All 23 Dune novels, laid out in chronological canon order

The Dune franchise is having a moment. Dune: Part Two is current tearing it up at the box office, getting a new generation up to speed on Frank Herbert classic sci-fi story about religion, politics, fanaticism, and giant sandworms that can swallow armies whole.

These first two Dune movies from director Denis Villeneuve adapt the whole of Herbert's original Dune book, published in 1965. If Villenueve has his way, he'll also adapt the 1969 sequel book Dune Messiah, so look out for Dune: Part Three sometime in the future.

And if you've fallen in love with the Dune universe (known by fans as the Duniverse, obviously), then you'll be happy to know there's a lot more material out there. In addition to Dune and Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert wrote four more sequels before his death in 1986. Years later, his son Brian Herbert teamed up with writer Kevin J. Anderson, and together they've written another 17 Dune novels to date. There are 23 Dune books total!

The original Dune book starts with the story of young Paul Atreides, and Frank Herbert's remaining sequels move forward from there. The books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson — which we'll call the expanded Dune books for simplicity's sake — branch out in all directions. Some are prequels, some are sequels, and take place in between the original six novels.

It can be confusing to keep track of everything. In this article, we're going to lay out all 23 Dune books in chronological canon order, starting from the earliest part of the Dune timeline and stopping at the very end. We've marked each of Frank Herbert's original six Dune books with an asterisk*.

Into the Duniverse...

1. The Butlerian Jihad (2002)

Dune is unique in that it's a sci-fi story set in the far future where no one uses computers. The closest thing they have is mentats, which are people trained to think like computers with the help of the powerful drug known as the spice melange.

It ends up there's a reason why no one uses computers. Tens of thousands of years before the original Dune book, human beings fought a war against intelligent thinking machines. We won, but the whole thing scarred everyone so badly that they swore off computers forever.

The Buterian Jihad tells the story of that man-vs-machine war. It starts when humanity is already under the thumb of humanoid robots called Titans, which are themselves under the thumb of an artificial super-intelligence called Omnius. Humanity is fed up with this crap. When the independently minded robot Erasmus kills a young human in front of his mother, humanity rises up and starts the Buterlerian jihad, which is opposed to all things mechanical.

The Butlerian Jihad kicks off a trilogy of books written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, the earliest in the timeline. Let's skip ahead to the next volume:

2. The Machine Crusade (2003)

The Machine Crusade continues the story of the war behind man and machine begun in The Butlerian Jihad. Several of the characters in these books are the ancestors of characters we know from the original Dune book; you'll meet Atreides, Harkonnens and Corrinos here.

The Machine Crusade also introduces us to the first mentat, the result of a bet the robot Erasmus makes that he can raise a human child to grow up civilized like a machine. Think of it as sci-fi My Fair Lady.

We also spend time on Arrakis, where human settlers first discover the spice.

3. The Battle of Corrin (2004)

The Battle of Corrin takes place decades after the start of the Butlerian jihad and brings this trilogy to an end. Humans are finally able to destroy the artificial intelligence Omnius and decimate the robot army. The books ends with the formation of the political climate that will endure until the original Dune book. We see the origins of the Atreides-Harkonnen fued, the first Corrino emperor, and of course, the ironclad prohibition on making thinking machines.

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