Now the fourth conflict is imminent, and the Confederation’s navy is on alert, positioned behind the frontier, waiting for the attack it knows is coming. Three generations of its warriors have gone off to war, held the line against the larger, more powerful enemy.
The Confederation has fought three wars against the forces of the totalitarian Union. With the very future of the human race at stake, Bracer and the crews of his three ships find they may have no choice but to make the ultimate sacrifice… once again. Like Bracer, all of the officers and crew are living in the hope that the hospitals of Earth will be able to make them whole again, will give them living skin and muscle and organs where they now have crude mechanical prosthetics.īut the Jillies are a race determined to drive humanity to extinction, and the demands of the relentless war interrupt Bracer’s journey home. The ships are two patched-up battle cruisers and a hospital ship, all of them crewed by walking wounded men and women whose broken bodies have been roughly repaired and given a semblance of life.
Resurrected by medical technology and with a body that’s more machine than human, he and the three ships under his command are on their way back to Earth. It will have to be enough.Ĭaptain Absolom Bracer has already given his life once in mankind’s seemingly endless interstellar war with the alien race known as the “Jillies.” Against the brute efficiency of their adversaries, these leaders and the human race have only imagination, compassion, and the capacity for love. Among them are Xavier Harkonnen, military leader of the Planet of Salusa Secundus Xavier’s fiancée, Serena Butler, an activist who will become the unwilling leader of millions and Tio Holtzman, the scientist struggling to devise a weapon that will help the human cause. Amid shortsighted squabbling between nobles, new leaders have begun to emerge. Ten thousand years before the events of Dune, humans have managed to battle the remorseless Machines to a standstill, but victory may be short-lived. And here is the backward, nearly forgotten planet of Arrakis, where traders have discovered the remarkable properties of the spice melange. Here is the tale of the Zensunni Wanderers, who escape bondage to flee to the desert world where they will declare themselves the Free Men of Dune. Herein are the foundations of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, the Suk Doctors, the Order of Mentats, and the mysteriously altered Navigators of the Spacing Guild. Throughout the Dune novels, Frank Herbert frequently referred to the long-ago war in which humans wrested their freedom from “thinking machines.” This book is the story of that war, of how Serena Butler’s passionate grief ignited the war that will liberate humans from their machine masters.
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