The Orange Catholic Bible

The best thing about the Orange Catholic Bible is the name, and the name is doing real work. “Orange” and “Catholic” are a sectarian joke — the Orange Order and Roman Catholicism, two traditions that spent centuries failing to share an island, stapled into one volume by committee. Herbert is telling you in three words that this is a negotiated scripture, and that the negotiation was not friendly.

Its most famous commandment is the reason the Dune universe looks the way it does. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind is the prohibition that clears the board of computers and forces humanity to develop people instead: Mentats for computation, Guild Navigators for navigation, Bene Gesserit for analysis. Every strange institution in the books is downstream of one line of invented scripture.

And then Herbert does the harder thing, which is to show the scripture being used cynically. The Missionaria Protectiva is a religious-engineering programme — deliberate myth-seeding on backward planets so that the myths will be waiting, centuries later, when a Sister needs shelter. Paul walks into a prophecy that was manufactured for someone in his exact position. The book is holy and it is also infrastructure.

On the readability rating. A handful of commandments and aphorisms are quoted directly across the novel and its appendices. The volume itself is famously nine hundred pages of filament paper, and we see almost none of it.