Product Description

The epic story of the planet Arrakis, its Atreides rulers and their mortal enemies the Harkonnens is the finest, most widely acclaimed and enduring science fiction novel of this century.

Huge in scope, towering in concept, it is a work that will live on in the reader’s imagination.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18878 in Books
• Published on: 1982-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
This Hugo and Nebula Award winner tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Arrakis is the sole source of Melange, the "spice of spices". Melange is necessary for interstellar travel and also grants psychic powers and longevity, so whoever controls it wields great influence.

The troubles begin when stewardship of Arrakis is transferred by the Emperor from the Harkonnen Noble House to House Atreides. The Harkonnens don't want to give up their privilege, though, and through sabotage and treachery they cast young Duke Paul Atreides out into the planet's harsh environment to die. There he falls in with the Fremen, a tribe of desert dwellers who become the basis of the army with which he will reclaim what's rightfully his. Paul Atreides, though, is far more than just a usurped duke. He might be the end product of a very long-term genetic experiment designed to breed a superhuman--he might be a messiah. His struggle is at the centre of a nexus of powerful people and events, and the repercussions will be felt throughout the Imperium.

Dune is one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written, and deservedly so. The setting is elaborate and ornate, the plot labyrinthine and the adventures exciting. Five sequels follow. --Brooks Peck

Review
'Unique among SF novels ... I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.' -- Arthur C. Clarke 'One of the landmarks of modern science fiction ... an amazing feat of creation.' -- Analog

This future space fantasy might start an underground craze. It feeds on the shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Martian series), Aeschylus, Christ and J.R. Tolkien. The novel has a closed system of internal cross-references, and features a glossary, maps and appendices dealing with future religions and ecology. Dune itself is a desert planet where a certain spice liquor is mined in the sands; the spice is a supremely addictive narcotic and control of its distribution means control of the universe. This at a future time when the human race has reached a point of intellectual stagnation. What is needed is a Messiah. That's our hero, called variously Paul, then Muad'Dib (the One Who Points the Way), then Kwisatz Haderach (the space-time Messiah). Paul, who is a member of the House of Atreides (!), suddenly blooms in his middle teens with an ability to read the future and the reader too will be fascinated with the outcome of this projection... With its bug-eyed monsters, one might think Dune was written thirty years ago; it has a fantastically complex schemata and it should interest advanced sci-fi devotees. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review
‘Unique among SF novels . . . I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.’ (Arthur C. Clarke )

‘One of the landmarks of modern science fiction . . . an amazing feat of creation.’ (Analog )

Customer Reviews

Something else. Something unexpected.
It's easy to find reasons not to read Dune. For a start, it's hard to think of many books that are more quintessentially `sixties'. Essentially Lawrence of Arabia, in space, with added drugs and zen philosophy, it's tempting to dismiss it as just another half-baked hippy fantasy, good for carrying around in a backpack whilst `finding' oneself, but destined to be put aside in favour of more respectable literature once your journey of self-discovery has revealed that you're best suited to accountancy work. Certainly the fact that it straddles those two most maligned of genres, Sci-Fi and Fantasy, like a bespectacled tanktop-clad Colossus, doesn't help. Then there's the endless stream of sequels and prequels, some of which aren't bad, many of which are dreadful, but all of which give the whole enterprise the dreaded whiff of franchise fiction.

There are also glaring flaws aplenty. It suffers to some extent from those twin curses of science fiction - reams of exposition, and stock characters (particularly the villainous Harkonnens, whose over-the-top cartoon evilness feels strangely at odds with the book's emphasis on feudal and religious intrigue, as if Dr Doom had wandered into the pages of Il Principe.) The pacing is awkward - most of the book's best moments are in the first two thirds of the book, which are taken at a measured pace, before the final, inferior third jumps forward two years, hurtles through some jumbled highlights, and abandons the gradual development of the main characters in favour of a really big fight. Herbert's prose is good when dealing with plot and setting, but comes unstuck every time he tries to describe the transcendent and mystical aspects of the world he has created. The dialogue is of variable quality. The emphasis on supposedly superhuman minds trained to incredible levels of insight often proves a problem, as Herbert (who, by all accounts, was jolly clever but probably not a human computer) has a character state the obvious, and then tells us what a blinding insight has been made.

It's a tribute, then, to Herbert's tremendously ambitious creative achievement that none of these problems sink the book as whole. For all it's formal limitations, Dune builds a largely convincing fictional universe, with sufficient detail to give an illusion of reality, but not so much as to overwhelm the reader. Moreover, Herbert largely avoids the inclusion of detail for the sake of detail - this world serves the needs of his story, rather than the desire of the readership for a world with no question marks, avoiding the kind of arid dot-joining so often found in `epic' sci-fi and fantasy. Indeed, Dune has the wit to make the importance of mystery in stories one of it's themes, as the main character steadily finds himself caught in the momentum of the narrative, able to use his prescient powers to `see' possible alternatives but unable to escape towards them, as the religious myth he has initially cultivated around himself spins out of his control. By the end of the book he is a `prophet' unable to do anything other than act out the role ordained for him.

This consistent willingness to engage with ideas of storytelling and mythmaking provide an agreeable gloss to Dune's suitably epic plot, which in turn offers Herbert a sound basis from which to introduce a dazzling array of ideas. A sisterhood that sets out to guide the course of human evolution, and runs around the universe planting religions in primitive cultures. Navigators that depend on visions of the future to guide super-fast spaceships through the hazards of space. Humans who have trained themselves to think like supercomputers in a society without 'thinking machines', but who are unable to think outside the confines of logic. Dune might carry the flaws of sixties sci-fi, but it also carries the era's strength - a wide-open sense of possibility. This strength is tempered by Herbert's grasp of realpolitik, and an underlying cynicism towards human nature. There's even occasional evidence of a dry sense of humour - for instance, the key orthodox religious book in Herbert's universe is called the "Orange Catholic Bible," and our main character, an outsider who has united the desert tribes to take on an imperial enemy whilst struggling with a god complex, titles his memoirs the "Pillars of the Universe." Presumably there are seven of them.

Overall, Dune might fall short of the "literary sci-fi" tag it is sometimes lumbered with, but remains a fascinating piece of work, a flawed genre masterpiece that takes hints of postmodernism, mythology, predictive science fiction and political allegory, and melds them into a thoroughly entertaining melange. Simultaneously commercial and deeply strange, this really is a page-turner like no others, and should be read if only to enjoy its intoxicating uniqueness.

May have been good ... once
This book has got such a high profile and has had such rave reviews that I was expecting something a little special. I suppose that it has to be borne in mind that it is more than 40 years old and was quite startling at that time, but to be honest I found it to be a predictable and soulless dirge. Out of respect and a desire to see what all the fuss is about I stuck with it until then end, but it didn't really light my fire. I understand that after this 'high point' the series goes down hill ... so I won't be bothering with the follow-ups.

Terrific balance of themes
As you will gather from other reviewers this is a brilliant read. What I found shocking however, was that reading Dune one comes to the sudden realisation that George Lucas was not only of limited imagination but a B-rated pilferer at that. Once you take away from Star Wars what Dune provided you are left with a fairly limp fairy-tale. Look at it this way: Dune is for Star Wars what Star Wars is for He-Man.