Week 10: Dune, by Frank Herbert (5)

 Herbert obviously had a lot of thoughts when he wrote Dune, and now I have a lot of thoughts as well. And it's not really like he did anything new per-say, just extrapolated and taken to their extreme. In the strangeness of prophetic reclamation and centuries of eugenic cultivation under intergalactic imperialism, the humanity of the characters lends us readers a foothold to place ourselves in as we journey through Dune.

I kind of get the feeling that Herbert mixed past present and future ideas in creating his world. Feudalism and religious centrism, the natural gas fuel crisis, space travel. Everything stretching and growing into a singularity that can no longer sustain itself and where even in subverting is reinforced. Dune reads half like a traditional novel and half like a history book, which I feel is fitting for the purposes of this novel. Dune could have easily been a satire in how it exposes this flawed organization of human priority, but it's not, because the characters themselves are all solemn cogs of destiny that have become aware of the machine, their manufacture and duty. But these are still humans we're talking about, and significant portion of the flawed decisions are being made by people who 'should be above' such. Hawat, Yueh, Jessica, their very human vices and experiences causing the action events to unfold as they did.

I'm not sure how Herbert managed to fit so much into just under five hundred pages (which was how long my copy of it was), but some of the book does suffer for it. Like, the Barron didn't need to be so cartoonishly villainous, his and the emperor's motives kind of fall to the way-side and end up being as one note as 'kill the Atreides' and nothing more. I also can't get a clear read on his opinion of women, specifically women empowered outside of their traditional roles, which is a shame with the Bene Gesserit and Mentat's existing. As well as his opinion on cultural Darwinism - if the environment makes the people, then how did the Atreides adapt so well to Arrakis? The message gets a little muddled. The lack of clarity on the characters internal thoughts and emotions, especially Paul, I think is fine though, going back to my opinion of Dune being half written as a history book. Dune isn't really a character-driven story as it is a story of characters being driven to do things.

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