Dune

There’s not much else to say about this book that’s not already known. There was a resurgence in popularity of Dune since they upcoming release of the new movie. This book is long, and especially since I was trying to get back into reading again, this took a while to get through. The book is set in a future where a planet called Arrakis contains a drug known as “melange” or “spice”. In this world, “thinking machines” were thrown away long ago, and instead spice is used to enhance pilots during space travel. The plot follows the young heir of the House Atreides, Paul. His father, duke Leto, was given Arrakis by the former owners and enemy of House Atreides: House Harkonnen.

This book set the foundations for much of science fiction today. It has political scheming, imperialism, religion, and interesting takes on the role of augmenting human intelligence in the future. A lot of the terminology in the book are Arabic and come from Islam, which is interesting. I feel like the Middle East was relatively unknown to people in the 1960s, so there probably was somewhat of a novelty factor at the time. The politics within the novel is allegorical to the Middle East, where “spice” can effectively be replaced with “oil”.

Some argue that there is some religious approriation going on here, but I don’t think the book portrayed anything negatively. It is interesting to see how Islam influences his world though. Since the book was written in a pre-9/11 world, so it’ll be interesting to see how the new movie will translate some of the book to the movie, since it seems they’re potentially rebranding “jihad” to “crusade”.