Dune: 50th anniversary edition

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My copy is from the third printing of this particular edition, so corrections may have been made in subsequent runs, but still: for shame, Hodder, for shame! Many of Frank Herbert’s major characters have deductive capacities that rival Sherlock Holmses’s and speak like they’ve computed 500 possible lines of dialogue in a split second and then chose the most apt option – which is probably exactly what they’ve done, given that each of them underwent some form or other of rigorous mind-training. Many years before the need for climate change on earth was recognised, the dream of transforming a planet’s climate from a superheated dust bowl is an unintentionally relevant prediction. It would be two decades after Dune was published that the electronic dance culture and ecstasy would become popular in Western society.

I was a bit apprehensive as I though Dune was such a good novel that it would be difficult to follow it up. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Dune, the Folio Society has produced a lavish illustrated hardback edition of the book. It is the first installment of the Dune saga; in 2003, it was cited as the world's best-selling science fiction novel. This is not simply a battle between Good and Evil, Atreides and Harkonnen, the Empire and the Rebellious Fremen, it’s also a conflict between the human and the animal, fear and trust, loyalty and fanaticism, where a future of the absolute Triumph of Good is far worse than the Evil it would replace.

There was a moment when a chill went up my spine and I did a happy dance because Paul was such a badass in that moment. Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, the was Dune - the greatest science fiction novel ever written.

Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Since 2009, the names of planets from the Dune novels have been adopted for the real-life nomenclature of plains and other features on Saturn's moon Titan.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. His current project is a reconsideration of popular fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Main character Paul Atreides and his family are about to embark on a journey to the desert planet Arrakis, where Paul’s father will take over management from the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Spicy detail (yes, pun very much intended): the Harkonnen Baron has already set in motion an intricate plot to bring about the downfall of the entire Atreides family. It won great acclaim, as well as the Hugo and Nebula awards, establishing Frank Herbert as a master of modern science fiction.

Anderson on numerous prequels and sequels to the Dune novels, which have regularly featured on the New York Times best-seller list.With this dichotomy of imagery presented on the cover, perhaps the reader will be prepared for the intriguing themes held in the pages it contains.