Ulf and Katarina Harkonnen and their son Piers (the parents and brother of Xavier Harkonnen) are travelling to Salusa Secundus when they are attacked by Thinking Machines under the command of General Agamemnon, a cymek. The Harkonnen ship is severely damaged and the 20-year-old Piers is ejected in an escape pod. He lands on the planet Caladan and meets a band of primitives who assist him in taking vengeance against the cymeks.

 

The story begins 10,000 years before the events of Frank Herbert's DUNE -- Machine and Human are locked in a deadly struggle for supremacy. The centuries-long battle is finally in its last stages and the Human Race knows that somehow they must repel the tide that has begun to rise inexorably against them. Their opponents are seemingly invincible: Omnius, the evermind, the soulless artificial intelligence that is overlord of countless robots and machines on the Synchronized Worlds, and the Titans, whose sadistic and imperially arrogant human brains are housed in massive mechanical bodies designed to be weapons of destruction.  For centuries, the valiant men and women of the planets under human control have somehow managed to battle their remorseless enemies to a standstill but recently have grown complacent. Amid the political and shortsighted squabbling between the representatives of the League of Nobles, however, new leaders have begun to come to the forefront -- Xavier Harkonnen, the resolute and courageous military leader of the Planet of Salusa Secundus, Xavier's fiance, Serena Butler, a passionate activist who will become the unwilling leader of millions, Tio Holtzman, the brilliant scientist whose genius has begun to fade, struggling to devise a weapon that will help the human fight for freedom. Against the brute strength and faultless efficiency of their adversaries, these leaders and the human race have only their boundless imagination, their ever-expanding capacity for compassion, their lightning fast ingenuity and the irresistible desire for hope and love. It will have to be enough.  And on the backward, nearly forgotten planet of Arrakis, traders have discovered the remarkable properties of the spice melange.

 

young Vergyl Tantor is serving in the Army of the Jihad on Giedi Prime during in the Butlerian Jihad when his mentor and adopted brother Xavier Harkonnen arrives for repairs to be done to his battered fleet of warships. Vergyl, eager to fight the Thinking Machines, is pleased to encounter a mercenary from Ginaz who uses a captured machine for training purposes.

 

More than 2 decades have passed since the end of the events chronicled in THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD. The crusade against thinking robots has ground on for years but the forces led by Serena Butler and Irbis Ginjo have made only slight gains; the human worlds grow weary of war, of the bloody, inconclusive swing from victory to defeat. The fearsome cymeks, led by Agamemnon, hatch new plots to regain their lost power from Omnius ... as their numbers dwindle and the sands of time begin to run out. The warriors of Ginaz, led by Jool Noret, forge themselves into an elite warrior class, a weapon that somehow must be thrust into the cold metal heart of the machine-dominated worlds. Aurelius Venport and Norma Cenva are on the verge of the most important discovery in human history -- a way to "fold" space and travel instantaneously to any place in the galaxy. And on the faraway, nearly worthless planet of Arrakis, Selim Wormrider and his band of outlaws take the first steps to making themselves the feared fighters who will change the course of history, The Fremen.  Here is the unrivaled imaginative power that has put Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson on bestseller lists everywhere, earned them the love and devotion of readers around the globe. The fantastic saga of DUNE continues...

 

The Army of the Jihad attack the Tlulaxa homeworld as vengeance for their actions in The Machine Crusade, but one scientist escapes to Thinking Machine territory. There he offers his services to the evermind Omnius, and sets about creating a clone of Serena Butler. Meanwhile, in the League of Nobles, Vorian Atreides attempts to combat the slurs on Xavier Harkonnen's name by confronting Iblis Ginjo's wife.

 

It has been fifty-six hard years since the events of THE MACHINE CRUSADE. Following the death of Serena Butler, the bloodiest decades of the Jihad take place. Synchronized Worlds and Unallied Planets are liberated one by one, and at long last, after years of struggle, the human worlds begin to hope that the end of the centuries-long conflict with the thinking machines is finally in sight.  Unfortunately, Omnius has one last, deadly card to play. In a last-ditch effort to destroy humankind, virulent plagues are let loose throughout the galaxy, decimating the populations of whole planets . . . and once again, the tide of the titanic struggle shifts against the warriors of the human race. At last, the war that has lasted many lifetimes will be decided in the apocalyptic Battle of Corrin.  In the greatest battle in science fiction history, human and machine face off one last time . . . And on the desert planet of Arrakis, the legendary Fremen of Dune become the feared fighting force to be discovered by Paul Muad'Dib in Frank Herbert's classic DUNE.  This is the concluding volume of the "Legends of Dune" trilogy, culminating in the end of the Butlerian Jihad, the Battle of Corrin, and the origin of the great rift between House Atreides and House Harkonnen!