Dune/ Musings

Woah, I just finished this missile of a book after it having occupied my mind (both awakened and dreaming) for four days. Man.

In the last four days, I have dreamt of the Harkonnens, the spice, lady Jessica and the enigma that is Arrakis.

What started with a slightly dated beginning and was honestly repulsing me a little because of its slightly misogynistic undertones (I’m still trying to make up my mind about the misogyny of Dune. While the position of women is clearly limited to being associated with a man, it baffled me that humans progressed enough to space travel but not enough to have women rulers. It’s still the male son that inherits the throne and wives are, to the max, smart counterparts that, if lucky, are loved. Ugh. Benne Jesserit are pretty rad but they also are conspiring to have a ‘male’ Bene Gesserit, the Kwiatsch Haderach, the one who can see where they cant. Are you kidding me?

Its when Alia came into the picture that I thought that okay maybe this man’s not a sexist, but I still am forming an opinion before passing a sentence.

Anyway, thats a whole different conversation)

This was also the first time that I was reading a book AFTER having seen the movie, which is a very different experience. The locations, the characters are all already formed, have a face, hair, ticks of their own. Sometimes it felt like I am reading a screenplay, but it slowly moved beyond that because of one thing that Dune completely smashes.
World Building.

Its a fucking case study in world building. More than the science, (the ecology bits are very rich), its the multi-dimensionality and the richness of the Dune universe. To be frank, I feel that Dune didn't have to be a inter-planetary universe. I mean, all planets in itself are quite one-dimensional. Its nice throughout Caladan. Arrakis is almost all desert. We know, as inhabitants of Earth how magical it all is. There are deserts and ice caps and cool deserts and hot deserts and places where it rains every single day in the year and places that live that live and breathe the sea.

So its sort of strange to see the whole planet have a singular climatic identity, its more like a large city, not even a continent/country except for the population numbers that are told.
(That being said, I’m still one book old in the Dune Series and maybe the planets and the worlds get richer, get more than one identity. I truly cannot comprehend how every human being on a planet has a singular culture/ religious/ physical identity)

All that being said, where Dune makes the kill is its detail. It’s for this and this alone that I sit here counting days to when I will have the sequel in my hand. The richness of the universe, Herbert successfully turns Arrakis into a character. Far more than Muad’dib, I wait for the Arrkaeen future and what it holds.