Joelchrono

I heard of this book a few times thanks to some reviews on YouTube, and it seemed rather interesting, oh boy, I had no idea.

Earth, two million years into the future, stopped rotating, half of it is in light, and the other half, in eternal darkness.

Vegetal life reached the peak of the food chain, humanity has devolved to tribalism and has lost most of its intelligence, spending most of their time surviving in the upper levels of a giant tree forest that covers half of the planet.

This book describes a completely alien world, where the Sun's radiation has evolved plant life in unimaginable ways. No one is safe, and everything that moves is trying to eat you.

The descriptions, the environments, the prose in this book was mindboggling from start to finish. Many times my mind truly get to work trying to comprehend many of the events and concepts exposed here, but it was never a chore, I just wanted to fully experience what was going on, trying to picture how the creatures and the landscapes would be like in this dystopian future.

At first it kinda felt like there was no plot at all, and the characters were all too simple-minded to be interesting to me. However, this quickly changes as a series of events start to unfold and it just keeps going. This story is a journey of discovery and survival. Characters will die left and right, and the question of how things ended up like that will pop up quite a bit. But such is the way of life.

This is not a super fun story, or high stakes and action packed. However, it is not boring, and the more I learned about the world and how it worked, and the more the characters were faced against, only led me to want to keep turning pages, filled with interesting and inventive ideas, that I would never imagine someone could come up with.

Spaceships and faster than light space travel? sure. Alien life and lasers? sure. But the almost lovecraftian vegetal life and the different wildlife and interactions that can be found here are really, really incredible.

I think this is a novel everyone should read, it tackes a variety of topics, but I don't know if I could say it was the most thought-provoking thing ever, in fact, I barely highlighted any sentences or ideas that I could reflect on compared to Dune or Childhood's End, but it for sure provoked my mind to imagine, and the ending left me thinking, what would I have done?

Since I watched the movies first, I was happy to have one of my main fears dissapear completely during the first couple chapters. Many of the plot twists present on both movies are actually things the reader just knows from the start. The betrayal and the plot against House Atreides, the people behind it and the reason for it can be inferred quickly enough.

Herbert's confidence in the world he wrote can end up being too much to a lot of people. From the beginning of the novel, characters throw around a lot of made up terms that can be confusing, and in a setting where Dukes, Counts and Emperors, Great Houses and Cults are still a thing, alongside intergalactic travel and human calculators, the politics and relationships of it all are quite complex.

The book doesn't hold your hand at all. There are references and intriguing events from long ago that came and went and help give you an idea of the state of affairs, such as the interesting computers, for example, but a lot is left for the reader to figure out and fill the gaps as they keep reading. I think the movies helped me get through this much quicker too.

The story begins after House Atreides is put in charge of Arrakis, a planet with the most valuable substance in the galaxy, the spice melange. A drug that is essential for space travel, can improve the user's life-span, awareness and many other things.

The planet is a huge desert, making for a harsh environment nobody would bother to live on, where water is scarce and as valued as spice. Despite this, it is inhabited by the Fremen, people who have managed to tame the desert, and resist the heavy rule of the Harkonnens, who up until then had been the House harvesting the planet's resources for the Empire.

Our protagonist, Paul Atreides is the son of Duke Leto and Lady Jessica; and he'll finds himself entangled in the middle of prophecies, visions and politics in a path that would lead him to do what he thinks is right, but at what cost?

The novel deals with many different topics, such as the fight over natural resources, the dangers of organized religion, capitalism and freedom and things.

Some people might not like the politics at the start, others will not enjoy the spirituality later on, and a few will find everything weird and confusing and with cringy prose. I kind of loved it, I can see why this novel is among the greats, and how it has served as the inspiration of tons of different works over the decades, and it will keep on giving for years to come.

Every character has their motivations, their perspectives and interactions. There is conflict even between allies, family and friends, and it is simply so intriguing and it all feels like a big disaster and a terrible tragedy, but that is still the best possible outcome of it all.

It was a cool read, I am considering reading the next books by Frank, but we'll see, I kind of want to read a ton of different authors, which I've been doing since the year begun, so maybe next year will be the year of reading full book series for a change.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: “Now, it's complete because it's ended here.” 

— from “Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib'' by the Princess Irulan