Dune (Movie Tie-In)

Many mediocre sequels followed, but this first is a great piece of political sci-fi. Imagine the oil-producers were extraterrestrial cultures, producing not lubricants and fuels but a natural psychotropic which facilitated hyperspace navigation. Now imagine an Asimovian empire trying to rest control of the source. Imagine that there is a fanatic desert uprising seeking to regain that control, resisted not by the Husseini nor the Ibn Saud but by a royal gang which looks for all the world like the Hapsburgs. Throw in a heroic noble family, political intrigue, brilliant, West-Wing level smartwriting, and just for, the helluvit, a tribe of real witches and some giant snakes which patrol the =deserts by tunneling under the sands. Completely addictive read. A modern classic..

So much to love and a different take on space based science fiction. I wanted to explore this world, the characters, the universe. All of it is still exciting and fresh feeling even 50 years later. Dune stands alone as it’s own. Too bad I hate this book. It is written by a man who may have never actually had a conversation with another living being in his life. He takes the world he created, the characters he created, and renders them lifeless. I don’t care about anyone in the book because why would I? I’ve been given nothing other than basic outlines of them. Plus the second half of this book feels like it was written in a day. The best way I can describe reading this is as if I was reading it through a vaseline covered lens. I can make out something but mostly it’s just vague shapes and colors. It reads like the Bible. Hate this book. Hate it. The only reason I give it two stars is because I actually like the ideas. Too bad someone, anyone else, didn’t write it.

The hype is justified for this book. If you have not read it yet, please do yourself a favor and change that asap. I'm sure there are a landslide of other reviewers that can tell you all about the story itself, so I will skip that. This book was an epic pleasure to read. I had some apprehension going in as I repeatedly heard that it's overly jarring from the beginning. I did not find this to be the case, and I'm no prodigy. It does have some of it's own words that are explained in the back of the book if needed, but said words are also presented with enough context to give you a good idea of what they're talking about. You have to push through a little at the beginning, but everything falls into place quickly enough. From cover to cover it is interesting and exciting. There is a reason it is hailed as such a timeless story, and I implore that you find the time to experience it for yourself.

Dune is a great book, and Simon Vance, the primary narrator of the audible version I'm listening to, has probably one of my favorite voices of all time. The voice acting overall is good in this version, but I'm confused as to why some chapters feature several voice actors doing various characters while other chapters - featuring the same characters - have everything voiced by Vance. As I said, I love his voice, but the switching back and forth is odd and distracting to me.

Great book so far, what can I say? It's a touchstone of science fiction. Ordered the first three books separately (because it was actually slightly cheaper to do that than get the box set) and kind of surprised the first book is larger in width and height than the other two. It's not a big deal I guess but kind of defeats the purpose of getting three books from a series that match each other. I just thought this was odd enough to mention in a review. UPDATE: Figured it out, the first book is actually in Trade Paperback format; the other two are the NEW Mass Market Paperbacks. Unfortunately on Amazon, the latter is being sold without delineation as the "Paperback" option, often with the "Mass Market" option seeming to be OLDER editions of the MMP size. This is also true for the 6 book (unboxed) set that I later purchased twice, trying to get the rest of the books in the bigger size. Note: I prefer the bigger size because it stays open when laid on a flat surface or in your lap. That sold it for me. On top of that, the font looks better somehow, and the narrow size just looked and felt kind of weird because the font size was the same but the pages are so narrow (I had an older edition of the first book that was MMP size but smaller font so it didn't look and read weird). In all my frustrated searches on Amazon, it seemed really unusually difficult to find the rest of the books in the larger Trade Paperback size, so for your sake, here's what I figured out after way too much time: A) The official BOXED set is the Trade Paperback size of the first book. B) Or, if you are like me and only wanted to get the first few books in Trade Paperback size, go to the Penguin Random House website, find the individual Dune books, select "Paperback", and click on their Amazon link to buy it here (they also link to other major book dealers, if you prefer). I managed to find books two, three, and four this way., which were the only ones I really wanted anyway. Note that as of writing this, the second and third books in Trade Paperback size on Amazon are both $9.99 each (same price as the NEW MMP books) but God Emperor is almost full price at $16.99 for some reason.