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Frank Herbert

Children of Dune and Leto’s Bargain with the Sandtrout

by Hutch Morzaria November 9, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

Children of Dune has been my favourite in this series for a long time, and it is the one I have gone back to almost as often as the original. It finishes the story that started on Caladan and starts one that runs for the next three and a half thousand years, and it is the last book here that behaves like a normal novel.

A family coming apart

Paul’s twins, Leto II and Ghanima, are nine years old and pre-born, carrying every ancestral memory in their line from the moment they drew breath. The difference between them and their aunt is that they have watched what it did to her and have some idea of the fight ahead of them. Alia is losing hers badly. Thousands of ancestral personalities have been pressing on her since birth, and the one that finally comes through is Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, her own grandfather, running her from the inside while she keeps telling herself she is still in charge.

Herbert takes his time with that, and it is the most upsetting thread in the whole series. Alia was presented as a wonder in the first book, a child born already aware, and this is the bill arriving. The Bene Gesserit have a word for what she becomes and the novel makes you wait for it.

What sharpens it is that the twins are not simply younger versions of their father. Ancestral memory gives them the same equipment Alia has and the same exposure, and the novel is explicit that their survival is not guaranteed by cleverness. They have a plan, they know roughly how thin it is, and they have watched the alternative playing out in their aunt for their entire lives. Very few books manage to make children genuinely frightening and genuinely sympathetic at the same time.

Alia’s decline is also paced beautifully, which is not a word I use often about this series. It is not a switch that flips. She makes a series of individually defensible decisions, each one slightly worse than the last, each one justified by a voice that sounds exactly like her own judgement, and by the time anybody around her can name what is happening she has been gone for a while. Anyone who has watched a person be slowly overtaken by something will recognise the shape of it.

Paul gets a send-off, if not the closure he needed

A blind man walks out of the desert into Arrakeen and starts preaching against the church built on Muad’Dib, in public and at length, and nobody dares touch him. The book lets the question of who he is hang for a while before confirming what you worked out immediately. Paul survived and has come back to pull down the religion made in his name, and he fails at it completely.

I have mixed feelings there. I do not think Paul gets the closure I believe the character required after everything the second book put him through. What he does get is a send-off, and a real one, and on balance I would rather have that than nothing. He is not simply written out between novels. He comes back, he makes his argument, the machine he built ignores him, and then the story lets him go. That is not satisfying in a comfortable way. It is the right ending for what the previous book set up.

A young figure kneeling on a moonlit dune as a silvery living membrane flows up over his skin

The green desert also does something clever to where my loyalties sit. For two books the terraforming has been the Fremen dream, the one unambiguously good thing anybody in this universe is working toward, and now it turns out that achieving it kills the worms, ends the spice and collapses the civilisation that depends on both. Herbert set that trap in 1965 and left it sitting inside the most hopeful thread in the story, which is a genuinely nasty piece of long-range plotting and completely in character for him. By the time the twins are old enough to understand it, the choice in front of the family is not between good and evil but between two different catastrophes, and that is a far more interesting place for a third book to start.

The Preacher sections are also where Herbert lets himself be funny, in a dry and slightly cruel way. A blind man wandering into the holiest sites of a religion to tell the faithful they have misunderstood everything, while the priesthood tries to work out whether killing him would be worse than letting him carry on, is close to farce if you tilt it. It never quite tips over, and the fact that it could is part of what keeps those chapters alive.

The sandtrout sequence

The centre of the book, and the reason it stays my favourite, is Leto walking into the desert and accepting the vision his father looked at and refused. He merges with sandtrout, gives up being human in any meaningful sense, and commits to holding the species on one narrow path for thousands of years so that nobody with prescience can ever herd it again. It is exceptional. Herbert makes you feel both the scale of what is being chosen and the cost of it, and he is clear-eyed that Paul was not weak for refusing. Paul said no because he could still feel like a man. His son says yes precisely because he is willing to stop being one.

Ghanima takes the harder half of that deal, staying human, living among people, holding a secret she cannot share. The two of them scheming as nine-year-olds with several thousand adults arguing in their heads is a strange thing to read and Herbert never softens it into something more childlike.

Jessica also gets one of the best character notes in the run. She arrives as an inspector for an order she left, is treated by everyone as a Bene Gesserit first and a grandmother second, and has to decide how much of that she still accepts. Herbert had every opportunity to make her simply sympathetic, and instead she is frequently cold, occasionally wrong, and entirely convincing as somebody who was trained young and never fully untrained.

The politics of the green desert are handled well too. It is not simply that terraforming is bad. The Fremen who want it are not fools and the ones who resist are not romantics, and Herbert lets both sides make their case. What kills the argument is arithmetic nobody wanted to run: the plan works, and the reward for it working is the end of the thing that made them who they are. Very few series are willing to make a three-book-old aspiration into the antagonist.

Stilgar, Jessica and the Corrino problem

Stilgar is the quiet tragedy running alongside everything else, and I do not think he gets enough credit for how well he is handled. He is the last real link back to the sietch culture of the first book, now a naib working as a palace functionary, keeping faith with a family whose religion has swallowed everything he was raised inside. Herbert puts him in a position where his loyalty and his conscience finally point in opposite directions, and what he does about it is the most Fremen thing in the novel. It is also the moment the book quietly admits that Muad’Dib’s empire ate the people who built it.

Jessica comes back to Arrakis on Sisterhood business and finds herself lined up against her own granddaughter, expected by the order that raised her to authorise something unthinkable. Watching her work out how much of a Bene Gesserit she still is, thirty years after she broke their most important rule, is one of the better threads Herbert gives an older character anywhere in the series.

The Corrino restoration plot is run out of Salusa Secundus by Wensicia and her son Farad’n, and Farad’n is a genuinely nice surprise. He starts as a spoiled heir being used by his mother and ends up somewhere nobody would predict from his first scene, largely by being curious and honest enough to change his mind when the evidence changes. In a series this full of people running century-long schemes, a character who simply learns something is worth having. Duncan Idaho, meanwhile, is caught between loyalties that cannot both be served, and how he resolves it is entirely in character and still lands like a punch.

Why this one will never get a film

The ecological trap springs here too, and it is the payoff for everything the Fremen have been doing since the first novel. The terraforming is working, and that is the disaster. Open water kills sandtrout, no sandtrout means no worms, no worms means no spice, and no spice means the end of Guild navigation and the empire that runs on it. Meanwhile the Fremen themselves are being turned into a heritage attraction, performing water rituals for pilgrims while the sietches become towns.

I can understand why this book is never getting a film. Villeneuve’s trilogy stops at Messiah, and even if somebody picked the series up again later, however good the desert looks on a screen I cannot see a studio finding a way to make an audience engage with a boy slowly turning into a sandworm, and that transformation is not a subplot you can trim. It is the entire third act. That is probably the clearest example in the series of something that only works on a page, and it is worth keeping in mind when you weigh the novels against whatever ends up on a screen.

It is still the one I hand people who tell me the series falls off after the first book, and it is still the one I reach for most often after the original. Three novels in, Herbert had already told a complete story and then found a way to make the ending of it the beginning of something much stranger.

This is also the book where the series stops being about a family and starts being about a species, and it manages that turn without losing the family. The twins are Atreides, with everything that carries, and the choice one of them makes is legible as a son answering his father. That the same choice happens to be a three-thousand-year plan for humanity is what gives the ending its scale, and keeping both of those things in focus at once is the hardest thing Herbert pulls off here.

Rating: 5/5.

November 9, 2026 0 comments

Dune Messiah and the Twelve Years After Arrakis

by Hutch Morzaria October 15, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

Dune Messiah is the book in this series I have the most trouble with, and I have reread it several times trying to work out whether that is the book’s fault or mine. I had it down as a four for years. Going back to it after the first novel, I think three is closer to honest.

It is also, as of this week, the one with a film attached. Villeneuve’s third and final Dune adapts this book, and after what he did with the first one I am curious how much of the sourness survives the trip. It is a bold thing to build a finale out of, given what this novel does to its hero.

Twelve years, and a number the book will not let go of

Paul rules as Emperor and the jihad carried out in his name has killed something on the order of sixty-one billion people across roughly ninety planets. Herbert states that figure plainly and then keeps coming back to it, which is the whole design. He wrote this because too many of us finished the first book treating Paul as a straightforward hero, and this is the correction, delivered with the volume up.

Paul himself is not a tyrant by temperament and the book never suggests he is. He is a man locked inside his own prescience, seeing every path and unable to find one that avoids what is already happening, while a priesthood he does not control runs a bureaucracy that commits atrocities and quotes him while doing it. As an idea that is genuinely uncomfortable and worth the pages. The trouble is what Herbert does with the space around it.

The other thing that shrinks is the cast’s room to move. In the first novel people travel, plan, change their minds and go somewhere else. Here almost everybody is waiting: waiting for Paul to decide, waiting for the conspiracy to mature, waiting for a birth. Herbert is deliberately writing a trap and a trap has walls, but the effect on the reading experience is that scenes start to feel interchangeable, and a book this short cannot really afford that.

The prescience rules are worth pausing on, because Herbert tightens them considerably here and the tightening is the best new idea in the book. Seeing the future is not a menu of options. It is a narrowing, where each glimpse forecloses alternatives, and where another prescient mind creates a region you simply cannot see into. That turns Paul’s gift into the thing that traps him and hands the conspirators a workable method at the same time.

It is too short for the story it has

This is my real complaint and it has not softened with rereads. There is an enormous story implied here and the book is not big enough to hold it. A galaxy-spanning holy war has been running for twelve years, sixty-one billion people are dead, and we are told about it rather than shown any of it. There is not a single battle sequence in the novel. The jihad, which is the entire moral engine of the series at this point, happens offstage and arrives as a statistic.

I understand the argument that this is deliberate, that showing the war would make it exciting and therefore undercut the point. I still think there was far more that could have been done to open the universe out here and it was left on the table. We get corridors and council chambers. We could have had the war those corridors are arguing about, and the book would have been stronger for at least letting us see the edge of it.

A lone robed figure walking away into a moonlit desert with a distant city glowing behind

There is a version of this book that is twice the length and genuinely great, and I can see its outline through the one we got. Give me the jihad from the inside, a Fremen legion on some world that has never heard of Arrakis, carrying out an atrocity in the name of a man who is sitting in a palace watching it happen and unable to stop it. That would have made the sixty-one billion land as something other than arithmetic, and it would have made Paul’s paralysis genuinely unbearable rather than merely stated. Herbert had the whole galaxy available and chose to spend the book in three rooms on one planet. For a series whose first novel opened out so completely, that feels like a retreat rather than a discipline.

None of that is helped by how little we see of the empire the war is supposedly building. We are told about ninety planets and a priesthood spanning them, and we visit approximately one city. For a series whose first book made an entire ecosystem feel inhabited, the second one is oddly incurious about the galaxy it has just conquered. When Herbert does open a window, as with the Fremen veterans who have come back changed from worlds they will not describe, it is very good, and there is not nearly enough of it.

The conspiracy, and the one idea that fully lands

What does work is the plot against Paul, mostly because of how it is put together. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam wants the bloodline back. The Guild navigator Edric supplies prescient cover, so the conspiracy is hidden inside Paul’s own blind spot, which is a properly clever bit of machinery. Scytale supplies the weapon and Irulan, married to Paul in title and nothing else, has been quietly keeping Chani from conceiving for years.

The weapon is Hayt, grown from the cells of the dead Duncan Idaho with metal eyes and something buried in him nobody has mentioned. The question of whether Hayt is Duncan, or an extremely good copy wearing his face, is the best thing in the book and the series never really stops asking it. When the Tleilaxu later offer to bring Chani back the same way, the offer is genuinely cruel, because it is sincere and Paul understands exactly what taking it would make him.

Chani gets less than she deserves too, which is a real shame given how much of the first novel she carried. She is largely defined here by what is being done to her body and by what her death will mean to somebody else, and the book knows it is doing that without ever quite fixing it. There is a version of Messiah told partly from her side, watching the man she married disappear into a role, and I would read that book immediately. I’d be very curious to see how the film handles this as I can’t imagine Zendaya simply being written off.

Scytale is the most purely enjoyable presence in the novel for the opposite reason: he is having a wonderful time. A Face Dancer who can wear anybody, working for an order with no particular stake in who wins, cheerfully offering the worst possible bargain at the worst possible moment. Set against a protagonist who cannot act and a wife who cannot leave, a villain with genuine freedom of movement is a relief every time he turns up.

Alia and Irulan are doing the real work

The two characters I find myself watching most closely are the ones the plot treats as supporting players. Alia is a teenager holding an interstellar religion together while every ancestor in her line argues inside her skull, and she is doing it without anyone who can genuinely help her, because nobody else alive has the condition. Herbert lights that fuse here and does not hurry it. She is sharp, capable and visibly starting to fray, and the book is content to let you notice rather than underline it.

Irulan is the other one, and she is the most quietly tragic person in the novel. Married to Paul for purely political reasons, never touched, writing the histories that turn her husband into a god while being cut out of every part of his actual life. She joins the conspiracy because it is the only lever she has, and the thing that gets her is not the plot succeeding but the realisation of what she has actually helped do. Her turn late in the book is the most human moment in it. If the novel had been willing to be longer, I would have taken more of her and less of the Guild.

There is also a whole strand running at ground level, among Fremen who fought for Paul and have watched what the jihad made of their religion. Otheym is dying of a wasting disease in a city he no longer recognises, and the information he hands over costs his household rather than anyone in the palace. Bijaz, the Tleilaxu dwarf who comes with it, is one of the more unsettling things in the series, a person built as a recording device and entirely aware of what he was made for. Those scenes are where the cost of the empire actually shows up, and they are a big part of why I keep coming back to a book I have just given three stars.

Where it lands

Chani dies bearing twins. A stone burner takes Paul’s eyes. By Fremen custom a blind man walks into the desert, and Paul, who could keep ruling on prescient sight alone and whose priesthood would be delighted to let him, goes anyway. The religion carries on without him and barely breaks stride, which is precisely the point Herbert wanted to make.

So it is a three from me, and it is still a book I keep going back to, because it is part of a series I have loved for thirty years and because the ideas in it are better than the execution around them. It is the necessary hinge between the first novel and Children of Dune. It just is not the best of the series by any measure, and I would not pretend otherwise to keep the run tidy.

None of which stops me rereading it, and I have, several times. It is the book that makes the rest of the run mean something, and a flawed hinge is still a hinge. I just wish Herbert had trusted the story with more room, because the ideas in here deserved a bigger book than the one he wrote.

It is also, whatever else I think of it, a genuinely brave book to have written. The commercially sensible move after the success of the first novel was another desert adventure with more worms. Herbert instead delivered a short, bleak correction that tells his new readership they enjoyed the last one wrongly, and he did it knowing exactly how that would land. I can criticise the execution and still admire the decision.

Rating: 3/5.

October 15, 2026 0 comments

Books Deep Dives Dune

Dune, and the Science Fiction That Isn’t Really Science Fiction

by Hutch Morzaria October 8, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

I first read Dune as an older teen and I have gone back to it roughly once a decade ever since, usually dragging the rest of the series along with it. With a third Villeneuve film a month away, I have had the itch again, and rereading it this time I found myself thinking about something I have never quite been able to settle: this is one of my favourite science fiction novels, and I am not entirely convinced it is science fiction.

Half of this could actually happen

Think about what is in here. The Bene Gesserit with their ninety generations of breeding and their Voice, the Kwisatz Haderach, Guild Navigators folded into tanks of spice gas seeing a safe path through space. None of that is science. It is magic with a technical vocabulary bolted on, and Herbert barely pretends otherwise. Then set it against the other half of the same universe. A war against thinking machines that ended with humanity banning them outright. Mentats, people trained as human computers because the alternative is illegal. A single scarce substance that an entire economy depends on and that everyone is prepared to kill over. Those are not fantasies. Those are things I can see happening, and one of them is arguably happening now.

That split is a large part of why the book keeps working on me. It sits on the line between the two and refuses to pick a side, so the mystical parts feel grounded by the plausible ones and the plausible ones get some of the grandeur of the mystical. Most books that try this end up feeling like neither. This one gets to be both.

It is also why the book survives being adapted and re-adapted without ever quite being replaced. The visual half travels perfectly well, because deserts and worms and knife fights are exactly what a camera is for. The argumentative half does not, because most of it happens inside people’s heads in a language the novel spends four hundred pages teaching you. You can film the Water of Life. You cannot easily film what a Reverend Mother is doing while she watches somebody drink it.

The trap, and the reset in the middle

The setup is a trap and everybody involved knows it. House Atreides is handed stewardship of Arrakis, the only source of melange in the universe, because Emperor Shaddam IV has decided that Duke Leto’s competence and standing in the Landsraad have made him dangerous, and the Harkonnens are happy to do the work. Leto walks into it anyway, because refusing an Imperial directive is a faster death, and because he thinks the desert might hold something worth the gamble. He is right about that. He does not live long enough to use it.

What breaks the house is betrayal from inside it. Wellington Yueh’s Suk conditioning is supposed to make treachery impossible, and the Harkonnens get around a thing the whole Imperium treats as unbreakable by taking his wife. Leto dies trying to take the Baron with him and gets Piter de Vries instead. Then Paul and Jessica are in the deep desert with a stilltent and no allies, and the novel effectively starts over a third of the way in. That reset is a bold piece of construction and it is why the back half feels like a different book wearing the first one’s clothes.

A sandworm breaching a dune ridge on Arrakis while three figures in survival suits watch from below

What I notice more on each reread is how much of the first act is people being competent at their jobs. Thufir running projections he does not trust, Hawat and Halleck arguing about whether the Harkonnens left saboteurs behind, Leto working out how quickly he can convert spice revenue into loyalty. Herbert lets that run long, and it pays off, because when the trap closes you understand precisely which piece of the machine failed and why nobody caught it. A lesser version of this book would have opened with the betrayal.

What the Fremen are really doing

The Fremen turn out to be far more than the desert fighters the Atreides had hoped to hire. They are running a terraforming programme measured in centuries, hoarding water in sealed caverns against a green Arrakis that not one of them expects to see, working from a plan an Imperial Planetologist handed them two generations back. Every sietch pays into it. Every death pays into it too, because the water in a body belongs to the tribe. Herbert works the social arithmetic of that out in more detail than the plot strictly requires, and it gives the whole desert half of the book a weight that the palace intrigue never quite matches.

It also means the politics everyone remembers is sitting on top of an ecological argument. Who holds Arrakis matters less, in the long run, than what Arrakis is slowly being turned into, and the people doing the turning are the ones nobody in the Imperium bothered to count.

The water discipline is where the world-building stops being scenery and starts being character. Spitting as a greeting because you are giving away moisture. Counting a man’s worth in the litres his body will return. Stillsuits that are uncomfortable, inefficient at the seams, and absolutely non-negotiable. Every one of those details does double duty, telling you about the planet and about the people the planet made, and none of it is delivered as a lecture. It arrives as manners, which is a much harder thing to write and a much easier thing to read.

The prophecy being a plant is the detail I find myself explaining to people most often, because it changes what kind of story this is. Paul is not fulfilling a destiny. He is a trained operator using a piece of psychological infrastructure his own order installed centuries earlier for exactly this contingency, and he knows it, and Jessica knows it, and the book tells you so directly. That the ending still feels triumphant while you hold that knowledge is the single cleverest thing Herbert does.

The household, and the people who take it apart

Paul gets the arc everybody remembers, but Jessica is the more interesting person underneath it. She broke a breeding programme thousands of years old because Leto wanted a son, and she spends the whole novel carrying what that decision costs, up to and including a daughter born already conscious because Jessica took the Water of Life while pregnant. The book treats Alia as a wonder. Reading it now, knowing where the series goes with ancestral memory, the wonder has an edge on it that I do not think was there the first time I read this at seventeen.

Around the two of them Herbert builds a household worth caring about in a remarkably small number of pages. Gurney Halleck with his baliset and his endless quotations, Duncan Idaho, Thufir Hawat running mentat projections for a house that has already lost and has not been told yet. None of them get much room and all of them land, which is a knack a lot of writers with three times the page count never manage. Duncan in particular does more with a handful of scenes here than most series manage with a whole book, and given how many times this character comes back later, it is worth noticing how economically he is established.

The opposition is drawn much broader and works anyway. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is an appetite with a title and a suspensor harness, Piter de Vries is what a mentat looks like when nobody bothers with the ethics, Feyd-Rautha is the polished one, and Rabban exists to be brutal enough that his replacement can arrive looking like mercy. That is a deliberate bit of political theatre inside the story, not just lazy villain design, and the book is explicit about the Baron planning it that way. Meanwhile Stilgar and Chani carry the Fremen side without ever being flattened into noble savages, and Liet-Kynes dies in the sand working out exactly how his father’s plan slipped away from the people it was meant for.

The two scenes that stay with me

Two moments do the heavy lifting for me and they always have. The first is Paul taking the Water of Life and coming out of it as the Kwisatz Haderach. That sequence felt like fulfilment and closure at the same time, the whole book arriving at the thing it had been pointing at since the gom jabbar, and Herbert earns it because the training, the prophecy and the ecology have all been laid out in advance. Nothing about it is a gift. Even the prophecy is a fraud, seeded on Arrakis centuries earlier by the Missionaria Protectiva so that a stranded sister could exploit it, and the book is completely open with you about that while you are cheering.

The second is the sandworm ride when they take the shield wall. It is exceptional storytelling, the point where every piece the novel has built starts moving at once, and it is the image the whole series gets remembered by for good reason. The films have their own version of the desert and it looks tremendous, but the shield wall belongs to the book.

Sixty years on it still holds up better than most of what came after it. It won the Hugo and the first ever Nebula Award for Best Novel, and if you have only met this universe through a cinema screen, the novel is where the ideas actually live. If you want the same era of writers wrestling with religion and politics at a similar pitch, Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers sit on the same shelf, and Leviathan Wakes is the modern series that inherited the interest in resource politics over laser battles.

Rating: 5/5.

October 8, 2026 1 comment

Deep Dives Dune

A Desert Planet, a Spice, and a Destiny: Diving Deep into Dune

by Hutch Morzaria April 8, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

Frank Herbert’s Dune is more than just a science fiction novel; it’s a sprawling epic, a complex tapestry woven with threads of politics, religion, ecology, and human nature. It’s a story that has captivated readers for decades, and its journey to the big screen has been a long and fascinating one. While the 1984 David Lynch adaptation holds a certain cult status, it’s Denis Villeneuve’s recent two-part cinematic masterpiece that has truly brought the grandeur and depth of Arrakis to life, reigniting the passion of longtime fans and captivating a whole new generation.

As a science fiction and fantasy enthusiast, I’ve always been drawn to stories that transport me to other worlds, worlds with their own unique rules, cultures, and landscapes. Think of the intricate world-building of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the complex political landscape of Westeros in Game of Thrones, or the far-reaching galactic empire of Asimov’s Foundation series. These are worlds that resonate with readers because of their depth and detail, their internal consistency, and their exploration of timeless human themes. Dune delivers this in spades, standing shoulder to shoulder with these titans of the genre. Herbert’s creation of Arrakis, a harsh desert planet teeming with colossal sandworms and the precious spice melange, is a stroke of genius. The intricate political machinations of the Imperium, the clash of cultures between the Fremen and the outsiders, and the exploration of prescience and destiny all combine to create a truly immersive and thought-provoking experience. It’s a universe so rich and detailed that it invites endless exploration and discussion, much like the meticulously crafted worlds of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, where the Aes Sedai, with their own internal hierarchy and mystical abilities, share some thematic similarities with the Bene Gesserit sisterhood in Dune. Both organizations are shrouded in secrecy, possess unique skills, and exert significant influence over the course of events, often operating in the shadows to achieve their goals.

The Bene Gesserit, with their mastery of the Voice, their control over their bodies and emotions, and their long-term, carefully laid plans, are a fascinating element of Dune. Their influence permeates the story, shaping events in subtle but powerful ways. Like the Aes Sedai, they are a sisterhood of powerful women who have dedicated their lives to a specific path, wielding considerable power behind the scenes. The parallels between these organizations, while not exact, highlight a common trope in fantasy and science fiction: the powerful, often secretive, all-female group that plays a crucial role in shaping the destiny of the world.

While the original Frank Herbert six-book arc remains a personal favorite – exploring the intricacies of Paul’s ascension, the consequences of his actions, and the evolution of the God Emperor Leto II – the subsequent additions to the Dune universe, while interesting, aren’t essential to grasp the core themes and story. It’s the original six books that truly capture the essence of Dune, much like the core Foundation trilogy provides the essential framework for understanding Asimov’s vision of psychohistory and the fall and rise of galactic empires.

Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) are not just adaptations; they are cinematic events similar to the Lord of The Rings & Hobbit recently released on our screens. He has managed to capture the sheer scale and majesty of Herbert’s vision, creating a visually stunning and emotionally resonant experience. The casting is nothing short of brilliant. Timothée Chalamet embodies Paul Atreides with a perfect blend of vulnerability and burgeoning power. His portrayal of Paul’s journey from a privileged young man to the Kwisatz Haderach, the messianic figure of the Fremen, is both compelling and nuanced. Rebecca Ferguson delivers a powerful performance as Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother and a Bene Gesserit adept. Her strength, grace, and unwavering devotion to her son are palpable. The supporting cast is equally impressive, with standout performances from Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides, Stellan Skarsgård as the grotesque Baron Harkonnen, and Javier Bardem as Stilgar, the Fremen leader. Each actor embodies their character with depth and conviction, bringing Herbert’s complex personalities to life.

One of the most striking aspects of Villeneuve’s Dune is its visual grandeur. The cinematography is breathtaking, capturing the stark beauty of the Arrakis landscape. The vast deserts, the towering rock formations, and the ever-present threat of the sandworms are all rendered with stunning realism. The sandworms themselves are a triumph of visual effects. These colossal creatures, the embodiment of Arrakis’ power, are both terrifying and awe-inspiring. Their movements beneath the sand, their gaping maws, and their sheer size are truly a spectacle to behold. The scenes featuring the sandworms are some of the most memorable in the films, perfectly capturing the sense of danger and wonder that they evoke in the books.

The world-building in Villeneuve’s Dune is meticulous. From the intricate costumes and weaponry to the unique architecture and cultural practices of the Fremen, every detail feels authentic and carefully considered. The film effectively conveys the complex social and political dynamics of the Imperium, the rivalry between the noble houses, and the importance of the spice melange. The fight choreography is also a significant improvement over previous adaptations. It’s brutal, efficient, and reflects the Fremen’s practical approach to combat. The use of shields and the emphasis on close-quarters combat are well-represented, adding a layer of realism to the action sequences.

The shift from page to screen inevitably involves changes, but in the case of Villeneuve’s Dune, these changes largely serve to enhance the story. Some internal monologues and complex narrative threads have been streamlined for the sake of pacing and clarity, but the essence of Herbert’s vision remains intact. The films do an excellent job of capturing the themes of power, destiny, and the dangers of messianic figures. They also effectively convey the ecological message at the heart of Dune, highlighting the importance of respecting the environment and the delicate balance of nature.

The Imperium, with its vast reach and intricate power structures, is brought to life with impressive detail. The films showcase the sheer might of the Emperor and the influence of the various Great Houses. The political machinations, the alliances, and the betrayals that drive the story are all portrayed with a sense of grandeur and intrigue. The Harkonnens, with their brutal and decadent culture, are a particularly memorable presence, embodying the dark side of the Imperium’s power.

Villeneuve’s Dune is not just a science fiction film; it’s a cinematic masterpiece. It’s a visually stunning, emotionally resonant, and intellectually stimulating experience that does justice to Herbert’s complex and beloved novel. It’s a film that stays with you long after the credits have rolled, prompting you to ponder the themes of power, destiny, and the human condition. As a science fiction and fantasy fan, I’m thrilled that Dune has finally received the cinematic treatment it deserves. It’s a testament to the power of storytelling and the enduring appeal of Frank Herbert’s vision. This two-part epic is a must-see for anyone who appreciates imaginative world-building, compelling characters, and thought-provoking themes. It’s a journey to Arrakis that you won’t soon forget.

April 8, 2025 3 comments

Theatrical poster for Dune Part Two (2024)

Dune Movies

Dune: Part Two — I Made the Family Do Their Homework First

by Hutch Morzaria February 15, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

Dune Part Two is a much more action-packed film than the first one, and I loved it. Where Part One spent a lot of its time setting up the houses, the planet and the betrayal, this one takes everything that was built and starts using it, worms and raids and battles and a knife fight to finish, and it barely stops for breath once it gets going. Where the first film ended with Paul and Jessica just getting in with the Fremen, this one starts with them already out in the desert fighting. There are a couple of changes to the story I didn’t like at all, which I’ll get to. But overall I really enjoyed this film, and a big part of why it hit as hard as it did has less to do with the film and more to do with some homework I made the family do beforehand.

Because last time didn’t quite work for them. I took the whole family to Part One, and they came along knowing Dune was one of my favourite books and that I was very excited, and they sat through it without really getting it. Too many names, too many houses, a lot of very serious people making decisions nobody had explained. So this time I wasn’t leaving it to chance, and before we went anywhere near a cinema I sat them all down and made them watch Part One again. I explained everything as we went, who everyone was and why it mattered, and it made a real difference to how this one landed.

Homework first

The rewatch helped a lot. The second time through Part One, with me pausing to explain every so often, the pieces started to fit for them in a way they hadn’t in the cinema. Who the Atreides are and why the Emperor wants them gone, why the Harkonnens are back on Arrakis, what the Bene Gesserit are actually up to with Jessica and Paul, why the Fremen matter so much, what the spice is and why everyone would kill for it. I gave them the context from the book as well, the bits the films only hint at, like the prophecy the Bene Gesserit planted on Arrakis long before Paul got there, and what he keeps seeing when he closes his eyes. It turned a film they hadn’t really got into a story they could actually follow.

So when we went and saw Part Two together, it hit home a lot more for them. They knew who Stilgar was, the Fremen leader who takes Paul in, they knew why Jessica drinking the Water of Life was such a big deal, and they knew what it meant when the Fremen started calling Paul by a name out of their prophecy. They could see where it was heading before it got there, the same way Paul can. In this film he keeps seeing a holy war spreading out from Arrakis in his visions, and he spends most of it trying to find a way around it. Knowing Chani from the end of Part One helped too, because this is her film nearly as much as it’s his.

Paul and Chani on a dune in Dune Part Two

Much more action

This one moves. Paul and Jessica are with the Fremen now, and the first big chunk of the film is them raiding the Harkonnen spice harvesters, coming up out of the sand, blowing things up and vanishing again, which is a completely different energy from all the setup of the first film. Paul learns to fight the Fremen way, and the Fremen fighting is quick and nasty, all knives and ambushes and people appearing out of the ground behind you. Then Paul rides a worm for the first time, the moment the whole of Part One was building towards, and it’s every bit as big as it should be. The worms are everywhere after that, carrying armies across the desert and turning up in the middle of battles.

The Harkonnens get more to do as well. Feyd-Rautha turns up, pale and bald and grinning, and his first proper scene is a fight in a black and white arena on the Harkonnen homeworld that looks like nothing else in either film. The Emperor finally shows up in person too, along with Princess Irulan, and the whole thing ends up in one room on Arrakis. The big battle at the end has the Fremen coming out of a storm on the backs of worms and running straight over the Emperor’s forces. And it finishes on a knife fight between Paul and Feyd, the two of them circling each other in front of everybody, and it’s so much more action-packed than Part One that it never really lets up once the raids start.

Chani, and the Alia who never shows up

So, the two things I didn’t like. The first is Chani. In the book, Chani is with Paul all the way, she believes in him, and she ends up standing beside him while it all goes the way it goes. Here they’ve turned her into the skeptic, the one Fremen who thinks the prophecy is a Bene Gesserit trick, and she spends the back half of the film pulling away from Paul. She’s with him for most of the film, fighting beside him on the raids and teaching him how to live in the desert, and she still doesn’t buy a word of the prophecy. It changes the ending too, because in the book the last word goes to Jessica telling Chani that history will call them wives, and here Chani’s the one walking away on her own. I didn’t like the changes to Chani, because that’s not the Chani I know from the book.

The second is Alia. In the book, Jessica is pregnant when she takes the Water of Life, and Alia is born a strange little girl who already knows everything, and she’s the one who kills the Baron. She stabs him with the gom jabbar in front of the Emperor, and that scene is a big part of why she’s such an unsettling presence in the book. Here Alia never actually gets born. She’s a voice Jessica talks to in her belly, there’s one quick glimpse of her grown up in Paul’s visions, and it’s Paul who kills the Baron instead. I didn’t like losing her, and even with both of those changes still bugging me, I loved this film.

Rating: 5/5.

February 15, 2025 0 comments

Theatrical poster for Dune Part One (2021)

Dune Movies

Dune: Part One — Shivers in the Cinema, Blank Looks From the Family

by Hutch Morzaria January 22, 2022

written by Hutch Morzaria

Dune Part One gave me the shivers, sitting there in the cinema, and not just the once. I loved it. Dune is one of my favourite books, and I’d been very excited about this one for a long time, the kind of excited where everybody around you knows about it whether they wanted to or not. I’d spent years with the 1984 version, which I really enjoyed, camp and all, but this is the first time I’ve watched Dune and felt like I was looking at the actual place. The scale of Arrakis, the sand and the heat haze and the size of everything against the people standing in it, the huge slab-sided buildings, the ships hanging in the air, and more than once I had the hair standing up on my arms like a kid.

It’s also only half the story, which is worth knowing going in. The film covers the first half of book one, the move to Arrakis, the Harkonnen attack, the Duke’s death and Paul and Jessica running for the deep desert, and it stops right as the Fremen take them in, with Paul’s fight against Jamis as the last big moment. Part Two has already been confirmed, so the rest of the book is on its way. Chani barely gets a look in this time, a few glimpses in Paul’s dreams and a couple of scenes at the very end, so a lot of what I’m waiting for from the book is still ahead. None of that took anything away from what’s here, and I walked out wanting the next one straight away.

Taking the whole family

I didn’t go on my own. I took the whole family along, and they came, fair play to them, because they knew this was one of my favourite books and they could tell how excited I was. That’s two and a half hours of sand, spice, noble houses, planets, prophecies and people whispering at each other in the dark, all dropped on them cold with no warning about who anybody is. So they didn’t really get it. They just didn’t have the book sitting in the back of their heads filling in the gaps the way I did, and without that a lot of Dune is people making very serious decisions about things nobody’s explained yet.

And there’s a lot to not get if you haven’t read it. Bene Gesserit, Kwisatz Haderach, mentats, the spice, the Guild, why the Emperor would hand the Atreides the most valuable planet in the universe and then help the Harkonnens take it back, the film throws all of it at you and trusts you to keep up. Even the voiceover at the very start, Chani talking about her planet and the outsiders who keep taking it, assumes you already care who the Fremen are. The film never stops to hand you a glossary either, so if a word means nothing to you, the scene just moves on without you. I’d had those words in my head for years, so every one of them landed for me, and for my family they were mostly names going past. They knew it mattered to me, though, and they sat through every minute of it with me anyway.

Lady Jessica in the desert at night in Dune Part One

A universe that feels real

The thing I loved most is how they built the whole universe. The look and feel of it felt real to me in a way no Dune has before, not a set and not a special effect but somewhere people actually live and work and die. The ornithopters fly with wings that beat like a dragonfly’s, and they’re chunky and loud and look like they’d be a pain to keep running. The stillsuits have the tubes and the catch pockets and the whole idea of drinking your own recycled water right there on screen, and you believe people would wear them because they’d be dead in a day without them. Nothing looks shiny or new out on Arrakis, it’s all rusted, worn down and lived in, which is exactly how I always pictured it reading the book.

The Harkonnens get the same treatment. The Baron’s homeworld is dark and heavy and nasty, the Baron himself floats up out of a black bath, and the Sardaukar turn up looking like they came from a planet built to break people, which, if you know the book, they did. Even the shields get a look of their own, a blue shimmer that turns red when a blade goes slow enough to get through, which is exactly the rule from the book. Then there’s the first time you see a worm come up out of the sand, enormous and quiet until suddenly it isn’t. Every piece of this universe has been thought through, the tech, the buildings, the clothes, the way the sand moves, and it all adds up to a place I’d believe was out there somewhere if you told me it was.

Paul, Jessica, Leto, and the Duncan I didn’t love

The casting is mostly spot on. Timothée Chalamet is Paul, and he’s got that thing Paul has in the book where he’s young and a bit fragile at the start but you can see how clever and how dangerous he’s going to become, through the gom jabbar test, the visions, the night in the stilltent where it all lands on him and the fight with Jamis at the end. Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica is spot on too, because Jessica is doing about five things at once in every scene she’s in, protecting Paul, obeying the Bene Gesserit, loving the Duke and being terrified, and you can see all of it. Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto is just right as well, calm and decent and clearly walking into a trap with his eyes open, for the sake of his son and his house. And most of the rest of the cast land exactly where I wanted them.

The one I didn’t love was Duncan. Duncan Idaho is the Atreides swordmaster, the one who goes ahead to Arrakis to win over the Fremen, and he gets a big last stand in this film covering Paul and Jessica’s escape. I just didn’t love the choice for him, and with the rest of the casting landing so close to how I’d pictured everyone, that one stuck out more than it would have in a weaker film. He wasn’t the Duncan I had in my head from the book. It’s a small gripe in a film I loved, but it’s the one thing I’d change about it.

Rating: 5/5.

January 22, 2022 2 comments

Dune Movies

Dune (1984): A Pug, a Floating Baron and All of Book One

by Hutch Morzaria April 20, 2002

written by Hutch Morzaria

This is a review of David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Dune, covering how it compresses the events of Frank Herbert’s first novel, the move from Caladan to Arrakis, the Harkonnen betrayal, and the rise of Paul Atreides among the Fremen, into a single film, and where it swaps out book details like the weirding way and the ending for its own inventions. It also covers the cast, particularly Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides, and Kenneth McMillan as Baron Harkonnen, and the film’s heavily physical, model-based effects work.

The piece lands on genuine affection for the film despite its campier moments, praising the cast as exceptional across the board and the practical effects as holding up well, while noting the 1984 production design reads more like the 1960s than any vision of the future. No numeric rating is given.

If I’m going to start a blog about the things I love, it may as well start with Dune, because it’s one of my favourite books and nothing else was really in the running for the first post. So the first thing up on Zone Six is a Dune 1984 review, David Lynch’s version with Kyle MacLachlan in the stillsuit, and I’ll get the obvious bit out of the way before anything else. It’s a bit camp. Sometimes it’s a lot more than a bit, and I really enjoyed it anyway, which is exactly why it’s the one I wanted to open with. A film can have Patrick Stewart charge into a battle with a pug tucked under his arm and still take a massive swing at a story this big, and this one manages both inside the same ten minutes.

What got me watching it is how much of book one is actually in there. The move from Caladan to Arrakis, the Harkonnen betrayal, the Duke’s death, Paul and Jessica running for the deep desert, Stilgar and the Fremen, the spice, the worms, Paul going from exiled heir to the man leading all of them, it’s all on the screen. It just comes at you in a slightly different manner than I was expecting, and that’s the fairest way I can put it. Scenes get shuffled around, a lot of what people are thinking gets whispered over their faces so you always know where everyone stands, and a couple of the big pieces get swapped out for something else entirely. If you’ve read it you’ll spend a good chunk of the film going “oh, so that’s how they did that bit”, and for me that was a big part of the fun.

Paul and Jessica in stillsuits in the deep desert in Dune (1984)

All of book one, just in a different fashion

The biggest swap is the weirding way. In the book it’s the Bene Gesserit way of fighting, the reason Jessica and Paul are so dangerous once the Fremen take them in, and it’s mostly about how they move and how fast they are. Here it turns into the weirding modules, a little handheld gadget you speak into with the sound doing the damage, so the scenes of Paul training the Fremen become Paul teaching a cave full of fighters how to use them. That’s not a scene I’d ever pictured while reading it, and it’s probably the clearest example of what I mean by the film doing book one in its own fashion, because the story beat is exactly where it should be and the thing on screen looks nothing like the thing that was in my head.

The ending’s the other one anybody who’s read it will spot straight away. Paul beats Feyd, takes the throne out from under the Emperor, and then it starts to rain on Arrakis, which is a very big thing to have happen at the end of a film called Dune and not how the book finishes at all. The Guild Navigator gets moved right up front too, this huge floating thing in a tank of spice gas that you meet in the opening minutes instead of a mystery you wait the whole story to see. And then there’s the gom jabbar test, with the box and the needle and the Reverend Mother, done almost exactly the way it’s written, which is part of why the changes stand out as much as they do. None of that stopped me enjoying it. Working out how each piece had been carried across from the page, and what it had turned into on the way, kept me hooked right to the end.

Gurney, Paul and the Baron

The cast is where it really does it for me, and three of them in particular. Patrick Stewart is exceptional as Gurney Halleck, the Atreides weapons master who trains Paul, and it’s a real kick seeing the man most of us know as Picard (before he actually was Picard) play somebody this rough around the edges. He’s got the baliset, he’s got the scowl, and yes he’s got the pug, carried into the Harkonnen attack like it’s standard issue, which is about the campiest image in a film full of them. He’s still exceptional, pug and all, and he’s Gurney as I know him from the book.

Kyle MacLachlan is Paul Atreides and he’s exceptional too. He has to carry the whole thing, from the nervous duke’s son with his hand in the box for the gom jabbar to the man riding a worm at the head of an army. He looks young enough at the start that the Reverend Mother testing him feels like something being done to a kid, and by the end he’s the one the whole desert is shouting for, so the jump the book asks for is all there in one performance. It’s a lot for one actor, and he makes it look easy.

And then there’s the Baron. Kenneth McMillan plays Baron Harkonnen floating around his halls on suspensors with his face covered in sores, and he’s exceptional in exactly the way that part needs. He’s the campiest thing in the whole film by a distance, and I mean that as praise, because he’s also properly nasty, the kind of villain who pulls the heart plug out of a servant just to make a point. Sting turns up as his nephew Feyd, in not much more than a winged pair of underpants, and between the two of them the Harkonnen scenes are where the film’s camp really lives.

A 1984 film that looks like the 60s

It suits the filmmaking of its time, and I say that as a good thing. The worms are big physical models thrashing through real sand, the ships are models, the Harkonnen homeworld is all smoke and pipes and furnaces, and the Emperor’s palace is gold and heavy dark wood everywhere you look. Even the stillsuits look like they came out of a workshop, all ribbed and heavy and a bit rubbery. There’s nothing about it that feels like a computer made it, and when a worm comes up out of the ground it’s a proper object with weight to it rather than something drawn in afterwards. For a film trying to put a whole alien planet on screen in the early 80s, that’s a lot of stuff somebody had to physically build. Other viewers who’ve gone looking for the film’s cult following tend to land on the same point, that there’s almost always something interesting to look at even when the story’s losing them.

The funny part is that for a film made in 1984, it looks like something from the 60s. The costumes, the big stiff uniforms with the high collars, the hair, the way people stand around in enormous rooms delivering lines to each other, it all feels a lot less like the far future than an older idea of what the future was supposed to look like. That’s the one part of it that dates it for me, more than any of the effects, and it’s also where a lot of the camp comes from. Some of it’s a bit much, the Baron’s scenes especially, and there are moments where the costumes got more of my attention than whatever was being said. The Emperor’s court alone could keep you busy for a whole viewing.

April 20, 2002 2 comments