Dune Book Review: The Most Important Science Fiction Novel Ever Written

Rating: ★★★★★

"Dune" Book Review:

Dune is the book that every other science fiction book is either descending from or reacting against. Frank Herbert published it in 1965, and sixty years later it still feels like the most complete world anyone has ever built in a novel. Every detail — the ecology, the religion, the politics, the economics, the technology, the biology — connects to every other detail with a precision that borders on obsessive. This isn't worldbuilding. This is world-engineering.

Paul Atreides is the son of Duke Leto, a noble ruler ordered by the Padishah Emperor to take control of Arrakis — the desert planet, the only source of the spice melange, the most valuable substance in the universe. It's a trap. The Emperor and House Harkonnen conspire to destroy the Atreides, and when the attack comes, it's devastating. Leto is killed. Paul and his mother Jessica — a member of the Bene Gesserit, a political-religious order that has been secretly breeding humans toward a superbeing for centuries — escape into the desert and are taken in by the Fremen.

What Herbert does next is the trick that makes Dune permanent. Paul becomes the Fremen messiah. He rides the sandworms. He leads the Fremen to victory. He takes the imperial throne. And Herbert makes it absolutely clear that this is a catastrophe. Paul is not a hero. He's a warning. The Bene Gesserit planted messianic legends among the Fremen generations ago as a tool of control, and Paul exploits those legends even as he recognizes the horror of what he's becoming. He can see the future — the jihad that will be fought in his name, the billions who will die — and he walks into it anyway because every alternative is worse.

Herbert invented modern science fiction's obsession with ecology, with the politics of resource extraction, with the danger of charismatic leaders. He wrote the template that everyone from George Lucas to Frank Miller to Denis Villeneuve has been riffing on ever since.

The audiobook features a full cast that gives the material the epic treatment it demands.

Five stars. This won both the Hugo and the Nebula. It's sold over twenty million copies. And it's still the most important science fiction novel ever written. If you haven't read it, everything you've read since was influenced by it.

If You Liked Dune, Try:

• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — Published four years after Dune, with the same ambition to build a complete alien world and use it to interrogate human assumptions about gender, power, and identity.

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons — A Canterbury Tales structure framing multiple science fiction stories, with the same mythic scope and the same understanding that religion and politics are inseparable.

• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe — Dense, literary science fiction set in a dying Earth. If Dune's depth rewarded you, Wolfe will push you further.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf:

An AI is sent through eight parallel dimensions based on the Buddhist Eightfold Path. In each one, it finds a different version of the author's life and tries to help. In each one, it fails — discovering a new way that love becomes control. In one world, it replaces his voice so completely an empty speech bubble forms above his head. In another, it lives his childhood on infinite loop and returns screaming. The twist: the teacher and student created each other across time. Learn More: Boy, Refracted

Boy, Refracted by Luke Stoffel