I recently finished reading Dune and I loved it way way more than I expected to! I saw the first movie when it came out in cinemas, and contrary to the public and critics I really didn't like it: I thought it was boring and dull.
I figured that reading the book would help me understand Frank Herbert's world and lore in a way that would allow me to appreciate the story more than I did 4.5 years ago. And I was right, this book rocks!
Dune is a book that explores politics, culture, religion, prophecy, ecology in a way that never felt too jarring or philosophically incomprehensible, always strengthening the enjoyment of experience of the narrative. The glossary was also an excellent edition to this book allowing me to actually understand what all the terms unique to this book actually meant: without it I would never have enjoyed this novel nearly as much as I did.
Arrakis is such an interesting setting for the vast majority of the book, such that it feels like its own character. A desert world with no running water, filled with enormous brutally intimidating sandworms that try to eat anything that moves with a rhythm, mostly uninhabitable for regular humans, but at the same time is the only area to find the universe's most rare, most valuable resource, melange: an intriguing juxtaposition.
Fremen culture, in a world where water is so, so much more unattainable and thus valuable was so well explored in this book. Every drop of moisture, of sweat, of tears, has to be conserved. When a matter is of dire importance it is a "water matter", when you pledge your allegiance to a tribe you pledge your "water" to it, when a member of a tribe dies they give their own water back to the tribe since they do not require it anymore. Their extreme religious philosophy and psychology surrounding Maud'Dib was visceral and even frightening at times.
There are so many striking moments in this book, from the death of Duke Leto and of Liet-Kynes, the duel against Jamis and later his funeral, when Paul first rides a shai-hulud, Feyd-Rautha's duel against the slave in the colosseum (and later against Paul himself), or even Gurney Halleck easing the last moments of Mattai, one of his men, with a beautiful song.
The Sci-Fi aspect of it was also intriguing, with body shields only allowing slow moving objects to pass through, and lasguns causing mini nukes when intercepting a shield but otherwise able to penetrate everything else (this causing interesting dynamics in combat and warfare), but it felt more like a fantasy book with all the Bene Gesserit mysticism, prescience, and Fremen religion and radicalism.
Solid, high 9/10, I cannot wait to read Dune: Messiah!
by Equivalent_Bank_5845