If the covert alliance of Princess Irulan, the Bene Tleilaxu Face Dancer Scytale, Edric of the Guild, and Reverend Mother Mohiam hooked you in Dune Messiah, you’ll love how Ambassador Mahit Dzmare navigates the honeyed traps of Teixcalaan’s court. The way Paul’s every public gesture is weaponized against him finds an echo in Mahit’s need to read poems-as-policy, decode assassinations as diplomatic notes, and survive a succession crisis where culture itself is political leverage. It’s that same heady mix of intrigue, soft-power feints, and “win without seeming to move” statecraft.

If Paul’s reluctant role as a living prophecy—flanked by a state religion he can’t fully control, haunted by the jihad he foresaw—gripped you in Dune Messiah, The Sparrow will devastate in the best way. Jesuit linguist-priest Emilio Sandoz journeys to Rakhat with an almost Pauline burden of purpose; what he finds shatters certainties and leaves him wrestling with theodicy as painfully as Paul staggers under prescience. Like Paul’s walk into the desert after the stone burner, Sandoz’s aftermath asks what faith means when destiny exacts an unbearable price.

If you were compelled by Paul Atreides as an emperor who makes terrible, necessary choices—and by Alia’s and Irulan’s shades of gray—Breq’s quest inside the Radch will hit that same nerve. As a fragment of a warship seeking justice against Anaander Mianaai, Breq weighs loyalty, collateral damage, and identity with the same ruthless introspection that marks Paul’s reign. The Radch’s imperial civility hides knives much like the Corrino court, and every moral stance is compromised by scale.

If Dune Messiah drew you in with Paul’s psychic burden, Duncan Idaho’s resurrection as Hayt, and the Bene Gesserit/Tleilaxu/Guild tug-of-war over one man’s soul, Banks’s portrait of Cheradenine Zakalwe will resonate. Under the Culture’s Special Circumstances—puppet-masters as coolly meddlesome as Witches or Tleilaxu—Zakalwe’s missions peel back layers of trauma and identity. The psychological unmasking lands with the same intimate, devastating force as Paul confronting the trap of prescience and the cost of being used as a symbol.

If Paul’s choices about the jihad and his abdication after the stone burner—acts that weigh personal cost against the fate of billions—stuck with you, Shevek’s decision about how to share the ansible mirrors that ethical crucible. Le Guin probes what responsibility a single visionary has to power structures and to the powerless, much as Paul weighs Fremen devotion, Irulan’s political machinations, and the empire’s future. It’s less about battles and more about the conscience behind them.