot (Richenda Carey) and her more easy-going husband Vincent (Barry McCarthy), and Professor Jabbery (Richard Cordery), a Lucerian academic studying human culture.

Oh, and there’s the Daleks who’ve been frozen underneath the village for centuries, who’ve chosen just this moment to wake up…

Penned by Mark Morris, this is a fairly standard Dalek runaround enriched by taking place in the setting of Stockbridge, and by the overarching structure it lends to the trilogy. With this in place, the mini-season becomes a triptychs about origins, preservaton, and destruction – with Castle of Fear depicting the origin of local Stockbridge traditions, The Eternal Summer presenting a nightmare version of Stockbridge that has been kept alive in an unhealthy, stagnant fashion, and then this story showcasing how Stockbridge is finally destroyed.

The 45th Century setting is a bit of a major time jump, but it’s probably the right call – it means there’s lots and lots of intervening timeline between then and the present day to allow for as many Stockbridge stories as anyone could possibly want to write. Equally, it does raise questions; when it comes to all the locations on a far future Earth that’s being evacuated which could have been conserved under a dome, why Stockbridge, a place which fantastical far-future tech could just as happily make an artificial replica of elsewhere? There can be no convincing answer other than “so the story can happen”.

Similarly, it’s far from clear to me how a bunch of Daleks ended up buried under Stockbridge in the first place. The timelines given here would, if I haven’t misinterpreted them, see the Daleks frozen in the 27th or 28th centuries – long after The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Is this something to do with the Dalek Empire spin-off series? Maybe – there’s references to the Daleks’ space empire having long since fallen by this point in the timeline.

I think the intention is that at some point when they were on Earth the Daleks discovered the TARDIS in the vicinity of Stockbridge, realised they needed the Doctor or some other Time Lord to unlock its secrets for them, and so decided to lurk nearby because they knew the Doctor was a frequent visitor to Stockbridge and would show up sooner or later. This certainly tracks with the Doctor’s sense of guilt for the destruction of Stockbridge at the end of the serial, even though arguably Stockbridge as a community was long gone due to the evacuation of Earth and what was left behind was only a replica.

Either way, I suspect Plague of the Daleks would be remarkably less effective listened to in isolation, which rather shows up the issue with these tightly thematically-intertwined mini-seasons: are they meant to be three distinct four-episode stories, or are they twelve-episode epics structured in three acts?

Ringpullworld

Some time after The Five Doctors, the Doctor, Turlough, and Tegan encountered a group of novelisors – entities which enter parasitic relationships with their chosen subjects in which they follow them around constantly narrating their lives and thoughts. Now Turlough has gotten himself into hot water and his novelisor, Huxley (Alex Lowe) is along for the ride. The TARDIS crew have encountered the Ringpull – an entire pocket universe trapped in a sort of cosmic tin can ever since the Dark Times in order to imprison its dangerously warlike inhabitants. Turlough knows what it’s like to have your horizons confined to a narrow little world because someone thought you were dangerous, and he’s intent on opening the way for the re-emergence of the Ringpull into real space. But will he and Huxley survive this?

Written by Paul Magrs, this is part of a string of stories – two Doctor Who ones and one otherwise Who-unrelated – to use the novelisor concept, which I find rather tiresome. The whole point of them, at least here, is that they are deeply annoying but won’t fuck off, and this is the sort of idea which grates massively in a lot of contexts and feels especially intrusive and irritating in the Companion Chronicles format.

There’s some stuff going on here with Magrs playing with ideas about narrative and story structure, as you’re probably inclined to do if you fancy yourself a literary postmodernist author but have to keep writing Doctor Who stuff to pay the bills. The first episode has Turlough and Huxley on a ship, with Turlough about to make his run to open the Ringpull, talking about how they got there; the concluding half has them in a prison cell, talking about what happened next and what might happen in the immediate future. I dunno. It doesn’t quite seem to be worth the gimmick.

The most interesting aspect of this story is how Strickson handles Turlough’s impersonations of the Doctor and Tegan when recounting their dialogue. They aren’t accurate, but they do sound like how a snotty know-it-all like Turlough would mimic them for the purposes of making fun of them.

Freakshow

It’s just after Enlightenment; Turlough has finally come clean to the Doctor and Tegan about his pact with the Black Guardian, and won himself free of it. Turlough is glad to have made a clean slate of things, but Tegan still isn’t sure she wants him around at all – it might be best if he were just quietly dropped off on Trion, all told. Before any long-term decisions are made, the TARDIS is undertaking a series of randomised “kangaroo hops” in order to evade the Black Guardian’s wrath; its latest hop sees it landing in Arizona, 1905 – the dying days of the Old West.

After an especially upsetting argument with Tegan, Turlough decides to go out and get some air; the Doctor obliges, lending him a Stetson to help blend in. (After all, Stetsons are cool.) Soon enough, Turlough’s found his way to the sleepy town of Buzzard Creek, where he soon talks his way into the locals’ affections. Soon there’s another new arrival – Thaddeus P. Winklemeyer (Toby Longworth), snake oil salesman and carnival barker. Winklemeyer has not one but two spectacles to offer Buzzard Creek; his human zoo of what they call “freaks of nature” in this day and age, and his sales pitch for his cure-all tonic.

Turlough, however, is no easy mark. For one thing, he spots that the “freaks” are nothing from the sort – far from being humans with unusual personal conditions, they’re entirely average examples of a range of different alien species. For another, he knows better than to drink strange medicine from a huckster like Winklemeyer. The same can’t be said for the rest of the townsfolk – and they’re going to be in trouble without a spot of help from Turlough, the Doctor, Tegan, and Berman (also Longworth), a Krolock that Winklemeyer forces to act as the “Wild Man of Borneo” in his Freakshow…

The format for this one has Turlough recording these events in an audio log, the Doctor having given him a device for that in case he wanted to keep a diary. Written by Mark Morris, the intention seems to be to give Turlough an opportunity to spend a story doing some unambiguously benevolent and helpful things in order to prove himself a bit more to Tegan, given that in the televised show the whole “plotting against the Doctor” thing was forgiven and forgotten startlingly quickly after Enlightenment.

For this purpose, it’s alright, and certainly benefits from being used to tell a fairly straightforward and enjoyable story. At the same time, it’s also the last gasp of a format which was about to become redundant. The only really compelling reason to do Turlough-narrated Companion Chronicles, after all, is that Janet Fielding wasn’t keen on making a return as Tegan – she’d done The Gathering as a one-off, but otherwise felt there was a conflict of interest involved in performing as an actor when she was also acting as a talent agent for other actors. With Tegan off the board, there wasn’t really much opportunity to do full-cast audio dramas with Turlough other than the odd visit to the gap between Resurrection of the Daleks and Planet of Fire, so the only way to tell stories in the rest of Turlough’s run involved resorting to Companion Chronicles. But things were about to change…

Cobwebs

We pick things up very shortly after Enlightenment (and, presumably, Freakshow). Tegan still doesn’t wholly trust Turlough, though the Doctor is more than willing to see the best in him. Either way, Turlough would like to go home, and the Doctor’s trying to oblige – but before he can, the TARDIS is drawn into a temporal spiral, dragging it off-course and forcing it to land in a desolate research base on the toxic world of Helheim.

As the TARDIS crew search the cobweb-strewn interior of the base, they find the place is abandoned. The base’s computer system, EDGAR (Raymond Coulthard) is still active, but behaving extremely oddly. Memory-recordings of the crew are leaking, revealing some sort of abhorrent tragedy here – it seems like the base was Under Siege at some point. The only other people to encounter are also visitors – an assistant robot named Loki (also Coulthard) and his human companion… Nyssa!

Whereas only a few days have passed for the TARDIS crew since they said farewell to her on Terminus, it’s been fifty years for her (though to human eyes she’s aged more like twenty to thirty years, because that’s how it goes with Trakenites). Having moved on from her research on Terminus, Nyssa is now seeking a cure for Richter’s Syndrome, a plague which is running rampant in the galaxy and has already killed six billion people. This base was supposedly researching a cure, and it seems like they found one – but it looks like a hop back in time in the TARDIS to a point before the base collapsed will be needed if she’s going to find that information.

That certainly makes sense, since there’s evidence that the TARDIS team did show up in the base before, at a subsequent point in their timelines – such as the four skeletons in the medical bay, wearing their clothes…

Yes, Janet Fielding finally returned to the role of Tegan on a regular basis here, immediately opening up a host of new possibilities for Fifth Doctor audio adventures. Big Finish had always had to exercise a bit of creativity to work around Fielding’s previous reluctance to bring the character back, since Tegan was such a constant presence throughout the whole Fifth Doctor run on television – with only two stories where she doesn’t appear, she was the longest-serving companion of his entire run, a rock of stability in a period notable for John Nathan-Turner’s near-constant fiddling about with the companion lineup.

As a result, the previous Fifth Doctor audios had tended to focus on odd little gaps here and there in his timeline, like the period between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity when he was travelling with just Nyssa, or the gap between Resurrection and the Daleks and Planet of Fire when it was just Turlough onboard, or the gap between Planet of Fire and The Caves of Androzani where it’s just Peri (and, for a while, Erimem). Perhaps the biggest benefit to this was that Big Finish were forced to think about how to do a good Fifth Doctor story without simply imitating what happened on television – a worthwhile exercise given that the Fifth Doctor’s televised run was so very hit and miss when it came to the quality control.

Each of those three periods has a different texture to them, and each allowed for an opportunity for Davision and his co-stars to deepen those particular character relationships and for the writers to develop different styles to these different eras. Davison and Sarah Sutton’s genuinely warm friendship makes the Five-and-Nyssa stories truly sparkle, whilst the stories with Peri and Erimem might have had some clunkers (talking about you, Nekromanteia) the experiment also yielded some genuine classics, like The Council of Nicaea – a story which couldn’t possibly work with any other Fifth Doctor lineup.

At the same time, there were drawbacks. The Fifth Doctor stories with just Turlough along never quite took off to the same extent the other lines did. I don’t know whether this was down to scheduling issues with Mark Strickson (though he’s certainly been active enough since Fielding came back) or a simple matter of people having less ideas for that lineup, but I think part of the problem is that whilst Turlough being a brat and the Doctor reluctantly putting up with this has a certain amount of mileage to it, Turlough really shines as a character when he has other companions to bounce off – Tegan in particular.

Cobwebs, then, is an exercise in reviving a TV-era companion lineup for the first time, but with the benefit of a decade or so of Fifth Doctor audio dramas giving Big Finish a high level of expertise in what works and what doesn’t in the format, and the confidence to present their own approach to Fifth Doctor stories. Apparently, all of this clicked into place when those Turlough-fronted Companion Chronicles were being made; Strickson had suggested he’d be keen to see the reunion happen and made sure Big Finish had his schedule, Big Finish were nudged into checking in with Fielding and were overjoyed to discover she was interested in doing it after all, and the mini-season was on.

I don’t usually listen to the interviews on these, but I did for this one given the unusual circumstances, and you can tell both from those and from the performances here that the actors are absolutely thrilled to be back together again. The Doctor and his companions slide into their familiar chemistry as though they’ve never been apart, and with Davison, Strickson, and Sutton all having a better sense of what their characters are like when Tegan isn’t there thanks to their prior audios it feels like everyone’s holding their own a bit better. The script by Jonathan Morris (working to a season arc devised by Alan Barnes) is helpful here, making sure every character is able to contribute and ensuring that nobody gets lost in the shuffle – a problem which regularly turned up on the TV show.

As for the story itself, it’s actually very Sawardian in approach – there’s a Base Under Siege where it turns out the danger isn’t the aliens on the outside, it’s the corporate greed on the inside, lots of people die, in many respects it’s quite grimdark in an early 2000 AD sort of way. This is no bad thing; as I have said before, the real problem with Sawardianism wasn’t that Eric Saward liked dark stories with lots of downbeat moments and grubby violence replete with greed and competition, it’s that Saward seemed to only like those stories. It’s absolutely possible to do a really good Sawardian Doctor Who story – The Caves of Androzani is practically the manifesto for “Sawardianism done right”, after all – but if the script editor is trying to push every story as far in that direction as he can get away with, things get samey.

At the same time, Cobwebs does apply the benefit of decades of hindsight to avoid Sawardianism’s worst excesses. The Doctor is never quite as sidelined and helpless as he’d be in, say, Warriors of the Deep, and even when the peril seems insurmountable things never get quite as oppressively bleak as in Resurrection of the Daleks. Moreover, Nyssa’s search for the Richter’s Syndrome cure and the need for her to deliver it after the adventure means that even though the base gets wiped out, something hopeful can still come of it all; the most soul-crushingly miserable stories of the Saward era were always the one where things seemed bleak and pointless, and this pitfall is capably avoided.

As an exercise in picking up where things left off, then, Cobwebs is a storming success, setting up the mini-season for future success. Next up, as the TARDIS crew try to help Nyssa deliver the cure they find themselves in…

The Whispering Forest

Having recovered the cure to Richter’s Syndrome, Nyssa has rejoined the TARDIS crew so she can distribute the cure and get home – the Doctor calibrating the TARDIS to seek out places where outbreaks are mentioned. Now the TARDIS has landed in the midst of a forest on the world of Chodor.

There’s no sign of the Syndrome here – at least, no sign right now – but there’s every reason to think that something terrible has happened in this world’s history. Take the strange community of Purity, nominally led by the young Sister Seska (Hayley Atwell) following the death of her father, Brother Anulf (Lennox Greaves), but where Seska’s ultra-conservative stepmother Sister Mertil (Sue Wallace) is using demogoguery and conspiracy to undermine her.

Purity obsessively follows hand-washing rituals and the like to the point of self-injury, reveres legendary figures like “Doctors” and “Saint John“, and they have all manner of technology to hand and no sign of understanding how it works, or what the decontamination processes are actually for. The signs all point to Purity being a place founded by the survivors of a hospital ship crash – but if that’s the case, where is the rest of the ship? Crucial features like the main power plant simply aren’t in evidence. On top of that, the folk of Purity are not alone in the forest. Shades whisper and demand attention, becoming all the more insistent in certain places. And then there’s the mysterious Takers, who spirit away the sick and dying.

Clearly, if there had been a Richter’s Syndrome outbreak here at some point in the past, it’s long since burned itself out – but it’s just as clear that something is badly wrong. Mertil is chancing her arm more and more, and soon Seska herself will be in danger. The Takers are becoming all the more desperate as their power weakens. And as the Takers run down, the shades are closing in…

Written by Stephen Cole, this story feels like a throwback to the pre-Earthshock period of the Fifth Doctor’s TV run, fitting the mould of stories like Castrovalva, Four To Doomsday, and Kinda where the Fifth Doctor and his friends stumble across a weird little community and have to work out what their deal is. Of these, it’s probably the most like Four To Doomsday and Kinda, in that both of those stories revolve around multiple factons – an indigenous population and colonists in Kinda, the aliens and their passengers in Four To Doomsday, and Purity and the Takers here. The forest setting adds to the Kinda parallels, for that matter.

Of course, there’s also shades of stories from other eras here. Purity is essentially in a Face of Evil situation, for instance, whilst the idea of autonomous hospital ship systems gone rogue is something Steven Moffat had showcased in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and would eventually revisit again in Boom. But overall, Cole’s script comes across as a distinctly Fifth Doctor-flavoured attempt on the whole concept, with the struggle between Seska and Mertil and their family providing both the emotional heart of the story and a chance for Sue Wallace to get her Lady Macbeth on.

As with Cobwebs, care is taken to make sure each of the TARDIS crew get some significant moments, and on that front it works much better than Four To Doomsday (where the only companion moment I really remember is the bit where the Doctor tells Adric off for sympathising with fascism) or even Kinda (a great story, but one which Nyssa misses for contract-related reasons and so it doesn’t have to juggle the usual companion quotient). If Cobwebs demonstrates that the High Sawardian era could have been better than it was, this reminds us of the untapped potential of the Antony Root/early Saward era. There should have been another way…

The Cradle of the Snake

As the TARDIS crew were departing The Whispering Forest, Tegan showed telltale signs of the Mara re-emerging from the depths of her subconscious. The Doctor attempts to use his hypnotic abilities to help her out, and she seems to improve – but in the spirit of “better safe than sorry” the Doctor sets course for Manussa, where they defeated the Mara during Snakedance, so they can get help of the friends they met during that incident.

The TARDIS, alas, has landed centuries early – but no matter! This is Manussa from a century before the rise of the Mara corrupted its society – at the height of its culture. So off go the Doctor and Tegan to the Faculty of Advancement so she can be checked out, whilst Nyssa fills Turlough in on what all this Mara business is about.

Hopefully, he’s paying attention. Because the Mara isn’t gone – it’s awake, it’s in full control of its host, and it is intent on escaping the fate the Web of Time has laid out for it by ascending to power a hundred-odd years ahead of schedule. And her host is the Doctor…

This one was written by Marc Platt, and honestly “Marc Platt writes a Mara story” is all the pitch you really need. After all, Kinda and Snakedance were the closest precedents in classic Who for Ghost Light‘s mixture of weird mystically-tinged alien nonsense, character exploration, and spooky atmosphere, so why not let him loose on the gimmick?

The plot here doesn’t actually add a whole lot to the whole Mara thing, instead filling its four episodes by cunningly remixing the general concept. Switching the target of possession from Tegan to the Doctor is inspired; not only does Davison once again have a whale of the time playing a sinister version of the Fifth Doctor, but with him as lead antagonist that means the three companions all have something to do.

Of course, one of these companions is not like the others, because Turlough is the only televised Fifth Doctor companion who didn’t get to go on a Mara adventure – well, other than Kamelion, but outside of his introduction and exit not going on adventures is basically Kamelion’s schtick. This isn’t as much of a problem as you’d think – remember, Nyssa misses Kinda because she’s “ill” (in fact contract issues meant Sarah Sutton had to sit most of the story out), and Adric missed Snakedance because he died, so Tegan is actually the only companion who was fully involved in both televised Mara stories.

The story does have its issues; Vernon Dobtcheff plays “Dadda Desaka”, a local sage, as some sort of very odd tribally-themed stock character. Sure, Manussa isn’t Earth and so its indigenous people aren’t directly one Earth culture or another, but it really feels like this is landing very close to the sort of ethnic play-acting that the previous two serials skirted the edge of. Nonetheless, The Cradle of the Snake deserves props for recognising the long-danging possibilities of “what if the Mara possessed someone else and it was down to Tegan to stop them?”, and identifying the perfect person to get possessed under that circumstance.

Jhonen Vasquez hit his highest level of cultural prominence with Invader Zim, a Nickelodeon cartoon which benefitted from his distinctive artistic aesthetic and playfully overexcitable style. Overshadowed by fare like Spongebob Squarepants, it lasted for a bit over a season, got a Netflix special in 2019, and lives on largely through the massive amounts of merch Hot Topic sold for it. (Though to my understanding, Vasquez wasn’t involved in the merchandising side of things and didn’t benefit from it – shame.)

The other thing people know about Vasquez, other than Zim, is that he got the job after writing a string of flagrantly child-inappropriate comic books during the 1990s, showcasing a style combining genuinely well-observed rants, total nonsense, shocking artwork, and jokes combining cynicism, whimsy, and grimdark lolrandomness in similar proportions. What HoL was to RPGs of the era, Jhonen Vasquez’s comics were to comics – the voice of the mid-1990s dialled up to 11 and fully aware of how ridiculous it was.

For this article, I’m going to look at his breakthrough comic and the various sequels and spin-offs that played on material from it, which between them make up a short-lived fictional universe that Vasquez has subsequently moved away from as other projects take up his time. Come, step with me into the NNY-verse…

The Famous One: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac

Johnny C. – “NNY” for short – lives in a tiny run-down house in an anonymous American city. NNY lives a reclusive lifestyle because he finds most people deeply irritating. Formerly a capable artist, he hasn’t drawn anything of substance for ages, his main creative outlet in that respect being Happy Noodle Boy, a stultifyingly lolrandom stick figure comic he doodles. There’s several reasons why he might be in a rut. Lack of social contact with like-minded people is rarely great for your mental health, and the fact that he has long conversations with inanimate objects certainly suggests he’s got some issues there.

The main thing distracting him from resurrecting his former art career, however, is the fact that he spends most of his time killing people in ostentatiously horrible ways. Some of his sprees happen outside – the authorities seem more or less entirely incapable of tracing anything he does back to him, and he almost never encounters anyone who fights back. A fair amount of his killing, however, happens at home – for there is an extensive underground complex underneath his house, where he confines people he abducts so he can kill them and drain their blood, which he needs to paint a wall on his house so that the Lovecraftian horror behind it can’t escape and destroy the universe.

Is this real or just NNY’s ornately intricate delusions? If any of it is real, how much of it is? Are the authorities unable to catch him because of the same supernatural forces that animate some of the inanimate objects NNY chats with and render him unable to die, or are the cops just miserably bad at their job? Is NNY really an unstoppable killing machine, or are we just witnessing the revenge fantasies of a deeply lonely man? And what will become of Squee, the little boy who lives next door and who NNY has decided to mentor?

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Revisiting it in the light of Vasquez’s later career, one thing is brutally apparent about Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: it’s kind of a rough draft for Invader Zim, despite almost every single panel including content that you could never get away with on kid’s television, even on Nickelodeon when it was at its most permissive (this is the channel that brought us Ren and Stimpy, after all).

Think about it: both stories centre on a villain protagonist (NNY/Zim) who lives in a house with a full-blown dungeon underneath in which the villain protagonist does vile things (murders people/plots world domination). There’s a local boy who knows the villain protagonist’s true nature (Squee/Dib), but his parents point-blank refuse to believe him. The villain protagonist is pushed by a duo of authority figures (the Pillsbury doughboys/the Almighty Tallest) into enacting a dark agenda (killing others or himself/taking over the world).

Of course, there’s also stylistic parallels – the art style, the whimsical and shrill dialogue, the outbursts of lolrandom humour – but even if you set these aside, the core concepts are undeniably very close. The main distinction is that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac has a bleakness to it which makes Invader Zim look positively sunny and optimistic in comparison. This goes beyond the fact that serial murder is a grimmer topic than alien invasion – though a story about an absurdly successful serial killer is certainly going to have a darker tone than a story about an absurdly ineffectual alien invader, that’s just the start of it.

Take the characters of Squee and Dib. in Zim, Dib’s dad is rather distracted by his mad scientist schtick but clearly has some paternal affection for his son. In comparison, Squee’s father openly resents his existence, whilst his mother is too drugged to reliably remember who he is. For his own part, Squee is too traumatised by the one-two punch of his horribly neglectful parents and NNY’s weird nightmare fuel version of being a big brother-type mentor to really take much action in his own right, whereas Dib is motivated to try and foil Zim’s plans.

The closest thing NNY has to people who’ll push back against him, once you set aside cosmic forces which might just be figments of his imagination, are Devi and Tess, two women who survive encounters with NNY. Of the two, Devi’s resistance is more direct and more effective; she goes on a date with NNY, they go back to his place, he has a turn and prepares to murder her, she clocks him one and runs away.

Perhaps most impressively, Vasquez then spends time in subsequent issues depicting how Devi’s ended up becoming a bit of a shut-in as a result of the trauma (she’s had bad dates leading up to this one, but NNY was an order of magnitude worse), and he seems to have a good handle on the very understandable anxieties women have around violent men.

Once Devi realises that NNY is the one responsible for the ridiculously high murder rate in the area, she assumes that he is also responsible for killing a woman who was found raped; NNY flips out at this and angrily states that he doesn’t do what he does out of sexual reasons, but it is completely and absolutely reasonable that Devi would imagine that; moreover, in the last issue it turns out the culprit was “Jimmy”, a NNY fanboy who’s sussed out what his deal is and is trying to imitate him, much to NNY’s disgust. (As NNY says after he dispatches Jimmy, “I don’t like myself much.”)

This plot point raises the question of whether NNY can really disavow responsibility for Jimmy’s actions as much as he wants; sure, Jimmy was a sick puppy in his own right and could well have found his way to doing something awful anyway, but NNY’s actions surely help to foster an environment where individuals like Jimmy feel emboldened and act accordingly. He might not have made Jimmy do what he did, but his actions made the world a bit more a place where a Jimmy could thrive.

For her part, Tess ends up being captured along with Dillon, her meathead boyfriend who’s emotionally manipulative towards her and more directly nasty to more or less everyone else, talks back to NNY when he tries to justify what he’s doing, and is the sole survivor of an escape attempt from his basement complex which coincides with his temporary death and the escape of the thing behind the wall. NNY’s chatter to Tess cuts uncomfortably close to Incel rhetoric about women insisting on dating jerks rather than Nice Guys who’ll treat them right, but the fact that this is coming from NNY of all people suggests that this is something we should take with a pinch of salt.

And here’s the hint to where the saving grace of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac lies. It’s very, very easy to imagine a version of the comic which slides into regarding NNY as a super-cool, transgressive protagonist who, if not to actually be imitated, at least represents a perspective to be respected, with his grandiose rants against the quirks and foibles and frustrations of wider society set against absurd and over-the-top violence being purely cathartic.

It lands very, very close to there, and the “Jimmy” subplot suggests that at least some readers took it that way. But to my eye, the comic doesn’t quite support that reading. NNY doesn’t particularly like himself, and the narrative doesn’t seem to like him either. The frustrations he voices are often recognisable, but they’re also frequently not really justified – they aren’t reasoned, justified, defensible philosophical positions, they’re the rants and tantrums of the unfettered id, sometimes hitting on a justifiable target by accident, sometimes getting into hypocritical positions like being really mortally offended by having his fashion sense be mocked by random passers-by whilst at the same time passing judgement on total strangers all the goddamn time, whilst doing much worse things to them than making a rude little comment.

All of this makes NNY’s attempts to be a mentor to Squee even more ridiculous than they already are – as well as being a wholly inappropriate role model in terms of how he lives his life, NNY is wheeling out advice for Squee which he’s entirely unable to live himself. The only really decent bit of guidance he gives Squee comes right towards the end, when he warns him not to be ruled by his fears and hatreds because he’s still young enough to grow into a more or less functional person and “The best some people can hope for is to better manage their damage.”

Certainly, the thrust of NNY’s character development over the series seems to suggest he’s groping towards trying to do that, but ineffectually. The possibly-supernatural content of the series culminates in him visiting Heaven and Hell and being rejected by both, in the process learning that his weird status is the result of him being a “waste lock” who serves as a sort of sink for the psychic pollution generated by humanity. The conclusion, however, seems to see him conclude that who he is and what he does isn’t special or noble or worth being grandiosely overexcited about; the seven-issue series concludes with him resolving to deaden the emotions and compulsions which drive his behaviour.

NNY originated as a silly little character that Vasquez would draw rudimentary little comics of in high school, back when American kids were allowed to showcase a dark imagination in high school before being identified as as potential school shooter, sent to the school nurse for euthanisation, and cremated in the boiler room furnace. Turning the character around from those humble origins into a protagonist you can tell a story which manages to deliver the odd surprisingly mature statement in the midst of all the shrieking is an impressive achievement, but equally you can see why Vasquez would need to stop the series where he does.

Put it this way: the original issues came out from 1995 to early 1997, when Vasquez was 20-22, and NNY was a product of his adolescence; being in your early 20s puts you just far enough past puberty to recognise what an ass you could often be in your teen years, whilst being close enough that you can still remember how it felt and still tap into that rage from time to time. If there’s any redeeming feature to a comic which deliberately goes to dark, distressing areas and stays there to find comedy, it’s that it disguises itself as an adolescent rant against the things Vasquez despises in the outside world but then reveals itself to be a self-exorcism of aspects of himself he clearly dislikes.

The Sequel: Squee

Vasquez’ immediate followup to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was a four-book series about Squee, NNY’s neighbour. Running for four issues from mid-1997 to 1998, and continuing a lot of the ancillary strips which had run in its parents series (of which more later), it has less of an arc than Johnny, which feels like it was constructed more purposefully.

That isn’t to say nothing develops or changes – Squee makes an actual friend at school, Pepito, who turns out to be the child of Satan, and by the end of the run Squee’s parents have entirely lost patience with him and confined him in a mental hospital, after he actually stands up for himself for once (he convinces some aliens to abduct them instead of him). But equally, these developments don’t seem to be the product of a process of change or personal development on the part of Squee or anyone else – it’s all just random, arbitrary stuff that happens to the poor tyke.

Then again, that’s kind of the appeal of it; if Squee can be said to be “about” anything, it’s about how weird and confusing childhood often is when adults either don’t explain stuff to you or the explanations don’t really make a whole lot of sense. This is the comic which fell into the hands of Nickelodeon executives and convinced them it was worth chatting to Vasquez and seeing if he was up for creating a TV show, and whilst it still feels like there’s a big gap between this and anything you can broadcast on television for an 11-15 demographic, the decision to try and work with him doesn’t seem so weird when it’s evident that Vasquez “gets” childhood and can make statements about it which ring true, in a way which many adult creators struggle with.

The Coda: I Feel Sick

The final significant story in the “NNYverse” (unless you’re willing to count Invader Zim as being part of it) is this two-issue series focused on Devi, who after her run-in with NNY has become a shut-in. As it turns out, Devi is also an artist, and has been diverted from working on her own personal projects by the demands of a big contract she’s landed with some soulless corporate giant. The one work she’s been able to make headway on which isn’t part of the contract is a painting of a creepy little doll, who she dubs “Sickness”. But Sickness now starts talking to Devi, attempting to leech on her thwarted creativity just as the dark forces which rule NNY have done to him…

This is a brief two-issue story which culminates with Devi taking a more proactive and far more healthy approach to getting her dark impulses under control than NNY does – she doesn’t kill anyone, the only act of violence she really does is a symbolic deed to put the Sickness under her control, things end in a broadly hopeful fashion.

Coloured by Rosearik Rikki Simons, who would also serve as the voice of Gir in Invader Zim, the timeline on this makes it rather obvious it’s a side project that Vasquez and Simons indulged in on the margins whilst their main creative energies were being taken up by preparing Invader Zim for Nickelodeon, not so subtly paralleled by Devi having to take time away from the unfiltered, personal art that speaks to her inner creative drive for the sake of making something more corporate, with all the compromises that entails.

Biting the hand that feeds? Possibly, but it’s also a perhaps necessary way to conclude the Johnny/Squee/I Feel Sick triptych by depicting someone who has both the agency and the insight to find a healthier way to overcome the forces trying to destroy them than either Johnny (who has agency but no insight) or Squee (who can see how messed up the world is but isn’t really old enough to exert much agency over it).

Unlike Johnny the Homicidal Maniac or Squee it doesn’t have any ancillary strips filling out the pages of the issues, and the colour also helps give it a sheen of professionalism which sets it apart from the stark monochromatic indie style of Johnny and Squee; it feels like Vasquez taking one last desperate stab to get Devi’s story out before Invader Zim entirely eats his life and leaves him without time to complete it.

Not as influential as either of the previous stories, it still seems like a vital piece of the puzzle, not least because of the faith it expresses in the ability of people to find better solutions to their problems than Vasquez’ more hopeless protagonists manage. At the same time, there are some parts which are a tad jarring – not least a long sequence which boils down to an extended fat joke, an unworthy target for Vasquez to aim at all things considered.

The Ancillary Strips: Meanwhile, Happy Noodle Boy, Wobbly Headed Bob, Anne Gwish

Furthering the sense that Squee was simply a continuation of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac without the main character (bar for a cameo at the end) is that the eleven issues of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee had various additional strips appearing in them to flesh out the page count, most of which ended up carrying over from Johnny into Squee.

Perhaps the most substantive of these were the Meanwhile stories – little four-page comic stories showing other stuff going on elsewhere in NNY and Squee’s world when the main characters are away. These both did a bit of worldbuilding and character establishing; Devi, for instance, first appeared in a Meanwhile in which she was on a date with a dude who was trying too hard to play it cool and so avoided going to the bathroom all evening (despite all evidence suggesting Devi wouldn’t have thought anything of it), with needlessly disastrous results. (It ends with the immortal line “Oh my god!! Somebody put shit in my pants!!!!“)

When Slave Labor Graphics put out the graphic novel collections of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee, Vasquez decided to stick the Meanwhile strips in the Squee book – a logical enough decision given that this balances out the size of the books somewhat, and also because Vasquez’ declared intent was to make the Johnny graphic novel focused on NNY and his story.

This is presumably why Happy Noodle Boy appears in both graphic novels – with each strip associated with the Johnny issue it first appeared in and the remaining four compiled at the back of the Squee book – because, of course, Happy Noodle Boy is meant to be NNY’s own comic, and so in theory ought to be illustrative of his state of mind. What it actually works best as is as a self-parody of Vasquez’ own Johnny-era; his painfully skinny protagonist reduced to a stick figure, his frenzied dialogue dialled up until it’s just a lolrandom rant, and every panel being as over-busy as it can get whilst still sticking to the deliberately simplistic style Vasquez adopts for it.

Another ancillary strip, Wobbly Headed Bob, is collected in the Squee volume, which I think misses a trick since it’s clearly meant to be a companion piece to Happy Noodle Boy, in that together they form a sort of microcosm of the bipolar experience. Happy Noodle Boy is, quite obviously, the manic phase, which means poor Bob gets the depression… kind of. Certainly, on one level Wobbly Headed Bob is about a depressed little gremlin who waxes lyrical about how hopeless everything is constantly, to the point where he brings everyone else down and everyone else gets heartily sick of him. If thrown as a brickbat from the outside, this sort of thing risks being read like an ugly slam on depressed people.

What saves Wobbly Headed Bob is that it’s not really making fun of Bob for being depressed (maybe), it’s making fun of him for being an arrogant braggart with a superiority complex. Bob might or might not actually be depressed – he doesn’t actually apply that word to himself. What he claims to be is a genius – a uniquely brilliant mind who, alone out of all the sappy fools in this absurd world, has figured out just how shitty everything is. He attempts to explain this to people, at length, regarding it as his personal mission to help people mentally improve themselves by giving up on love, laughter, and anything which brings them joy, when in fact all he is doing is berating people for being happier than him because he’s convinced only an idiot could be happier than him.

You get the impression that if Bob abruptly flipped his attitude and became genuinely happy, he’d be going around giving people deeply unhelpful advice along the lines of “just have a positive attitude!”, because his basic malfunction isn’t his own emotional state, it’s his conviction that everyone else should have the same emotional state that he does, and anyone who doesn’t is an idiot who needs this explained to them. Whereas Happy Noodle Boy has essentially no interiority worthy of serious consideration, Bob is a strikingly well-realised character, and a truly vile one at that.

The final side strip worth mentioning in this section is Anne Gwish. Like Meanwhile, this is set in NNY’s world, and follows the exploits of an arrogant gothic type – the titular Anne. Much like Wobbly Headed Bob, Anne is convinced that she’s better than everyone else, and her reasons for this are just as shallow – she’s convinced she’s incredibly stylish and cool, and she’s correct in that, but she won’t concede the same to anyone else, dishing out viciously judgemental put-downs directed to everyone who catches her eye.

The best Anne Gwish strip is probably the one where she and her friend got to the goth club, spend their entire evening firing off hurtful, judgemental comments at people, and then someone makes fun of Anne’s goth outfit as she’s headed home and the last panel is her grumpily complaining about that in her diary. Now, I don’t think Vasquez is wholly correct to treat the two as equivalent; being hassled by total strangers in a public space is a very different prospect from someone lurking around in a social space you’re apart of throwing around their social capital by making catty remarks about you.

At the same time both of those things are clearly quite bad, and bad in ways which can be just as hurtful to others – and Anne is persistently, sustaiendly making the spaces she has social cachet in just a bit more elitist and unwelcoming, whereas the random off-hand comment by a stranger, whilst clearly distressing in the moment, will probably be forgotten about by everyone who was present other than Anne within five minutes.

Vasquez says that Anne is deliberately drawn as the most attractive of his characters because he regards her as having the ugliest attitude, and this does play into a regular beef Vasquez expresses over the course of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, both with goth culture specifically and with people as a whole. (Vasquez trying to distance himself from being a “goth” artist is, ironically, the absolute best way he could possibly bolster his goth credibility: there’s nothing more goth than furiously denying being goth once the goth kids have latched onto you.)

His stance is that if you want people to treat you with respect and genuinely foster a society which is more welcoming and accepting, you absolutely can’t be judgemental about people whose aesthetic style or personal tastes differ from you, because not only is this hypocritical, but it’s a type of hypocrisy which reveals that your previously stated attempts at tolerance were just rooted in self-interest, asking for treatment for yourself you are not willing to extend to others. Reasonable enough, provided you watch out for the sort of people who like to pass off expressions of fascism as “artistic statements” rather than “threats”.

The Bottom of the Barrel: Filler Bunny

And then there is Filler Bunny. Initially, Filler Bunny was devised to solve a space issue; an earlier printing of one of Vasquez’s comics was advertising an event which had obviously come and gone by the time the comic was due to be reprinted, so for subsequent printings the original page was yanked and Vasquez threw in a one-page doodled comic of a cute fuzzy bunny that has to caper and cavort for the enjoyment of the reader… or else.

Filler Bunny got used a few more times for similar purposes, and then had a few comic releases of his own, with a 2014 compilation of his standalone comics eventually emerging (with a bunch of all-new content). None of this is to Filler Bunny’s benefit: respawned over and over again by sadistic scientists who take enjoyment from his suffering, he endures horrors vaster and more transgressive than anything Vasquez throws at his other characters.

The first few Filler Bunny stadalone comics were the result of Vasquez doing the whole “24 hour comic” challenge. Certainly, the simplistic style of Filler Bunny is suited to that sort of thing, and as is often the case with that sort of endeavour there’s bits where Vasquez derives material from how difficult it actually is to do a 24 hour comic and panicing. The whole endeavour is an exercise in unfettered id, Vasquez airing his nastiest ideas without any sort of filter – a sort of comic book equivalent of the old Aristocrats joke, and whilst the results when Vasquez does that aren’t remotely as bad as what would happen if you did a similar exercise with, say, Dave Sim or Frank Miller, at the same time the unfiltered version of someone is often their least immediately appealing and that’s definitely the case with Vasquez here.

With the release of the compiled edition, Vasquez has more or less finished putting out works collecting or following up on material released in the original runs of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Squee, and that may play into it to an extent – Filler Bunny often feels like Vasquez reaching to recapture the intense energy of his post-adolescent early comics career, which is the sort of motivation which is very understandable but can end up feeling somewhat try-hard when it doesn’t quite land. As much as some people might want Vasquez to put out another Johnny-esque comic, I think it’s unlikely he will, and even more unlikely that such a thing would actually please anyone if he made the attempt. Artists move on; audiences often don’t.

The Companion Chronicles concept, which has a companion actor mostly narrating a story audiobook style with another actor in a “second voice” role to add aspects of audio drama to the production, was devised to let Big Finish with tell stories featuring the first four Doctors, none of whom they could get in to appear in full-cast audio dramas. But there was always an underlying asymmetry there; whilst Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee all had inextricable grave-based scheduling conflicts, Tom Baker was in theory available to work with them, but in practice didn’t want to.

This did not deter Big Finish from including Fourth Doctor stories in the first and second seasons of The Companion Chronicles, and it would have been kind of unfair if it had – after all, why should Tom holding out on negotiations get in the way of any of his companions picking up a paycheque for narrating some of these tales? In this article, we’ll cover six Companion Chronicles, narrated by three different companions – two from Leela, two from the First Romana, and two from the Second Romana.

Empathy Games

As in The Catalyst, Leela has been imprisoned by the Z’nai. The tables have turned on her captors, but her situation is no less dire; the Z’nai have all expired from a plague to which Leela is immune, but with no survivors left to free her from captivity, she is facing a different kind of death. As she mulls over her past, she recalls a time when she and the Doctor came to the world of Synchronis, ruled over by the cruel Co-Ordinator Angell (David Warner), who recruits “Cathartics” to fight in the Empathy Games.

As much ritual as sport, the Games see the champions of the people symbolically overcome their darker side for the sake of preserving the tranquility and order of Synchronis. It largely revolves around fighting giant rats – something that Leela is used to from her recent brush with The Talons of Weng-Chiang – but as the fight continues, Leela realises that there’s something up about these rodents. Can her own empathy extend to the mutant rat-people?

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Written by Nigel Fairs as the second part of his Leela trilogy, this is… alright. Not better than alright, but alright. It’s an OK listen, with a mostly baffling first episode which more or less rights the ship by the end of the second episode. The major problem with it is that it’s a story where the framing device overshadows the main narrative – and, more unforgivably, nothing actually happens in the framing device, with Leela ending the audio in more or less the exact same state as she began it without any changes along the way.

It compares poorly to Simon Guerrier’s Sara Kingdom trilogy; in the parts of that I’ve heard so far, Home Truths and The Drowned World, the framing device is also a significant story in itself, and in The Drowned World it also seems a bit more important than the story itself, but Guerrier adds substance to it which is wholly lacking from Fairs’ efforts here. The bizarre situation the Sara simulacrum is in is much less static than Leela’s imprisonment here, and most importantly includes at least one other actual character – by contrast, at this point Leela is now alone in the Z’nai facility, which puts a major cramp on anything substantive happening with respect to the framing device, but because she’s gradually dying the framing device feels urgent in a way that a story she definitely did survive (because she’s remembering it now) doesn’t.

The Stealers From Saiph

The Doctor and the First Romana have completed their quest for The Key To Time, and the randomiser has now taken them to the French Riviera in the 1920s – the perfect venue for a holiday, and between the Doctor’s bohemian air and Romana’s effortless chic they fit in perfectly. What better time to kick back and deal with something relaxing and low-key after the drama and bombast of The Armageddon Factor? After all, there’s nothing to worry about here except posh lad Tommy Creighton’s crush on Romana, dotty fortune-teller Madame Arcana’s crush on the Doctor, a string of petty thefts from the hotel, the artwork in a nearby cave which the Doctor and Romana recognise as hailing from a far-off star system, and the Lovecraftian horror that emerges from the cave to puppeteer the Bright Young Things in a scheme spanning the Mediterranean…

Mary Tamm makes her Companion Chronicles debut here, in an experiment with doing without anyone in the “second voice” role entirely. She pulls it off quite capably, aided by a great little concept – putting this particular TARDIS team into the midst of a story which blends Wodehouse, Christie, and Lovecraft into a 1920s period piece is a just plain great idea, and the story by Nigel Robinson ramps up the stakes wonderfully, much like a serial of the era would.

One can imagine this being televised with a rich cast of character actors, but at the same time it’s tricky to nominate any one individual other character who cries out to be given the “second voice” role – the supporting cast are all grand, but part of the mystery is figuring out who’s truly significant to the core mystery and who is a mere unfortunate bystander in this situation, and giving someone the second voice spot inherently underlines them as being important in a way which undermines that. The other natural candidates would be the Doctor – obviously impossible – or K9, but he stays offstage for this story. (We saw in The Leisure Hive that beaches don’t really agree with him, after all.) Compromising on the usual formula for the benefit of the story is a laudable trait, particularly when that compromise is easy to achieve – casting less people is always going to be cheaper than casting more, after all – so why not?

The Pyralis Effect

Long ago the First Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara visited the world of Pavonis IV, where they helped the inhabitants during a great crisis. Long ages later, Pavonis IV has been devastated by a disaster that has killed most of the population. Genetic samples from which they can be reborn have been stored on a fleet of ark ships, such as the Myriad, which set forth on a mission: find the Doctor, get him to help restore Pavonis IV, and recreate civilisation at the moment of catastrophe.

Conveniently enough, the TARDIS has just landed on the Myriad. As the Fourth Doctor and Second Romana explore the ship, they find all is not well. CAIN (Jess Robinson), an AI based on a fungal network grown in a humanoid chassis, has apparently become mad and had to be confined. Meanwhile the ship’s captain, Suri (also Robinson) believes she has found the Doctor’s TARDIS – a sort of blue monolith on a moon of a gas giant somewhere in the constellation of Kasterborous. But that’s not the TARDIS – it’s a prison in which the Time Lords imprisoned the mind parasites known as the Pyralis (also Robinson)…

Written by George Mann, this is set in the gap between  Seasons 17 and 18, and leans more towards the style of the latter than the former, with a basically serious science fiction plot with the Doctor as a goofball presence whose presence is less overbearing than in the middle period of Tom Baker’s run. The style of this era – Doctor-lighter without being all the way over to Doctor-light – lends itself well to the Companion Chronicles treatment, the story is OK but not exceptional, Lalla Ward is a good narrator and Jess Robinson gets to showcase her vocal talents. It’s alright but not particularly memorable, and it’s hard to shake the fact that we already saw the Fourth Doctor tackle parasitic life forms going after a stored-away humanity in The Ark In Space.

The Time Vampire

Leela, still imprisoned in the Z’nai facility, recalls another time she and the Doctor faced down the Z’nai. When the Z’nai equipment keeping her alive finally gives out, she dies, and in the accordance with her people’s beliefs is reincarnated as a baby.

I’m kind of done with the Z’nai stuff at this point. I don’t know why Nigel Fairs was allowed to take up so many slots with it – and in such a way as to monopolise Leela. It made a certain degree of sense to make a special series out of the fate of Sara Kingdom, since the character would otherwise be too dead to do the whole “reminiscing about their past with the Doctor” thing. (Then again, maybe all of her Companion Chronicles could have been narrated by herself to herself as she endures subjective aeons in an instant under the influence of the Time Destructor at the end of The Daleks’ Master Plan.) It makes no sense to restrict Leela to a single writer’s Companion Chronicles, especially when that writer isn’t even the one who created the character in the first place (so it can hardly be a rights issue, especially since Chris Boucher was clearly fine with lots of other writers making material for Leela over the years).

I particularly don’t get why anyone thought this story would be an appropriate send-off for the character. It’s just impossibly sad and grim, and though the reincarnation thing is meant to take some of the sting out of it, it doesn’t really work because if cosmologically the Sevateem actually got things right in this respect and reincarnation really is our postmortem destiny, Leela was going to reincarnate anyway, whether she died in agony in an abandoned Z’nai facility or gently slipped away with Romana and a couple of K9s caring for her in her last days. With all that baggage hanging over the story, it’s near-impossible to care about Leela’s recollected tale because a past situation she successfully got out of is clearly less important than a present one which is firmly threatening her life.

Having John Leeson here as K9 is nice, that’s something – but equally, it also raises the question of just what the blue blazes K9 is doing. Shouldn’t he be trying to get Leela out of the Z’nai facility? Fetch, doggy, fetch!

The Invasion of E-Space

After rescuing Adric from a State of Decay, the Second Romana and the Doctor are continuing their journey through E-Space, searching for a Charged Vacuum Emboitment which will allow them to return to their own universe. Now they have found one, hanging in orbit over the world of Ballustra – with a Farrian invasion fleet surging through it. For the Farrians have discovered the means of creating CVEs to invade other universes – and now the Doctor, Romana, Adric, and K9 must join forces with Marni Tellis (Suanne Bruan), a crack detective from Ballustra investigating a serial murder case connected to the invasion…

This one was written by Andrew Smith, writer of Full Circle, who would go on to be a fairly prolific writer of Big Finish audios. I suppose it makes sense that Smith would set this during Season 18’s E-Space trilogy, since that was his wheelhouse, but at the same time there’s issues. Adric doesn’t do much that’s particularly memorable in this story – Companion Chronicles often struggling with multi-companion stories in this respect – and though Lalla Ward and Suanne Bruan do a reasonable enough job delivering the material, I think the story focuses on the wrong stuff.

In particular, all this thwart-the-invasion run-around-the-corridors stuff is pretty standard fare for Who, and overlooks the concept of the serial murder case being the work of a Farrian advance scouting party. I don’t particularly remember why that’s the case – the conclusion to that sort of slipped past me, and despite writing this review within a day or two of listening to the story I’d already forgotten that Marni is technically a murder detective. Kicking off the invasion entirely too early, short-circuits what could have been an interesting serial murder investigation storyline for the sake of an overworn planetary invasion yarn, when I think the more interesting route would have been for the story to be 80% murder investigation, 20% thwarted invasion at the end.

Throwing in the idea that Romana might have devised her own route back to N-Space after she’d finished aiding the Tharil slave revolt by observing the Farrian’s techniques here is fun, though also rather needless – an entirely viable alternative explanation for Romana getting back to N-Space was wheeled out in Blood Harvest, and whilst that’s strictly speaking New Adventures chronology that Big Finish aren’t beholden to, at the same time the whole concept of Romana becoming President of Gallifrey is a New Adventures concept too, and if Big Finish were going to trade off that as much as they do, they might as well respect the setup.

Ferril’s Folly

The First Romana, the Doctor, and K9 are in the middle of questing for The Key To Time, and the tracker has brought them to a sleepy Norfolk village in 2011, close to the estate of Lady Millicent Ferril (Madeleine Potter). A former NASA astronaut before she married into the aristocracy, Lady Ferril has used her wealth to maintain a private observatory on the grounds of her estate – but her interest in space is not solely academic. For her ladyship is providing the vanguard of an invasion, possessed as she is by alien forces that tampered with her during an ill-fated shuttle mission. The same forces that have turned every metal object in the area into her minions…

Slipping an extra episode into the Key To Time saga requires some finessing, since there were a set number of pieces in that and we saw each of them retrieved on television. Peter Anghelidies’ script here arrives at a reasonable solution – as well as helping the Doctor and Romana track down pieces of the Key and transform them into their original forms, it can also be recalibrated to causes a piece of the key to disperse, reforming elsewhere in space and time. It’s not something Romana or the Doctor would prefer to do, because it gets them no closer to finishing their quest, but it does provide them with a way to “throw” a particular section of the quest and get a do-over in situations, like this one, where for some reason or other it’s better to send the segment away than retrieve it (though in this instance the reasons are pure technobabble).

As for this story, it’s meant to slot in after The Stones of Blood, which I guess means that if it had aired on television it would have ended up providing a double dose of folk horror – not that that’s such a bad thing, given that the horror-tinged Fourth Doctor stories ended up being quite good. Lady Ferril’s control over metal objects leads to fun instances like decorative suits of armour roaming around to enforce her will and all manner of more subtle tricks, making her an engaging enemy.

The approach here sees Mary Tamm sharing narration duties with Madeleine Potter, rather than Potter purely providing dialogue, so we really get this gradually evolving sense of what Ferril’s deal is through her narration. There’s a particularly good bit where Ferril’s narration takes in a conversation between the Doctor and Romana that she wasn’t present for, and just when you realise it’d make more sense for Romana to be narrating this bit it becomes apparent how Ferril was spying on them, making this a reasonably cunning use of the format.

This story marks the end of the Fourth Doctor era being one of the four pillars of the Companion Chronicles – because even as the stories I’ve covered in this article were coming out, Tom Baker was working with AudioGo to put out the Nest Cottage series, a format which was part audio drama, part Companion Chronicle with the narrator being the Doctor himself. Clearly, Baker enjoyed that process enough to reconsider his previous spurning of Big Finish, and a deal was struck which has held to this day. The first season of the Fourth Doctor Adventures series was on its way – and when the full-cast Fourth Doctor audio dramas began, the pace of Fourth Doctor Companion Chronicle releases slumped.

In theory, they didn’t have to; by this point the door had been opened to do Companion Chronicle stories based around Doctors whose actors were actively collaborating with Big Finish – either because the story included a companion who wasn’t available to appear in a full-cast audio drama or because someone had hit on a story which simply worked better in the Companion Chronicle format.

Still, such things were special treats sprinkled lightly across the line, whose bread and butter was still producing stories for absent Doctors – and so the balance thereafter would shift towards First-to-Third Doctor tales. Eventually, of course, a bit of casting department necromancy would see full-cast audio dramas for those Doctors emerge too, with the result that the pace of Companion Chronicles releases eventually slackened off – they brought the monthly line to an end and whilst they do still occasionally put out releases here and there, one suspects they only do it when they’ve hit on a concept which really makes sense for the format.

As such, Ferril’s Folly can be seen as closing out an era of Fourth Doctor stories at Big Finish. In the next article in this series, we’ll finally reunite with the Fourth Doctor – the genuine article, you might say!

So, here we are, having covered the last of the New Adventures and the final Missing Adventures. There’s one last bit of content for me to get through before we’re done covering the Doctor Who fiction Virgin put out whilst they were the keepers of the flame for Doctor Who: the Decalog collections. Beginning in 1994, these were annual short story anthologies which, as covers proclaimed implied, offered up ten stories which between them got you a little Doctor-y fun with each of the classic Doctors.

Whilst they could, if they wanted, have rushed a fourth volume in 1997 so they could do one with the Eighth Doctor, they opted against this; Decalog 4 offered snapshots of the lives of Roz Forrester’s ancestors and Decalog 5 had only one story which even touched on the Benny-fronted New Adventures which Virgin put out after losing the licence, the others apparently being unrelated sci-fi tales. I don’t intend to cover either; Roz was a great character but her family was never really the point, and neither of the Doctor-less Decalog entries seem to get much love.

As for these collections – well, the first one was a hot seller which can be credited with taking Doctor Who short fiction out of the realm of fanfic and brief low-effort numbers rattled off for Christmas annuals and into a form in its own right, and the third one has a very special authorial debut indeed. Might as well do the second one while I’m at it!

Oh, and content warning – there’s a story here where to meaningfully and honestly discuss it, I have to address its rape themes.

Decalog

The task of editing the first Decalog was taken on by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker, who were also co-authors of the Handbook series. In the process, they decided to work in a framing device which would allow each of the individual stories in the collection to act as part of a cohesive whole, at least in theory – we’ll see how well that worked in practice.

Walker’s own Playback provides the connecting tissue: the Seventh Doctor wanders into a private detective’s office in 1947 in LA, where he explains he’s come down with a bad case of amnesia. The detective takes him to see Silverman, an aristocratic former client of his who might be able to help – for Silverman is a psychometrist, who can clean information from handling objects. And the Doctor’s pockets are so full of tat that some of it must have psychometrically interesting properties. Having done this setup, Walker then switches back to this story between the individual tales to narrate Silverman moving from object to object as he searches for the Doctor’s identity.

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Andy Lane’s Fallen Angel introduces us to Lucas Seyton, an aristocratic gentleman thief in 1930s England who encounters the Second Doctor midway through one of his adventures. It’s largely an exercise in having the Doctor meet the protagonist of an entirely different genre of fiction, with different mores from Doctor Who, and pondering what the two heroes would make of each other, and does pretty well at that. (Seyton would later be borrowed by David McIntee for The Shadow of Weng-Chiang.)

Marc Platt gives us The Duke of Dominoes, which is really a story about the Delgado Master getting up to mischief in Al Capone’s Chicago, with the Fourth Doctor having a cameo where he and Sarah Jane stroll in and ruin the Master’s stratagem without even realising the Master was there; it’s a pretty good exercise in “what do the Master’s exploits look like from his perspective?”

The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back is a story by Vanessa Bishop, set somewhere in the vicinity of Season 7, in which the Third Doctor goes a little rogue to try and help an alien in distress get away from Earth without UNIT involvement, because he doesn’t trust UNIT not to kill the alien in question or worse after The Silurians. The main attraction here is the depiction of having the Doctor, Liz, and Brigadier have the sort of blazing argument that the end of that story really called out for, but which we never got. The idea of the Doctor working at cross-purposes to UNIT is something which was explored a bit in The Silurians but otherwise abandoned for the rest of the Pertwee era, so it’s nice to see an attempt here to redress the balance, a move which certainly helps my feeling that the Third Doctor was a bit too establishment-leaning.

Scarab of Death by Mark Stammers is a straight-ahead Pyramids of Mars sequel in which the Fourth Doctor and Sarah tackle a cult that’s engaged in a doomed attempt to revive Horus; it’s notable mostly for a great sequence where Sarah fully takes the lead in rescuing the Doctor from captivity.

Way at the other end of the traditional/experimental spectrum is The Book of Shadows, quite possibly the best thing Jim Mortimore has written for Doctor Who. Set in between The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue, it largely focuses on the First Doctor and Barbara, Ian being sidelined for much of the story, and sees them stumbling into a version of early Ptolemaic Egypt which has gone terribly wrong. The story culminates in the First Doctor breaking his rule on changing the course of history, albeit only because another force has already reshaped it, and sees Barbara sacrifice a timeline where she was married to Ptolemy for eight years and had a son in order to save Ian’s life and prevent a disaster which would have utterly confounded the future history of the planet – including the bit which Susan lives in now.

It’s all very ambitious, and it’s genuinely impressive how much Mortimore is able to pack into the tale. Set late in Alexander the Great’s reign and early in the rise of Ptolemy Soter after Alexander’s death, you can see why BBC Books would have commissioned Mortimore to do an entire novel on the theme of “early-style First Doctor historical where the TARDIS crew meet Alexander the Great”. Of course, what resulted from that was Campaign, a tale which bore little resemblance to the proposal, but when you’re putting out material this good hubris is an occupational hazard.

Such a shame, then, that one of the collection’s best stories should be followed by one of its worst. Fascination by David J. Howe is a Fifth Doctor story in which he and Peri visit a fifteenth century Greek village where the inhabitants secretly use the conjuration of spirits on a regular basis to carry out chores, ease labour, heal the sick, tend to the distressed, and (in the case of one nefarious young man) rape Peri.

I wish I didn’t have to phrase it like that, but there really is no other way around it. Tablibik uses conjured spirits to override Peri’s judgement and free will, sow discord between her and the Doctor, and get her to sleep with him, and when she’s freed of his influence the narration makes a big deal of how soiled and used she feels, “her self-respect in tatters around her”, so great, not only do we get the sexual assault but we also get a ton of judgemental terms tossed around at the victim. Lovely.

Given that Peri was so frequently subjected to sexual peril during her televised stint on the show, this feels like Howe doubling down on one of the major flaws of her era rather than taking the opportunity to do something better. The idea of Peri seeing the Doctor as a protective big brother is a decent way of summing up the interactions between Peri and the Fifth Doctor, I suppose, but in terms of enunciating the point there should have been another way. It is little surprise that Howe’s contributions to official Doctor Who stuff ends here.

The Golden Door by David Auger is a return to form for the anthology; at first it looks like it’s going to be a First Doctor story featuring Steven and Dodo, but by the end it’s twisted around into being a Sixth Doctor story, the two Doctors never quite running into each other but instead having an intertwined adventure which is cunningly structured to ensure that the Sixth Doctor’s recollection of the incident cannot actually help him.

Tim Robins’ Prisoners of the Sun is set in the gap between Seasons 7 and 8, and seems to be a bid to write a Third Doctor story in the style of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius series. Sure, the idea of a timeline gone astray where familiar characters show up in unusually different contexts was seeded in Inferno, but the stylishly garish violence, the leaning into the Doctor’s unusual fashion sense, the apocalyptic themes, and the pop culture nods (Liz Shaw has a dream about her resignation from UNIT which recreates the intro sequence to The Prisoner beat for beat) are all very Cornelius.

The plot is about a world rendered a flooded wasteland by – let me check my notes here – an overuse of solar power? I think this may have been intended as a commentary on the way the Time Lords had Omega blow up a star to make an artificial black hole to power their technology, and I suppose it is in keeping with the recurring “energy project gone wrong” theme of the early Third Doctor era, but it still feels like a misstep given where we are now.

Paul Cornell offers us Lackaday Express, in which the Fifth Doctor dives into a particle accelerator Quantum Leap style to rescue a woman who’s stuck wandering about in her own timestream. (This feels a lot like the “jumping into the Doctor’s timestream” concept that would eventually show up in The Name of the Doctor.) Based on the timing, Cornell probably knocked this off at the same time as he was writing the Fifth Doctor-fronted Goth Opera, though it’s wholly possible some of it comes from his pre-Timewyrm: Revelation fanfic writing, in which the Fifth Doctor era was apparently his focus; either way, Cornell has a good knack for the voices of the Fifth Doctor and his companions, as well as an unusually emotionally mature grasp on characterisation by the standards of the anthology, so of course this ends up a highlight.

The anthology wraps up, of course, with the conclusion of Playback, in which it turns out the mystery client wasn’t the Seventh Doctor after all, the genuine article turning up very shortly before the end of the story. De-emphasising the Seventh Doctor may well have been a deliberate undeclared policy here, the better to give spotlight to the other Doctors – Decalog came out a few months before Goth Opera inaugurated the Missing Adventures, so much like the flashbacks and cameos that the New Adventures were indulging in at the time this may have been part of a tactic to whet the readership’s appetite for legacy Doctor stories.

As a package, this is perhaps a little hit and miss – inevitable when you have a mix of established and first-time writers contributing – but it’s varied enough in style to retain interest all the way through and the batting average is rather good. As I often do with multi author anthologies, let’s crank up the ol’ Boy’s-Club-o-meter and see what it says…

Number of authors with stories in the anthology: 10
Number of said authors who are male: 9
Boy’s Club-o-meter rating: 90%

Not great! Let’s see if things improve.

Decalog 2: Lost Property

The second Decalog was also edited by Stammers and Walker, who in their introduction note that it’s a “by popular demand effort”, the first collection having been one of the Virgin line’s hottest sellers. This time, rather than a connecting narrative there’s an overarching theme, with each story intended to reflect a place the Doctor has called home, however temporary.

The New Adventures, of course, had by this point thoroughly adopted Andrew Cartmel’s idea of “the house on Allen Road” – a sprawling pile out in Kent where the Seventh Doctor had a little home base, first appearing in Cartmel’s Doctor Who magazine comics before he imported it into the New Adventures continuity via Warhead. As such, a Decalog playing further with the idea of the Doctor having little boltholes scattered about the cosmos had at least some conceptual merit.

How much each story cleaves to that theme varies. Gareth Roberts’ Vortex of Fear, set during Season 6, finds the Second Doctor and his chums gaining a sort of shadowy half-presence in a weird little hotel in the time vortex itself – a haven for tax exiles that’s gone wrong and left its inhabitants stuck in a time loop. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe don’t actually stick around, but the after-echoes of their presence do.

It’s a fun concept, but it’s hard not to see this as Roberts rebelling against the concept a bit since they aren’t really visiting a place the Doctor ever called home, however briefly. In his notes on The Last Word, his Doctor Who Magazine comic story written to mark the tenth anniversary of the New Adventures debuting, Roberts is a bit snide about the house on Allen Road, suggesting it’s a bit of a silly trope because the TARDIS itself is inherently more interesting than the house itself could ever be.

Here, though, I think Roberts is flat-out wrong. Sure, the house on Allen Road can’t contain anything in it the Doctor can’t find in the TARDIS in terms of rooms or furnishings. But you know what it’s rather good at doing which the TARDIS is at best a bit inconsistent at? Receiving mail. A home, however temporary, allows the establishment of connections and relationships which it’s more difficult to maintain when spatially nomadic and more or less impossible to keep up when you’re barrelling around time and space. Whether it’s the Fifth Doctor comics seeing him take up a residency in the vicinity of a sleepy English village, or the Doctor spending a while running a restaurant in The Crystal Bucephalus, or working at a hotel in Joy To the World, or serving as UNIT’s scientific advisor during his exile on Earth, or living in someone’s spare room as in Roberts’ own The Lodger, letting the Doctor stop somewhere for a while can often tease out intriguing new possibilities.

Tim Robins’ Crimson Dawn at least cleaves closer to the concept, with the story unfolding as the Fourth Doctor, Leela and K9 take some time to enjoy a houseboat holiday on the canals of a terraformed Mars. Whereas Prisoners of the Sun‘s breathless, experimental style managed a decent enough pastiche of Moorcock, here it resembles less a Jerry Cornelius story and more the amateur fanfic which I suspect was Robins’ background, throwing incident after incident at the reader without varying the tone enough to stop it all blurring together in a big differentiated mass.

Things get back on track with Where the Heart Is by Andy Lane. Set in between Seasons 9 and 10, it’s largely a “just so” story to explain why UNIT HQ ended up moving to that manor house from The Three Doctors; here, UNIT itself is the Doctor’s temporary home, and the threat of the British branch disbanding when penny-pinching ministers decide to cut funding is a bigger driver of the story than the alien scheme the Doctor investigates in parallel. It’s fairly traditional stuff, given a bit of extra meat by Lane’s examination of the UNIT family’s interrelationships.

Paul Cornell’s The Trials of Tara is more experimental – a sequel to The Androids of Tara featuring the Seventh Doctor and Benny, presented as a Shakespearean play (stuffed with aspects borrowed from a cross-section of the bard’s works). It’s an object lesson in how you don’t need all that original of a plot provided that you still find an interesting way to tell your story.

David A. McIntee offers us Housewarming, in which retired genocidal fascist Mike Yates, feminist journalist Sarah Jane Smith, and heckin’ doggo K-9 join a ghost-hunting team checking out an old spooky house. It turns out to be the house on Allen Road – and rather than having an appearance from the Doctor, the story focuses on the Doctor’s friends trying to foil the dark scheme of Count Marius Castillo, leader of the team. The Count turns out to be none other than the Master – specifically, the Basil Rathbone incarnation that he regenerates into in McIntee’s First Frontier – who’s trying to lay a trap for the Doctor. It’s a fun, campy story which involves the Count doing a lot of stuff for the sake of being pointlessly evil, so I suppose a lot of the Ainley Master survived into his next incarnation.

In The Nine-Day Queen by Matthew Jones the First Doctor, Ian, and Barbara are on the trail of the Vrij – a vortex entity which possesses people and jumps from host to host. Their pursuit leads them to Tudor England, where they take up a brief residency that sees their mission intertwined with the sad fate of Lady Jane Grey, the teenager who ruled as Queen briefly after the death of Edward VI before being deposed and executed in favour of Mary I and a return to Catholicism.

Jones takes the view that Grey, in contrast to the masterful political operator history tends to view Elizabeth I as, was a victim of the ambitions of the men around her, strongarmed into an unhappy marriage in order to cement political ties within the Duke of Northumberland’s faction and forced into the role of queen by Protestants desperate for an Anyone But Mary candidate. This is certainly plausible, though it does gloss over the fact that Edward VI seemed to be interested in her as his heir during his final illness, and tends to present her claim to the throne as being weak – when really, the weakness was arguably not in the claim itself but in the lack of popular support for the faction pushing it.

Daniel Blythe’s Lonely Days, featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, made more or less no impression on me whatsoever. It tries to fit the theme by taking place on a planet that the Doctor won in his previous incarnation during a card game, but since he never even visited and certainly doesn’t stay for any prolonged period of time it’s a stretch to regard it as a temporary home of his.

Similarly tenuous is People of the Tree by Pam Baddeley; this sees the Fourth Doctor and Leela checking in on the titular culture, an population of furry bipeds who are a dehumanised minority on their homeworld. Back in the day, the First Doctor helped them out by using the arcane and unusual property law of the majority culture to get the land recognised as belonging to him in law (the “Primitives” not being regarded as having land rights in this legal system), and duly leaving it alone, so the People could live there undisturbed, but now someone’s trying to get the land back from the Doctor and purge the People by hook or by crook.

This is Baddeley’s sole official Doctor Who work. It’s not exactly scintillating prose, and thematically it’s a bit shaky; it works best as a polemic against colonialist attitudes to land, but the depiction of the People is as clichéd as anything. At best they’re basically Ewoks, at worst this is a big white saviour narrative. There’s hints that we haven’t been told the whole story here, Baddeley perhaps holding out hope that she’d get to do a follow-up, maybe even a full New or Missing Adventure novel. She didn’t, of course, and on the basis of this I’m not sure that’s much of a loss.

Vanessa Bishop’s Timeshare involves the Sixth Doctor and Peri investigating a time machine-enhanced timeshare scheme – the sort of arrangement where you book out a particular week of the year on the regular on a property. It’s largely an exercise in schtick, with Bishop leaning very heavily on the bickering between the characters that was a hallmark of Season 22.

The sequence where apparitions from different years start appearing in little time loops gets impressively chaotic, and in that sense the story is rather fun; the fundamental problem is that Bishop doesn’t have the time travel functionality do anything other than cause the problem in the first place. The clever way to do it would be for the scam artists behind the timeshare to book out the same weeks to lots and lots of different buyers and use the time technology to partition them out into separate parallel instances – indeed, when it’s initially explained it sounds like that’s what it’s meant to do – but with all the apparitions coming from different years this aspect goes astray.

Finally we get Question Mark Pyjamas by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker. This features the Seventh Doctor, Ace, and Benny and is set a little bit after No Future provided a bit of a reset to the character relationships, allowing for a more lighthearted tale than typical for the New Adventures. The trio have discovered a horrid theme park run by the sinister Garpol, a businessman who has stolen notable buildings from across time and space to make this rubbish tourist trap on a bleak little asteroid. The house on Allen Road is one such misappropriated property, and when the Doctor objects he and his companions are compelled to reside in the house as the “20th Century family” exhibit. Unfortunately, Garpol’s understanding of human families is weak at best – he doesn’t twig that the Doctor isn’t from Earth, he thinks Benny is married to the Doctor, and he thinks Ace is their infant daughter.

Much of the comedy comes from Garpol trying to get them to behave accordingly and their various reactions to this; it works because Perry and Tucker have an excellent sense of how to depict the key task, and in the BBC Books era they’d end up writing a string of Past Doctor Adventures featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace. (Mike Tucker himself would also do audio dramas like The Genocide Machine and Dust Breeding.)

The story concludes brilliantly, with the Doctor materialising the TARDIS around the house on Allen Road so he can transport it back to its proper time and place, thus closing the anthology on an image of the Doctor’s true home encapsulating one of his more beloved temporary ones and providing perhaps the most convincing use of the anthology’s schtick. It’s the best story in the collection, in fact, with The Trials of Tara coming in second and the rest being rather lukewarm – one suspects because Virgin rushed to get submissions in order to get this sequel out in a hurry. The third Decalog would swap out its editing team for some fresher hands and take a different approach, but before we get to that, let’s consult the Boy’s Club-o-meter:

Number of authors with stories in the anthology: 11
Number of said authors who are male: 9
Boy’s Club-o-meter rating: 81.8%

A mild improvement but not a major one. On to…

Decalog 3: Consequences

The third anthology saw Andy Lane and Justin Richards take over as editors, and a new concept: this time, the story would reflect a chain of events running up and down the timestream, and which the Doctor wouldn’t necessarily encounter is order from his own perspective, so an adventure of the Fifth Doctor might have an outcome which affects a situation faced by the Fourth.

We kick off with …And Eternity In an Hour by Stephen Bowkett, in which the Third Doctor takes Jo on a mission to sort out a dangerous time rift, only to discover that the Servalan-like dictator of the planet the rift is on is attempting to hijack the rift in order to reshape the way of life here, such that she gets to live forever whilst her subjects live happy, fulfilling, productive lives… in the space of an hour.

This is a story which works in some really big concepts, but then kind of abandons any effort to really explore them in favour of the experiment just producing a gribbly monster, the Cerunnos. I suppose high-concept stories which end up being upstaged by apparently random monsters was a Pertwee-era feature – the Primords of Inferno are possibly a needless embellishment when “dangerous experiment plus fascist parallel universe where we get to see what happens if it isn’t stopped” would be enough, and the dinosaurs are the least interesting bit of Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

But even in those stories the monsters were at least somewhat purposeful and added thematic weight; the Primords see humans reduced to creatures of unthinking violence as a visual metaphor for the effects of fascism on those who live under it, whilst the dinosaurs being dinosaurs are a clue that whatever is going on has some sort of time travel agenda attached. Here the monster is just kind of a monster, and we never get to see how that “life lived in an hour” idea would work in practice. No matter how often the televised Pertwee era resorted to a cheesy monster – from the tentacle creature at the end of Spearhead From Space onwards – the worthwhile serials from that era (which would be most of them) always made saw we got to see the most exciting idea of the story in question unfold as well as getting a monster. This would be Bowkett’s last contribution to official Doctor Who media, and between the weak plot and somewhat “meh” execution I’m not greatly surprised.

Caught in a time blast, the Cerunnos ends up falling to Earth, where it undergoes various transformations to survive and become the primary threat of Moving On by Peter Anghelides. Here, Cerunnos has become a sort of psychic parasite, which attempts to possess Sarah Jane Smith as the latest of series of hosts; easily the highlight of the story is the confrontation where he tries to get her to give in by using the guise of the Fourth Doctor, which turns out to be a blunder that allows her to turn her full resentment at her abandonment against Cerunnos, purging him utterly.

This was Anghelides’ first contribution to official Who, but not his last; we’ve encountered The Chaos Pool among his subsequent Big Finish work, and he wrote some significant entries in the BBC Books novel line, with The Ancestor Cell being particularly important. It took me a while to get into this one, but once I realised where it was going I could see how Anghelides showed potential even this early on. The story is a vehicle for a meditation on Sarah Jane aging bit by bit, alongside her K9 unit, who slowly and gradually ends up going dormant because he needs replacement parts that haven’t been invented yet. (Note that the revived show seems to have respected this idea: K9 is broken when he shows up in School Reunion and only reactivates after the Doctor gives him a tune-up.) Anghelides even manages to make her objections to Cerunnos (and the Doctor) sound like a plausible feminist critique delivered in plain English without jargon.

The shaky opening means this isn’t A-grade material, but it still marks out Anghelides as one to watch. The main problem is that Cerunnos as conceptualised here really doesn’t bear much resemblance or thematic unity with Cerunnos from the previous story, exposing a weakness of the process – clearly, the writers here couldn’t wait for each other to finish their stories before starting theirs, and so you’re going to get bits which don’t fit together in a project like this unless editors rigorously set out a skeleton structure beforehand and provide associated notes on the elements which run from story to story, and it seems unlikely Lane and Richards did that.

A holographic message transmitted into space by Sarah Jane under the Influence of Cerunnos ends up becoming the basis of a hideous forgery in Tarnished Image by Guy Clapperton, in which the First Doctor and Dodo expose the great lie upon which a space colony’s system of governance is based. A story which raises interesting questions about the Doctor’s tendency to knock over societies, tell them to rebuild better, then leave without helping further, it’s notable mainly for its framing device, in which the Doctor and Dodo read on an electronic newspaper the press coverage of their visit to the world. The idea of an epistolary story told through extracts from the media of a world the TARDIS crew visit is a sound one, and to be honest I kind of wish Clapperton (or the editors) had enough confidence to do without the framing device and just present the press clippings, with perhaps an aside at the end to allow for the setup for the next story.

A piece of jewellery whose role in the deception is poorly explained (since it doesn’t really seem to do anything to support the big lie) gets tossed by the Doctor into the time vortex and ends up becoming significant in Jackie Marshall’s Past Reckoning, in which the Fifth Doctor takes Nyssa to the castle owned by an old friend of his. Said friend has died, the jewels turn out to have been hidden on the estate, someone comes after them and is killed by some of their hidden properties which the previous story didn’t really set up, yadda yadda – this really comes across as a character piece written without a clear idea for anything for the Doctor and Nyssa to do (indeed, events would have shaken out more or less the same had they never shown up), subsequently bent out of shape by the need to work in a consequence from the previous story.

The chain of consequences gets truly arbitrary in UNITed We Fall by Kevin R.A. DeCandido, when the Fourth Doctor helps the retired Brigadier deal with some quibbles about UNIT’s 1970s-era spending whilst also dodging assassination attempts by a disgruntled ex-UNIT agent, who tries to kill him in revenge for blowing his cover with a stray comment in the previous story. It’s all rather brisk and exciting, but that’s not enough to cover for the fact that the individual in question wasn’t set up in Past Reckoning at all – the Doctor makes the comment in question, sure enough, but there really is no real reason for there to be a random UNIT agent working undercover in the direct the Doctor randomly points in. Here it becomes apparent that Lane and Richards fundamentally failed to properly brief the writers on the links they needed to weave from one story to the next, with the result that the concept of the anthology has become an absolute farce.

To dispose of an inconvenient bomb towards the end of the story, the Doctor sends it very far forward in time and an incredible distance away in space, so the explosion shouldn’t affect anyone unless they are really astonishingly unlucky. The equipment he uses includes the defunct old dematerialisation circuit that the Time Lords broke when they exiled him, which means that the object has a vortex signature identical to that of his TARDIS. At the start of Aliens and Predators by Colin Brake, the Second Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie encounter the signal and, diverted by their attempt to investigate it, they end up encountering an android-crewed arc containing the last genetic samples of humanity, under attack from mutant horrors. This story isn’t much to write home about, but it does play with the idea of humanity’s last descendants being cruel cybernetic horrors, a concept played with in a much more extreme fashion with the Toclafane in The Last of the Time Lords.

An art piece saved from the ark ship by the Doctor and donated to a museum ends up going on the auction block in Gareth Roberts’ Fegovy. The Sixth Doctor and Mel stumble across the auction, which the titular entity is holding for an invited guest list of villains and ne’er-do-wells. It’s a reasonably good stab at what a Sixth Doctor and Mel story might have been like had the televised show featured them for a full season after The Trial of a Time Lord, with the voice of the characters captured particularly well and a style which plays on some of the 2000 AD-ish aspects of the Sixth Doctor’s televised era whilst mostly avoiding the needless grimness. (There’s a bit where Mel is verbally threatened with sexual assault, but she deflects it neatly enough that it never feels like it’s a serious prospect.)

At the auction the Doctor encounters some New Alexandrians, who he encourages to set up a nice library. Eventually, the library at New Alexandria will be the size of a planet, and the Seventh Doctor and Benny will have a seriously difficult time cajoling a truly obstinate librarian into letting the Doctor see a book in the restricted section that it’s especially essential he see. So there’s nothing for it but for the Doctor to take some quick trips back into the past, meddling so that Andrea the librarian ends up with a friendlier attitude in the present…

This is the basis of Continuity Errors, the first offical Doctor Who contribution by Steven Moffat, and one in which the seeds of much of his later work can be seen. Planetary library? Silence In the Library. The Doctor tampering with someone’s past to make them a nicer person? A Christmas Carol. The Doctor responding to an obstacle by mucking about in time to an extent he doesn’t really do in the classic series? The Curse of Fatal Death. Describing the Doctor as a “complex space-time event”? Boom. Shoehorning in Moffat’s dommy mommy fetish? That’ll be his entire oeuvre.

Continuity Errors is easily the best story in this collection. For one thing, it’s one of the few stories which aren’t tripped up by the string-of-consequences concept – I suspect it was so good that Lane and Richards couldn’t bring themselves to apply edits to make it fit the concept and so had the surrounding stories shape themselves to fit as necessary. For another, it shows a wit and flair rare outside of what the likes of Cornell or Orman (or, on a good day, Aaronovitch) were achieving with the New Adventures. Indeed, one of the books in here is called Four Seasons and a Wedding, which I think is an allusion to Cornell’s “seasons cycle” of Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War, No Future, and Human Nature, plus the wedding in Happy Endings.

The librarian’s daughter in Continuity Errors ends up becoming a doctor herself, eventually having a medical institute named after her. A complication arising from a nanotechnological cure the institute devises ends up causing a crisis in Timevault by Ben Jeapes, a story set upon a vault-ship of the Lorq, a species who wander the space lanes and provide extremely long-term storage for those who can afford it. This is a fun Fourth Doctor story; he’s with K9 but no other companion, so it most likely falls between seasons 15 and 16, and even though it’s rehashing the idea of The Invisible Enemy a bit Jeapes is at least able to capture the Doctor’s personality and make an endearing temporary companion for him.

The last full story here is Craig Hinton’s Zeitheist, in which it turns out a Lorq that the Doctor befriended in Timevault has accidentally given a far-off world some time travel technology, with results that culminate in the creation of the time rift from …And Eternity In an Hour, bringing the chain of consequences full circle. This is most interesting for the figure of the Savant, an alternative Fifth Doctor from a timeline where he never ran away from Gallifrey and has become a dour, pitiless cosmic troubleshooter, an idea which could really have done with being developed further.

The collection ends with an Afterword written by Professor Candy, a figure from Continuity Errors whose lecture about what a shocking menace the Doctor is was significant to the librarian’s subsequent mistrust of the genuine article, and who the Doctor has to shuffle out of the way in order to resolve things. It’s a dangling consequence from the loop – with Professor Candy left stranded on Earth in 1996 and dictating this appeal for rescue to Steven Moffat. This includes the puckish suggestion that when the Doctor’s involvement with a world becomes too regular he sets up a cover story by introducing himself to the world’s mythology as a fictional character, implying in turn that all of Doctor Who in all formats is just a misdirection that the Seventh Doctor set up.

It’s just a brief throwaway idea, but when the throwaway idea is so much better than so many of the stories it’s testimony both to how good Moffat is when he’s on form and how flawed a collection this is. Even if we allow for the fact that anthologies like this probably should be giving opportunities to budding writers who aren’t quite 100% of the way there yet, the chain of consequences concept is an albatross around the neck of Decalog 3, since it is transparently obvious that Lane and Richards simply didn’t do the legwork necessary ahead of time and then were stuck trying to massage in deeply implausible (and, in at least one case, outright spurious) linkages. Continuity Errors is grand, but it’s so much better than the typical Decalog standard that it has to be considered a fluke, unrepresentative of the collections as a whole and not really something that Lane and Richards can be given much credit for, since it’s written by a much better writer than this botched project deserves.

Let’s round things off with one last look at the Boy’s Club-o-meter:

Number of authors with stories in the anthology: 10
Number of said authors who are male: 9
Boy’s Club-o-meter rating: 90%

It’s slid back to the same proportions as the first Decalog. This is all deeply unfortunate, but not unexpected. Despite Rebecca Levene being in the post of editor for a good chunk of their runs, the New Adventures and Missing Adventures didn’t exactly showcase many women either. Every Missing Adventure was written by a man. The New Adventures, of course, had Kate Orman, who was the absolute best of the bunch – she was kind of the Ginger Rogers to Paul Cornell’s Fred Astaire, in the sense that to be taken seriously she had to do everything he did but backwards and in heels.

At the same time, one is left with the dreadful suspicion that if Orman had been anything less than stellar even she might have struggled to get a foot in the door, and the fact that Orman is the only woman to have written a novel for the Virgin lines is truly pathetic. The women whose stories are featured in the Decalogs seem to have been beginners towards the start of their careers, and that’s positive, but the fact that there weren’t any women in Virgin’s stable of established Who writers other than Orman to call on, and that through all three anthologies the editors either didn’t bother soliciting stories from her or weren’t able to convince her to contribute, is a ridiculous position to be in.

Shamefully, this is an imbalance the revived show hasn’t really redressed – episodes written by women are still rarities. Although Kate Orman not having written for television may have been an impediment in getting her in to do an episode, the lack of even a “from a story by…” credit on any episodes of the revived show when it went back to the Paul Cornell well multiple times is likewise a glaring oversight. Doctor Who needs to do better all around on this front, and in this respect the Decalog series isn’t an outlier, it’s a litmus test showing the extent of the problem.

After their struggles against His Divine Shadow and Mantrid led to the destruction of the entire Light Universe, the crew of the Lexx have fled to the other universe – the Dark Zone. Almost immediately, they run into a serious problem: the Lexx is achingly hungry, having used so much of its reserves in the final showdown with Mantrid, and it now no longer has enough power to work its engines (though it does have a few planet-killer shots left in the tank).

There’s nothing for it: Stan and Xev will have to join Kai in cryogenic sleep, as the Lexx drifts and 790 maintains an ongoing scan of nearby space, hoping for the day when the Lexx arrives somewhere it can find something to eat. This lasts for thousands of years, until eventually the heavily armed bio-ship finds itself caught in the strange dual planetary system of Fire and Water. The two planets are on closely aligned orbits, and are sufficiently close to one another that there’s actually an atmosphere bridge between them – and both are inhabited.

Water, as the name implies, is essentially covered by one massive ocean, with people inhabiting islands dotted about here and there. The folk of Water seem happy in their own way, each settlement being aligned with some manner of happy, positive pursuit they can all get behind – but they must contend with regular raids from Fire, whose inhabitants make hot air balloons which can undertake the perilous ascent across the atmosphere bridge. Fire, meanwhile, is a desert planet of conditions so harsh that none can survive outdoors on its surface for long without shelter. Its bickering, violent inhabitants primarily live in towering city-states ruled over by violent warlords, the most dangerous of whom is Prince (Nigel Bennett).

With the Lexx caught in a gradually decaying orbit, sooner or later the crew are going to have to get enough food for the ship or accept it’s going to land. Every so often, Lexx ends up pointing directly at Fire or Water, and the easiest and least ethical way to get Lexx fed and move on would be to blow up one planet or both and nom the remains. But it isn’t so easy – for after Prince boarded the Lexx in his balloon, he’s drawn the crew into a web of intrigue that’s left them all with decidedly mixed feelings about the situation.

As the gang investigate these strange new worlds, they find that Prince is not who he appears to be – and death doesn’t work the same way here it does in the rest of the universe. Prince can die over and over and return, often in the guise of others – and there’s people here who seem to be folk the crew knew from the Light Universe, reborn in strange new contexts…

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After a somewhat mixed second season, Lexx decided to go for quality over quantity, dialling the length of the season back to 13 episodes. The production team also made the decision to focus the entire season on a single ongoing story, albeit with the odd episode focused on exploring a particular oddball community on Fire or Water, and there’s a certain amount of logic to that; focusing on a fairly tight set of locations compared to the galaxy-spanning scope of the second season allows for more reuse of sets and costumes, there’s scope to work in more of a recurring supporting cast. On top of the logistical and budgetary advantages, season 2 seemed to work best when it stopped going fully episodic and focused on the ongoing plot a bit more, and perhaps that played into the decision.

What’s much more unexpected is the tonal shift and the overall quality of the writing. From the start, Lexx had always been a hybrid scifi-comedy effort which mashed up the most ridiculously lowbrow nonsense you could imagine with some genuinely smart touches. That still somewhat describes this season – but for this go-around the show leans much harder on the science fiction side of the formula and softpedals the comedy somewhat, and the upshot of that is that the fun concepts get more room to breathe before some daft nonsense happens.

The most immediately apparent thing about this is the distinctive aesthetic styles of Fire and Water, which feel like they could have dropped out of some Leigh Brackett-style planetary romance. Fire, in particular, manages the particular Lexx trick of regularly confronting you with viscerally uncomfortable nonsense, and both planets manage to present a distinctly different aesthetic from the biomechanical surroundings of the Lexx itself, really giving a sense of the Lexx as this seriously out-of-context problem that’s shown up from an unthinkable other universe to cause major problems for everyone living on these two planets.

I say “living” advisedly, because it turns out there’s some wild metaphysical stuff going on here. The fact that Fire and Water have that atmospheric link at all is a bit of a stretch, but if you accept that premise you might realise early on something odd is happening – a very damp atmosphere in contact with a very dry one should result in a transfer of moisture from Water to Fire. Something is going on to stop the two environments reaching a more natural equilibrium – and it turns out that what is going on is as much spiritual as physical.

The lynchpin of all this is Prince. Nigel Bennett plays him like he was told “listen, we wanted to bring back Rutger Hauer and give him this role, but we can’t afford him so we need you to be as Rutger-ish as you can”, and he does a pretty decent job on that front. Toying with the Lexx crew and the people of Fire and Water alike, Prince comes across as a particularly interesting conceptualisation of the Devil; he resides in Hell (Fire), he resents Heaven and constantly wants what is there even though he can at best only take scraps, of all the people in Hell he is the freest and yet he doesn’t really understand who he is, why Heaven and Hell work that way, and how he came to be – just that he’s some cog in the cosmic machinery that’s gained self-awareness.

The curious nature of death on Fire and Water allows for favoured actors from past seasons to come back and reprise old roles in new contexts; those reborn here don’t recall their old lives, but they do retain their former personalities, allowing for old characters to be revisited in spirit without needing to bring back their original context (which, in most cases, was destroyed with the rest of the Light Universe).

Although the genre has shifted somewhat into science fantasy here, there’s the odd bit of surprisingly hard science fiction in the mix here; as well as thinking through the consequences of the Lexx‘s unstable orbit, the season also includes episodes like Battle, which is largely devoted to the mechanics of a fight between the Lexx crew in a hijacked balloon and Prince’s forces in a group of other balloons. Building an episode of exciting television around buoyancy requires a certain amount of skill, and it actually pays off – even though the CGI on the balloons is some of the weakest the series has to offer.

As mentioned, the comedy is dialled back a bit here – it’s not gone entirely, but for instance you get much less 790 this time around, what with 790 being largely a comedy character. You don’t get none, however – 790 has a nasty accident early on and after the repair job ends up infatuated with Kai instead of Xev, as well as intermittently identifying as a woman.

Yet again, this is the sort of thing where a series of this vintage, genre, and overall style might be expected to make a total hash of it, but it kind of works. For one thing, stopping Xev being constantly pestered by a robot head feels like a step forward when it comes to taking her seriously as a character. For another, rather than endorsing the idea that 790’s gender has flipped along with their sexual attraction as though that should automatically be the case, the delivery instead endorses the idea that 790 is a creature defined by their programming, and they don’t really have a gender identity or sexual identity independent of that.

This is not the only instance where the season comes out with something which ends up more progressive than you’d expect. The best example is probably the episode Girltown, which takes a premise which on the face of it seems primed to shower you with homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and the sort of depiction of feminism you get from science fiction writers who know nothing about the subject, and in fact ends up an episode about how feminist movements which get overly caught up in legalistic debates about the definition of “woman” will tend to lose their way. It’s particularly nice that the masculine -presenting folk who want to wear pretty dresses but aren’t allowed to in this one are presented as being entirely benign and lovely, rather than being yet more hideous Fire residents.

As well as the season focusing on one long story, it also presumes anyone watching has already watched past seasons – little effort is made to contextualise who Lyekka is when she shows up, and Stan’s memories of past incidents used in The Beach when he’s put on trial by a manifestation of himself (in an idea lifted from the Red Dwarf episode The Inquisitor) will probably also baffle anyone who hasn’t kept up from the start. It’s far and away the best season the show turned in once it decided to be regular television as opposed to a string of TV movies, but it’s also demanding at least a certain level of information retention from its viewers. When a show as daft as Lexx is shows this level of confidence in its audience, that’s really something.

Ah, Foundation. Along with Asimov’s robot-themed stories, the Foundation series vies for the title of Asimov’s most influential work. I suspect the robot stories have it – the Laws of Robotics have made their way into the wider culture far more than psychohistory has – but time was when Foundation reliably showed up on lists of the definitive science fiction series every reader ought to dip into.

Still… there’s caveats. Asimov worked on the series over a span of decades, though in practice this happened in two bursts – the initial flurry of novellas released from 1942 to 1950, which from 1951 onwards were repackaged as the series of fix-up novels that constitute the original Foundation trilogy, and then a duo of brick-sized belated sequels towards the very end of his career, followed by a couple of prequels when he realised he had no idea what happened next.

I’ve long since written off both the prequels and sequels. The prequels seemed essentially unnecessary – a two-volume biography of the figure of Hari Seldon, an individual who perhaps works best as the distant and barely-glimpsed version of the character he appears as in the rest of the series than someone whose life history is given serious consideration.

As for the sequel books, they exist solely to address an enigma: why, in a future so astonishingly far forward in the future that the existence of Earth has been essentially forgotten, aren’t there any robots, when in Asimov’s science fiction set in a less distant future the process of interstellar colonisation is massively reliant on robot technology?

The Doylist answer to that is quite simple – the Foundation stories and robot-themed ones were written separately and not originally meant to be in the same continuity at all. Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth are meant to provide the Watsonian answer, the whole thrust of the two brick-sized novels culminating in a bid to tie all of Asimov’s major science fiction works into a single continuity and explain anomalies which really didn’t need explaining. (Fundamentally, an author who has declined to the point where they’re putting out dreck like The Robots of Dawn is not going to stick the landing on a project that ambitious.)

I had, however, previously had some residual affection for the original trilogy, though I hadn’t actually bothered to reread it for decades. Now I have, and I regret to report it’s rubbish, and may always have been rubbish.

As I mentioned, the original trilogy consists of “fix-up” novels – essentially a bunch of connected short stories lashed together. Foundation, the first book, consists of short stories and novellas from 1942 and 1944 (plus a prologue written for the book release), Foundation and Empire contains follow-up novellas from 1945, and then Second Foundation incorporates a run of novellas originally released from 1948 to 1950. I did not get to the end of the first book before I decided to bail, which surprised me – I thought I’d be throwing my toys out of the pram towards the end of Foundation and Empire at the earliest.

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The initial premise is set up in The Psychohistorians, the sole story written specifically for the fix-up novels; it acts as a prologue, and with the benefit of hindsight since the rest of the trilogy had already been written by the time Asimov got around to it. Gaal Dornick, a mathematician, has been invited to Trantor to work with Hari Seldon, the pioneer of the science of psychohistory – a technique by which statistical analysis can be applied to entire societies and make predictions about their development.

Gaal is basically a “promising rural youth arriving in the big city for the first time” archetype, with Trantor itself being the big city. (In fact, it’s the model for Coruscant in Star Wars – a vast cityscape that covers the entire planet; Asimov’s own The Caves of Steel would use a future Earth to explore similar ideas.) What he mostly is, however, is a viewpoint character – the vast bulk of the series takes place after he’s dead, along with Seldon, the point of this story being to set up Seldon’s project.

As Seldon explains to Gaal, he has applied psychohistory to the overall trajectory of the Empire and has realised that disaster is certain; stagnation has set in and a collapse of Imperial authority is near-certain. With it will come an era of violent conflict; peace and the rule of law will not reign generally for another thirty thousand years… or at least, it won’t if nothing is done about it. Seldon believes that through the application of psychohistorical principles the interregnum can be drastically contracted, so that within a thousand years or so a successor system to the Galactic Empire can end the era of conflict.

The authorities aren’t thrilled by what Seldon is saying, but also don’t want the disruption which would be caused by making a martyr of him – which, as it turns out, is just as planned. Seldon confides to Gaal that there will be two Foundations set up to carry out the Seldon Project. One public-facing one will be on Terminus, a world on the edge of the galaxy to which Seldon’s followers are being exiled by the government; their ostensible purpose is to compile the Encyclopedia Galactica, a tome compiling as much knowledge as possible, the idea being that this would protect against the loss of critical knowledge in the midst of the social collapse.

The other, more mysterious Second Foundation is alluded to at being at the “other end” of the Galaxy at a place called “Star’s End”; it is not explicitly stated here, but it will eventually be revealed that the Second Foundation will conserve the knowledge and practice of psychohistory itself, because psychohistorical predictions go wrong if the general public know about its principles so the knowledge can’t be kept with the First Foundation itself – if they were, the trajectory of the First Foundation couldn’t be calculated, and the whole point is for the First Foundation to act as the kernel of the new society. Such, then, is the premise of the series.

Now, it’s important to remember that psychohistory is a load of horseshit.

The premise of psychohistory is that whilst individual actions are unpredictable, the actions of societies in aggregate can be predicted via statistics. This can only hold true if situations where a comparatively small number of people are unable to have an outsized impact. If the Foundation has become the nuclear broker of this era, then this would create a strong incentive to subvert the Foundation, and the way counterintelligence and counter-terrorism works is that those playing defence need to succeed every single time, but those on the attack only need to succeed once to have a major, outsized effect. Do the psychohistory calculations take into account the probability of state actors attempting to subvert the Foundation and bring it into one sphere of influence or another? Is there a bribery factor which accounts for Quislings in the formula?

Even if it is, it seems like making a limited set of locales (the First and Second Foundations) the lynchpins of the entire plan would be exactly what a good psychohistorian wouldn’t do – you’d propagate lots of seeds widely to maximise the chances of their germination. What if a plague wiped out the Second Foundation? For that matter, the spread of disease in and of itself seems like a refutation of psychohistory – a single mutation in a virus or bacterium causes a change in its properties which can then propagate throughout an entire ecosystem, in the ultimate example of a single microscopic individual bringing about a macroscopic change.

And the range of potential outcomes – from HIV to COVID to the Black Death to some infection which comes and goes without non-experts really noticing because it’s not such a big deal – is so variable as to render prediction difficult to impossible. Even if the probability of a Black Death-like superplague emerging over time approaches zero, you still can’t predict when in that time frame it will show up, and when you have events that impactful whose occurrence can show up anywhere in your time frame, this sort of grand-scale planning becomes almost impossible.

The thousand year span of the Plan does at least allow for some possibilities to be factored out as being highly improbable; you wouldn’t expect humans to evolve appreciably between the beginning and the end. In terms of virus and bacteria generations and mutations, it’s basically eternity, particularly when the plan has to take into account the status of the galaxy as a whole – meaning that a disruptive plague anywhere within its countless worlds could be just as disruptive as one which took out the First or Second Foundations.

This is just one of several holes you can poke in it. (For example, how is psychohistory meant to account for the emergence of technologies beyond the knowledge of Seldon’s era?) However, there’s a bigger problem. We are told that psychohistory can’t work in a situation where the principles of psychohistory have become known to the general population, because then people’s behaviour will take psychohistory into account and become unpredictable. Presumably, psychohistory breaks even harder if you have multiple groups attempting psychohistorical interventions working at cross-purposes with each other – because, again, the basic techniques assume nobody is acting with knowledge of psychohistory and breaks if that’s actually happening.

The problem there is that it requires that three unlikely things: that the academic papers Seldon is stated in The Psychohistorians to have published somehow managed to keep back the actual details of how psychohistory works, but at the same time were accepted by peers without anyone noticing there’s a honking great gap where the calculations are meant to go, that everyone that Seldon brought into the project either co-operated or was neutralised before they went rogue, and that nobody could have possibly developed the same ideas independently of Seldon.

It’s the last of these assumptions that are the real killer. Newton and Lorentz ended up discovering key principles of mathematical calculus in instances of parallel discovery, and they were living on one planet, with a population significantly smaller than ours. The galactic empire of Foundation is astonishingly vast, and its population is utterly unthinkably staggering. Hell, Trantor alone is stated to have a population of 40 billion, vastly in excess of even modern-day Earth’s, and though it’s made clear most other worlds aren’t nearly so densely populated, there’s an absolute fuckton of inhabited planets in the galaxy and you’re going to need decent numbers on all of them to maintain a viable population on each of those planets in the first place. (The population is apparently measured in the quintillions.)

The idea that Hari Seldon was such a special snowflake that he and only he was able to discover the principles of psychohistory, even though an utterly unthinkable number of people in his generation alone had access to more or less the same information – that is absurd. It’s particularly absurd when you consider that these are mathematical techniques and therefore don’t require specialist equipment to study and develop.

No, as well as a Second Foundation, there must have been a Third, Fourth, and Fifth one, as well as Bender’s Foundation With Blackjack and Hookers – and the presence of a bunch of independent Foundation-like groups would have created so much noise as to make psychohistory useless.

This is a major problem. A lot of the rest of the conceptual shortcomings of psychohistory you can set aside as obvious untruths you need to accept for the sake of indulging in Isaac’s thought experiment. However, the implicit uniqueness of Hari Seldon means that for psychohistory to work, the Great Man Theory of history must be true and Hari Seldon must, therefore, be a Great Man. (The Psychohistorians certainly gives him such an aura, as does much of the rest of the series.) At the same time, the founding axiom of psychohistory is that the Great Man Theory is a load of rubbish and history is the result of large numbers of chaotic individual actors whose behaviour can, like atoms in a gas, be statistically modelled.

It’s one thing to be asked to accept a set of counterfactual axioms – some stated explicitly, some implicit in what is being presented – for the sake of a thought experiment, but when two of those axioms outright contradict each other, you’re building on a house of cards. If the outcome of the Seldon Project is anything other than abject failure, then the thought experiment collapses under its own terms: either someone else must discover psychohistory at some point and thereby ruin the Foundation project, or the Great Man Theory is true and so psychohistory shouldn’t work. Say what you like about the robot stories – some still hold up, some are terrible – but at least the bulk of them take their fundamental axioms and actually fucking apply them rather than contradicting them almost immediately.

This is a problem which is implicit to the entire series, but is especially apparent in The Psychohistorians, because it’s the story which actually puts the real, live Hari Seldon onstage. The absurdity of nobody else developing psychohistory is something which is easier to just kind of accept in stories set a significant amount of time after Seldon’s era, once the decline has set in, but if you revisit Seldon’s time the goofiness of it becomes all the more apparent.

The story also involves an instance of Seldon applying psychohistory to get what he wants out of an individual, which shouldn’t work and the story itself says shouldn’t really work; you can just about excuse this by taking the view that the person in question isn’t acting as an individual but as a cog in the machine which is the Imperial government, a body large enough for psychohistorical purposes, but it does feel like it’s bending the rules a bit. Perhaps this is the consequence of this story being knocked out for the sake of acting as a prologue after the series had already most the momentum which had been carrying it forward.

We then move to The Encyclopedists, originally titled Foundation in its 1942 publication. Set fifty years after the First Foundation is established, it depicts an era when the outer “Prefects” of the Galactic Empire (Asimov means “Prefectures”), including the ones nearest Terminus, have been declaring themselves independent kingdoms, putting Trantor at risk of being annexed by one since their Imperial Charter guaranteeing their freedom from meddling is now no longer really enforceable.

The story centres on how Salvor Hardin, leader of the civilian government of Terminus, finds himself obliged to wrest political power from the Board that oversees the Encyclopedia project and holds the Imperial charter in order to be able to act to ensure Terminus is not annexed and turned into a feudal preserve, exploiting the fact that Terminus has been able to retain the use of atomic power whilst the local states have declined to the point that they can’t use it to obtain vital leverage.

The exact shape of the solution Hardin arrives that is the focus of the next story, but before I get to it there’s a couple of points to make here. Firstly, this story introduces the idea of the Vault – a repository containing sealed holographic messages from Hari Seldon, set up to be released gradually over time. The first message is released on the 50th anniversary, and sees Seldon reveal that the Encyclopedia project was a sham – a gambit to set up Terminus as a knowledge-rich, resource-poor enclave on the galactic periphery as a necessary precursor to enacting the Seldon Plan of minimising the dark ages between the collapse of the old Empire and the rise of the new one. The predictions offered here seem reasonable enough – Seldon isn’t so superhuman as to predict the exact shapes of the local kingdoms, only that the outermost provinces will be breaking away at this point and will most likely have major technological disadvantages.

Another notable scene is the bit where an Imperial diplomat espouses his stagnant conception of the scientific method to Hardin, who later denounces it to the Board; this views the pursuit of knowledge as being less rooted in original research and more about comparing existing authorities and coming to a reasoned decision as to which is more plausible.

This is, of course, scholasticism, which was the model of scholarship pioneered by the Church in medieval Europe. It makes sense that it would come up here, since Foundation as a series was essentially comceived as a science fiction take on the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the process of rebuilding that happened there. As we shall see, the Foundation is basically the Western Church in Asimov’s setup – a group that has retained a cherry-picked body of knowledge and learning and remains a centre of literacy and elevated thought in an era when such things are otherwise in retreat, and exerts influence over the rising barbarian kingdoms through its unique offerings – baptism and communion with Christ historically, atomic power here.

The thing is that scholasticism, which Asimov denounces as stagnant here, was cutting edge in medieval times, and was also a major motivator for the Church’s preservation of sources. Sure, the Encyclopedia project is a fake, but the stockpiling of information and knowhow is absolutely key to the real project here; would Terminus, explicitly stated as being poor in resources, really have been in a position to maintain its atomic plants without good nuclear textbooks to hand? It’s evidently beyond the local kingdoms to rediscover atomic energy from first principles, and they seem to have more resources to do primary research.

Either way, Hardin’s solution to the problem posed in The Encyclopedists is explored in The Mayors – originally published in June 1942 as Bridle and Saddle. Hardin has ruled Terminus for 30 years, and prevented its conquest by any one of the four local powers by offering technological secrets and support to all of them, with the result being that any one which tried to exert an undue influence would get chased off by the other three.

In the process the Foundation has become a scientific priesthood, with only the elite knowing how the high technology really works and the lower ranks only knowing how to operate it through rote ritual. (In other words, it’s the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer 40,000 except less 2000 AD and more Hugo Gernsback in aesthetic.) Now, however, one of those powers is attempting to move against the Foundation – but in the process it discovers that the divine right of kings is a grand way to hold power so long as the Church is on your side, but bites you in the arse if the Church can put you under interdict.

Time was when I’d have thought 80 years from Hari Seldon’s time is too brief a span for atomic power to go from being a generally understood technology to the subject of religious superstition, but I’ve come around a bit on that after learning how computer literacy standards have actually slipped in younger generations due to them being more used to interacting with walled gardens that never require (and frequently don’t let) you handle simple ideas like “files” and “directory structures” than machines which demand you fiddle about from time to time to get what you want out of them.

However, the big problem of The Mayors is that it’s Great Man theory again. It’s not about Mayors, plural, it’s about Hardin being a super-genius who anticipates the necessary actions before Seldon even puts in an appearance to offer his next commentary on the Plan. Maybe we’re meant to be a little disturbed by it. Writing in the early 1940s about an autocratic figure who has seized power of his government and led his world to greatness, who brushes aside the illegitimate quibbles of democratic opposition and whose successes are celebrated with literal torchlight processions… it’s all a little The Iron Dream, and I have to wonder whether Asimov was conscious of what he was doing. He hardly had much reason to admire Hitler, after all, and some of this is doubtless drawing on the same bits of ancient Rome that the Nazis riffrd on from time to time.

Even so, I think a big problem with these two Hardin stories is that he doesn’t really face any opposition which isn’t some sort of utterly vapid strawman. Nor will he – the sweep of history moves on past his lifetime at this point. And this points to a structural problem of the series structure as it exists at this point: each story is constructed around one of the great crises facing the Foundation over the course of the Plan, and consequently has to depict some figure successfully meeting and overcoming that crisis. This is naturally going to bias the series to treating the people who solve that crisis as heroes, tipping back over into Great Men in, again, a series whose fundamental axioms ought to be mitigating against Great Men being a major feature of the plot.

Asimov seems to have realised this, because the next story – The Traders, originally published in October 1944 as The Wedge, steps away from directly addressing the ins and outs of the Seldon Plan altogether to depict a small little incident that takes place some time later, in an era when Foundation traders spread atomic technology across the galaxy to pave the way for the Foundation techno-religion to follow in its footsteps. This is alright but dispensable, exposing perhaps the biggest problem with Asimov as a writer of fiction: when the big ideas step back, he has to rely on alright but not stellar plots and a decidedly shaky approach to characterisation. It’s still fundamentally a story about an admirable clever-clogs getting one over on a strawman enemy, it’s just that the protagonist isn’t positioned as a Great Man of History here.

It’s also a brief piece – of a comparable length to The Psychohistorians, it’s basically a little side story that isn’t really essential to the overall structure of the saga, but does provide further insight into the trader network which is a lynchpin of the much more substantial final story in the first novel. This is The Merchant Princes, originally published in August 1944 as The Big and the Little. (Yes, it preceded The Traders in the original magazine publication, but for the book the stories have been arranged in the in-fiction chronological order).

It’s nearly 75 years after the events of The Mayors, and the smart money is on a new Seldon crisis unfolding, with internal tensions about the balance of power between the Foundation’s techno-religion and the traders they use to extend their power beyond the worlds that have already converted and a new external threat – someone’s getting advanced weaponry into the hands of some of the realms on the periphery of the Foundation’s sphere of influence, which suggests someone else in the Galaxy has retained a certain amount of power.

Along with a new Seldon crisis, we get… hang on, let me take a break from typing to facepalm for a moment… OK, I’m back. Along with a new Seldon crisis, we get another bloody Great Man: Hober Mallow. Mallow is the trader tasked by the Foundation with swinging by the Republic of Korell, a region of space where these weapons have been showing up, to establish whether they are producing them locally or getting them from someone else – and in the latter case, who their supplier is.

It eventually turns out that it’s the remnants of the Empire itself, which despite having declined to the point that the Foundation has been out of communication with them for decades has been attempting something of a comeback. Off the back of this discovery and some other deeds, Mallow propels himself into the Mayoralty, resolves the issues with Korell, and is the guy who realises that the Foundation needs to dial back on the religious frippery, which by this point has served its purpose, and to instead focus for a while on being a primarily merchantile force.

Before I got to the end of that on my reread, however, I tapped out. Part of this is that Mallow is far and away the most objectionable Great Man in the book. People are constantly rude to each other in Foundation, but Mallow is particularly boorish, and backs this up with violence from time to time, pulling guns on his crew and whatnot to maintain ironclad discipline on his ship. It’s like Asimov had been spending too much time with Robert Heinlein and wanted to prove he could do a macho tough guy protagonist with the best of them.

On top of that, there’s the misogyny. Until this point, there has been essentially no woman of any significance showing up whatsoever. Here, in the final story in the novel, we finally encounter a woman with a speaking part in the form of the ruler of Korell’s wife. Asimov doesn’t bother giving her a name, just a title – the Commdora – and she shows up after her husband, the Commdor (a contraction, presumably, of Commodore), has had a chat with Mallow where Mallow convinces the Commdor to do business by selling him a bunch of fancy jewellery (with a healthy atomic glow!) to sell at an inflated price to the women of Korell, along with a promise of handy domestic appliances to do likewise with.

Had it stopped with the chat between Mallow and the Commdor, that would be one thing – there’d be scope for a reading of it where the Commdor is just plain sexist, and Mallow is either also sexist or is deliberately playing on that sexism as a means of manipulating the Commdor. But no; the Commdora comes in, is grumpy and threatens to sic her parents on the Commdor gives her some pretty atomic jewellery and then it’s implied that they bone down once she realises how pretty they are. So thanks, Asimov – not only is this a world of sexist assholes, but it’s also a world where they are more or less entirely correct, and also you decided that the best thing you could insert into your serious political science fiction saga was this third-rate sitcom nonsense.

From here on out the trilogy is increasingly less to my taste. Foundation and Empire consists of two meaty novellas, the first of which involves a Count Belisarius-like figure attempting to reconquer the Foundation’s territory in the name of the fading Empire – and at this point the allegorical connections to real history are disrupted, along with the Seldon Plan, by the emergence of the Mule, whose psychic powers render him a Great Man among Great Men and an individual of such potence that psychohistorical calculations cannout account for him.

His downfall is chronicled in Second Foundation‘s first half; the second half is spent revealing the true nature of the Second Foundation (including the mystery of its true location), and it turns out the definition of “psychology” is being stretched mighty thin in this setting: effectively they’re a telepathic collective who enforce the Seldon plan through targeted brainwashing of people to keep things shepherded along the correct course.

The logical conclusion should really be that they are the villains, but by this point the ends-justify-the-means ethics of the series embraces them as heroes – really, really smug heroes – whose masterful manipulations are to be interpreted with awe, rather than the contempt which is richly deserved when a novel series has so thoroughly run out of ideas and lost its way.

You see, both the Mule and the “Second Foundation are psychics, actually” gimmick are blatantly cases of Asimov playing to John Campbell’s well-established fancy for all things psionic, and his desire to push the idea that telepathic ubermensch will naturally be the philosopher kings of the future (something Philip K. Dick would later spoof with The Golden Man and similar stories). None of this was part of the initial setup of the series – the existence of psychic powers is a total ass-pull, just like saying “actually, robots were always present in this setting, they were just all hiding during most of the series” is an ass-pull.

If you actually bought into the concept of the Foundation series as initially laid out – that it would trace the reconstruction of the Galactic Empire by the Foundation bit by bit over a sequence of Seldon crises – this is the bit where that concept more or less entirely goes off the rails. In Asimov’s eventual followup, Foundation’s Edge, Asimov eventually decided that the trilogy ending with “First Foundation agent tries to find Second Foundation, fails” is an underwhelming ending to the series, but rather than course-correcting to just wrap up the overarching story structure he set up at the start of the series he goes even further astray, resulting in a plot which is mostly a rehash (“First Foundation agent tries to find Second Foundation, succeeds this time”) and also includes a bunch of subsequent ass-pulls. Foundation and Earth would continue with this trend by tossing in the arbitrary reveal that the robot detective from The Caves of Steel was behind everything.

As such, Foundation as a series begins with Asimov setting himself a very specific and clearly-delineated challenge – plot a sequence of Seldon Crises which takes the Foundation from obscure research centre to restorer of galaxy-wide order, tell the story of how that happens – and then notably failed to follow through, resorting instead to a thudding series of “haha, here’s my incredible twist!” conclusions which hit diminishing returns astonishingly rapidly. The downfall is pitiful to behold.

It is high time we admitted that whilst the Foundation saga may have been influential in the science fiction field in its time, that doesn’t mean it was good, it’s because the field had extremely slim pickings back when it first emerged. Between tepid characterisation, the occasional instance of glaring authorial sexism, the collapse of the fundamental concept (a weak foundation, if you will), and the excessive reliance on people being Smartypants Big-Brained Great Men who outplan Poopyhead Small-Brained Weak Men, it just isn’t great.

Fundamentally, a world where Dune exists and is available to reread any time you like is a world which has no particularly great need for Foundation. Sure, Dune has its own issues – Frank Herbert vastly overestimated the extent to which Kegel exercises could influence men’s decision-making. But it has a similarly epic scope, has actual characters (some of whom are women with authority!), and whilst it’s also a world where making big epic Smartypants Big-Brained plans to shape galactic history is not the exclusive purview of one organisation, but the subject of competing interests which then interact in interesting and unusual ways. I think it is high time we no longer regarded Foundation as the standard by which far-future political science fiction set in an aristocratic space empire is measured, and instead adopt Dune as the baseline model of the form.

As for which of Asimov’s robot series and the Foundation saga represents the superior contribution to science fiction, there really is no contest. Sure, the robot stories frequently just boil down to Asimov doing a little thought experiment based on the implications of the three axiomatic Laws of Robotics he proposes, rather than actually offering something with depth of character or serious nuance, but that just means they’re the sort of material Asimov is good at. With Foundation you have the spectacle of a hard science fiction guy trying to write soft science fiction and making a hash of it, like a STEM guy who’s convinced himself he can just bluff his way through the humanities. I am frankly surprised that someone as clearly politically conscious as Andrew Cartmel can be taken in by this guff.

Arguably, Jon Pertwee was instrumental in pioneering the Doctor Who audio drama format. Sure, Tom Baker had done The Pescatons back in the day, and Colin Baker had done Slipback, but it was The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space which were the first officially-sanctioned full-cast audio dramas involving a legacy Doctor and his supporting cast coming back to slide a few more stories into their canon, with episode lengths and serial formats like the TV show. It’s that recipe which, three years after Ghosts of N-Space was belatedly broadcast, Big Finish would pick up and run with, and it’s particularly frustrating that Pertwee didn’t live to see them start out and maybe lend his talents to some of their work.

Still, the Pertwee era would eventually be addressed by Big Finish, and right from the first two seasons of The Companion Chronicles Pertwee stories would be a cornerstone of that series. It certainly helped that the Pertwee era saw a combination of memorable main companions and a regular supporting cast who between them could provide a varied range of narrators. For this article, covering four mainline Companion Chronicles and one special (The Mists of Time) we’re going to get two from Jo Grant, one from Mike Yates, one from Liz Shaw, and one from an unexpected source…

The Doll of Death

The Doctor and Jo Grant investigate a temporal anomaly centred on a mysterious tablet that Professor Saunders, a museum expert, is studying. Bizarre manifestations in the area – hounds running backwards, spectral dolls talking nonsense, and an explosion which somehow has done its damage before the moment of detonation – herald the unthinkable truth: the tablet has strange properties derived from a parallel universe overlapping ours in which time runs backwards. And the eccentric Mrs Killebrew (Jane Goddard) has become the puppet of an inhabitant from that place…

Written by Marc Platt, this is Katy Manning’s first Companion Chronicle. It’s a little surprising it took the Chronicles this long to get around to her; as well as being the longest-serving “proper” companion of the Third Doctor era (I still think categorising the Brigadier or Yates or Benton as companions stretches the definition too much), she’s also one who worked fairly extensively with Big Finish already, lending her voice to Iris Wildthyme.

Then again, writing for Jo can have its pitfalls. The televised show, after all, frequently underestimated or infantilised her a little, and Platt’s certainly guilty of that here, with Jo being distracted by the high street sales midway through a crucial trek through a backwards London in which everyone’s life is in the balance. The story itself here is another Marc Platt oddity – there’s lots of creepy imagery a la Ghost Light or Lungbarrow, but the delivery doesn’t quite sell it (which I am inclined to regard as a failure of direction or a failure of script to provide guidance for Manning’s performance, rather than her fault), and the whole thing boils down to an alien who got overly curious about the Doctor’s exile in Earth taking a peek. Overall, underwhelming.

The Magician’s Oath

Years after he was turfed out of UNIT for being a genocidal fascist, Mike Yates recalls an incident from early on in his UNIT career. London was sweltering in a heatwave, and in the midst of this bizarre localised drops in temperature are reported. The most extreme of these is an instantaneous cold snap which freezes Hyde Park in a flash, killing everyone present. Everyone? No, not quite everyone. As the investigation progresses, a curious bystander is identified: Diamond Jack (Michael Chance), a street magician. Why do these dips in temperature correspond to Jack’s movements? What is his true nature? And what does he have to do with an alien craft buried under Highgate Cemetery?

Narrated by Richard Franklin, The Magician’s Oath is a Mike Yates-centred story. On the one hand, the television show didn’t really do one of those until his villain turn in Invasion of the Dinosaurs. On the other hand, Scott Handcock (hurr) as writer doesn’t really find much interesting to do with him. He tries to put some weight on the idea that Yates had a thing for Jo which didn’t pan out, but that’s grasping at straws a bit. Otherwise, the story just isn’t that memorable. OK but not great.

The Mists of Time

Jo has found herself abruptly and unexpectedly on Zayin Eight, a planet she visited long ago with the Doctor. There, she encounters Newton Calder (Anthony Whipp), a member of the archaeological team that had been there on her last visit, who implores her to tell the story of that adventure…

During Jo’s visit with the Doctor, the archaeological team were in a bad way. Here to examine the sprawling ruins left behind by a hitherto-unknown alien culture, they’ve found themselves cut off from outside contact by magnetic storms, and encountering bizarre visions of the past. Something on Zayin Eight evokes spectral images of the dead – not just those who were killed in the devastating war which destroyed this place, but also the loved ones of the archaeologists. The Doctor is only more perturbed when he realises what the city really is – among the last stray remnants of the Mnemosyn, an alien species that Gallifrey fought a Time War against back in the Dark Times, before they adopted their policy of non-interference…

Written by Jonathan Morris, this plays around with the Companion Chronicles format. Rather than having Whipp deliver Calder’s dialogue in Katy Manning’s narration, here he’s restricted to talking to Jo in the framing story and delivering a small amount of narration to cover an incident Jo wasn’t present for. It’s all in keeping with a story which is specifically about an unusual means of recording information and narrative, which is a reasonable enough concept for a Companion Chronicle, especially one developed as a special story to be given away with Doctor Who Magazine.

Though at this point Big Finish weren’t really allowed to play with concepts from the revived show, Morris is able to deftly work with the material he has access to in order to tease out an implication established by new-Who‘s references to “the Last Great Time War”, inherently implying that there had been previous Time Wars that Gallifrey had weathered. It’s a fun explanation for the story’s central schtick, which Morris then makes use of in particularly interesting ways. For instance, Jo gets out of the villain’s ambush by subconsciously evoking ghosts of the Brigadier and Benton – who of course are alive in her own time but are long dead here in the far future. The main twist about the “Jo” who’s narrating will be guessed readily by most listeners, but there’s an extra twist around her involvement which is rather fun. The end result is the strongest Third Doctor Companion Chronicle so far.

The Prisoner of Peladon

When a military coup takes place on Mars, it prompts an Ice Warrior refugee crisis as displaced Martians flee. Peladon is one of the Federation worlds that has accepted refugees, but now King Peladon is facing a crisis: as hardline separatists use the refugee issue as a wedge, a murder in the refugee camp threatens to cause chaos. It’s a good thing that King Peladon’s old friend the Doctor has shown up – but without Jo or some other companion to hand, will the Doctor mishandle the situation?

This is narrated by David Troughton as King Peladon from The Curse of Peladon, the framing device being that he’s telling a bedtime story to Thalira, whose reign was depicted in The Monster of Peladon; the “second voice” spot goes to Nicholas Briggs, who does the Ice Warrior voices. King Peladon isn’t really a companion, of course, but that’s kind of the point – by setting this story in the gap between Season 10 and Season 11, Mark Wright and Cavan Scott get to explore what the Third Doctor is like when he doesn’t have a companion, and to play on the idea that the Doctor really needs his companions to avoid going astray.

That’s a commonly-cited trope which feels easier to apply to some Doctors than others, of course – it’s hard to imagine the Second or Fifth Doctors being anything other than benign. One could sense it being true of the Third Doctor, however; Jo Grant was always best used as a character when the writers remembered she’s a better people person than the Third Doctor is, so she could smooth over any ruffled feathers. Here, the Doctor ends up so pleased with his own cleverness that he won’t just level with King Peladon about what’s going on – leading to an outcome which, whilst still essentially a victory, is not without friction.

Wright and Scott also seem to be trying to account for the heel turn the Martians take between Curse of Peladon and Monster of Peladon, as well as carrying on the EU allegories those stories traded on, with Federation membership being associated with a need to look after refugees which causes domestic consternation. However, for the analogy to really land for me the story really needed to be about how anti-refugee sentiment is stoked by domestic villains out to ruin the body politic for their own greedy ends; as it stands the racism allegory is there in the background but never quite gets foregrounded enough to seem all that important.

Shadow of the Past

Decades after she left UNIT, Liz Shaw is asked back to check into something sealed up deep in the vault. Accompanied by Sergeant Marshall (Lex Shrapnel), she’s checking in on the remnants of an alien craft that crashed in the Pennines, back when she was working with the Doctor. This was in the immediate wake of that nasty business with The Silurians, when relations between the Doctor and the Brigadier were at their worst.

The Brigadier saw the craft and its occupant as a threat; the Doctor wanted to save the pilot both for simple ethical reasons and because a friendly alien might well be able to assist him in escaping from his exile. When the craft was opened and the sole passenger appeared to have been smeared over the insides by the extreme acceleration forces, the matter seemed moot – but little did they realise the trouble was only starting…

Caroline John’s second Companion Chronicle has a framing story interwoven with the main plot itself. Once you learn that the craft’s occupant was a shapeshifter, you’ll probably guess what’s going on there, though the exact outcome is still something of a surprise. At the same time, the mid-story cliffhanger depends on playing keep-away with that information so it looks like the Doctor has betrayed UNIT – perhaps not so much of an issue if you listen to these all in one go rather than listening to one episode at a time with breaks between (the latter being my preference), but it still kind of means this is a story of two halves, so all the shapeshifter stuff is backloaded into the second part whilst the first part is mostly about the Doctor and the Brigadier being at loggerheads.

Caroline John has fun returning to the role of an older Liz Shaw reminiscing about old days; the script by Simon Guerrier even throws in a mention of her having spent a bunch of time on “preternatural research” as a tip of the hat to PROBE, which I suspect is more about respecting Caroline John and Mark Gatiss’ work there than it is a shout-out to Bill Baggs himself.

Other than that, I’m not so taken with it. Like all of these Third Doctor Companion Chronicles, this is alright enough at the time, but doesn’t seem to have much sticking power – I don’t see myself returning to it very often. These stories are good at capturing at least the surface style and the overall story types that the Pertwee era would deal with, but whilst the flash is here, the substance doesn’t quite seem to be there. Part of this may be the curtailed running time of the Chronicles, and part of it may be the format – the Pertwee era, after all, thrived on having an ensemble cast and the constraints of the Companion Chronicles format will always prompt you to focus on the lead narrator and the one actor in the second-voice role.

Another aspect could be that three of these five stories have been Earthbound UNIT affairs. As fun as those tales were in their time, they always had the risk of running into the basic problem that Malcolm Hulke pointed out back in the day – that a Doctor exiled on Earth and working with UNIT is inevitably going to see writers leaning on alien invasions and science experiments gone wrong a lot.

Of course, Hulke and the other writers of the era were able to get around this to an extent; any alien invasion or science experiment gone wrong could have a conspiracy thriller angle added to it, The Silurians and The Sea Devils are strictly speaking not alien invasion narratives (though they differ only in the backstory of the non-human force in practice – and, of course, one is a repeat of the other), the incorporation of the Master added a certain amount of spice.

But whilst Hulke may have been overstating it when he said that alien invasions and mad scientists were the only options available to the early Third Doctor – a stance which prompted Terrance Dicks to challenge him to write something different, yielding The Silurians – it’s certainly true that those concepts will tend to exert a strong gravitational pull, to the point where it can be hard to get away from them. And it’s also worth noting that all three of the UNIT stories this go-around have been alien invasions – not one terrestrial mad scientist (or Master story) to break them up! The sense that it’s all getting a bit samey is hard to escape.

After the first and second seasons of The Companion Chronicles test-drove the concept, Big Finish would regularly return to the Second Doctor era in the context of that series – a special format designed to allow a single narrator and one other actor to carry a story, rather than producing full-cast audio dramas. In later years, Big Finish would become less squeamish about recasting characters whose actors had died, and they’d end up producing some full-cast Second Doctor dramas as a result – but early on their Second Doctor output was focused in the Chronicles.

For this article, I’m going to cover four of those – one set in Season 4, two set in Season 5, and one set in Season 6. Interestingly, only one of these stories will really resemble the type of serial those seasons focused on; the remainder are all pure historicals, a format the Second Doctor era on television only dipped its toe into very briefly before giving up on it altogether. Is this a weird departure from precedent, or have Big Finish found ways to do Second Doctor historicals that the TV show failed to develop?

The Great Space Elevator

The Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria have arrived in Sumatra, near the Earthside base station for the crowning engineering achievement of this future era – a space elevator extending into orbit. Taken into custody by security officer Tara Kerley (Helen Goldwyn), they are brought into the base station and so witness the receipt of a distress call from the “sky station” – the orbital space station that’s at the other end of the elevator. Soon enough, they’ve volunteered their services to help Tara investigate the orbital Base, and what do you know – it’s Under Siege!

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Deborah Watling reprises the role of Victoria for the first time for Big Finish here; in the long run, she wouldn’t do that many of these, in part because she died in 2017 after a battle with lung cancer and so didn’t have as long a window of time to dig in, in part because Victoria just isn’t a character people are all that keen to revisit these days.

That didn’t used to be the case – she was in no two of the four Second Doctor Missing Adventures, for instance (Twilight of the Gods and The Dark Path). However, the passage of time seems to have seen the fandom in general cool on her era. Ben and Polly (and, post-Highlanders, Jamie) offer a strikingly different internal TARDIS chemistry from the one enjoyed from Tomb of the Cybermen through to The War Games, whilst Zoe has the advantage that she’s got some clearly-delineated unique skills which makes it easy to give her something to contribute in a story.

Victoria, on the other hand, is the Second Doctor companion whose story was “I don’t really want to be here but I don’t exactly have other opportunities”, and is remembered mostly for crying a lot and getting captured frequently. I still think the plot point in Fury From the Deep in which her screams themselves have the power to defeat the monsters is a case of the show more or less admitting she’d been short-changed and reduced to a damsel in distress way too often.

There’s a chicken and egg problem here – some really solid Victoria stories which allow her to contribute to the adventure in ways which are distinctive to her could really help make the case for making more Victoria stories, but to do one of those you’d need to have the confidence to make a Victoria story anyway, rather than just going for Zoe.

In some respects, The Great Space Elevator is a bid to redress this balance, but it doesn’t quite pull it off. Victoria’s main contributions are pretending to be under the control of the electricity creature that’s possessed the crew of the sky station and gathering intelligence that way, and realising what the Doctor is urging her to do at a certain critical point and doing it. (The Doctor isn’t in a position to do it himself, and he can’t state it directly because then he’d tip off the creature as to what was about to happen.) Both of those are quite good on the level of making her an active participant in the story who’s contributing to the success of our heroes, but they’re both things which Zoe, Polly, or Ben could have done just as well – they’re still not selling us on the idea of Victoria having a unique selling point.

Perhaps part of the problem stems from the fact that, despite hailing from history, Polly never got to use her command of the social mores of a past era in a story – because after her introduction in The Evil of the Daleks the show shifted to an almost total focus on modern-era or futuristic stories, until The Time Monster dabbled in going back into mythic history and The Time Warrior finally decided to revisit a more realistic sort of history.

The sole exception in that multi-season span of futurism was The Abominable Snowmen, and the era and locale of that story isn’t one where Victoria’s knowledge was particularly useful. Had there been more Second Doctor forays to the 19th Century – or if there’d been visits to earlier periods and Victoria was established as a history buff – then maybe she’d have had more of a chance to shine. As it is, Victoria had the misfortune to be added to the cast just when the series was shifting to a model which she wasn’t actually suited for.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to use Victoria, in fact, is to signal to the audience that you’re doing a Season 5 story, and therefore they should expect a formula Base Under Siege, which this absolutely is. In fact, I’d argue that this story represents two very common story types of the Troughton era; the Base Under Siege is the more widely-acknowledged one, but there’s also what I’m going to call the Future Infrastructure story, a theme which, once you spot it, is everywhere.

The Future Infrastructure story takes as its inspiration some of the practical logistics of making some sort of futuristic society work, making one of those features the a central plank of its story – think the weather control machine in The Moonbase, or the transmat network in The Seeds of Death, or the glacier management project in The Ice Warriors. Future Infrastructure stories will often make the aspect of infrastructure the story’s using as background the key to the plot’s resolution or the basis of the core threat, or indeed both, though sometimes this slips through the cracks or the connection is outright arbitrary. (Fury From the Deep is arguably a story about near-future Future Architecture bordering on Present Day Infrastructure where the connection between the drilling, the seaweed, and Victoria’s screaming feels like a bit of an asspull.)

Future Infrastructure stories are often Base Under Siege stories, because having the Base in question be a critical node in some bit of Future Infrastructure is usually a good way to give it a focus. (Indeed, The Tenth Planet – the first Base Under Siege – is also a Future Infrastructure story.) However, they are not the same. The Power of the Daleks and The Macra Terror are clearly Base Under Siege stories of a sort, but in both cases the Base isn’t Future Infrastructure so much as it is an entire space colony.

Likewise, not all Future Infrastructure stories are Bases Under Siege. People point at The Enemy of the World as being a bit of an anomaly amidst a bunch of Bases Under Siege, but you could make an argument that it’s a Future Infrastructure story where the Infrastructure is not a technological marvel but a governing institution. Arguably, The Space Pirates is a Future Infrastructure story based around mineral rights.

Jonathan Morris wrote this one, and he seems to have understood this point. Put Victoria in the story, centre it around a bit of Future Infrastructure, and make sure there’s a Base Under Siege, and you’re pretty much signalling that you are engaged in a bit of pure pastiche, something which is going to work the tropes of the Second Doctor era in more or less the way the show did at the time in order to produce something reasonably entertaining and is not going to be remotely experimental. Here the first episode is largely focused on the Future Infrastructure side of things, giving us a rundown of what the elevator is and how it works so we understand why the conclusion makes sense, whilst the second episode contains the bulk of the Base Under Siege stuff.

Indeed, there’s not one but two scenes involving outright unreasonable amounts of foam, a trope from stories like Fury From the Deep or The Seeds of Death, both stories where the production team realised bubble machines are cheap and watching Patrick Troughton do pratfalls in foam is funny and will keep audiences pleased.

There’s also a delve into “let’s put people into some tight-fitting clothes because we don’t want to lose audience share to The Avengers” – remember that loving shot of Zoe’s catsuit-clad butt in that cliffhanger from The Mind Robber? – where the story puts an awful lot of emphasis on the sky station crew wearing full body rubber “insulating suits”. As far as exercises in the Writer’s Barely-Disguised Fetish, it’s a little blatant but it is at least less objectionable than, say, The Creed of the Kromon – but when Victoria ends up putting one on, it’s yet another instance of her doing something which Zoe did just as well in her own era.

Ultimately, The Great Space Elevator is like any other mid-level story from Season 5. On the one hand, it’s formulaic, on the other hand it’s based on a comfortable and reliable formula which will keep most audience members reasonably entertained, on the third hand it still doesn’t really make a case for Victoria as a character.

Resistance

The Doctor, Jamie, Ben, and Polly have landed in Vichy France in early 1944. In a few months, D-Day will herald the liberation of France – but for now, the brutal Milice, Vichy’s home-grown collaborationist paramilitary force, enforce the will of the Vichy government and their German puppetmasters. When the Milice capture Ben and Jamie, Polly and the Doctor must seek help to rescue them – and they find it in the form of a resistance cell.

Along with the local resistance members, the duo meet someone who introduces himself as Randolph Wright (John Sackville), a British pilot, shot down over France. Polly is perturbed; she was too little to remember her Uncle Randolph, who during the War was shot down, and who later died in a German prisoner of war camp. Could this be him? And if it is, can Polly save him?

Anneke Wills had already done some with with Big Finish, playing bit parts here and there – most prominently, she played Charley’s mother in Zagreus, The Next Life, and Memory Lane – but this is the first time she reprised Polly for them. Polly, of course, suffered from being sidelined just as much as Victoria did, though she did at least seem to have a bit more grit to her and could be more proactive than Victoria often was. Steve Lyons’ script acknowledges the recurring problems with Polly’s televised run – there’s a crack about how she’s always asked to make the tea – whilst at the same time taking steps to repeat them, ensuring that she is very much the focus of this story.

Part of this is achieved through the simple expedient of having Ben and Jamie be captured for most of the story’s running time, so that the bulk of the adventure has Polly and the Doctor as a double act. This is something which a Companion Chronicle can do but which the televised Troughton era couldn’t get away with unless the actors’ holidays happened to align, and which is also something which it would be difficult to justify in a full-cast audio drama.

If you’re paying the cast to be there, you kind of need to use them, and that’s inherently going to nudge you towards throwing in a B-plot about Ben and Jamie’s attempts to escape – but because a Companion Chronicle is rooted in the viewpoint of the narrator (or narrators – Randolph takes on some of the narration here) it can afford to have a tight focus on just one plot thread. Having achieved that focus, Lyons finishes the job by tying the action of the story in with Polly’s family history – not difficult to do with a pure historical which is only barely historical from her point of view, given that we’re within her own lifespan.

Lyons’ decisions here really go a long way towards justifying the Companion Chronicles format as something which can tell stories which the full-cast format is simply less suited for. The Great Space Elevator is a Companion Chronicle out of necessity, not choice – it’s trying to be as close to a standard Troughton-era story as it can be, within the constraint that Big Finish hadn’t yet bit the bullet and just started recasting characters whose original actors had died and so couldn’t do full Second Doctor audios.

Resistance, on the other hand, tells the sort of story the Troughton era never did (they gave up on pure historicals after The Highlanders) and never could (leaving Jamie and Ben on the shelf for a full serial wasn’t an option), but which nonetheless feels appropriate to the characters and the type of thing they got up to, and in the process enriches Polly as a character.

The Glorious Revolution

In the late 18th Century, old Jamie McCrimmon receives a mysterious visitor (Andrew Fettes) who reveals himself to be a member of the Celestial Intervention Agency. This, of course, means nothing to Jamie because of the Time Lord block on his memory – which the visitor then lifts. For something has gone awry with the timeline, and the visitor is here to help correct the matter – but to do that, he needs Jamie to help him figure out how things went wrong.

A century earlier objectively, forty years earlier by Jamie’s subjective experience; the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie, fresh from The Seeds of Death, find that the TARDIS has displaced them in time but not in space. They’re still in London, but it’s 1688, in the midst of the downfall of James II of England (also played by Andrew Fettes) – or, as Jamie knows him, James VII of Scotland. William of Orange, James’ son in law, has landed in Britain at the invitation of the English Parliament, who are discontent with James’ policies (especially with regard to Catholicism) and would rather be ruled by a Dutch Protestant than a British Catholic.

The coming transition of power will be known as the Glorious Revolution, because of how bloodless it was… in England. As Jamie angrily tells the Doctor and Zoe, the consequences for Scotland and Ireland will be far from peaceful – after all, the Jamie first met the Doctor in the chaotic aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, in which he fought on the side of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender. The Doctor and Zoe see major problems with Jamie trying to intervene here – but as the Doctor points out, the TARDIS crew intervene in situations all the time. When Jamie convinces King James to stay in London and fight for his crown rather than fleeing, he risks creating a paradox which will wipe him out of existence…

Written by Jonathan Morris, this is the second Frazer Hines-fronted Companion Chronicle, after Helicon Prime, which also worked a “Jamie gets his memory back temporarily” angle. The visitor offers to let him keep his memories at the end, which would have been the easiest way in the world to get more Hines Chronicles out, but Jamie actually opts not to, because he’s got a lovely life here in 18th Century Scotland and being lumbered with the recollection of an adventurous life he had once but can’t have again would kind of ruin it. Instead, later Chronicles would find other means to justify Jamie narrating the story, which I suppose allows for a wider variety of tales to be told.

The most impressive thing about Helicon Prime was probably how uncannily accurate Frazer Hines’ impression of Patrick Troughton was, and this story explores the possibilities of that further by pairing him with Andrew Fettes, who’s skilled enough at voice work to ensure his Time Lord agent and his rendition of James II sound like clearly different characters. There would be subsequent Companion Chronicles leaning into this, pairing Hines with a similarly adaptable actor to break from the “only two speaking characters” convention and shift into being more like full audio dramas – this being one of the ways they justify having a Hines-narrated one despite Jamie forgetting about the Doctor after he leaves the TARDIS.

As for this specific story, it’s a brilliant exercise in exploring a “missed opportunity” in the truest sense of the phrase. Expanded media about legacy Doctors often positions itself as filling in gaps in the saga – Virgin called the Missing Adventures line that for a reason – but these almost always boil down to actually just inventing a whole new story that hadn’t been alluded to before, with an occasional sideline in fleshing out an incident we’d been told about but didn’t appear onscreen (like Liz Shaw’s departure from UNIT, say).

Here, however, there is a genuine Chekov’s Gun that the television show carefully placed on the mantlepiece and then never fired, in part because of the abandonment of the pure historical format after The Highlanders. Jamie meets the Doctor as a direct result of both of them being at Culloden, and Culloden is a historical event which you can trace back directly to the Glorious Revolution itself. The situation cries out for a story where Jamie goes back and revisits the very roots of the Jacobite cause, and yet they never did it, largely because the production team at the time were largely focused on their Base Under Siege and Future Infrastructure stories.

As with Resistance, this is a story which appreciates the potential of pure historicals to do character work; I think the benefit arises from the fact that you don’t need to develop a science fictional threat and therefore don’t really need to explain it to the audience, and you can lean on the historical events to provide drama without requiring the TARDIS crew to actually interfere that much in the grand scheme of things, so this creates a space to drill down on the characters a bit more. Certainly, recalling that Jamie at some point in time was committed enough to the Jacobite cause to go to war for it helps flesh him out to be a bit more than the Second Doctor’s ~~husband~~ sidekick.

On top of all that, it’s just a cracking good story, which fits the style of the era of the show it’s going for whilst offering something different. We never got a Zoe pure historical, which strikes me as a shame; whilst Victoria might be a bit lost in lots of futuristic settings, Zoe’s mathematical skills and scientific knowledge strike me as the sort of thing which she could potentially leverage in a range of historical societies (The Menagerie and Martin Day be damned), and Jamie being a Jacobite was basically never relevant after The Highlanders; this story is a welcome correction on both fronts.

The Emperor of Eternity

The Doctor, Victoria, and Jamie have arrived in China, a couple of centuries or so BC. Qin, the First Emperor, reigns – but a meteorite strike close to the nearby Dongjun river has been interpreted by some as an ill omen for the Emperor’s rule. Lacking any clear source for these rumblings of discontent, many of the locals have been massacred outright. All of this is rather grim – but the TARDIS crew can’t simply leave, because a glancing collision with the meteorite in travel has damaged the ship’s instruments and it needs a while for its self-repair systems to operate.

The trio take shelter in a nearby village, where they must tread carefully in light of the rumours swirling of assassins plotting to kill the Emperor – but when Li Si, the Emperor’s chancellor, comes through and encounters the Doctor, he’s impressed enough by his erudition to strongarm him into coming back to the place to aid the Emperor’s quest for immortality. To retrieve the Doctor, Victoria and Jamie will need to find their own way in, with help from the people they’ve met locally – but who to trust?

Written by Nigel Robinson, this is narrated by Deborah Watling as Victoria, with Frazer Hines in the “second voice” role to provide Jamie’s dialogue. Bringing in Hines to voice Jamie is a reasonable enough fallback for these Second Doctor stories, if there isn’t a more compelling casting concept to hand. At the same time, having him present but not voicing the Doctor feels like a missed opportunity. It’s not like having him doing so would usurp Deborah Watling – she still does the narration and recounts all the supporting cast’s dialogue – but given how spookily accurate his Troughton impression is, it’s kind of a waste not to make use of it if you already have him in the studio working on the story.

The alternative here would have been to get in someone to play a Chinese character (hopefully a Chinese actor – let’s not rehash the yellowface casting of Marco Polo or Talons of Weng-Chiang in audio, shall we?), but I actually think not giving any of the supporting cast their own actor works well for this specific story, and would have been the right call even if it were retooled as a story taking place in, say, Queen Victoria’s London within the ranks of the British aristocracy. The whole point of the plot here is that it’s tricky for the TARDIS crew to figure out which of the Chinese characters are proactively driving events and which are more ancillary, and to give any one of the Chinese characters their own voice actor would automatically position them as being more important – thereby acting as a spoiler.

Victoria is less lost here than she is in The Great Space Elevator or her televised stories, Robinson resorting to the simple trick of actually giving her a spine and letting her do stuff off her own bat. Again, I’m left thinking that it would perhaps have been best to give Victoria an active interest in history so she could bring something distinctive to the table in a historical story, but at least here she seems to hold her own a bit more.

Attempting to read Cerebus the Aardvark for what you could describe as “the good bits” is a bit like being Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day in reverse: if I don’t see the shadow of Dave Sim’s later downfall, I’ll happily keep reading, but if I do see the signs of what’s coming then I am done. A while back I reviewed the first phonebook-sized collection of the comic, titled simply Cerebus, which covers the era when the series was mostly telling short, brief stories, though slightly longer arcs were becoming more frequent towards the end of the book.

High Society would be when the definitive gear shift happened – an ambitious storyline originally published over a span of two years or so, it would mark the point when the Cerebus project’s character fundamentally changed. Storylines would, with a few very rare exceptions, unfold over multi-year-long arcs. The artwork would become increasingly complex and ornate, to the point where early in the Church and State story (which would eventually run for some five years or so) that followed High Society Sim would bring on Gerhard as a hired gun to handle the backgrounds.

Accompanying the greater span of the stories and the heightened production values would be a shift in the narrative. The focus of the story, already drifting somewhat from the Conan parodies of the comic’s earliest days, would definitively abandon its earlier approach to instead cover concepts like politics, religion, feminism, revolution, human tragedy, civilisation, and so on. The standard narrative on this – indeed, the viewpoint I’d previously subscribed to, and can still somewhat defend (albeit with some major caveats) is that High Society is the start of the best stretch of Cerebus – the period when it was really pushing the boundaries of the medium and telling its most meaningful stories.

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Where you draw the line on this varies. Church and State competes with High Society when it comes to popular acclaim, perhaps in part because it ends with a conclusion which seems to condemn both Cerebus as a character and Dave Sim’s own later espoused views as a hardened misogynist. Simultaneously taking the political concerns of High Society into the sphere of religion, it combines the erudite and intricate approach of that novel with some intriguing insights into the cosmology of Cerebus’ world.

Jaka’s Story is, particularly in light of what follows, more contentious, not least because it’s absolutely possible to discern a feminist reading of it even if that isn’t necessarily what Sim intended, though later developments in the comic would try to push back on this. The best way to cling to Jaka’s Story as a feminist text is to take it in strict isolation and ignore more or less everything that comes after it – but to do that is to go against the text of Cerebus as a whole, which is clearly constructed as one long saga.

Melmoth is a true oddity, since it more or less entirely abandons the existing plot in order to offer an account of the last days of Oscar Wilde. It’s certainly a moving treatment of the subject matter, but taking a break from the story in order to tell an essentially unconnected and mostly self-contained tale (Oscar has a cameo in Jaka’s Story but not a particularly important one) doesn’t suggest a storyteller entirely in command of where his story is going.

For most people, the make or break point is the truly epic Mothers and Daughters arc, broken into four acts – Flight, Women, Reads, and Minds. This is where the long-running plot about the squabbling between the Cirinists and the Kevillists (advocating, respectively, conservative matriarchy and second-wave feminism) really came to a head, and where Sim makes a number of really jarring creative decisions which together end up being incredibly off-putting.

Many don’t read past issue 200, which concludes Minds, and indeed most of the remaining story arcs like Guys, Rick’s Story, Going Home, and Form & Void seem to form a bit of a coda, unfolding on a much more personal scale and chronicling Cerebus and Jaka reuniting, attempting to make a life together, and then unavoidably growing apart. Latter Days and The Last Day return to weightier themes with a vengeance, the former largely taken up with Dave Sim issuing his own very idiosyncratic interpretation of the Torah with Cerebus as a mouthpiece and the latter, as the title implies, jumping ahead to depict the last day in Cerebus’ life, set against the backdrop of an empire he’s established which has become corrupt in the hands of subsequent generations.

In its last third, then, Cerebus is an endurance slog. Dave Sim still does baffling, alienating, ugly things in the text of the comic from time to time, but whilst the specific things in question are often startling and surprising – the depths of his weirdness truly know no limit – the fact that he’s done something alarming by that point is no surprise. If you can tolerate what happens in Mothers and Daughters, it’s highly unlikely that something Sim does later on is going to make you abruptly flip from being all-in on pressing towards the end to giving up; if you quit between issues 200 and 300, it’s because your patience got ground down bit by bit.

However, as other critics who’ve exercised more patience with Cerebus than me have pointed out (Andrew Rilstone and Tom from Freaky Trigger being particularly worth your time), you can’t really isolate the “bad bits” and “good bits” of Cerebus. To attempt to do so is no longer engaging with the work critically so much as it is constructing a new text of your own, cherry-picked from the raw material Dave Sim has given you. As Tegan O’Neil eloquently put it:

For better or for worse, the questions asked in the first 150 issues of Cerebus are only answered in the final 150 issues. That the answers turned out to be so painfully, ruthlessly strange remains a singular disappointment.

In literature, however, once you know the answer you can often hear its echo in the question. When I attempted to reread High Society to continue this review series, I got a bit of momentum behind me only to slam into a brick wall when I ran into an ugly reminder of what comes later in the saga – a reminder sufficiently stark to stop me in my tracks. Even if it’s doubtful that Dave Sim planned the precise outcome we got, it’s wholly plausible that he did intend it as far as back as when he was writing the “good stuff”, and the woeful turn the story eventually takes is not as incompatible with past precedent as I thought it was at the time. Far from being an abrupt betrayal of what came before, it is a malignant development of issues which were already seeded in Cerebus well in advance.

It’s a real shame, because the basic concept of High Society is really exciting. Cerebus’ travels have brought him to the city-state of Iest, a sack of treasure over his shoulder. He decides to treat himself by staying at the Regency, an astonishingly swanky hotel, in part because he’s looking forward to getting into a violent argument with the receptionist. Imagine his astonishment, then, when the desk clerk on hearing his name immediately arranges for him to get a plush suite “on the house”. Over dinner, random people come up to him, try to introduce themselves, and press cheques for large amounts of money into his hands. What gives?

Well, a while back Cerebus served that stint in the government of Lord Julius of Palnu (played, bizarrely, by Groucho Marx), and the folk of Iest believe he still has Lord Julius’ ear – hence all the lobbying. After a few misadventures trying to exploit the situation, Cerebus finds himself owing the government of Iest a startling amount of money, a problem which is swiftly solved by the mysterious Astoria, who gives him some sage advice which settles the matter effortlessly.

Having established her credentials as someone who knows how high politics works, Astoria makes Cerebus an offer: work with her, and he’ll be a very rich aardvark indeed. Soon enough, Cerebus is in the running to become Prime Minister of Iest, with Astoria as his campaign manager. But what is her true agenda?

Astoria is one of the most important characters in what is regarded as the “good part” of Cerebus; after showing up here, she has a major role in the subsequent storylines, eventually being revealed as the founder of the Kevillist movement. She disappears a bit over halfway into Mothers and Daughters; having helped kick off the revolt against Cirinist rule, she is persuaded to stay out of the confrontation between Cerebus and Cirin, which takes on a violent fury and cosmic dimensions entirely beyond her.

She does not appear again in the comic; Mothers and Daughters, as mentioned, is the climax of the “Cirinists vs. Kevillists” story arc, and whilst the remaining Cirinists are somewhat relevant to the remainder of the story the Kevillists fade away after Astoria ducks out. And once you know how Mothers and Daughters ends, the logic is clear: it makes no sense for Dave Sim to tell a story about differing philosophies about women and their relationship to political power and ethics when Sim regards women as all being essentially the same, and the real duality in society being the tension between male reason and female emotion.

This is something Sim states and restates several times over the course of the comic, as well as expounding on interminably in supplemental material and interviews. First, there is the monologue delivered to Cerebus at the end of Church and State by the Judge, and can be read as a feminist allegory about how all of us carry the trauma of violence towards women enacted by men. Then there is the bit in Reads where it flat-out stops being a comic and just presents you with a prose essay by “Viktor Davis”, who by the end of the rant has ripped his mask off to reveal himself as being Dave Sim writing under a pseudonym, which inverts the Judge’s narrative to talk about a Female Void of emotion that’s out to smother the Male Light.

Towards the end, Latter Days and The Last Day would see Sim changing up the metaphor and making it a tad more gnostic; here the male force is associated with darkness and the void, abandoning material existence in favour of reunion with God, whereas the female force is associated with matter, gravity, and light (stars being the product of a bunch of matter being squeezed together via gravity) and attachment to the world.

However, whereas the switch from the Judge’s account to Viktor Davis is a full reversal when it comes to the underlying moral judgement, the shift from the Viktor Davis version to Cerebus’ exegesis at the end of his life is basically aesthetic. The underlying idea is the same: masculinity is rational, femininity is emotional, and both on the collective and the individual level women seek to smother men, sap their energy, and render them less than what they could have been on their own.

This is, needless to say, a big “speak for yourself, Dave” moment. I don’t care what gender you or your partner is – if you find your relationship is a net negative when it comes to your personal reserves of energy and inspiration, that’s an issue with that relationship in particular, not all personal connections anyone has had ever, and if you find all your interactions with people of a particular gender have the same problem, maybe you should consider that the other common factor in all of those, other than the gender of the other party, is you.

This dismal view of gender is, by the end of Cerebus, clearly intended to be what Dave Sim believed to be the truth. It’s common to two of the three in-comic explanations of his cosmology, along with his statements in interviews and the like. Furthermore, in Reads Sim says that he’s believed stuff essentially along these lines from at least as far back as John Lennon’s death – meaning that he’d come to these conclusions at some point during the original run of issues collected in Cerebus, before High Society even began.

Moreover, the execution of the Cirinist and Kevillist plotline over the span of the comic suggests this is true. Both Cirin and Astoria make their exit in Mothers and Daughters, and after that there isn’t really an ideological leader of women who enjoys similar sustained prominence to either of them. Once you have declared that women are basically irrational and rationality is essentially male, there’s no point to including women as philosophers, because you’re not going to believe in their capacity to contribute to a philosophical discussion. The most significant woman of the post-Mothers and Daughters run is Jaka, who is there not to present an ideology but to act as an example of how women essentially operate on an emotion-driven basis.

And before Mothers and Daughters – as far back as the first volume of Cerebus itself – you have the mysterious figure of Suenteus Po, a sort of mystic libertarian philosopher that Sim has admitted was acting as his authorial mouthpiece before he was supplanted by Viktor Davis. And Po, through his strange interactions with Cerebus (largely on elevated planes of existence accessed when Cerebus is unconscious) makes it clear that the Kevillist position is just an extremist take on the Cirinist worldview.

As such, Astoria coming onstage in High Society is kind of a big deal; she is the first leader of the female-oriented theological factions to show up in person, she’s pivotal to the action of High Society itself and several subsequent arcs, and she’s a significant figure in the thoughts on gender which will ultimately see Sim blow up his credibility.

So it’s not great to come back to High Society twenty years or so after I last read it, hoping to get a dose of “the good stuff” before Sim’s rotten views took over the comic entirely, to find that she’s basically introduced via a rape joke.

OK, that’s a harsh way to put it; it’s not solely via a rape joke, but the rape joke is integral to her introduction. Cerebus first crosses paths with Astoria here when he’s chasing the Roach – the comedy side character introduced in the previous volume whose multiple personalities allow him to act as a parody of whichever comics character happened to be hottest at the time. (Here he’s spoofing Moon Knight, and has just dropped a giant concrete crescent moon on someone Cerebus needed to settle a deal with.)

When Cerebus catches up, he finds that the Moon Roach is under the control of Astoria, who has shaped a placid and comparably normal (if rather passive) alter ego he can adopt when he’s not out Moon Knighting at her behest. In the process of explaining this, Astoria says that she first encountered the Roach when he staggered into her home in a befuddled and wounded state, during which she fell in love at first sight, tended his wounds, got raped by him when he was strong enough, and after that decided that despite the fact that he’d “ravished” her she wanted to look after him anyway.

Now, in some respects this is an absurd spoof of aspects of Moon Knight’s origins and early stories, which hinged on him having actual multiple personalities rather than just alter egos (making him ripe material for being spoofed via the Roach). And it is also the case that when Astoria shows up a bit later, she tells Cerebus that a lot of what she told him when he first runs into her and the Roach is just a lie.

Whether the rape actually happened or was a lie, however, it’s still a weird and incongruous thing to include. The most generous reading of it is that it’s part of the lie – a feature which sticks out because it’s oddly redundant (Astoria says she fell in love with the Roach at first sight, so why not just say they had consensual sex once he healed up?), and because of its conclusion hints at something about Astoria (namely, that she’s the sort of second-wave feminist who regards all heterosexual sex as rape).

Any other interpretation ends up with even uglier implications – and it is also notable that towards the end of Church and State, Cerebus ends up raping Astoria, in an instance she later spins as something she provoked to try and see if he could get her pregnant (ew).

Beyond the rape, however, one way or another it’s clearly true that Astoria has manipulated Roach into being her agent. And the way she’s done it is that she’s reshaped his personality to domesticate him, just as Sim-as-Viktor Davis excoriates women for doing in Reads. The Artemis Strong personality she builds for the Roach can be seen as the prison that Sim fears women confining him in.

(It would not be too long after this that Sim’s own marriage would disintegrate; he and Deni Loubert would finally separate during the early stages of Church and State. Contrary to Viktor Davis’ bellyaching about women undermining men’s creative drive and sapping their energies, Loubert was critical in establishing Aardvark-Vanaheim, the publishing house through which Sim would put out Cerebus.)

So even though it’s a passing reference occurring in one panel, this rape joke is a problem for me – firstly, because I’m basically always going to have a bit of a problem with rape jokes, they’re not funny and not OK, and secondly because it’s a honking great signpost of things to come. And more broadly, Astoria and Moon Roach’s setup at the start of High Society is in itself a microcosm of Sim’s entire thrust about women and men, and the terrible fate that befalls men when they listen to women.

There were other decisions made during Mothers and Daughters which put me off continuing further when I read it the first time. The erasure of the Roach and Elrod from reality didn’t sit well with me; you have to sit through a lot of Roach and Elrod stuff in the first two thirds of Cerebus, so having them abruptly discarded as no longer being useful or important makes all that feel like a waste of time. And as others have pointed out (including Tom from Freaky Trigger) the whole bit with Cerebus meeting Dave Sim himself and having a conversation of him might have been revolutionary had Sim conceptualised it early on in the comics’ run, but by the time it actually emerged in the 1990s it felt like old hat.

More generally, Mothers and Daughters made me feel like I’d been a fool for reading the preceding portions of Cerebus. The Judge showing up at the end of Church and State did at least feel like an appropriately cosmic summation of Cerebus’ flaws and proclamation of his doom to end such a huge plotline with. Minds essentially brings the first 200 issues of Cerebus to a head with Dave repeating the Judge’s denunciation of Cerebus (but with a different theological and moral underpinning to it), but in a way which seem to be to be clumsier and vastly less interesting.

But it’s Sim’s views on gender power dynamics which most people write him off over, and I can’t help but join them in that. Not least because, in doing background reading on this article, I found that Sim had recently confessed to having groomed a 14 year old fan who he ended up in a sexual relationship with. Sim insisting that they weren’t actually intimate until the individual in question was 21 does not help his case particularly.

It’s one thing to be suspicious that women are a big bloc out to sap the autonomy of men they are in relationships with. It’s quite another to enter a relationship where the power dynamics are skewed in such a deeply suspect way, especially if you have already expressed the view that men must constantly be on their guard for women trying to have the temerity to actually get their own way once in a while in a relationship.

It is, perhaps, high time we all left Dave Sim well alone and regard Cerebus as a tome for academic study, not for personal enjoyment, entertainment, or enlightenment – a fate that Tegan O’Neil’s own exploration of the subject suggests, fairly persuasively, is its inevitable destiny. It is unquestionably a historically important landmark in the history of comics, and the technique involved in it is brilliant. It’s just a shame that such incredible visuals should have been used to tell such a rotten story – and that once you are aware of the rot, you can see it’s spread throughout the entire structure.

There is nothing for it but to pull out the old Reading Canary tag and close down the entire mine. Though the most poisonous gases are in the deepest depths, you’ll get whiffs of them throughout.