Dune by Frank Herbert - Finished : 14/03/2025

"Hope clouds observation."

Dune is a sci-fi novel written in 1965 by Frank Herbert. We follow Paul Atriedes of House Atriedes from his home planet, Caladan, where water falls from the sky in droplets, to Arrakis, a sparsely populated desert wasteland. (And by sparsely, it is alluded to that millions of Fremen inhabit the planet, buuut that's not relevant until the sequel...).

What did I enjoy? I enjoyed the banter between Paul and Gurney at the beginning of the book, this helped ease me into it. I thought a lot of the landscaping was good, particularly given that Herbert was just working with *Dunes* (ha.. I said it) for like 400 pages of the novel. He described the desert pretty thoroughly each time it was necessary, which I found impressive. The world building was deep, and marvellous, and I found the universe itself to be very well-crafted and thought out.

I found Paul's journey from noble heir to messianic figure to be compelling, though his transformation does raise questions about the dangers of prophecy and absolute power. Initially, Paul appears as a heroic figure - training to overthrow those in power, with the people's best interests at heart. He is meant to be the "good guy", someone who can separate right from wrong. However, I think this novel does an excellent job of exploring the consequences of the sacrifices required to achieve this - and how far is too far.

The more emotion, and, sort of, humanity that you sacrifice, the more you risk becoming what you initially sought to destroy. This is evident in the final chapter when Paul decides he must marry the Emperor's daughter. By that point, his arrogance had grown subcontinentally (fuck, he got so annoying), and while he was paving the way for others, he no longer truly cared about their well-being. In that sense, he diverged from a God-like figure. A God is omnipotent not just because of power, but because they act with humanity’s best interests at heart. Paul, despite his God-like foresight, does not. And that is what makes him human, and in turn, a flawed, and ultimately dangerous leader.

I also thought the novel’s pacing was a bit dense at times, especially with all the terminology and politics, but that’s also part of its richness. Although, I was pretty bored when Paul and Jessica were fleeing through the desert for around 100 pages or more. I did understand that we were experiencing their struggles and their journey in real time, and that these events would ultimately shape the rest of the novel and Paul's character as a whole. However, there's only so many times you can refer to walking on piled sand before I tire of it.

"The thought hung like a sine wave in Leto's mind."

This line made me laugh quite hard when I first read it. I think I showed it to about 5 or 6 friends. What the hell does this even mean?? It's periodic?? He can't stop thinking about it? It repeatedly entertains his thoughts? You can tell Herbert was really trying to get cerebral with that one. I'm just imagining a poor English lit student googling "sine wave" and getting back a squiggly line, trying to derive some kind of meaning from that. What an absolute "fuck you" moment. These kind of things bothered me throughout the novel though. It's like Herbert sacrificed the emotional depth of characters at times, just to make everything feel as complicated as the universe itself. Perhaps that's some sort of giga-forehead level attempt at introspection on human emotions as a whole though - who knows? I will say, it does add to the quirky charm of the novel.