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	Dune by Frank Herbert This Hugo and Nebula Award winner tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Arrakis is the sole source of Melange, the "spice of spices." Melange is necessary for interstellar travel and grants psychic powers and longevity, so whoever controls it wields great influence. The troubles begin when stewardship of Arrakis is transferred by the Emperor from the Harkonnen Noble House to House Atreides. The Harkonnens don't want to give up their privilege, though, and through sabotage and treachery they cast young Duke Paul Atreides out into the planet's harsh environment to die. There he falls in with the Fremen, a tribe of desert dwellers who become the basis of the army with which he will reclaim what's rightfully his. Paul Atreides, though, is far more than just a usurped duke. He might be the end product of a very long-term genetic experiment designed to breed a super human; he might be a messiah. His struggle is at the center of a nexus of powerful people and events, and the repercussions will be felt throughout the Imperium. Dune is one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written, and deservedly so. The setting is elaborate and ornate, the plot labyrinthine, the adventures exciting. Five sequels follow.
	Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert The bestselling science fiction series of all time continues! This second installment explores new developments on the desert planet Arrakis, with its intricate social order and its strange threatening environment. DUNE MESSIAH picks up the story of the man known as Maud'dib, heir to a power unimaginable, bringing to fruition an ambition of unparalleled scale: the centuries-old scheme to create a superbeing who reigns not in the heavens but among men. But the question is: Do all paths of glory lead to the grave?
	Children of Dune by Frank Herbert Children of Dune, the third book of the Dune chronicles, tells the story of the Atreides destiny after the disappearance of Muad'dib. The children of Muad'dib, Leto and Ghanima, now must take up the heavy burden left by their father. Old faces pop up, and there are many plot twists (but do we expect any less from Herbert's grand work?). The scope of this book is much broader than in Dune Messiah, which makes it a more enjoyable read. How can a series of books continue to produce, particularly under such heavy expectations? Who knows, but Children of Dune continues the rich tradition of the series
	God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert With more than ten million copies sold, Frank Herbert's magnificent DUNE books stand among the major achievements of the imagination. Of them all, GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, the fourth, is the greatest and the grandest. Centuries have passed on Dune itself, and the planet is green with life. Leto II, the son of Dune's savior, is still alive but far from human. He has become a human-sandworm creature, ruling over his angry and frustrated empire with his vast legions of Fish Speaker soldiers, enforcing peace for dozens of generations to teach the universe a lesson, while also waiting for the right time to turn Dune back into a desert planet. The fate of all humanity hangs on Leto's awesome sacrifice. GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE seizes the glittering loose ends of empire, ecology and mysticism and weaves them together into a seamless, brilliant tapestry of a human ecology evolving to transcend worlds and time.
	Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert On Arrakis, now called Rakis, known to legend as Dune, ten times ten centuries have passed. The planet is becoming desert again. The Lost Ones are returning home from the far reaches of space. The great sandworms are dying, and the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilax struggle to direct the future of Dune. The children of Dune's children awaken as from a dream, wielding the new power of a heresy called love.
	Chapterhouse Dune by Frank Herbert The desert planet Arrakis, called Dune, has been destroyed. Now the Bene Gesserit, heirs to Dune's powers, have colonized a green world and are turning it into a desert, mile by scorched mile. In this, the final book in the Dune Chronicles, Herbert again creates a world of breathtakingly evolved characters and the contexts in which to appreciate them. The richness of detail and perspective fascinates, while the multi-layered plot evolves as pages turn. Riveting from end to end, the legend lives on in the greatest science fiction epic of all time.
	Dune: House Atreides by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Dune: House Atreides chronicles the early life of Leto Atreides, prince of a minor House in the galactic Imperium. Leto comes to confront the realities of power when House Vernius is betrayed in an imperial plot involving a quest for an artificial substitute to melange, a substance vital to interstellar trade that is found only on the planet Dune. Meanwhile, House Harkonnen schemes to bring Leto into conflict with the Tleilax, and the Bene Gesserit manipulate Baron Harkonnen as part of a plan stretching back 100 generations. In the Imperial palace, treason is afoot, and on Dune itself, planetologist Pardot Kynes embarks on a secret project to transform the desert world into a paradise.
	Dune: House Harkonnen by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Don't even think about reading House Harkonnen without reading its predecessor Dune: House Atreides; anyone who does so risks sinking in the sands between Frank Herbert's original Dune and this prequel trilogy by Herbert's son, Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson. The purist argument that had Frank Herbert wanted to go backwards he would have done so is, at least in part, negated by the sheer narrative verve, and by the fact that Anderson and Brian Herbert manage to pull some genuine surprises out of this long-running space-opera. House Harkonnen is a massive book, and there are places where it becomes plot heavy, but in following the story of Duke Leto Atreides and the conflicts with House Harkonnen, the authors succeed in spinning a gripping adventure while going off in some unexpected directions. Anderson, who has written many successful Star Wars novels, has noted his particular admiration for The Empire Strikes Back, and his desire to emulate that film's dark take on the genre. In House Harkonnen, the conflict encompasses the tragedy of nuclear war, marked by grief and horror, vengeance and torment, and all while the complex intrigues continue to unfold. As one character puts it: Everything has its cost. We pay to create our future, we pay for the mistakes of the past. We pay for every change we make--and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change. Ultimately this is the theme of a compelling game of consequences, choices, and responsibility, a study of Leto's growth into power and the price of politics and love.
	Dune: House Corrino by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson In this fully satisfying conclusion (after Dune: House Atreides and Dune: House Harkonnen) to the authors' "House" trilogy, Emperor Shaddam Corrino tries to grasp greater power than any emperor before him and to rule the Million Worlds solely according to his whims. On the captured planet Ix, the research Shaddam directs into the creation of a synthetic spice, amal, that will make him all-powerful spirals out of control, putting the entire civilization at risk. Meanwhile, the enslavers of Ix must contend with threats from exiled Prince Rhombur Vernius, who wishes to rule the planet instead. Tumultuous times are also in store for the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, whose breeding plan has been thrown off course one generation shy of its end. Tension between the houses Atreides and Harkonnen builds to a dramatic showdown. While the intricacy of the first prequel is absent here, so is the filler of the second. Because Herbert and Anderson are extrapolating from someone else's ideas and characters, they tend to overuse catch phrases (like "the Golden Lion throne") from Dune and its sequels with a resulting flatness of language. The inevitable derivative features aside, this is a good, steady, enjoyable tale, and readers who haven't read the first two books can easily follow the plot. A bold, red-and-gold dust jacket, with illustration by Stephen Youll, is a real eye-catcher. Fans who will be sorry to see the end of this series will be heartened by the hint that the Dune saga is far from over.
	Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Working from Dune creator Frank Herbert's notes, Herbert and Anderson begin to reconstruct the galaxywide events that eventuated in the highly specialized societies of the Dune novels: the wars against thinking machines that led to an absolute ban on artificial intelligence, the discovery of the powers of the spice, and the establishment of the Bene Gesserit sisters, among other things. Those thinking machines are a world mind, Omnius; his many copies operating other worlds; and the cymeks, elaborate machines with transplanted human minds. The cymeks woke up the computers of Earth and taught them to rule, not foreseeing the ultimate power that would be used against them. Humans on the machine-run Earth are slaves to an efficient "evermind." Free worlds remain, of course, their human inhabitants relying on circuitry-disrupting shields to protect them from computer-driven attack ships, and on slave labor in place of mechanization. A young Harkonnen officer is clearly the hero of the book, and Vorian Atreides, son of the voraciously cruel cymek, Agammemnon, is on the would-be oppressors' side. The planet Arrakis maintains only a few hardy desert dwellers when an exiled teen stumbles on the secret of riding the giant worms, and the sorceress Zufa trains a select group of young women in telepathic powers on the planet Rossak while rejecting her daughter, a brilliant mathematician. Herbert and Anderson strain to corral the book's many origin stories into a single plotline, and the dialogue can be stiff, but the powerful allure of the Dune mythos overcomes the awkwardness.