Dune

by Frank Herbert

“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”

I have had trouble reading sci-fi in recent years (see my notes from Startide Rising). Flipping through Dune before starting to read, I expected the same thing. It’s hard for me, out of the gate, to care about Bene Gesserits, Harkonnens, Guilds, Dukes, etc. Like the comedian Pete Holmes said, “I’m not watching Game of Thrones. Everybody tells me it’s the most fantastic show. I think I figured out why I can’t get into it: it’s realms. Any show that has realms, I’m out. I didn’t know that was a deal-breaker, but if a man on a horse gets off in a foggy wood and goes, ‘This realm…’, I’m like, nope.” (That’s from his Conan interview, about 2 minutes into this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBjz0zeMasY)

I think I resist things that take themselves too seriously. And Dune is serious – there is no humor in the book, so you either buy into the world or you don’t. Thankfully, I quickly did, and the book read surprisingly quickly. You do have to read about some political intrigue, but there is also much more action than I expected, and the characters are compelling.

Dune is compared to Lord of the Rings in terms of world-building and epic scope, and I think that is a good comparison. Tolkien built LotR around language, Herbert built Dune around ecology, but neither overdo it by telling you a bunch of language or ecology that you don’t care about and that doesn’t serve the story. I think this is the trick. Herbert studied and read for about four years, then wrote and rewrote for another four, in a process he called a “technique of enormous detail.” This is akin to Tolkien creating whole languages (and their proto-languages!) for his people groups, in order to have a few lines spoken in those languages in LotR.

I admire the book and see why it’s a classic. I decided up front that I would probably not read the whole series, and that’s most likely true, but you never know!