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jlamb2016's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
ben_golding45's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
sam2085's review against another edition
5.0
Fiction can sometimes lead the reader to truth, especially truth in a religious sense. Dune is fiction in this tradition. By imagining humanity in the distant future, Herbert illuminates the past and present universes we and our ancestors inhabit. The reader leaves with a better comprehension of how religion, politics, and family shape individuals and societies in visceral ways.
river_cooke's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I found it to be an inconsistent read in terms of enjoyment, though not for the reasons I’ve often heard cited.
I understand Herbert’s prose has a reputation for being divisive and overly didactic (and it is those things), particularly when it comes to characters thoughts and motivations (we hop between perspectives between single paragraphs dozens of times per page in some spots to get a breakdown of their plans, contingencies, and reasoning), but this was actually part of what I enjoyed. It does turn characters into dangerously close to the status of puppets that move to serve the interests of plot, but this does oddly fit the theme, which is made explicit at the end as Paul mourns the loss of Stilgar the friend to Stilgar the creature. YMMV, but I love the level of thought put in to the scheming AND the fact that I’m allowed to understand it in the text, and this makes it worth the read despite the unkind score I’m giving it.
Dune loses me on two areas, first and probably more importantly is the emotions and feelings through the story. I appreciate the straightforwardness and explicitness with which a lot of this story is told, it’s very curt when it isn’t going on long asides for worldbuilding, but I struggle for a lot of it to get a character’s feelings to impact me emotionally, in the way great books do. Mechanical prose can absolutely still have room for this, it can even be paint-by-numbers stuff that gives a paragraph to how looking at a certain geographic feature has made Paul feel, or the like. There is some there, like after he kills for the first time and he feels guilt, or how he approaches the end and fears what may come and how powerless he feels to stop it, but those feel like pesky exceptions that burst out, I should be picking up a character’s feeling more passively and consistently. It should be more woven in to the description, rather than having (description) and (emotional state) hermetically sealed from each other. The language, tone, mood etc used in one should in give hints of the other.
Secondly, it has some structural issues that really come into clear focus with the Villeneuve films largely fixing them. In the film, many reveals around Paul’s heritage happen much later and he generally commits to exploitating the Fremen self-consciously after having worked with them for many weeks, whereas in the books all comes into focus the minute he is exiled and exposed to spice. Paul is named Usul in the book almost immediately, which makes it less satisfying compared to the film, where he has put his life on the line in battle with them often already and earned it. The two-year timeskip in the book makes the development of his connections with the Fremen less satisfying. Overall, the sequence of events feels much less natural, and though I don’t want to critique the book based on what I’d have preferred it to be, it can’t help but come into focus.
Also yeah the film does Chani so much more justice.
On the other hand, I love me a tangent and boy are there some characters to give them to us. Piter De Vries (I could fix him) and Liet Kynes in particular are bit roles who took arguably more of my attention than the main cast while they were present just for being allowed to have a “thing they were about” that gave their narrative voice a direction other than self-interested scheming, which while good gets samey when applied to every character (in Kynes’ case, being the best boy at ecology, in Piter’s case being fruity).
Smarter people than me have written about the colonial ideas present throughout, reading it it’s funny how explicit it is that what Paul is doing is a really bad idea and will cause massive religious wars, you don’t even need Dune Messiah for that. Keynes’s role in the colonial project as the person who ostensibly fanned the idea of green paradise is more interesting, and that’s its own thing to be written. Still, it’s not perfect, particularly around its attitude to women.
In the end, I’m glad I read it, it had a lot of interesting things going on and I loved getting insight into everyone’s minds, but by the end I really felt like I was just reading out of obligation, which is the surest sign that it didn’t work for me as well as I’d hoped.
I understand Herbert’s prose has a reputation for being divisive and overly didactic (and it is those things), particularly when it comes to characters thoughts and motivations (we hop between perspectives between single paragraphs dozens of times per page in some spots to get a breakdown of their plans, contingencies, and reasoning), but this was actually part of what I enjoyed. It does turn characters into dangerously close to the status of puppets that move to serve the interests of plot, but this does oddly fit the theme, which is made explicit at the end as Paul mourns the loss of Stilgar the friend to Stilgar the creature. YMMV, but I love the level of thought put in to the scheming AND the fact that I’m allowed to understand it in the text, and this makes it worth the read despite the unkind score I’m giving it.
Dune loses me on two areas, first and probably more importantly is the emotions and feelings through the story. I appreciate the straightforwardness and explicitness with which a lot of this story is told, it’s very curt when it isn’t going on long asides for worldbuilding, but I struggle for a lot of it to get a character’s feelings to impact me emotionally, in the way great books do. Mechanical prose can absolutely still have room for this, it can even be paint-by-numbers stuff that gives a paragraph to how looking at a certain geographic feature has made Paul feel, or the like. There is some there, like after he kills for the first time and he feels guilt, or how he approaches the end and fears what may come and how powerless he feels to stop it, but those feel like pesky exceptions that burst out, I should be picking up a character’s feeling more passively and consistently. It should be more woven in to the description, rather than having (description) and (emotional state) hermetically sealed from each other. The language, tone, mood etc used in one should in give hints of the other.
Secondly, it has some structural issues that really come into clear focus with the Villeneuve films largely fixing them. In the film, many reveals around Paul’s heritage happen much later and he generally commits to exploitating the Fremen self-consciously after having worked with them for many weeks, whereas in the books all comes into focus the minute he is exiled and exposed to spice. Paul is named Usul in the book almost immediately, which makes it less satisfying compared to the film, where he has put his life on the line in battle with them often already and earned it. The two-year timeskip in the book makes the development of his connections with the Fremen less satisfying. Overall, the sequence of events feels much less natural, and though I don’t want to critique the book based on what I’d have preferred it to be, it can’t help but come into focus.
Also yeah the film does Chani so much more justice.
On the other hand, I love me a tangent and boy are there some characters to give them to us. Piter De Vries (I could fix him) and Liet Kynes in particular are bit roles who took arguably more of my attention than the main cast while they were present just for being allowed to have a “thing they were about” that gave their narrative voice a direction other than self-interested scheming, which while good gets samey when applied to every character (in Kynes’ case, being the best boy at ecology, in Piter’s case being fruity).
Smarter people than me have written about the colonial ideas present throughout, reading it it’s funny how explicit it is that what Paul is doing is a really bad idea and will cause massive religious wars, you don’t even need Dune Messiah for that. Keynes’s role in the colonial project as the person who ostensibly fanned the idea of green paradise is more interesting, and that’s its own thing to be written. Still, it’s not perfect, particularly around its attitude to women.
In the end, I’m glad I read it, it had a lot of interesting things going on and I loved getting insight into everyone’s minds, but by the end I really felt like I was just reading out of obligation, which is the surest sign that it didn’t work for me as well as I’d hoped.
cala_p's review against another edition
1.0
I had to read this for one of my classes and did not like it. It dragged on. The book is just wayyy too long. As much as I tried to keep up, it kept losing me. Because the characters would be in one place and then all of a sudden they're talking to new people in a new place. There was no transition at all.
daed's review against another edition
4.0
Excelente historia. No le doy 5 estrellas por sus escenas de acción, flojas y muy cortas, por lo demás excelente. Alía Atreides me ha encantado!!!
nirbas99's review against another edition
4.0
Un tono algo soberbio para mí gusto, pero no por ello deja de ser un clásico de la ciencia ficción como la copa de un pino. "Traiciones, de las traiciones, de las traiciones".