I read Dune for the first time in 2021, picking it up in the run-up to Dune: Part 1 with a trio of friends who also hadn’t ever read the book. I was the only one who continued on with Messiah. My partner’s father enjoyed the books when he was growing up, so borrowing his copy was easy enough. This book is much shorter than Dune, and lighter on the worldbuilding that the first book is known for. While the palace intrigue involving the resurrected Duncan Idaho was interesting, I remember the story being mostly a bludgeoning of two points: Paul is not a hero, actually, and Paul is trapped by consequences of forces he set in motion. I’ve read that Herbert wrote Messiah in part because he felt that a substantial part of his audience misunderstood the first book. However much that’s true, it’s hard to escape that perception. In my opinion, it’s easy to pass over much of Herbert’s latent politics in the first Dune; the story is ultimately very conventional in its structure (an archetypal story of righteous vengeance amongst feuding nobles), while being dressed in a fantastic sci-fi universe. Messiah, however, is unmistakable in its suspicion of centralized authority and powerful leaders, to an almost absurd degree.