I mean it unironically: I always liked Frank Herbert’s Dune. I thought of it as an interesting attempt to put scope and depth into a science fiction epic. I never really got into the sequels, though. Not really sure why. It may very well be because I read them when I was, wow, almost one-third my age.
7 thoughts on “Book of the Week: Dune.”
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The sequels to the first book are (IMO) worth reading, although you should be aware Herbert takes a hard left turn starting with the first sequel (Dune Messiah) so if you’re expecting “The Further Exciting Adventures of Paul Muad’dib”, you will be disappointed.
Two other things to know:
1) Frank Herbert died without finishing the story, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger
2) The books written by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson are toxic trash and should be avoided at all costs.
Wait.
It took a hard left turn relative to embrace of eco-fascism, a corrupt aristocracy oppressing the proletariat, and a trade guild being the ultimate evil?
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I shudder to ask, but how?
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(I liked Dune. But there was a pretty big dialectic between Marx’s theory of history and the Great Man theory of history running though the heart of it. Politically neutral, it was emphatically not.)
I meant “hard left” in terms of “doing something you wouldn’t expect” rather than in any political sense.
On first blush, Paul’s prescient ability seems like a wonderful wish fulfillment fantasy. But Herbert finds a way to make it seem very awful.
I read Dune and the first sequel when I was about half my current age. I could never get up the energy to read Children, God Emperor, or Chapterhouse.
I liked Dune well enough, but I liked the book that tied it for the Hugo that year even more. That was Roger Zelazny’s …And Call Me Conrad (also known as This Immortal).
Just a matter of taste.
Somehow, I’ve missed that one .. and really shouldn’t have.
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I am in your debt, jeboyle.
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Mew
I read it during my middle school / high school sci-fi novels bender years ago. I went to reread it last year to see if my opinion of it still held up, and I couldn’t get past the attack on the spice harvester. I can’t succinctly explain what it was Herbert was doing that was off-putting, but it got tiring early enough that I set it aside and went to read something else.