Dune by Frank Herbert: Book Review

(Book Review--Science Fiction)

Started: January 8, 2023

Finished: January 14, 2023

(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.) 

Background Information

According to Wikipedia, this book was originally serialized in 1963-1964, and then published in 1965.

Famously, the author Frank Herbert had a really difficult time getting this book published.  The only publisher that would take it was Chilton Books, which mainly published automobile manuals.  And the first printing of this book did not do well.

However, this book slowly amassed a following due to word of mouth, and eventually became quite popular.

It has been called by many people the greatest science fiction novel of the 20th century, and it's claimed that this book influenced everything from Star Wars to Star Trek.   

It's also been filmed multiple times (1984, 2000, 2021).

The version I read is the 2021 movie tie-in edition.  (The one pictured at the top left corner of this blog post, with the words "Now a Major Motion Picture").  I haven't actually seen the 2021 movie, but the movie tie-in edition just happened to be the only version being sold at my local bookstore here in Vietnam, so that's what I bought.  This version is 884 pages long, but it also has really big print and large margins at the side of the pages.   (It's formatted like the kind of mass-market paperback that you would commonly find in supermarkets and airports.) According to Wikipedia, the original version of this book was 412 pages, so I'm assuming that in that version there was smaller print and smaller margins.

My version also includes, four appendices, a map, cartographic notes and  a glossary of terminology at the back--yes, it's one of those kind of books--and an afterwards by Brian Herbert, the son of the author Frank Herbert.

My History With this Book / Why I Read This Book

For the longest time, I didn’t know this book existed.  Then, once I found out it existed, I started to hear about it everywhere.  (Perhaps a classic example of what is called the Frequency Illusion.  Or, perhaps this is because the rise of the Internet has made geek culture more accessible nowadays than ever before. What do you guys think?)

The first time I ever heard of Dune was when the David Lynch movie was being shown on the Disney Channel in the late 1980s.  I didn't actually see the movie--I just saw pictures for it in the Disney Channel magazine.  But that was my first awareness that this thing called Dune existed. (*1)

If memory serves, the first time I ever realized that the movie Dune was connected to a book was the 2010 review of the movie that Lindsay Ellis did.  The impression I got from Lindsay Ellis’s review was that both the movie and the book that it was based on were not all that great.  So for a few years after that, I was aware that Dune was based on a book, but I was under the impression that the book wasn’t that great.  (*2)

But recently, the past 5 years or so, it seems like I’ve been hearing about Dune everywhere on the Internet. Everyone has been talking about how great Dune is.

Whisky Prajer's mentioned the book a couple times within the past 5 years --HERE and HERE.  (If you read those posts, you'll notice that they are somewhat tempered in their praise.  But it was enough to get me interested nonetheless.)

And then, there's all the chatter this book has been getting on Booktube.  I've seen a number of booktubers talk about this book in the past couple years, but, as readers of this blog know, I'm particularly influenced by Steve Donoghue, from whom I've been taking a lot of my reading cues lately.

Steve has a lot of praise for Dune.  He frequently calls it the greatest science fiction of the 20th Century--example here. And then, a few months ago, he talked about it on CPL Radio's Book of the Day.  

...and after watching that video, I was completely sold.

I wrote in the comments: "Okay, you guys have talked me into it.  I'm going to track down this book now."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9vXB0mNeSE&lc=UgznX151tPPPMkGDORR4AaABAg

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm frequently complaining about how I can't track down specific books in Vietnam.  But in the case of Dune, I knew it was available.  I had often seen it here in bookstores before. 

A few weeks later, I was in the bookstore in SC Vivo City, saw this book on the shelves, and snatched it up.

The Reading Journey

I spent 3 weeks trapped up in the countryside with my wife’s parents for Tet holiday, and this was one of the books I brought with me.  It was raining for several days, and with no TV, limited Internet, and nothing else to do, so I relied on this book as my sole source of entertainment for the week I was reading it. I finished the whole book off, all 884 pages, in one week.  Which is pretty good for me.  

In fact, the week I read this book, the week of January 15, is my highest number of pages read in one week since I started keeping track.  Now, granted, this was on a book with large print and large page margins. But still, a pretty good week of reading, if I don't say so myself. 

The Reading Experience

The first thing I noticed about this book was how clunky the writing style was. And the dialogue!  The dialogue was so cheesy and unrealistic.

In those first few chapters, the dialogue really interfered with my ability to immerse myself in the story.  I kept thinking to myself, “But people don’t actually talk like that!” instead of immersing myself in the plot.

Now, clunky prose has always been a feature of pulp science fiction novels.  So if this had been just another cheesy pulp adventure novel, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at some bad writing.  But cheesy pulp novel is not what I had been sold.  This was supposed to be the greatest science fiction novel of the 20th century.  What was up with this terrible writing? (*3)

I do have to say, though, that the more I read, the less the prose bothered me.  By the time I was a couple hundred pages in, I had altogether stopped noticing the bad dialogue and the stilted prose.  Maybe this is one of those books where the writing style just grows on you as you read it?  Or maybe Frank Herbert’s prose actually got better as the book went on?  I don’t know. (*4)

At any rate, I suppose it couldn’t have been that bad, because after all I did finish off all 883 pages in just one week.

This is also one of those books where you are constantly going to the glossary at the back to look up all the new words.  This Youtuber here nails it when he says: “I'm spending more time in the glossary in this book than the actual book itself.”

As I read the book, I was constantly debating with myself whether or not to go to the glossary.  Does Frank Herbert intend for me to go to the back and look this word up?  Or is he trying to get me to guess the meaning from context?  Is this word even in the glossary?  Or is this just a normal English word that I should know?

[There are some fantasy books where the glossary at the back is meant to be used only as a crutch, and new terms are explained in the story as they come up--The Wayfarer Redemption is a good example of this.  But in the case of Dune, I got the impression that Frank Herbert does intend for his readers to be constantly referring to the back of the book as new words come up.]

The constant flipping back to the glossary, and the constant thinking about whether or not I should flip back to the glossary, gave me a bit of a headache as I was reading this book.  And, needless to say, took me out of the story.  

And yet, the terminology, annoying as it is, does contribute to the world building.  It does contribute to the illusion that this is its own complete world which does exist on its own terms.  (Every reader knows what I’m talking about here--the feeling of immersion in a fantasy world that is created through a unique terminology.  So I won’t belabor this point.)

The plot of this book is… Well, what can I say?  The plot is truly epic.  This book may be 884 pages long, but man you are really getting your money’s worth for those 884 pages.  So much happens over the course of this book.

(This is one of those books that, when you finally finish, you look back and marvel at just how much the characters have changed since the book began.  So much has happened that it’s strange to think where these characters started out compared to where they ended up.)

There’s a number of surprise plot twists in this novel, and, if at all possible, it’s best to go into this book without any advanced knowledge of the story.  Avoid spoilers, in other words.

Although the good news is this is a book that’s very hard to spoil.  It’s not the type of book that you could spoil by simply yelling out something like “Snape Kills Dumbledore.” So much happens in this book that there’s no way someone could spoil all of it unless they were sitting next to you for 30 minutes straight.  Think of all the plot machinations in Game of Thrones.  It’s kind of like that.

Actually it’s like Game of Thrones in more ways than one.  Just like in Game of Thrones, there are multiple noble families that are scheming against each other.  Just like in Game of Thrones, there are also multiple subordinates within each great family, all of whom have their own agendas and character arcs.  So you have both the drama of the great houses maneuvering against each other, but you also have the drama of the conflicts between individuals within these great houses. It is, in many ways, kind of like Game of Thrones set in outer-space.(*5)

The characters in this book are very conniving, and there’s a lot of scheming and plotting going on.  There are plenty of chapters where two characters will just talk for pages on end laying out all their schemes.  These conversational scenes are often written in that cheesy dialogue style that I complained about above, but they’re still good fun.  If you like books that have complicated plots (and I do), then it’s fun to see all the various schemes that are being laid out, and I appreciated the amount of thought that Frank Herbert had put into all the different plans that different characters have.

However, in my opinion not all these schemes have suitable pay-offs.  A few times, there’s a plan that characters will spend a whole chapter talking about, and I expected this plan to evolve into a major plot point later in the book, but then we never hear about it again.  It seemed to me like there were some plot threads which were elaborately set-up, but then not adequately paid-off.

But I don’t know.  It could be that the reason we never hear about that plot point again is because we don’t need to.  The characters have already explained everything that they’re going to do.  Maybe it would have been redundant to narrate them actually doing it?  Like I said, I don’t know.  What do you guys think? 

The other problem is that the narrative momentum of the book lags in the second half of the book, when the spiritual element of the story takes center stage.  Frank Herbert starts to devote a lot of time to describing mystical trances--these are sections that I thought got a bit weird, and they were also very repetitive.

I’m also not entirely sure everything in the story was 100% consistent.  Paul's ability to see the future, for example, seemed to turn on and off depending on when it was convenient for the plot.  I know there was some attempt in the novel to explain away the instances in which Paul couldn’t accurately see the future, but… I don’t know, what did you guys think?  I’m not sure it entirely made sense.  I also thought that Jessica's ability to control people with her voice also seemed to come and go depending on plot convenience.

And then, there was the ending.  

In some ways the ending was very satisfying.  It gives the reader a thrilling climax packed with action scenes that appear on the surface to hit all the beats that the climax to a story like this needs to hit, even if it is a little bit overly dramatic.  (In this interview--courtesy of Whisky Prajer--Frank Herbert says that the huge action scene at the end was deliberately written to be high camp.)

But then at the end, we are left with so many unanswered questions.  Everything is left ambiguous.  Are we supposed to feel good about Paul’s triumph, or worried about it?  What is going to be the long term implications for the future of the Messianic cult that surrounds Paul?  Is it going to be a religion of peace and love, or is it going to unleash wars of religious conquest?

To be fair, the uncertainty is intentional.  Uncertainty of the future is a major theme in Dune. It’s something that the novel had been hammering home all along, so the uncertainty of the ending did kind of fit with the rest of the novel.

In the same interview, Frank Herbert says he deliberately left things unanswered in the ending of the book, because he thought that leaving unresolved questions would cause the story to remain in the reader’s imagination.

Not to mention, all of these unanswered questions at the end leaves plenty of room for writing sequels.  And write sequels Frank Herbert did.  He published 5 more Dune books in his lifetime, and then his son kept publishing more books after he died.

I haven’t yet read Dune Messiah, but just based on what I’ve picked up on the Internet, I’m given to understand that this book fully takes on the problems of Messianic cults, problems which are only just hinted at in Dune.

The Setting

Last year, when I reviewed The Return of the King, I had a bit of an epiphany, which is probably incredibly obvious, and yet also strikes me as really interesting--my mood changes depending on the setting of the book that I’m reading.  When I’m reading about nice, beautiful places, I feel happy.  When I’m reading about barren and desolate places, I start to feel depressed.  In other words, the power of the imagination has an effect on my mental happiness. 

The barren desert planet of Dune would not have been my first choice to spend 884 pages.  If I’m going to spend so much time imagining landscapes, I would much have preferred to read a story set in a lush and beautiful tropical forest.  (Once again, this Youtuber here, who jokes about how thirsty he feels when reading Dune, does a good job of capturing the feeling of what it’s like to read this book.)

And yet, once again, I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something.  After all, this book is really beloved by a lot of people.  And as Whisky Prajer points out, film makers love this book.  I guess maybe some people might love the whole "Lawrence of Arabia" awe and majesty of the desert.  (Watching the trailer for the new movie, I can see that they're definitely trying to sell the beauty of the desert angle.)

But it's never been my cup of tea.  As I wrote in my review of King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard:

the real meat of the journey takes place crossing a desert. And then it becomes a desert story—men wishing for water—wishing they had water again—complaining about not having water, et cetera. (I don’t care for desert crossing stories all that much. They tend to be one note songs.)

The scorching of the desert, and importance of water is also a very big theme in Dune.  So just as this theme bored me in King Solomon's Mines, it also tested my patience in Dune.  But maybe that's just me.  

The Chosen One

I believe that in recent years, there’s been a bit of a backlash against science fiction and fantasy stories that make use of trope of “the chosen one”, mostly in response to all the Harry Potter inspired fantasy stories that came out about 10 years ago. (At least that’s my take on the online discourse.  What do you guys think?)

If you’re sick of stories that follow The Chosen One narrative trope (W)…, well, bad news.  Dune is definitely a Chosen One narrative.

I mean, you have to cut it a bit of slack because it came out all the way back in 1965, before this narrative was done to death in the Harry Potter-inspired Y.A. market.

But still, consider yourself warned.  This is another Chosen One trope. 

The Themes of this Book

Oh my god, where to even start with the themes of this book?  It’s about spiritualism, it’s about religion, it’s about feudalism, it’s about ecology, it’s about free will and predestination, it’s about drugs, it’s about artificial intelligence, it’s about…

…it’s about just about everything, really.

We could sit here and talk forever about all the themes in this book.  

It definitely is an ambitious book.  You do have to give it that.  It wants to tackle everything.

Now, does it actually tackle all of these themes successfully?  

…I don’t know, man.  What do you guys think?

(Sorry, I know I’m dodging all of the big questions in this review.  But then, I’m not a professional book critic, and no one’s paying me for these reviews.  I’m just a guy with a blog. And I feel like the casual reader can’t help but come away from this book a little shell-shocked.  Like, yeah, there was really a lot in here.  Did it all work?  Did it make sense?  Does it deal with all of its themes successfully?  I’d probably need to re-read this book and spend a lot more time thinking to answer those questions.)

I'm also not going to try to give my thoughts on the various themes in this book.  I mean, I definitely do have my own thoughts on religion and my own thoughts on ecology--just to mention two of the themes that are prominent in Dune.  But we'd be here all day if I started getting into all my own thoughts on this book's themes. Better to just say it has a lot of themes, and then move quickly on.  (This book review is long enough already.)

Connections to Other Books I’ve read

* The Dune series is frequently compared to The Lord of the Ring series.  One is supposed to be the greatest fantasy series of the 20th Century, the other is supposed to be the greatest science fiction series of the 20th Century.

Although Tolkien actually didn’t appreciate the comparison, because he wasn’t a Dune fan.  See this video HERE.

* The protagonists of this book are named Atreides, after the House of Atreides from Greek Mythology--specifically Menelaus and Agamemnon--who featured in both The Iliad and The Odyssey.

I was able to immediately recognize the allusion because of Andrew Lang.  You see, a couple years ago I got annoyed when Andrew Lang used the word Atrides to refer to Menelaus without any explanation, and took the trouble of complaining about it in my review of Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang.  Ever since then, though, the nomenclature of “Atrides” has stuck in my mind.  (I think “Atrides” and “Atreides” are interchangeable.  I’ve googled it just now, and can’t seem to find any difference in how the terms are used.  But let me know if I’m missing something.)  

* The historical story of Lawrence of Arabia was one of Frank Herbert’s inspirations in writing Dune. Lawrence of Arabia is also the translator of my edition of The Odyssey, which I reviewed last month.

* Robert A. Heinlein has a blurb on the opening pages of my edition, praising this book for being “Powerful, convincing and most ingenious.”  For my review of some of Heinlein’s books, see HERE, HERE and HERE.

* This book was one of the inspirations for Star Wars.  The desert planet of Tatooine especially was influenced by Dune.

* This book was also one of the inspirations for Star Trek, or so Brian Herbert claims in his afterward.  The machine like logic of the Vulcans in Star Trek are based on the Mentats from Dune.  (It could be true.  This book came out in 1965.  The first episode of Star Trek didn't air until 1966).

* There’s also the theory that Dune is a response to Foundation by Isaac Asimov.

Extended Quotation

It was a relief globe of a world, partly in shadows, spinning under the impetus of a fat hand that glittered with rings. The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presented a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.

An ellipsoid desk with a top of jade-pink petrified elacca wood stood at the center of the room. Veriform suspensor chairs ringed it, two of them occupied. In one sat a dark-haired youth of about sixteen years, round of face and with sullen eyes. The other held a slender, short man with effeminate face.

Both youth and man stared at the globe and the man half-hidden in shadows spinning it.

A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle: "There it is, Piter - the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke's headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?"

"Assuredly, Baron," said the man. His voice came out tenor with a sweet, musical quality.

The fat hand descended onto the globe, stopped the spinning. Now, all eyes in the room could focus on the motionless surface and see that it was the kind of globe made for wealthy collectors or planetary governors of the Empire. It had the stamp of Imperial handicraft about it. Latitude and longitude lines were laid in with hair-fine platinum wire. The polar caps were insets of finest cloud-milk diamonds.

The fat hand moved, tracing details on the surface. "I invite you to observe," the basso voice rumbled. "Observe closely, Piter, and you, too, Feyd-Rautha, my darling: from sixty degrees north to seventy degrees south - these exquisite ripples. Their coloring: does it not remind you of sweet caramels? And nowhere do you see blue of lakes or rivers or seas. And these lovely polar caps - so small. Could anyone mistake this place? Arrakis! Truly unique. A superb setting for a unique Victory."

A smile touched Piter's lips. "And to think. Baron: the Padishah Emperor believes he's given the Duke your spice planet. How poignant."

"That's a nonsensical statement," the Baron rumbled. "You say this to confuse young Feyd-Rautha, but it is not necessary to confuse my nephew."

The sullen-faced youth stirred in his chair, smoothed a wrinkle in the black leotards he wore. He sat upright as a discreet tapping sounded at the door in the wall behind him.

Piter unfolded from his chair, crossed to the door, cracked it wide enough to accept a message cylinder. He closed the door, unrolled the cylinder and scanned it. A chuckle sounded from him. Another.

"Well?" the Baron demanded.

"The fool answered us, Baron!"

"Whenever did an Atreides refuse the opportunity for a gesture?" the Baron asked. "Well, what does he say?"

"He's most uncouth, Baron. Addresses you as 'Harkonnen' - no 'Sire et Cher Cousin,' no title, nothing."

"It's a good name," the Baron growled, and his voice betrayed his impatience. "What does dear Leto say?"

"He says: 'Your offer of a meeting is refused. I have ofttimes met your treachery and this all men know.' "

"And?" the Baron asked.

“He says: ‘The art of Kanly still has admirers in the Empire.’ He signs it: ‘Duke Leot of Arrakis.’” Piter began to laugh. “Of Arrakis! Oh, my! This is almost too rich!” (p.21-23) 

***END QUOTE**** (This conversation / exposition dump goes on for another 10 pages, but I can’t quote the whole chapter.  You get the idea.)

I know it seems like I ripped that out of context, but I didn't.  At least not by much.  This is only the second chapter, and this is our first introduction to the Harknonnens.  (Some of this stuff is alluded to in the previous chapter, but you're not missing much context.)

This is a perfect example of the clunky prose and cheesy dialogue I complained about earlier in the review.

It's also a great example of the all the terminology.  As you're reading this, how much should you stop and go to the glossary in the back?  How much should you just read on and hope it makes sense later?  

(From the passage I just quoted above, filmbooks, suspensor, elacca, Arrakis, spice, and Kanly are all in the glossary.  But some other words, which feel like they should be in the glossary, are not, like ellipsoid and Veriform.  So if you went back to the glossary for those words, you'd be wasting your time.)

Future Reading Plans

The Rest of the Series?

This is the first book in a whole long series which has 5 sequels written by Frank Herbert, two more sequels written after his death, and currently 14 prequels written by his son.  (The most recent of which was just published last year, so I expect more books will keep coming out.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)

 

Steve Donoghue seems to be of the opinion that the Frank Herbert books are must reads, but the Brain Herbert sequels are passable.

Whisky Prajer, however, cautions me about even continuing with the rest of Frank Herbert’s books.

When I asked him if I should continue with the sequels, he replied bluntly:

Don't do that -- Herbert only gets worse! I think I made it as far as Dune: Messiah. Herbert was now in the habit of grinding out a book a year , and his hunger for the yearly paycheck could not be denied, except by readers like you and me saying "no!" and refusing to read further. 

And yet, part of me feels like I should continue with this series, because I’m lead to believe (from what little research I’ve done) that Frank Herbert’s vision for this whole saga is to show how the messiah figure is actually an antihero.  And I don’t believe that comes through clearly until the sequels. (As Whisky himself seems to indicate in his post here)

So I feel like I should really continue with the sequels.

And, it looks like they are actually available in Vietnam.  So I could continue with them this year.

And yet, part of me doesn’t want to. At least not yet.  I’ve got a lot of other plans for my reading list this year, and I’m just not ready to tackle a massive series like this.  (These books, after all, are not short.)

Maybe I’ll wait a few years, and then try to come back at this series.

Maybe I’ll even re-read Dune, and then just keep running with the rest of the series.  Maybe.

If I am going to do this whole series, I could probably do with a re-read of Dune.  (It’s now been over 2 months since I finished this book, and I hate to say it, but I’m already starting to forget a lot of the plot details in the second half of this book.  Which characters died at the end again?  I don’t even remember.  So maybe best to just step away from this series for a few years, and then come back and try to tackle the whole thing at once.)

Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov

As I mentioned above, some people say that Dune may be a reply to Foundation.  

Also, in the same comment I quoted above, Whisky advises me to just re-read Foundation instead of Dune.

That time was better spent (for me) reading Asimov's Foundation series. Asimov was also hungry for the paycheck, but at least he could write -- or more likely could spot someone who knew.

I read Foundation back in high school, but don't remember it very well at all.  But I do remember the general feeling of being fascinated by it.  So I'm overdue for a re-read of it.  And I never read any of the other books in the series, so I'd like to read those as well.

Links

For Whisky Prajer's thoughts, see:

* In search of lost books, and

* Revisiting DUNE

Whisky writes:

Dune was finally, to my eyes, a hippie book. I bought it in a hippie used-book shop on the west coast. The only people discussing it were long-hairs who stank of patchouli and something faintly skunky. Thus: hippie book.

I had this in the back of my mind while I read Dune, and as I was reading Dune I could totally see why the hippies would love this book--Dune is very influenced by Eastern mysticism, and also has descriptions of mystical trances that are brought about by the aid of drugs.  Since this book was published in 1965, right as the hippie movement was beginning, no wonder the flower child generation loved it.

Also, I'm sure the themes about ecology must have seemed very prescient in 1965, and as the environmental movement began in the late 1960s and early 70s, that no doubt also helped the popularity of this book.

More links (also courtesy of Whisky):

* Willis E. McNelly interviews Frank Herbert on February 3, 1969 at Herbert's house.  (There is a lot in this conversation.  But it's all fascinating.)

*  Haris Durrani’s Twitter thread: “Do you think #Dune is a white saviour narrative? Well, you’re wrong.”  (This thread is also referencing stuff that happens in the sequels, which is another reason I might be sort of tempted to pick the sequels up someday.)

Rating:

7 out of 10 stars.  It's a really ambitious story, but the prose is clunky, and, on first reading at least, I'm not entirely sure the story makes complete sense.

Weekly Reading Vlog: 

January 15, 2023 p.1-884 

Footnotes (docs, pub)

(*1) My siblings and I grew up almost exclusively on the Disney Channel because my mother disapproved of regular network TV.  This is something I've mentioned before HERE, HERE, HERE,  HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE,  etc.

I’m not quite sure why the Disney Channel was airing Dune.  I don’t believe it had any connection to Disney? (Someone correct me if I’m wrong).  But back in those days, every once and a while the Disney channel would show some random stuff.

I remember photos for the movie Dune appeared in the monthly Disney Channel magazine.  (I used to pour over every inch of that magazine when I was a kid, looking for exciting stuff to watch.)  And I remember seeing the photos of the giant worms.  And also I remember Patrick Stewart’s face appeared prominently in one of the photos, which got my attention, as I was a huge Star Trek fan during those days, and this must have been right after Star Trek: The Next Generation first premiered.

I never bothered to actually watch the Dune movie--I don’t remember why not. I guess I just wasn’t that interested, and it must not have been on at a convenient time.  

(*2) Lindsay Ellis's Dune review is not currently on Youtube.  Apparently she later took down this review because of all the hate it received--see HERE.  However it can still be viewable on other sites--like this copy at the Internet Archive.  It's primarily a review of the 1984 movie, but it does reference the book as well. If you haven't watched the video, Lindsay Ellis thinks that both the book and the movie  have an uninteresting plot because they rely on a MacGuffin to move the plot along.  She also criticizes the writing style of the book, and says that the book is constantly telling you what all the characters are thinking in a style that is really annoying.

(*3) Whisky Prajer and I are on exactly the same page on this, by the way. 

In his 2018 post on Dune, Whisky writes:

Amalgamated linguistics aside, Herbert could hardly be called a “stylist.” He believed in sturdy narrative architecture, and laid down words like so much bricks and mortar. 

When I started this book, Whisky commented:

I wanted to like Frank Herbert, but Geez-Louise his prose is stilted!

(*4) Steve Donoghue is of the opinion that the prose of this book gets better after the first 200 pages.  In one of his (many) Dune videos, DuneTube 2019: Dune, Part 2!, Steve says that the problem was that the first 200 pages went through so many drafts that Frank Herbert just became inured to it, and lost the ability to see the problems with his prose.  Steve thinks that this is a problem that's limited only to the first 200 pages, and contrasts that to the subsequent 200 pages, which he says were written by "a complete master in absolute control of what he's doing."

I didn't watch this video until after I had already finished Dune, but it does square with my experience as a reader.  The first 200 pages struck me as really clunky.  After about 200 pages, I stopped noticing the problem.  But like I said above, it could also be that I just got used to Frank Herbert's prose.  I don't know.  I definitely know I've heard other people who criticize Frank Herbert's prose style generally.

Once again, I guess I'll throw the question out to you guys.  Let me know in the comments what you think.

(*5) But of course I shouldn't say that Dune is Game of Thrones set in space, because Dune predates Game of Thrones.  

Also, admittedly it's not an exact analogy.  In Game of Thrones, we see several Noble Houses plotting against each other.  In Dune we know other Great Houses are out there, but we really only see 2 of them: House Harkonnen and House Atreides.

Video Review:

Dune by Frank Herbert: Book Review