I think the first two books are wonderful. The whole Paul storyline is awesome, and to me actually feels very historical materialist, in that Paul sees this giant fucking thing coming and no matter what he does, there's nothing he can do to stop it. The material conditions of the world have already put the Jihad into motion, Great Man Theory won't stop something like that. And it's also about like, blowback when you just abuse and torture an indigenous population you vastly underestimate. The rest of the books are straight trash and I pretend they don't exist, let alone try to pry any political ideology out of.
I've only read The Dispossessed out of them, but really enjoyed it. That said, my nominee for best scifi series is probably the Culture series. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, the series.
I highly recommend it. I think the point of the series flies over a lot of folks' heads, since he never comes out and says "The Culture is FALGSC," but it's quite clear. It's a space utopia where you can change gender at will (people will do stuff like be a man, fuck a girl, get her pregnant, then switch to being a girl and then the girl switches to being a man to get her pregnant, so they're both pregnant at the same time), material needs are not even talked about because there's such an abundance of resources that everybody is provided for anything you could possibly want, it's run by benevolent super-computing AIs, and the whole series is about how people find meaning in different ways when FALGSC is achieved, and how The Culture interacts with societies and worlds outside of their utopia. What are the politics around forcibly bringing them into the Culture, when you know your way of life is better for all involved? What about uplifting species? How about war mongering races, what do you do? It's a really fascinating series that touches on all this stuff, and is the perfect illustration of the point a lot of people make where they go like "well even if we got to live in a communist society what would you do? Wouldn't you feel bad and lost without working all the time/suffering from lacking basic needs?"
Note that the first book probably isn't the best place to start, since it's an outside looking in to the Culture. It's still a good book, but Player of Games (imo) is a better starting point since it gives more background on the Culture and the main character is somebody raised in the Culture.
Yeah I stopped after book 4 because fuck it. Dune is still one of my favorite fiction books of all time though, love love love it. Death of the author and all that, Dune is lightning in a bottle and he really got it, and then everything else is just uuuuhhhhhhh bad.
From this thread apparently I'm the only one that prefers the last books to the first ones.
everyone said the books got increasingly bad so I just stopped after the first one
You made the right move. If you really loved book 1 you can read book 2 to get the end of Paul's journey, but then definitely stop there.
It just gets bad, and weird, and confusing. I got a book or two into the third series (cause I inherited a buncha books when some family passed away) before deciding that I had spent too much time staring into the void.
I remember one book seemed weirdly obsessed with describing desks...
IIRC Herbert confirmed that Ibn Saud and the Saudi dynasty was the initial inspiration for Dune. Its not like an analogy but a lot of the setup is inspired by the Saudis. From there Herbert starts to expound his own political theories which were also derived from learning Arabian history.
Gave up in the middle of book three so I can't say much more.
- Atreidis : Saudi : Green
- Harkonnen : Hasemites : Red
- Fremen : Bedouins
- Arrakkis : Arabia
- Spice : Oil
That's all the boringly obvious comparisons but there's a lot more with the actual rise of Ibn Saud that aligns.
I think the Dune series scratched the itch through SciFi that Game of Thrones scratched (more recently) through fantasy for alot of people.
The more I read the more it seemed like all of the main characters, while being introduced as super human, were kinda dumbasses.
I was confused for a while before finding that, yeah, Herbert might have been trying to make you like bad people who thought they were good people.
Also, :rat-salute: for powering through those six books.
Herbert was a libertarian and the story shows it
spoiler
(Leaders are bad and can't be trusted, let's rape kids etc.)
