Three thousand five hundred years have passed. Leto II, Paul's son, has fused his body with sandtrout to become a massive human-sandworm hybrid - virtually immortal, impossibly powerful, and utterly alone. He rules humanity with absolute tyranny on a now-verdant Arrakis, having deliberately suppressed all space travel, technology, and freedom in pursuit of a plan he calls the Golden Path - a course of enforced stagnation designed to ensure humanity's ultimate survival by building an unbearable pressure for change. God Emperor of Dune is the most philosophically dense and divisive novel in the series: part political treatise, part meditation on mortality, and part tragic love story as Leto becomes attached to his latest Duncan Idaho ghola. It is either Herbert's masterpiece or his most impenetrable work, depending on the reader.