Frank Herbert
God Emperor of Dune
Painted after Clyde Caldwell
- 35 plates
- Clyde Caldwell
The book
Three and a half thousand years later the emperor is a worm with a human face, running a deliberate tyranny designed to make humanity so sick of being controlled that it will scatter beyond any possibility of control again. He is assassinated on schedule, by his own arrangement.
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
The problem of drawing Leto II at all. He is a three-metre segmented body with a face at one end and no arms, and the plates keep him mostly at distance or in shadow — which is also how the novel handles him.
