The Dune Books.....I Am Not Enjoying The First Book

originally posted by: rukia

But yes, going back to what I was saying, it is a rip off--because everything in science fiction and fantasy is a rip off, essentially, from Tolkien and LeGuin. I thought that everyone knew that.

Everyone?

How about those that wrote in genre before your fantasy world builders:

product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) was one of the first true science fantasy works,[20] together with Voltaire's Micromégas (1752) and Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1620–1630).[21] Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered the latter work the first science fiction story.[22][23] It depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earth's motion is seen from there. The Blazing World (1666), by English noblewoman Margaret Cavendish, has also been described as an early forerunner of science fiction.[24][25][26][27] Another example is Ludvig Holberg's novel Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741).
Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, in the early 19th century, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man helped define the form of the science fiction novel, and Brian Aldiss has argued that Frankenstein was the first work of science fiction.[28][29] Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon.[30] More examples appeared throughout the 19th century.

H. G. Wells
Then with the dawn of new technologies such as electricity, the telegraph, and new forms of powered transportation, writers including H. G. Wells and Jules Verne created a body of work that became popular across broad cross-sections of society.[31] Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry. It is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth.

en.wikipedia.org...

How to put this? Even your favorite author can float a turd a times. Take King's Dark Tower series. The first book...is....so... boring. The following 6 were awesome. Personally I couldn't read Herbert. Didn't like it. If YOU like him though, hang in there. They are popular for a reason.

here I was going to bring up The Dark Tower as well. I tried to read it, but could not get past the first chapter. It was so bla. A few years later I came back to it, and it drew me in like those epics do. The first book in the Tower series is definitely slow, but I still enjoyed it!

Rock, regarding Dune, maybe it's just not the right time for you to get into it? Nothing wrong with walking away and picking it up later. However, while I am more fantasy and less scifi, I LOVED Dune. It captivated me and totally surprised me with how much I enjoyed it.

By the way, what about those series' I told you about way back when?

I've read the Dune series and have watched both film versions. It's a great read if you can get some enjoyment from thinking about how the various factions play off one another. It was made into a great board game too, by Avalon Hill.

It hasn't aged terribly well.

a reply to: Dewts

There are those of us to beg to disagree.

Feyd....Lovely Feyd.



On a more serious note regarding the series....I read Dune for the first time when I was eight. Didn't really grok the whole novel due to limited life experience and all that. Once I was in my early 30's a read it again, loved it and completely tore through the original series by Frank Herbert in a single month.

Couldn't get enough. Couldn't stop reading.

Last month I purchased "Mentats of Dune" written by his son and co-author, and will be looking forward to exploring those realms once again. It's sitting on the bookshelf...silently and patiently waiting for the right time to be digested in full.

(It might be an age thing....and yeah, I'm kind of an old fart.)

Also: the Lynch film is freakin' brilliant.
Better than Rocky Horror if you know the story well enough.

a reply to: schuyler

Dune, a lengthy, complex, and language-rich book, takes place on a desert planet that makes Tatooine look like a paradise where the ruling family has been exiled/sent/transferred there because of galactic politics, where a bunch of huge worms try to protect their excrement from "miners," who farm the stuff because people who eat it have their eyes turn luminescent, and it happens to be valuable because of its life-lengthening properties, where people who die have all the water squeezed out of them to contribute to a hopefully eventually vast underground lake that will obviate the desert......

Quite a great summary, thanks for that!

Dune is hugely "in your head" as I think of it. Kinda like this, in my model:

Most books are events and people which are then filled with inner meaning as if poured into them like a flexible mold, depending on the quality of the author. Interesting events and relationships first, and any 'deeper meaning' is a bonus.

Dune is more like manifest inner meaning, which has (like an emergent property sprouting into manifestation) people and events coming from it. Very much the head-trip, philosophical (and more) first.

I think this was more common in old science fiction (where often science fiction had nothing to do with science or space et al. and was merely something that was weird or really made you think) than today's stuff.

Heinlein is my favorite author since I think he warped my brain and personality as a teen, and his stuff is actually far more the first model, pretty much across the board. But I loved Dune's books like crazy when I read them around age 18... that was circa 1983 or so. Most the people I know suffered through The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when we were about 14. It might be more difficult to get very many people of that age to get through books that complex at this point in time.

As a contrast, I think of Wheel of Time as a blend in the middle of those two examples above -- a great deal of both the people/events and the 'deeper meanings and philosophy' wrapped together. I am probably exposing my bias in favor of Jordan there though. (Which, go figure, I utterly hated it when Dickens in English Lit waxed on for three pages about what someone thought as they turned a doorknob, yet I loved it with Jordan. Even though I think he should have been fined for every new character he introduced after book 7.)

Anyway -- Dune is a whole world with a lot of complexity so I think a lot of the book works on just setting up the groundwork for that. Once it gets a lot further in, you will probably find it more interesting.

RC

a reply to: rockpaperhammock

It does pick up. They get fantastic! I am on "The Sisterhood of Dune". Even the books after Frank Herbert passed are good. My favorite is "The Butlerian Jihad".

I love these books so much I became more of a Dune fan than a trekkie and I had been a trekkie my entire life.

I like Dune more than Star trek or Star Wars. the Dune Universe is much more vast.

originally posted by: GENERAL EYES
a reply to: Dewts

There are those of us to beg to disagree.

Feyd....Lovely Feyd.

On a more serious note regarding the series....I read Dune for the first time when I was eight. Didn't really grok the whole novel due to limited life experience and all that. Once I was in my early 30's a read it again, loved it and completely tore through the original series by Frank Herbert in a single month.

Couldn't get enough. Couldn't stop reading.

Last month I purchased "Mentats of Dune" written by his son and co-author, and will be looking forward to exploring those realms once again. It's sitting on the bookshelf...silently and patiently waiting for the right time to be digested in full.

(It might be an age thing....and yeah, I'm kind of an old fart.)

Also: the Lynch film is freakin' brilliant.
Better than Rocky Horror if you know the story well enough.

No, my sweet Usul. LOL

And you are ahead of me, I see.

I know this is an OLD thread and there is probably no one paying attention but I just found it and I have to weigh in.

Dune is absolutely one of the greatest Science Fiction books ever written, and is high on the list of fiction works without regard to genre. That doesn't mean every one will like it, but its stature cannot be denied. I don't like, and cannot read, James Joyce "Ulysses" - anything that needs an accompanying interpretation manual that is larger than the original is ridiculous - writing is meant to communicate to, not insult the reader. But I recognize it as a powerful achievement in English literature never-the-less.

If you don't like Dune, fine. No big deal, read something else. If everyone liked the same thing the world would be a very boring place.

That said, although Dune, the book, is among the highest rank of genre fiction, the films, especially the one with Sting and Kyle McLaughlin is dreck. Absolute, sewerage farm, 100% certified dreck. It is without a doubt one of the worst science fiction movies ever made (and yes I include even the film with a half dozen names - "The Bubble" or "The Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth" and others for each release cycle - which wasn't fantastisc and wasn't an invasion - and the poster showed Michael Cole with a gun 'protecting' the fair damsel from space ships shooting lazers - and there weren't any guns or lazers or spaceships, etc). That Dune film was just bad, and did the book absolutely no favors what-so-ever.

What might help prepare you for Dune though is a good read of some of Joseph Campbell's works like "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" or his masterpiece "The Masks of God" series.

Of the original Frank Herbert written books, Dune is, of course (in my opinion) the best, while "Children of Dune" is the most disappointing. The newer (posthumous) books are for the most part, very, very good, but none come up the standard of Dune. That is a very high bar indeed.

originally posted by: rockpaperhammock
so I'm reading Dune and I just don't get it...Does it pick up somewhere? It is boring so far and just not that interesting to me. Anyone out there who has read them please motivate me to continue or just tell me its not my cup of tea. Im unsure of what page im on but id wager im through atleast 50 to 100 and its been a bore fest so far.

I couldn't get through Dune until after I watched the David Lynch movie version.