Breaking Through Dune

Dune fan art by Jon Torres. Source: Wikimedia Commons

By the time I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, the David Lynch fan favorite was already a movie I turned to repeatedly.  The person who introduced me to SciFi-Fantasy gave me The Dune Encyclopedia for my 12th birthday.  So, when I picked up the novel years later, I was already sold.  Still, it took a few false starts to break through the first 70 pages or so.

Always a voracious reader, I devoured the initial series after that hurdle, only slowing down at the sixth book, Chapterhouse: Dune.  I’d pick it up and end up putting it back down shortly thereafter.  The entire first semester of my senior year in college was spent in this back-and-forth dance.  Later, I realized I just didn’t want the story to end.  Luckily, Herbert’s son Brian collaborated with Kevin J. Anderson to share more of the far-reaching stories and history of the Dune Universe.

Dune is dense with a sometimes overwhelming amount of setup in the initial pages.  But that foundation is some of the most thoughtful scene setting I’ve read.  Navigating the intricacies, the politics, the plans within plans throughout the expanded literary series requires that grounding.

Herbert taught me patience – first as a reader, and now, as a writer.  Waiting for the slow burn to deliver the payoff is not always a feature of today’s on-demand world.  Hopefully, the fascination and global success of modern Dune movies and HBO’s Dune: Prophecy series will draw new fans to the novels . . . so I have more people to dive down the wormhole with me.