Dune

A very good, if somewhat unusual, read. The pacing is fairly even, which is impressive considering the narrative dwells unexpectedly long on some things, and scurry fast past others. As a for instance, the second chapter informs the reader of an upcoming major and terrifying plot development as inevitable, only then to spend about a third of the book before this development comes to pass. This does contribute a terrific sense of foreboding to the early part of the book, true, but it also leaves a surprisingly small amount of space to deal with the repercussions that the narrative fairly early convinces one are really the point.

Which leads to a slightly unusual reading experience. Adding to this is Herbert's muddling of realistic (if show more heightened) skills and abilities, pseudo-plausible science fiction future skills and abilities, and outright mysticism in such a way that I as the reader am often not quite sure when something is a con the character is pulling to make it _seem_ like they have supernatural talents, when something is a non-supernatural talent so honed and skilled it legitimately seems (and might as well be) supernatural, and when something is actual, inexplicably supernatural. This, too, is not a bad thing -- far from it -- but it does contribute to the slightly unsual feel of the narrative. Finally, there is the use of third person narration with random insights -- a single paragraph can hop back and forth between several characters, showing you one's thoughts and then another's without warning. Potentially a confused mess in a less skilled writer's hands, burt Herbert handles it so elegantly I was never in doubt as to whose thoughts I was being shown.

The story itself is good, though it is the telling and the highly analytical, intelligent cast that populates it that makes it truly great. I'd not recommend the book to everyone, though. You should ideally have some slight liking of stories with political intrigue, I should think, and/or a well-developed science fiction backdrop to the same. Some tolerance for an occasionally dry narration style (as mentioned most of the characters are highly analytical, if with differing approaches and levels of skill) would probably be a boon, too. But for me, this was very good indeed. I recall trying to read it once at a young age and not getting quite into it, but as an adult, revisiting it was a decision I'm very happy I made. A classic for a whole bunch of good reasons. show less

Update 8/28/17

Re-read. Number 13. :) I cry when Paul meets Gurney. I shiver when Jessica consoles Chani. I'm awestruck by the peaks and troughs of time, free-will, and the weakness in Paul even as he heroically strives against the evil that is about to be unleashed upon the universe.

*sigh*

Perfection. Easily the number one book I've ever read. :)

I waver, sometimes, but right now, it is my absolute favorite. :)



Original Review:

This is a phenomenal classic of literature.

It's not just science fiction. It transcends science fiction, as a fascinating discussion of free-will versus inevitability. Can the Jihad be denied? Can Paul ever really avoid his own death, despite seeing every time-line play out with him as the butt of every cosmic joke? show more Can even cruelty or mercy even remain comprehensible after such knowledge?

Yes, I think this work outdoes Nietzsche. It certainly does a great job of making us care about the question.

Is this all? Is this just a work that pays great justice to philosophy of action and inaction?

Or is the novel merely a clever play at turning the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle into the physical embodiment of a man? It is that, of course. The Kwisatz Haderach can be many places at once, and he can be both alive and dead at the same time just like that certain cat.

Is the novel a coming of age tale, first set as a mirror against his father Leto, only then to mirror the whole universe that had just turned against him? Yes, of course. He was, after all, both the product of all his upbringing and his genes, embodying the question of nature versus nurture. He was taught within many schools of martial arts and assassins, as well as training the mind in both the schools of the Mentats with their pure logic and that of the mystics, the Bene Gesserit, that allows complete control over the body down to the cellular level. And if this training wasn't enough, he was deeply schooled in politics, leadership, and the meaning of loyalty. The boy was raised right. Of course, that is nothing without ninety generations of genetic bloodline tampering from the Bene Gesserit, right? To become the fulcrum between cellular memory, tapping the minds and lives of all your genetic ancestors as well as tapping the ability to fold time and space, to become the eye of a storm of time.

What a damn brilliant setup for one tiny character, no? His training links to the unlocking of his genes and to the life-extending and enveloping spice, Melange, to make him not merely aware of time in a theoretical sense, but eventually to be unable to discern what was in the past, the present, or the future. Here's a true Super-Man, well beyond Nietzsche.

And don't believe for one second that this serious discussion about what would make a superior man makes for dull reading. No. We've got PLOT that's probably some of the most exciting and visceral in all of literature, driving us right into the web of intrigue, vengeance, treachery, and galactic politics.

To quote the text, we've got "Plans within Plans," and it hardly stops there. We know the House Atreides is falling into a trap laid by the Emperor and House Harkonnen, and yet free-will and pride prevents any chance to avoid it. The setup is brilliant and extremely political, giving us character sketches of some of the most brilliant and memorable characters of all time.

Duke Leto, the Red Duke, the most honorable and beloved leader.
Duncan Idaho, the emotional and intuitive hero.
Gurney Halleck, archetypal loyalist and troubadour.
Lady Jessica, the woman who ought to have had all honor in life, but was unjustly reviled and set aside for political necessity. (Chani being both her mirror and her eventual glory.)

And of course, my favorite character of all time, Paul Muad'dib Atreides, the one that would prevent the greater evils he foresaw, and went to enormous lengths and sacrifice to achieve, but who eventually failed in his task because even a god cannot overcome destiny. (Or the will of so many minds set as one.)

So damn brilliant.

Frank Herbert spent five years writing this treasure, working and reworking it until he published it at age 25. None of his other works come close to this masterpiece, and there's little wonder. It was birthed, fully-formed, like Athena from Zeus's head, with enormous forethought and care.

The worldbuilding was just as carefully formed, from the ecology of Arrakis and the life-cycles of the sandworms, to the history and the creation of the Fremen from their mild beginnings as Zensunni Wanderers, adherents to the Orange Catholic Bible, to their history of oppression so like those of those who are Jewish, to their settling and hardening of their bodies and souls in the wastes of Arrakis, also just like the Jewish who carved out a place for themselves in Israel. (Current politics aside, this was a very potent idea before 1965 when Herbert wrote this, and indeed, the core is still just as powerful when you turn it back to Muslims.)

The Galactic culture is rich and detailed. The CHOAM economic consortium, with their monopoly on space travel and their need for the Spice to allow them to see a short period into the future to plot a safe course before folding space. The Empire is caught on a knife's edge between a single power and every other House who sit in the possibility of putting aside all their squabbles for the sole purpose of checking the Emperor, if they so desired. (And Duke Atreides was such a possible popular leader among all the Great Houses, which was the primary reason the Emperor wanted him dead.)

And of course, we have our Villains.

The Baron Harkonnen has always been a crowd pleaser. Brilliant in his own right, devious and able to corrupt anyone with just the right sorts of pressure, including a certain absolutely trustworthy doctor we might mention.

"The Tooth! The Tooth!" -- You can't handle the Tooth!

Feyd Rautha Harkonnen is especially interesting for the question of nature versus nurture.

The Bene Gesserit had intended him to mate with Paul, who should have been Leto and Jessica's daughter, and that offspring should have been the cumulation of ninety years of a breeding experiment to recreate the Kwisatz Haderach which had come about almost by accident during the Butlerian Jihad in the deep past, to overthrow the AI overlords.

He was practically Paul's genetic twin, or at least, his potential to be the "One who can be many places at once" was on par with Paul. But instead of fulfilling the kind of destiny that we get with Paul, we see him grow up under the auspices of his Uncle the Baron, becoming as cruel and devious as he was deadly. He was the argument of nurture in the conversation, of course, and having so very little of it eventually cost him his life.

I often wonder about the directions that Dune could have taken, all those little paths in time and circumstance that could have been. What if Feyd had been brought to Arrakis earlier and overwhelmed with Spice the way that Paul had? Sure, he wouldn't have been able to convert the unconscious changes into conscious manipulation, but he might have had enough glimpses of the future, the way that the Fremen did, to have given him the edge he would have needed to kill Paul.

And then there's a relatively minor character, Hasimir Fenring, the Emperor's personal assassin, who was nearly the Kwisatz Haderach, himself. Unable to breed true, he was still potent enough to be completely hidden to Paul's time-sight in the same way that Paul was hidden from the Spacing Guild's weaker time-sight. His training as a skilled killer was also superior to Paul. He was, by all the hints and tricks in the tale, Paul's perfect downfall. It always gives me shivers to think about, and it was only in a single instant of both recognition and pity from Paul that stayed Fenring from killing our hero. It was just a moment of whim.

The setup was gorgeous. Paul's pity, had it been missing at his moment of greatest triumph over the Emperor, would have meant Paul's assured death. I still wonder, to this day, what stayed Frank Herbert's hand from killing his most wonderful darling. We knew the pressure of religion and politics was going to have its way upon all the oppressed peoples of Dune. The return of a monstrous religious Jihad was going to happen one way or another, sweeping across the galaxy and toppling the Empire, regardless of Paul's frantic plans and desires. Paul's own death would only mean a higher level of fanaticism, and Frank Herbert's warning against unreasoning devotion would have been made even clearer with Paul's death.

Perhaps it was pity that stayed his hand. Who are we to say who lives and who dies?

If you really think this review is overlong, then I apologize, but please understand that I could absolutely go on and on much longer than this. It is a symptom of my devotion to this most brilliant of all tales.

And yes, it still holds up very, very well after twelve reads. I am quite shocked and amazed. show less

My first reading of Dune was before college, and I've long considered it a "favourite" even as, typical of me, I recalled only broad aspects of character and plot. Re-reading decades later, I was reminded of that first reading's faint surprise at some timeskips and major developments pushed offstage -- anticipating, for example, that the Fremen revolt would have been covered in detail only to find it covered in a few pages, glancingly, and then ... done. (Wait, wasn't the Sardaukar-Fremen war what the entire book was leading up to?!)

For this reading, my intent was to inhabit the world more than travel alongside the characters. I wanted to better appreciate Herbert's universe and sociopolitical setting, confident the plot would be show more entertaining enough. I began with the Appendices to better grasp the universe as I read through: not merely Arrakis, which I generally recall Herbert handling well in the course of the novel, but for his spacefaring civilization and the political machinations within it. I also looked into various secondary sources. *

Dune always had the conceit of being written as by an historian: most obviously, chapter epigraphs from fictional books summarizing encounters at a remove and in the past tense. This framing provided the space opera equivalent of an epic, and remained just as effective this reading. What I missed the first time, though, was how this careful storytelling calls attention to Herbert's thematic arc, less overt than the narrative arc but equally important to his story, and how his worldbuilding is in service of his themes as much as of his plot. A key instance of such dual-purpose worldbuilding is Herbert's use of a desert prophet (notably common to three religions of our own civilization, he observed) around which to structure his themes.

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero. [276]

Herbert brings together (at least) two broad themes in Dune.

That heroes are painful for a society and that superheroes are a catastrophe.
Herbert is on record as assuming humans are fallible by definition, and that several factors compound this foundational problem: leaders reinforce their shortcomings by assuming a myth of infallibility and deflecting criticism to maintain power; power structures coalesce around leaders and are co-opted by corrupt actors; noble intent never is sufficient to avoid these problems, and may in fact merely direct social pain toward the least deserving; and, followers are as culpable as leaders.

Systems take over and grind on and on.
Human-made systems amplify the mistakes of human individuals. Human projects with the largest scale psycho-socially are religious: "messianic convulsions." Ecological projects have potential for taking politico-economic projects to a global scale, and the largest of these would be terraforming a planet.

Paul Atreides / Muad'Dib is a different character viewed from this lens, a well-intended and perhaps ideal candidate for community-minded leader, and yet by the end of this volume, seemingly on a different path than he planned. And, an unexpected result of following the thematic rather than plot developments was insight into those puzzling offstage events: they would have been interesting novelistically, no doubt, but would merely delay the thematic developments Herbert was keen to address. So that "missing" Sardaukar-Fremen war suggests the reader is looking in the wrong place for the important developments, that the conflict's outcome was not the climax of the story so much as it was inevitable, and to question the apparent victory of House Atreides.

That the novel holds up under both readings is a testament to Herbert's avoidance of mere proselytising. "(Otherwise, who will read your pot of message?)"

As I hoped, this approach made for a very different reading experience, but happily one no less enjoyable. I see there is ample enough material remaining for a third reading, but first I will continue through Herbert's original trilogy: though he wrote six Dune books, he conceived originally of "a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book." I want to see where his thematic arc leads.

* Dune initially was serialized in Analog, and comparisons with the revised novel revealed interesting omissions. Herbert also discussed his preoccupations leading to the story in interviews ("Dune Genesis", OMNI 1980 is of special interest) and in liner notes and "connective text" to recorded readings ("Sandworms of Dune", which Herbert recorded for Caedmon 1978). show less

The story and world-building are amazing. The writing is not. I know it’s sacrilege to say this, but seeing the movie (which is incredible) made me realize how short Herbert sells his own story with clunky writing and awkward dialog.

Quite simply a once-in-a-generation masterpiece. This book is so jam-packed with layers upon layers of detail, worldbuilding, and themes, that I've read it start to finish four times and each time found something new that hadn't jumped out at me quite as much before. There is a meticulous and well-detailed future government and explanation of how it works, future society, future religion, future language, a large focus on the environment and ecology and how that environment is relevant to the people and societies living in it, a tense political thriller, (occasional, not frequent) action, just the whole package. Very few books of this length really feel like they deserve or have earned the pagecount, to me, the way Dune does.

For anybody show more who still isn't sure, by the way: yeah, Paul Atreides is a horrific monster, not a hero, and Paul himself knows it. show less

God, what a book.
It feels so contemporary for being written 55 years ago. The prose is beautiful, nuanced, and detailed. I found the perspective refreshing, though I can understand that some may not agree with me. The characters, which dominate the book, have great progression, and act very much like real people with believable motivations. The plot is crafted with such mastery. It's amazing that a book that revolves so much around the minutia of politics, where hushed back-room conversations can dominate entire chapters, can feel so exciting. I wish that it came to some sort of satisfying conclusion however, because as of now it feels unfinished, like a third of the story that I want to hear. I heard about how deep the world building show more was before I read it, but it still far surpassed my expectation. Arrakis feels like a real world with it's own culture, religion, and values independent from the the surrounding Imperium. I've never read about an imaginary world this composed.

Herbert explores the ideas of destiny and religious fanaticism thoughtfully and thoroughly. How much you impact a path in front of you that has been foretold? How is a religious zealot created? What can a religious leader do to change the will of their people?

I really couldn't say anything seriously negative about Dune. It's an excellent book, that left me itching to read more. Really a masterwork of science-fiction! show less

I started listening to this audiobook for several reasons. One, it was long (22 hours), which meant I wouldn't have to pick another book for a while. Two, it looked like a full-cast audiobook, and I was in the mood for one of those. And three, I had read it when I was a teen but couldn't remember much about it, so I figured a re-read (or re-listen) was in order. I think most of my memories of the series actually came from the 2000 miniseries.

Less happened in this book than I originally remembered. It begins when Paul Atreides is 15 and he and his family move to Arrakis, the harsh desert planet that is the center of spice production (spice being the most important and valuable substance in the universe). Paul and his mother, the Bene show more Gesserit Lady Jessica, barely survive one of their own people's treachery. They join a band of Fremen, waiting until the day they can drive House Harkonnen off Arrakis and Paul can assume his rightful place as Duke Atreides.

I'll get the thing that most aggravated me out of the way first: this is only partially a full-cast audiobook. For some bizarre reason, the book would occasionally switch from full-cast to single-reader. I have never listened to something like this before, and I hope to never do so again. It was as though two otherwise decent audiobook versions had had their tracks shuffled together, sometimes changing from one to another in the middle of a scene/conversation.

Dune has a huge cast, and this made remembering who everyone was even more difficult than it would usually have been. For example, Simon Vance's Count Fenring had a very unique speech pattern. When the full-cast tracks kicked in, that speech pattern was gone. Vance's Leto Atreides had an English accent, while Leto's full-cast actor did not. The person who played Leto in the full-cast parts also, I think, played Stilgar, which made any full-cast scenes involving Stilgar and either Jessica or Paul somewhat odd.

As far as the story went, it had all the wonderful political intrigue and interesting world-building that I remembered. It was also slower-paced than I remembered, and I had completely forgotten how young Paul was during most of the book. This is probably in part due to the 2000 miniseries, and in part due to Paul's behavior. He rarely came across as a 15-year-old boy.

I found Jessica to be a far more interesting character than Paul. Both of them were cunning, but she managed to feel human throughout the entire book, while Paul became less and less so. Although they were both master manipulators, weaving themselves into preexisting Fremen religious beliefs (which were in turn established by one of the Bene Gesserit long ago), Jessica seemed less bound up by what she was doing than her son. By the end of the book, I found myself actively disliking Paul.

I've never read beyond Dune. Part of me is tempted to do so, because I love the intricate politics and world. However, I'm less-than-thrilled at the idea of subjecting myself to more Paul the messiah, who I became very, very tired of in this book. I wanted to shout at him every time he became irritated with his mother for not being as prescient as him – seriously, Paul, don't give your mother lip, she was one of the ones who trained you. Also, I have decided that a God Mode Gary Stu is worse than a Mary Sue. I have mixed feelings about the Bene Gesserit, but one thing I know for sure is that it annoyed the heck out of me when Paul decided that he should be able to do anything that they, a group composed entirely of women, could do.

All in all, I'm glad I re-listened to this, and I'm also glad I'm finally done. Whether I decide to continue on or not, it's at least nice to get a break from Paul the messiah and the various horrible things that characters in this series do while scrabbling to stay alive.

Rating Note:

I think I'd probably give the overall book 4 stars, but the decisions made for the audiobook production cost it a full star. I did a quick check of the audiobook reviews for Dune Messiah, the next entry in the series, and it looks like the terrible decisions continue on. What were they thinking?

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less