Dune is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The blend of sci-fi, spiritualism and fantasy elements work so well together on all levels, from building the world, to plotting the journey, all the way to understanding the characters.
This sprawling universe represents a dark far future, thousands of years away, where humanity finds through technological disregard, un-checked scientific ambition, and nepotistic power hoarding. Atomics are banned, enforced by the Great Convention of the royal houses of the Landsraad, keeping a balance to the galactic Padisha Emperor and his fanatic military legions. Any one house is too small to go against the empire, but the constant politics, and the plans within plans, start to unravel any balance that was once had. Computers are also banned, as a machine cannot be created with the likeness of a human mind, a religious credo expected throughout the universe. This is compensated through the computing minds of the mentat assasins, and the mysterious Bene Gesserit with their superhuman mental conditioning. But the Bene Gesserit have their own schemes, apart from all other political conflict, of creating a higher being of a ruler, through ninety generations of eugenics and selective breeding. And the spice mélange is at the center of it all, the great awareness spectrum narcotic and its powers of addiction and prescience.
Each detail expressed through a word or thought from a character, another aspect of the conflicting and parallel systems and roles, the ever-encompassing litany or the very truths found in the natural desert scapes of Arakis itself fill a world that seems to stretch forever back into its own dark annals of history, and even further into the nebulous future as well.
This book explores the important relationships between nature and religion, spiritualism and science, duty and chaos, rule and servitude, sacrifice and purpose, and one’s self with the universe.
The story starts with a proud duke and his Bene Gesserit concubine bringing their son to a new world, the desert planet Dune, the source of most fortune and peril in the known galaxy, and starkly contrasting their previous water-filled jungle world of Caladan. Hands forced by the emperor’s own decree, they stumble into a trap set by the Duke’s hated enemy, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Faints within faints within faints. The son Paul, trained by the schools of both the mentats and the Bene Gesserit, then finds himself in the position of a religious prophet to the native Fremen peoples, proving to be a great leader, and facing his own terrible purpose to be reverberated across the stars.
I look very much forward to continuing this series, loving every moment of this first book.