Dune Messiah

The book

Twelve years on, the man who won is emperor of a jihad that has killed sixty-one billion people in his name and which he cannot stop. A conspiracy of his allies offers him a way out that costs him his eyes, his wife and his future, and he takes it because he has already seen that he will.

Why Clyde Caldwell

The obvious hand for Dune is John Schoenherr. He illustrated the original Analog serialisation in 1963 and painted the covers that fixed how a generation saw Arrakis — Herbert himself said Schoenherr's sandworm was exactly the one in his head.

We could not use him. Building an atelier means assembling a corpus of an artist's work, and doing that with Schoenherr would have meant scraping an estate that has a living heir and no public licence. The right move there is to ask, not to take, and asking is a slower conversation than this project was ready to have.

Clyde Caldwell comes from the same painted-paperback school — the fully rendered figure against a landscape, saturated and unembarrassed, that ran through science-fiction and fantasy covers from the seventies into the nineties. His weights were acquired properly rather than trained here, which makes this the only borrowed hand in the library and worth saying out loud.

What to look for

Interiors. Messiah moves off the sand into palaces and council chambers, and the cycle deliberately keeps the desert visible through windows and doorways so the book's argument — that he never actually left — stays in the frame.

Plates

The Jihad's ArithmeticEdric in His TankReverend Mother MohiamThe QizarateThe Ghola ArrivesBijaz the DwarfThe Fremen Grow FatChani's Fremen DietBlindedSemuta and the DwarfThe Flight to the SietchScytale's Offer