2017-07-20 at 6:46 PM UTC
My friend keeps recommending it but it's long af and idk if it's really worth it.
Opinions?
2017-07-20 at 8:25 PM UTC
Yes. The sooner the better. The more sci fi you read without reading things like Fine, the works of Aasimov etc, the more these works will lose their power on you because of "Seinfeld isn't funny any more" syndrome.
2017-07-20 at 9:01 PM UTC
didn't read it, but i watched the movie directed by lynch and it was quite awful, probably the worst lynch's film i've seen tbh
2017-08-08 at 7:37 AM UTC
Dune is one of my favorite books of all time, so I have to say yes. I think I posted what I thought of it a while back but to reiterate: it has some trappings of a teen fiction, young male protagonist, some action that probably isn't necessary, the writing is a bit angsty at times. It's my firm belief this is an artifact of realities of the sci-fi buying demographic of the time, by the time you get to God Emperor it's like 700 pages of soliloquy punctuated in three spots with really half-hearted action/adventure scenes that could mostly have been cut.
That blemish aside it's an amazing novel. It's a book that manages to build an interesting and fleshed out political world from a single character's perspective better than nearly any I've read, an early pioneer of "one big lie" style sci-fi I think it remains one of the best explorations of that approach. Also Herbert does very well at avoiding the gadget fiction genre excesses of the era.
The first book stands alone, it's by far the best of the series. The remaining books by Frank Herbert are worth reading if you liked Dune but they're not required to complete the story. The books his son wrote have been de-canonized on the grounds of being absolute dogshit.