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Book recommendation: Dune [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-20
There’s a movie. There’s a computer game that uses the visual IP from the movie and the text from the book (in what appears to be an alternate timeline).
Then there’s the book. The most recent movie misses the feminism and environmentalism of the book, which Frank Herbert may have written with his wife while they were running a firewatch station.
The first sentence of the book is about two women and man, but the movie focuses on Paul. Here is the first sentence – it names Paul and not the two women:
“In the week before their departure for Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”
The movie left out the environmental justice and other aspects of the book that make it liberal. The movie leaned in to what makes this book commercial.
There’s a story that Robert Silverberg wanted to find out what stories sell. He went to a book store and noticed that many books told the story of a young man of noble blood. He wrote Lord Valentine’s Castle.
Dune has that same commercial narrative but it also has other facets. This book was written in 1965. It is about a substance that the world depends on that is controlled by the Emperor Shaddam Hussein IV. The analogies to oil and to Iraq are obvious.
Dune has depth. The entire series of six books has depth. (I have not read Frank Herber’s non-Dune books, and I have not read the books about Dune written by others, such as Frank Herbert’s son Brian.)
I recommend reading this book, and then continuing on to the others if you like the first one. Book two (Dune Messiah) is very different – intended as a meditation on totalitarianism and demagoguery, with a plot that is less commercial that the first book.
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