Okay, these books are definitely getting… weirder. Big-picture, the universe’s empire is facing a crisis of legitimacy, and Paul’s jihad is spreading uncontrolled. The protagonists(?) are Paul & Chani’s twins, psychically endowed with memories and cognitive capability far beyond their physical age. An assassination plot drives most of the story’s events, and at the end, another Atreides (Leto II) has been declared emperor. In thinking back to when I read it, I’m not as sure where things are going at this point. Prescient sight of the future, something Leto posesses, motivates his efforts to continue the “Golden Path” from where Paul left off. Where Dune and Messiah might grapple with the horrors that holding prescience entails, Children of Dune seems to rebuke Paul for not having the necessary resolve to “do what must be done”.
I’m not sure how to square this turn with the reading of Dune and Messiah as criticisms of authority. Perhaps, we should be understanding Leto’s actions and intentions as being monstrous, but my feeling is that the novel is closer to being sympathetic to him. The prescient visions held by the Atreides line predict the extinction of humanity if the Path isn’t followed. We’re not given much to cast doubt on these abilities; thus, what reasons do we have to condemn Leto’s desired ends? Why shouldn’t we understand prescience as being a sci-fi instantiation of Plato’s philosopher king? It seems like we’ve gone from being concerned about vesting too much power into one political leader to endorsing it. Maybe I’ve missed the point, but it feels like the third book is an inversion of what some of what Hilbert was saying in the first two.