For the past few months my fiction reading has been pretty spotty. But lately I’ve been reading the 40th Anniversary Edition of Dune. I know, you’re shocked it’s taken me that long to read it. Heck, I was born the year it was first published.
But now that I’m reading it, on my Kindle, I will be making some observations on the story both here and on Twitter/FB. My first thought was how similar the actual text was to the David Lynch movie. Now I’ll admit, it’s been a few years since I saw that movie, but darned if the two don’t appear to be identical to me. There’s almost nothing different. The book even has all the whispering thoughts of Paul and Lady Jessica that I had always figured was from the brilliant but twisted mind of David Lynch, the film’s director.
I think a viewing of the film will be in order, after I finish the novel. Anyway, so far I’m only about 10% into the book and I’m loving it. Herbert’s prose is tight and yet elegant and perhaps due to the images in my mind from the film, visual enough for me. I remember having tried to read the book right before the film came out and I just could not get into it. So maybe the film is completely filling my mind’s eye with imagery.
I dabbled a bit in the works of Doc E.E. Smith and once again came to the conclusion that it was not my kind of Space Opera. I much prefer Dune.
One more quick thought about Dune. I realized that a reader can and will make sense of the crazy names given to characters and objects by the various cultures in a SF novel. I’ve always been a bit conservative in how I much world building I gave to naming things. I may have to open up a bit and let my imagination soar higher.