It’s hard to know what to say in reviewing Dune since it is such a classic and a cultural monolith at this point but I’ll do my best! This was my second time reading it with the first time being somewhere during college. Instead of throwing out the book again, I’ve kept this new copy since my personal rule is any book I buy twice I should keep the second copy of rather than keep buying books infinitely. Dune is a fast read for me and a transportive one. I remain perplexed that none of the publishing companies he sent to liked it and how many of them found it confusing and slow during the first hundred pages. But I am a person who likes worldbuilding and being thrown into the deep end of a SF/F novel so this book is sort of made for my brain.
Dune follows Paul Atreides as his family is caught up in a power struggle over Arakis, a desert planet that provides the life-extending drug “spice” to the universe. Spice is necessary for space travel and so whichever family is in control of the planet is guaranteed to be fabulously wealthy. The Harkonnens are ceding the planet to the Atreides, but this is part of a secret plan on their end to kill of the whole Atreides line. Paul is simultaneously undergoing his own struggle not to give into his terrible destiny.
I think a big part of why I like Dune so much is that Paul is not a hero — indeed, the book states that it’s the worst case scenario for the native Fremen to fall into the hands of a hero archetype, which Paul ends up being to them. He gets cast as the hero/religious Messiah type by everyone around him because he fits into myths that were seeded on the planet by the Bene Gesserit and because of the powers he has, but he is hugely controlled by forces outside of himself. He’s sort of the ultimate antihero and I enjoy narratives that subvert the classic myth of a bold hero riding in to save everyone. What’s happening to Paul during the story is pretty horrific and Herbert raises a lot of questions about free will and the human race’s intrinsic desire to survive and perpetuate itself without growing stagnant. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter that show how his life gets turned into a cult like figure head are very telling and made me think a lot about how we deify historical leaders or those in the past without fully grasping their humanity or the forces that shaped them. A lot of my own reading in history is about trying to humanize those people for myself and not turn them into perfect people, so Dune really works for me on that level. I also think its look at how ingrained power systems corrupt and how chaos seeds itself into systems are great.
I am interested to read the next two books at some point, but Dune really does work pretty perfectly as a standalone. It’s a classic and it will keep being a classic. If you like SF and losing yourself in a long worldbuild-y novel, you’ll probably enjoy it.