A review by bluejayreads
Dune by Frank Herbert

Did not finish book. Stopped at 22%.
 My husband has been begging me to read this book for a long, long time. He kept hyping it up, and he wasn't the only one - every single description I read of it was light on the plot and heavy on the "Dune is amazing," "the best scifi novel ever written," "Frank Herbert's death was a loss to the world because he wrote Dune" stuff. So I went into it with high expectations and no real idea what the story was actually about. 

At 7% into the story, I texted my husband and asked if it got better once they actually moved to the planet Arrakis, because so far: 

  • Paul took a torture test to prove he was human (there was doubt for some reason I guess?)
  • there was an exposition conversation about a prophesied male savior who could access both male and female magic (I think it's magic?) as opposed to the women who were limited to only female magic
  • an antagonist got introduced briefly
  • Paul did duke's son things like having lessons and talking to members of the guard 

My husband assured me that it did get better, so I kept going. And it did not. I felt more connection to the character being forced to betray the Atreides family than I did to Paul, his mother, or Duke Leto combined, because he at least had desires and motivations. And that connection wasn't great - I don't even remember that character's name. 

It seemed like the story was trying to be about The Prophecy That May Or May Not Be About Paul, but it was actually about politics. The politics of being a proper duke's son and heir, the politics of establishing yourself as in charge on a new planet, politically defeating your political enemies, mining strategies and diplomacy plans and managing troops ... it was boring. So insufferably boring. None of the characters were people, none of them had wants or desires or motivations or even agency. They were cardboard cutouts that shuffled each other around doing politics until something happened to them and they went, "oh, that's what we're doing now" and did more politics about it. 

This is science fiction, but the only way you know is by occasional mentions of futuristic technology and the fact that they're on a planet that isn't Earth, with its desert setting and natives whose eyes are solid blue with no whites. (The desert planet Arrakis could have been a fascinating setting if it was in a book where people actually did things.) It could just have easily been dropped in a high fantasy world of elves and dragons, or somewhere in the historical Middle Ages, or almost any other setting with only minor adjustments. 

I legitimately have no idea how this book became the world's best-selling science fiction novel. I get that some people enjoy slow stories of politics and resource management, but if I'm picking up a scifi novel that's not what I want or expect. It's too long, too slow, following too many characters with too many names I can't remember, and yet somehow nothing happens. (And from the Wikipedia summary, it doesn't look like that gets any better.) I'm used to old genre fiction not giving female characters agency, but no characters seemed to have agency here. This isn't a science fiction book, or a book about Arrakis or characters or even Paul becoming a gratuitously over-powered scifi hero. It's a book about characters pointlessly doing politics, and a boring one at that. 
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