I was introduced to the Dune universe in a roundabout way – first I saw a youtube video, some pages of wiki, then Villeneuve’s movie came out.
I LOVED it! A complex universe, rich in detail, steeped in philosophy, where progress is centered in a living human body, and the mind becomes almost religiously mystical in its development.
With these sentiments, I finally decided to start reading the book and was… disappointed. The text is very simple, the characters are written out in straight lines, people talk about plans within plans and yet say LITERALLY what they think. A lot of things are said straight head-on, the excess of direct speech is discouraging, and the structure of the work is heavy-handed and uncomfortable for the reader (before each chapter is essentially a spoiler, there are a lot of digressions about technical details).
I’ve heard many people complain about the abundance of names – I don’t have a problem with that, but the book really doesn’t want to engage the reader. It just shows what it’s interested in, and it doesn’t care if it’s interesting to the reader.
That said, behind it all, I can still see the world of Dune – majestic and mesmerizing in its sweeping intent. I love it – but the text really wants to get in the way of that.
Frank Herbert is a genius at creating worlds, but I can’t understand him as a writer. The pain and sadness…
by Amohir