I found the Dune series to be a very profound story. Frank Herbert was a grand story weaver. I found it, like Shakespeare had to be read and reread to understand it totaly. Every reading I find something new I didn’t get the first time I read it.
Even with god like powers Paul Muad’dib passed on his problems to his offspring, and they to theirs.
I liked the movie even if it didn’t follow the book or finish the series.
Having read the series how do you like the plot, characters, and style.
He created a world as real and original as Tolken and The Hobbit in my opinion.
Phobia,
Now your talking ! I loved the books, the movie wasn’t quite as good but it was ok.
And the best part of the movie , imo, were the sand worms ! I’m just gla I don’t have to ride one ! Metro is bad enough.
There are days I wish I had “The Voice”, oh man what I could do then.
Ayesha - Lioness
You sound reasonable. Must be time to up my medication.
Dune is a very great series! And his son is writing a new book…I’m just hoping that it will be as good as the others. The movie is rather weird but I just bought it on DVD and it’s good enough to watch it more than once.
LOVED IT!
i also loved the Riftwar Saga by Feist, highly recommended
and i enjoyed several dragonlance novels,
esp. the ones by Knaak and Weis and Hickman
I liked Dune and its first two sequels. I never got around to reading the later books. If you get a chance, check out a copy of the Dune Encyclopedia; it’s an amazingly detailed book of background material to the series (good luck finding it however, it’s out-of-print and copies can sell for over $100).
Another recommendation for Dune fans is Courtship Rites by Donald Kingsbury. This is an unjustly obscure SF novel about a human society that had to adapt to a harsh enviroment. Everyone I know that has read it thought it was great and most people find it reminiscent of Dune.
As for the film, I’d say Dune is as close to being an unfilmable book as any I’ve read. Anyone who had read the book was upset about how much was left out and anyone who hadn’t couldn’t follow what was left in.
i thouroughly (sp?) enjoyed the first book, but i found that the series distinctly tailed off. i got the impression that he’d written all he had to say in the first few books, and wrote the next few for other reasons.
as for his son’s new book…i read an excerpt of it, and it was complete and utter s***.
Does anyone know where I can get my hands on a director’s cut version of the movie or anything? I’ve heard it was originally 6 hours long, and you can definitely tell the huge cuts in the middle (there’s sort of a montage sequence, all music and background fire, that covers about half the book). Anyway, I’d really like to see the whole thing, but I don’t have an idea where to find it.
I think the long version was only broadcast on TV; David Lynch disowned it, which is why it’s credited to Alan Smithee.
I could not get through “Dune Messiah”, even though it’s the shortest of the series. The opening chapters are so depressing that I’ve never been able to work up the interest to finish it, even though I really enjoyed the first novel.
As to the movie, it was a great disappointment. I like David Lynch, but I don’t think he was right for this project. I was distracted by all the repulsive imagery he included, not the least of which was the Baron’s pustulent sores. Sting was badly miscast, and Alia was an impossible role to portray on the screen.
I loved it too. Both the movie and the book. I must say the really long version of the movie (I believe there are 4 versions…2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours, and 8 hours) are available at comic book conventions, but you have to look for them. I have seen the 6 hour version on regular television. It was great. It pretty much had the entire book. The 8 hour version according to my best friend has a lot of background information and a really long introduction that shows all the planets.
DUNE is one of the classic novels of science fiction. Herbert did a wonderful job.
DUNE MESSIAH stinks on ice.
CHILDREN OF DUNE is an improvement (anything would be, I thought, but discovered later I was wrong) and reaches the level of potboiler. A so-so novel, but readable.
GOD AWFUL . . . EMPEROR OF DUNE was one of the few books I threw across the room. Herbert’s pointless and puerile philosophical ramblings had reach the point of elephantiasis, so much so that he stopped every opportunity to advance to story in favore of dully recounting them.
The movie, BTW, was a failure, but an honest one. Lynch was defeated by the difficulty of turning the meterial into a 2-hour film.
Frank Herbert is one of my favorite authors, actually. If you haven’t read the rest of his (non-Dune) stuff, you should. It isn’t even all science fiction. Dune was great, I think I read all of them and I have to agree that none of them matched the original book…
I liked Herbert’s Jorj X. McKie stories. McKie was a government saboteur. The premise was that due to advanced information processing, government services were working at too high a speed for human society to keep up. So the Bureau of Sabotage was set up to commit acts of sabotage against the rest of the government in order to slow down its pace.
Phobia: Loved Dune, it is one of my favorite sci/fi novels. I thought Dune Messiah was pretty mediocre, but Children of Dune was very good. Haven’t read the rest of the series.
I also liked the move, which I guess places me in a small minority of posters.
Mike King, I also liked the Jorj X. McKie stories. The Bureau of Sabotage, what a great concept!
Any of you guys read Under Pressure (an excellent novel, IMO) or The Sandraroga Barrier?
One of Herbert’s best books, outside of the Dune series, is The White Plague, in which an Irish-American genetecist loses his wife and child to an IRA bomb while traveling in Ireland. He gets revenge by making a plague that kills only women, releases it in Ireland (for harboring the terrorists), England (for continuing the conditions giving rise to the terrorism), and Libya (for providing training and support), then demands of the world’s governments that they contain those countries and let the plague run its course, or else suffer a general release.
Now there’s something meatier. 