Don't hate me for my Dune review

Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Don't hit me for only 3 stars! Dune is good at world-building. Dune is good at inspiring the realtime strategy genre of video games. Like Seinfeld, Dune is more fun to talk about than it is to consume. Sadly, Dune is bad at being the book that so many of its fans claim that it is.

It's on a lot of people's sci-fi required reading lists for its strategy, plots-within-plots, and subtle political maneuvering. Reading with a kid-brain in a different decade might have seen those cool things. Reading the book as a 30-year-old in 2016/2017, the characters are hollow, self-satisfied gnostics. Characters only make mistakes when another character's circuitous but perfectly-executed plan involves careful deception. Arrakis' relationship with water is inconsistent. Sand worms are a problem until they aren't. Harkonnens are cartoony bad guys for no reason. Stillsuits are gross. The political maneuvering is clumsy. Jihad is lame. The we-have-Mentats-because-we-decided-we're-never-making-computers-again plot line is undeveloped. The empathy-is-a-greater-power-than-being-smart-all-the-time is suggested only to be immediately discarded.

Herbert wantonly transmutes conjunctions to commas, drives the reader crazy. He attempted to drive up the pace of certain scenes this way, never admitted the experiment was a horrible failure.

The hard sci-fi is inconsistent, the human elements are childish, and the comma-spliced verbal phrases are borderline unreadable. Three stars for historical significance and because so many people remember the book so fondly. Give this one to Michael Bay for a movie remake.

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