Dune (1965)

8470021818

This is a rare reread for me. I read the books in high school and loved them. When I cleaned out my childhood home, I found old HS class notebooks with "Atreides" and sand dunes/worms doodled in the margins. A tribute to how much I loved the books then. This reread went much better than my reread of the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which did not go well at all.

This book was better than I remembered. I don't think I could have a appreciated most of it when I was a teenager. I was definitely swept up by the romance of it then. Now I am swept up by the politics and the danger of rulers that play with the lives of their subjects like they are toys.

I'm moving on to the next book. I know I read it when I was young, but I don't remember it the way I remember the first. ( )

DNF

Hereby officially declared unreadable, despite its influence and status of a masterwork.
There are some interesting ideas, but all is buried in terrible writing and condescending pretentiousness. ( )

Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965. Introduction by Brian Herbert. Dune Chronicles No. 1. Ace, 2003.
By any measure, Frank Herbert’s Dune is a monumental work. It is also very much a creature of its time. Herbert began working on it in 1957, and a serialized version began to run in 1963. In that period, several events seem relevant to the themes of the novel. There was an increased cultural interest in charismatic religious and political figures. Movies like Elmer Gantry and A Face in the Crowd were in the theaters. Martin Luther King, Jr. met with Billy Graham. John Kennedy was elected and assassinated. The late-twentieth-century women’s movement was in its infancy. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was out, but Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was not published until early in 1963. One must also wonder what Herbert reacted when Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land became a bestseller in 1961 and put the word Grok in the language. Neither book fully escapes mid-century male chauvinism.
In other ways, Herbert was slightly ahead of his contemporaries. His treatment of genetics and bioengineering, psychedelics, and ecology were cutting edge for the time. It is no surprise that he spoke to a large Philadelphia crowd at the first Earth Day in 1970. There is, of course, no computer technology in the book. Bioengineering is responsible for interstellar navigation and specially trained mentats take the place of most computing chores.
According to his son Brian, Herbert called his style “extreme detail,” and Dune rivals Tolkien’s Middle Earth Books in that regard. Herbert raided ideas from several religions and mythologies to create the Fremen and Bene Gesserit belief systems. He is at pains to describe the Arrakis ecology, the Fremen conservation techniques, and the actions of the many drugs his characters employ. His method is close to that employed by New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, who were his contemporaries.
This world-building technique extends to his characters. Most science fiction writers, then and now, may develop one or two characters, but in Dune, in addition to Paul, his parents, sister, uncle, cousin, several allies and enemies all have their moments on stage and get the detailed treatment. This large cast of fully developed characters is one reason that Brian Herbert and his co-author Kevin J. Anderson have been able to create so many prequels to the Dune books. The back stories are all there, and the stage is fully dressed.
Another consequence of the book’s detail is that the story lacks suspense, and its characters do not conform to the loveable heroism we often see in popular fiction. None of the major characters, for all their virtues, is especially likable. The structure is more Sophocles than Hitchcock. Herbert usually tells you how things are going to turn out before they happen. The reader sees the future with the same eerie prescience experienced by Paul and Jessica. In his introduction to Dune Messiah, Brian Herbert says his father received many complaints about the flaws in Paul’s character in the second novel. They are there in the first novel as well. Paul knows that in the end he will only have worshipers, not friends, and that he will bring about the Jihad he hoped to prevent. 5 stars. ( )

Classic fantasy. Unfortunately, drugs and premarital sex are both accepted (and even used as plot devices), so I or recommend this book only to the discerning fantasy fan. ( )