i never really thought of myself as a sci-fi enthusiast. sure, i watched star trek and star wars; but sci-fi literature has never really been something that called to me before. call it a lack of my imagination... or perhaps a tendency to stick with what one already knows one will enjoy, the comfort of security or other such tosh. in any case, i didn't quite know what to expect of dune. i knew it was a masterpiece, that it was a landmark and something almost of a measuring tool upon which all other sci-fi works get compared to. with such heaps of praise for it, i expected a lot—and boy, did it fulfil all those expectations and then some.

the tempo, it must be said, is weird and uneven. the pacing took me out for a wild ride, because there were moments i'd have skipped and then moments where i couldn't put it down. that being said, even those moments i'd have skipped were still great pieces of character-focused literature. indeed, this is very much character-focused, philosophical and theological and political... words that you rarely see attached to 'blockbuster' books such as these. truth be told, i expected spaceship battles and epic melodrama; it's to the book's merit that the story in its pages is so much more than that.

all in all, a superb work and i can definitely see why people like it, because now i count myself among that number.