Reviews for Dune

The average rating for Dune based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-11 00:00:00 Brian Borrero Buddy read with Athena! The distance between greatness and disaster can sometimes be so depressingly short. The second half of The Machine Crusade was good enough to force a five-star rating from me, but all in all, the Legends of Dune trilogy has been the least impressive part of the Dune universe so far. And this was arguably the worst book of the three. I'll not call it a huge disappointment, for with the aforementioned exception, this trilogy has been more or less on a stable level throughout. But it was not good. Only two things made this book worth reading: first of all, the origins of the legendary feud between Houses Atreides and Harkonnen. I had anticipated it would turn out to be something like this, but in the end I was still horrified by it. And to be honest, the whole scenario behind the enmity seemed entirely forced. It took an Atreides and a Harkonnen to go completely out of character to provide us with a rather unsatisfactory explanation. But it still was worth reading this book just to actually get to know. And second, which is actually a positive point, that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, unlike the former's father, actually realise the importance of opening and finishing up a book with spectacular, epic writing. In my review of The Butlerian Jihad, you can find the opening passage of the trilogy, and here is the last passage of it. Arguably the best way a Dune book has ended so far. "The broad expanse of sand kept its own time. As tides of change and history swept from planet to planet across the galaxy, the endless desert on Arrakis scoured away all attempts to manipulate or tame it. The arid environment preserved artifacts, while ferocious sandstorms erased anything in their path. Spice prospectors came and went, and the worms destroyed many of the unprepared interlopers. But not all of them. The outsiders kept coming, drawn by the lure and legend of the spice melange. Even as empires rose and fell, Arrakis, the desert planet, would turn its face to the universe and endure." The only unfortunate thing is that those lines were better than the rest of the book combined.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-05-28 00:00:00 Jeffrey Clarkson Lavender eyes? Women with perfect bodies and blond hair always being slightly blown by a mysterious breeze which affects no one else? A man who worries about killing two million people after having killed over a billion? A cult of luddites out to remove the toaster from the households of all planets? A single, all-powerful, evil machine surrounded by a horde of evil minion machines--and two copies of itself (larry and larry?) A robot who likes to wear fancy bathrobes? People who want to be machines but don't like machines but behave like machines because they've lost what it means to be people? All could be forgiven if this were either a)an interesting story and not a group of index cards posing as one, b)were intentionally funny, or c) turned out to simply be the world's longest knock knock joke. Ah, Douglas Adams, you are sorely missed.