There’s only a decade between Lord of the Rings and Dune but the latter is way more post-modern. Not that LotR isn’t pomo, because it is, but Dune takes it a couple of notches further.
It’s so wild to me that this book came out in 1965, a few years before the six days war and on the bleeding edge of LSD hyperawareness, because this book is a trip and a half. Then again, it’s three years after the Lawrence of Arabia movie.
It’s a bummer that, also like LotR, the dose has been so diluted by the osmosis effect of knowing the gist of the story through video games, movies (it’s been adapted directly three times—I had seen the first half of the second movie of the 2020s version—but so many of its ideas have been in other movies like Star Wars), and board games. The “War for Arrakis” game pretty much spoils the entire thing. Because finding this book off a shelf without knowing anything about it and just taking a deep dive into the text as it is would’ve been such an experience.
Even diluted by the aforementioned pre-exposure through osmosis, this book packs a helluva punch. I’ve been diving into New Wave SF lately (K. Le Guin, Tiptree… and I’m running a new-wave–inspired D&D campaign) and loving it, and wow is this book a tour de showcase for the new wave! Strong worldbuilding, fresh new perspectives, out with the old.
Except not entirely. Some moldy old baggage is still in here. Not only do we have the tired old evil “white, blue-blooded savior with the Magical Royal Bloodline” tropes that plagues Star Wars, there’s also a Cerberus-esque idea about “the only man born to a tribe of women and he is immediately a Marty Stu Messiah of Ganondorfian proportions” with inner lights and voids that seems ripped from the pages of Reads. Not into it!
The translation by Gabriel Setterborg is also hard to review since for the first several chapter’s it seemed the work of a true poet and then for the latter half of the book it seems he completely dropped the ball and phoned a first-draft in (inluding the glossary at the end, which has several errors). Overall it’s okay and the book definitively stays readable, compelling even.
I’m gonna land on an overall reco for the book and the less you’ve been exposed to Dune already (through other media versions) the more I recommend it. I’m giving it a 7/10 and I immediately started reading the next book in the series (and I’m fifteen pages in on that as of writing this).