Dune Chronicles

What a crazy ass ride this series is. Still wildly popular and selling off the shelves after nearly 50 years, the Dune series has spawned a movie, computer games, board games, and numerous authorized sequels (sic). The seminal first book in the series, Dune, is widely recognized as the world's best-selling science fiction novel. What makes it so good? Everything. Ok, you want some reasons. Mostly it's because Herbert delivered a masterfully crafted world so beautifully layered and rich in detail that it became the template for every "epic" science fiction series that came afterwards. It's so good that no one has managed to catch Herbert yet although many are trying. Winner of both the Hugo and the first Nebula award ever given, Dune was published in 1965. The series plunges you into the life of an imperial family in a feudal interstellar society. Yeah, you got it. Dune is both high-technology science fiction and feudal fantasy all woven into one epic braingasm series. Spinning at the center of this story are complex politics, religion, ecology, advanced technology and people behaving badly. All of this is set on a difficult desert planet that is home to massive worms and ‘spice' a drug-like substance that transforms humanity. Yea it's more a combination of space opera, planetary romance, and science fantasy than hard sci-fi. Yea yea, those grand blow-your-mind ideas present in some of the other classic works (like foundation) are not there. But dammit to hell, it's such a sweeping epic of character and enviroment struggling against each other that this series just can't be missed. The series does degrade after the first couple books. Overall, it's a towering epic that just must be read. The first three books are good reads but the series winds down and gets pretty bloaded by the time you reach the 6th book. The books cover generations, however, and you read about the decendents of characters you loved in the first one. Unless you are crazy about the Dune world, give a skip to the sequels written by Frank's son, Brian. Overall, they are an attempt to just milk the series and pretty dismal. Worth reading if you absolutely have to have your "Dune fix" but are really not even in the same class as daddy's origional works. You can't call yourself a science fiction fan if you haven't read the Dune series. So, get blown.