Reading the Dune series is seriously an ordeal. Once you get far enough into them they're worthwhile, in my humble opinion.

Of course, Dune is my favorite, but once you learn more about the family lines and the history, things make more and more sense. I've read all of the main series but Chapterhouse: Dune.. which is on my list. Sooner or later I'll get to it.

I know I'd be interested in reading The Butlerian Jihad, and seeing how this universe of Frank Herbert's all ties together.

I say go for it. You'll be glad you did.

I read the first 3 or 4 books and decided that Herbert was just not a good author. So I stopped. The fact that Kevin J Anderson took over the new books doesn’t inspire me with confidence, either...

Having said that, my Father loves the books, and they are very good sellers, so take that for what it may be worth...

I'm a life-long fan of the Dune series, and am unabashedly appalled by the movies. The movies have, simply, nothing to do with the books whatsoever. They changed just about everything and removed the points that were actually central to Frank Herbert's work.

That said, if I had never read the Dune books -- all of them, repeatedly -- I might have liked the movies. But the SciFi channel just butchered them -- David Lynch even did better with his version -- and I feel like the richness of the books was squandered.

Liked the books. Liked the movies, too, for what that's worth. I can understand having difficulties with them, though. Try reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion and its sequels for what I consider to be an amazing treatment of religion and politics.

Of course, Dan Simmons is a god of writing in many genres. But Hyperion is a masterwork, and its sequels are likewise incredible... especially as he lets you know that there's a good possibility that everyone is lying, and that the story he tells in the first volume may be turned upside down in the second...

I always found Frank Herbert's writing boring and his plots byzantine at best. But then, I have the attention span of a gnat.

Look, shiny things!

I liked the movies and the books, both the original 6 and the 5 (thus far) prequels. I say go for it.

Besides, what could be timelier? I mean come on, fighting the evil forces of Shaddam on Arrakis?

Jon,

Yeah, the whole Shaddam and Arrakis, desert planet, seemed very eerie to me given real life events.

Dude, are there Fremen in Iraq? Maybe they're the Kurds but if that's so, what a let down.

But the spice melange could be a metaphor for Afghani marijuana. I could be looking too far into this however.

Well, 26 years ago, the only way to experience Dune was to read it.

So, adjusting for having grown older, lack of technology, having seen Sting in the movie and all.. I enjoyed reading it.

I enjoyed the David Lynch movie for the simple pleasure of "seeing" the characters come to life. I have not liked either mini-series for the reason that they just don't come close to the books. The Dune mini-series characters were so lackluster and watered down, I hated it. I love the Dune books and have gone through 2 sets of paperbacks and am now collecting the series in hardback. I have read two of the prequels and feel like Brian Herbert has done a good job of stepping into his father's shoes. I have not read the "House" books, but will soon. The books were VERY difficult to get into, at first, but I so wanted to understand, that I plodded through until I could see all the worlds. Tolkien's books, by the way, were the same for me. I could not read them. I always gave up. It wasn't until I saw the movies that I decided to try again. I'm very glad I did, because I finally found them enjoyable.

I saw the David Lynch movie first; I like both versions, especially the one he didn't want anything to do with. I wish they could have combined the two somehow. I then read the book. The movie made me understand the book more, and the book made me understand the movie more. IMO, the first Dune mini-series followed the book a bit more closely than the movie, but not having read any more of the books, I'm not sure how close "Children" was. I liked it, tho--Susan Sarandan not withstanding.

I liked Dune. The sequels were... okay. I think "Sequel Syndrome" struck again. And I haven't watched the miniseries, but I've heard enough from friends about how Sci-Fi butchered the novels to make me uninterested in doing so.

I never made the WOt connection with Dune before I read it here, but obviously, if we're going to draw parallels, then melange must be all that oiiilllll we're stealing from over there ;)

Question is, who are the fremen, and how do we convince them we're the Atreides and not the Harkonnen?

The better question is: If the U.S. is house Atreides, does that make the President, Paul Muad'dib? While Duke Leto was successfully killed President G. H. W. Bush did have an assassination attempt on his life. Dude... Dubya is Paul Muad'dib! He's the kwisatz haderach!

If the spice is oil then Saddam would be Harkonnen, which would fall in line with his assassination attempt on Bush the Elder's life. So, who is House Corrino? Who is Shaddam?

I still hold that the Kurds are the Fremen. While a let down, to be sure, I can't see anyone else filling that role in that region.

House Corrino= UN

Shaddam=Kofi Annan

There you go. Good call, Lord Worfin.

Kevin J. Anderson is a fuckin' hack. One of the better one's, sure, but there are all the signs of bad pulp writing all over the prequels. The same phrase repeated verbatim, cut-and-paste style, whole explanatory paragraphs are re-inserted in HouseHark. from HouseAtr. Awful. And they made several fundamental errors of fact that are inconsistent with either details from the original 6 books, or with plot-points/who-knew-what-when, and fundamental motivations/relationships between power centers. Brian Herbert ain't no Frank, hell he's no Christopher Tolkein (regarding looting your parents literary legacy). Here's praying that they don't screw up "book 7" too bad, thank god they are at least waiting to do that one last.

That said, Frank was writing on a LOT of different levels in the original 6 books. When you scratch the surface below the entertainment value, you get lots of things about current politics, spirituality, the nature of power, ecological issues, human psychology, and overarching all of it species survival concerns (esp. in the last 3, which ties it all up). He at times re-worked individual sentences to have up to 7 explicit layers of meaning (Christ, just like Gurdjieff!) Each read of the whole series shows you more new stuff each time.

But yeah, that can make it dense, ESPECIALLY the first half of book 4 (God Emperor of Dune), as the politics are all dull and you don't get the significance of most of it until you're read the last half of it, and the next 2 books! (took me 3 tries, first 2 I stalled out halfway through; a math teacher telling me that I stopped right before the action picked up encouraged me to give it another go, and it was worth it!)

In other words, the 6 Dune books are MUCH better on second or successive readings, and the BH/KJA prequels are mostly crap.

I couldn't stand the prequels. Though they all ran together for me, it felt as though he'd just lifted major parts from the Star Wars book Darksaber. I seriously half-expected some kind of beam-sword to make an appearance. When Anderson turned the Tleilaxu into simply money-grubbers instead of religious fanatics, I just quit.

The original two trilogies were pretty good, I thought, though I seem to remember reading them on car trips without much else to do. If you're easily offended, skip the porn at the end of the fifth book.