Selah! May Shai-Hulud feast on the souls of Anderson and Junior for all eternity!
I suggest you avoid ancient Greek theater entirely. Stay away from it. Far, far away.
No, I loved them. At least the Butlerian Jihad series (I haven’t read the others yet).
Dune is one of my absolute all-time favorite SF series. I could read it every year for the rest of my life and pull something new out of it each time.
I didn’t like God Emperor so much, but that’s probably because I read it out of order. (I was on a plane, I had just finished the first book and the only other book I had that I hadn’t read was G-E. Quite a shocking jolt, it was.)
This is not ancient Greek theater, at all (despite Herbert’s sly allusion to the Atreides being descended from Agamemnon).
The future, here, is not personified, and does not act. It just IS. In fact, it’s not really clear that Paul has any Free Will at all – that’s the trap of his prescience. He thinks he’s trying to stop the future, but what he’s doing is exactly what was going to occur.
The idea of a “clear and obvious first reading of the text” is rather gobsmacking, itself. Herbert wrote the Dune books with layers upon layers of interpretation. There’s not a “clear and obvious” anything in these books, by design.
My own, personal, read on it was that Paul’s struggle was all internal. The outer trappings of fighting against the Harkonnen, and mystical trappings of prescience against the future, were only there to be the setting for him play out his inner demons. Hence, Herbert’s (over)use of Paul’s internal dialogues.
In the end, Paul lost that internal struggle. (albeit, not as badly as Alia later did.)
Spoken like a bad freshman English student. 
-FrL-
Don’t get me started. My English teachers would have expected a 10 page essay on the parallels of Muad-Dib as a Jesus Christ figure and would have professed in absolutes what Frank Herbert’s intended reading was. That fate was the primary antagonist is exactly the type of vagary that they’d have loved.
The Hamsterian Jihad.
Nice.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a rodent wheel. That’s why the Hamstats were created after the Jihad…humans made in the likeness of rodents, to run the wheels within the law…
“It is by will alone I set my legs in motion. It is by the sticks of honeyseed that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my legs in motion.”
I had to force my way through the first book, telling myself not to dwell on the fact that:
The Sardukhar were the most awesomely awesome combat force in the galaxy, but…
The Freemen were even more awesomely awesome since they could slaughter the Sardukhar at will, but…
Paul could defeat any Freeeman in single combat, since he was the most awesomely awesome-est of them all.
Yeesh. I much preferred Doon.
And so could Paul’s mom!!!
I found it interesting that they always talked up how important and powerful Mentats were, yet all they ever seemed to do was act petulant and die.
I gotta agree that the first three are worthy the last three not so much.
The movie, to me, was fascinatingly bad. Kind of like having a scab but unable to keep from picking at it.
Yeah, but they thought really hard about acting petulant and dying.
Not the Agamemnon of the Greek theater though. Very different bird was the Atreides Agamemnon.
Wasn’t the “non-Greek” Agamemnon introduced in the post-Frank Dune books? I’ve only read the six books written by Frank Herbert, and I can’t remember any mention that the Atreides did not, in fact, decend from King Agamemnon.
It’s been a while since I read the books. But I liked Dune. I read all the way through Chapterhouse: Dune. There were sections on politics I did not understand. I thought some of the sex was over the top (Though I’ve heard that this was Herbert’s response to his wife’s death.). It was fascinating how things changed.
Paul becomes the Messiah.
Leto becomes God Emperor.
Leto becomes The Tyrant.
Somewhere in there, the Scattering happens.
Arrakis becomes a green, water rich, unimportant world.
The Bene Gesserit get the Kwizatz Haderach, and find out it isn’t what they really wanted. Paul awakens the Sleeper, and finds out it isn’t what he really wanted. The Fremen get a fertile planet, and find out it isn’t what they really wanted.
RE The Real Villain
Paul’s real problem is the future. Vladimir Harkonen is almost cartoonish in his villainy (he likes young boys and wants to have sex with his own nephew). But he isn’t the main villain. The whole book is about Paul’s journey from rich kid to Messiah. His final step is to realize he failed. IIRC There is a twenty or so page pause before the final battle. Paul sits around and looks at the Fremen. When he finally duels Feyd, his thoughts aren’t ‘Now, I shall kill my enemy.’ or ‘These bastards killed my son’. Paul thinks “If I lose, they will say I died so my spirit could lead them.”
Re DOON
For those who haven’t had the privilege- Doon is a dessert world covered in sugar. The Shmai Genug, giant pretzels, roam the sugar wastes. The Boni Maroni, spread false religions through Revved Up Mothers. The Baron Hardchargin plots to seize Doon, the universe’ only supply of beer, and destroy his enemies. It’s a fun book, clearly written by an author who really understood Dune.
First time I read the series, God Emporer was my least favorite. Ten years later it was my favorite by a pretty wide margin. No idea how I’d like any of them now, ten years removed from the last time I read any of them.
I always liked all six. Though there were large sections of suck in the last two books, I still enjoyed them quite a bit.
I have to agree with the people who do like God Emperor. The core story is a tetralogy, not a trilogy. God Emperor, even though it happens something like 3000 years after the events in Children of Dune, is the culmination of WHY Leto II took the sandtrout skin.
Chapterhouse and Heretics, on the other hand, always seemed like a separate dyad of books, separated from God Emperor by even longer than GE is separated from Children. I more or less liked them (or at least as far as I could tell…there were large stretches in both of them where I had no idea what was going on), but they didn’t catch me the same way the first four did.