An Informal Review Of Frank Herbert's "Dune" Vol. I

Finished "Dune" by Frank Herbert like 3 months ago and forgot to write a review on it lol but here we are at last. I want to start off by saying do not feel intimidated by this book. Yes, ~850 pages is a lot, but with 33 pages a day (the book itself having relatively small pages, I could read one page ± half per minute, so about half an hour of reading per day which really isn't a lot), you'd end up finishing it in 24 days which is really manageable (but I'm lazy and I left it for a while). Fun fact I picked this book up because I wanted to start reading more and it was great, the book being split into 3 big chapters entitled Book I, Book II, Book III, it was like reading 3 books one after the other. Enough chit-chat, actual content review time.

I don't want to spoil too much or say too much in general because (first of all the book is big , we'd be here all day and I'd get a PhD due to the sheer size of the essay that this review is already becoming, but second of all because) I want you yourself to read it.

Paul Atreides starts off this behemoth of a journey by… putting his hand in a hurty box. Yea, intense gameplay. He does this in order to prove that he's worthy of becoming the Duke of Arrakis, a massive one-biome desert planet full of thriving fauna and flora, being a living paradise for travelers and citizens alike. Ha, ha. Very much the opposite in actuality. Arrakis is in fact a barren desert planet (if you couldn't tell from the name and cover of the book), the only living things being either frail humans that have been unlucky enough to live on this hellhole of a planet (you'll see later), or giant sand worms and ghostly avians that detect even the smallest of movement in the sand, swiftly coming in for their meal.

Getting back on track, the current Duke of Arrakis is Paul's father, Leto, who is on his last leg, is widely hated among the inhabitants of Arrakis for reasons I have long forgotten (something either about misunderstood corruption, or a second aggressive political party, Harkonnens, who wanted him gone, the same party being very relevant later in the story). After Paul and his mother, Jessica, arrived on Arrakis, they were sent to a room in one of Leto's mansions, Paul sets up and chills in bed for a bit. Out of the blue, with his immense previous training to become a Duke, he spots a very small fly drone in his room which had some deadly poison, ready to catch Paul off guard. Thankfully he manages to destroy it and promptly tells his guards and mother that there's a mole somewhere.

A couple of days later, the Atreides family gathers their close friends and some suspicious people and I kid you not the words "among us" came up like 5 times in 3 pages, I was about to blow my brains out right then and there.

Gonna skip a couple hundred pages to get to another spicy scene in the book, Paul and Jessica's brave escape from the aforementioned Harkonnens. They stole a ship from a Harkonnen base after they were imprisoned for a couple of days, and tried to escape. Some Harkonnen guards of course got into another ship and started following them, and wowzers chase scene. After what seemed like forever but was actually a couple a minutes, they encounter a sand storm. They'd be crazy to go in it, winds there could easily tear up the metal the ship is made out of and they'd surely become worm food, but with no other choice, Paul and Jessica plunge into the unknown. The Harkonnen following them are just random soldiers and decide better of it, they turn back and tell their boss that they just died, like of course they died they went in a storm. But lo and behold, they survived, though their ship was completely wrecked.

Spotting some oddly shaped rocks, they slowly make their way to them, walking with slow but random movements, imitating wind moving the sand, as to not alert any worms. They discover a completely caves/underground society of Fremen (nomads-type society? idk) who are actually very advanced and who took it upon themselves to terraform Arrakis in order to support plant life and water (side note because I feel like it: when person X kills person Y, person X claims the water of the enemy, water being a very scarce resource on the sand planet, also almost everyone wears "stillsuits", special suits that turn sweat and the atmosphere into drinkable water. The Fremen somehow have giant underground pools of water specifically for terraforming).

Ok enough about the content of the book, time for other thoughts: for background music/sounds I listened to a lot. Mostly game OSTs I have already mentioned (Noita, No Man's Sky, Hyper Light Drifter, Ultrakill, sometimess jazz) but also mynoise.net with eerie/space-y ambient noise (Black Hole, Anamnesis, others on the "new" tab).

One more thing, this book came out in 1965, a whopping 4 YEARS before humans set foot on the moon, I find that insane, knowing the crazy technology that's presented in this book.

Enough praising the author like a God, on to criticism. You will be as blind as a bat in the beginning of the book, it throws a lot of new terms and words around and doesn't quite explain them well, but I personally got the hang of it, also some characters are a bit forgettable, and holy heck… My brother in christ, why the FRICK (gotta stay PG-13 :) ) does Paul have THREE names by the end of the book. Minor spoilers but here are what all 3 mean: One his first name, Paul, the second his Fremen name, and the third the name his wife calls him. I can't find the logic but meh it's not the end of the world to remember all of them so who cares.

Anyway I can't wait to start the second volume which is unfortunately way smaller than this one and I also have it in Romanian instead of English so terms are gonna be weird and other nitpicks. I give it hmm 9.5/10.

+ Random thoughts: having played No Man's Sky and reading this book helped the experience and helped A LOT in imagining how the characters look (to me, Fremen were Geks and Harkonnen were Vy'Keen, so when I saw some promotional art for the movie I was like ew who is that lol).