Dune

He's basically absolutely completely fucking nailed it, Mr Villeneuve.

I hope it's 6 hours long.

I hope it's successful, so the adaptations of the next books can go in deep on the jihad.

I need to read Dune, I always put it off, maybe now. Maybe.

The first four are great. The first three are a cohesive trilogy and fourth, God Emperor, is a good full stop ending. You probably dont need to go any further.

Dune itself is probably improved by the next two as it contextualises Pauls struggles.

Saw the first at the IMAX and you owe it to yourself to watch part 2 at a good cinema and pay a few quid more!

The sketchbook soundtrack is worth grabbing if you've not got it; it's about a billion hours long, but nice as background music. It can get a bit shouty, so it's not perfect.

Yeah this. They kinda get gradually worse, Messiah is still top notch. Children has some rough elements. God Emperor is worth it if you want to know where 40K got all their ideas, but has interesting ideas at least. The last 2, are basically just for completionists. Fuck knows about the prequels and what not his son wrote.

I've read them all, including the first 50 that his son wrote before I realised it was basically fan fiction. Polished, but shallow as fuck.

There's so much in books 5-7 that I'm really glad to have read, but it does veer further and further from the things I loved about the first. Expanded Universe almost, albeit with a reasonably clear through line.

Not sure how well any of them stand up nowadays though. I tried to re-read the first one again for the first time since maybe the mid-noughties. Maybe slightly more recently. Either way I only made it as far as the ecological white paper before parking it.

Drier than a dinner party in the Sahara with a main course of plywood and a drink of brine?

The Brian Herbert/KJ Anderson books get a lot of flak from purists but they’re decent enough reads. Nowhere near the style of Frank, but if you’re hankering for some good yarns in that universe (bearing in mind the first 6 prequel books are 10,000 years before Dune) they’re a fun romp.

But ultimately you could just read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune and call it good.

Yeah, they’re definitely shallow and have diminishing returns, but it’s all done with Frank’s blessing before his death. FH was pretty vocal that he didn’t want to be enshrined on a pedestal as the ultimate arbiter of Dune and that his son should run with the legacy.

I finished with God Emperor, which I really like in all its glorious weirdness. I can't quite decide if one day I should take the plunge and move to Heretics etc.

Possible delay coming