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Also, as I near the end of the book: come on Herbert, say "race consciousness" and "terrible purpose" one more time, I dare you.

The other issue with the Harkonnens is just that they're so purely, cartoonishly evil that their existence lets the Atreides off the hook for being white-knight colonisers who think they're so much purer than they are. A subtler villain would leave more space for considering that tension between the Atreides' self-concept and the colonialism inherent to how they found themselves on Arrakis in the first place.

OK, the first few chapters of this were a riot, but by chapter 20 the joke is getting verrrrry repetitive.

@sohkamyung Yeah, it really does make sense, and re-reading it with adult eyes the hints about why certain tech was abandoned are there and intriguing. I hadn't remembered them, so when a friend referenced the "Butlerian Jihad" a few years ago I thought he was referring to stuff that's deep into sequels I hadn't read or something. And in hindsight it just seems odd that this part of the worldbuilding didn't make more of an impression on me back then - it's actually well done, and without it the backstory would be a bit random.

Bleargh. I remembered that the portrayal of Baron von Harkonnen was gross and fatphobic, but I'd forgotten that it extends to the whole House, and I don't think I'd quite processed the homophobia attached to it. There are so many interesting elements to this book, why did Herbert have to throw this one in?

This quote from the Reverend Mother in the very first scene is... prescient.

And it's interesting as a re-read because I didn't remember the general backstory to the oddly low-tech elements of Dune being explicit. I guess when I read it the first time they weren't the parts that made an impression. Not sure how much that reflects how young I was or how long ago it was in terms of tech progression.

Also, I have the edition pictured and I think it has some terrible careless typos in it. Or does the Reverend Mother really talk about the "Swisatz Haderach" in the first chapter? I suppose that's consistent with how much I don't like this edition's cover art, and how much better the Villeneuve film's visuals fit my recollection of the story and its atmosphere.

Welp, I enjoyed the new movie a lot but it left me with a lot of questions about my recollections of this book that I probably read too young, at least 30 years ago. So it's time for a re-read.

And yes, I am reading these for the first time in my 40s, one book every year or two. They're fully rewarding books to read as an adult, though I wish I had encountered them as a kid because they'd have been much healthier input than all the macho swordfighting fantasy I did read back then.

Always such a pleasure to return to Earthsea.

...it's almost as if this 12th Century poet anticipated what Western Christians would do to all of Persian poetry centuries later....

I want to read this after it was extensively referenced in www.orionmagazine.org/article/upriver/

This translation is sort-of endorsed by www.patreon.com/persianpoetics who is on a mission to displace all the orientalised / de-Islamicised translations of Persian poetry with ones that they feel actually capture the spirit of the original.

(I say sort-of because it's not that they have an official "translations we approve of" list, but it's in a collection of ebooks they share with subscribers)