I haven't seen any of David Lynch's film version in about five years, and I haven't seen it start-to-finish in at least fifteen years, so I'm reasonably well-insulated against preconceptions formed from that film. I also haven't seen any of the SciFi Channel incarnations, so I'm likewise untainted by that telling (for good or ill).
This is the edition I'm reading, and I'll refer to it specifically in a moment.
I'm about 100 pages in, and so far I'm really enjoying it. The writing and characterizations are good, and I must admit that I'm pleasantly surprised to see it largely free of the stereotypes still infesting much science fiction in the 1960's. I also really like the way the book starts without giving a ton of back-story and also without resorting to extensive infodumps. I know that some readers of s/f enjoy infodumps and the authors who use them, but to me they always seem, at best, disruptive and, at worst, symptomatic of unsophisticated writing, though there are exceptions, of course.
In terms of a fully-formed universe, an obvious comparison can be (and often has been) made between Herbert's Dune and Tolkien's Middle Earth. This is made more poignant by the presence of many characters who've witnessed/participated in the major events that conspired to yield the current situation, and when this is done well I think it can give a powerful reality to the story. Herbert has accomplished this here, I think.
I can't review too much, simply because I'm only about a fifth of the way through, but I do have some criticisms, mostly stylistic:
I don't care for Herbert's pervasive use of italicized type to denote a character's thoughts. For the most part, these thought-passages simply aren't necessary, because Herbert's writing is strong enough to carry their meaning without resorting to them. Similarly, I don't care for the not-infrequent passages in which one character thinks in italics and then another character does so immediately thereafter. Here's a caricature of what I mean:
Charles faced Emily with an uncertain air. Does she suspect that I'm not really a vegetarian?
Emily eyed him criticically. I suspect that he's not really a vegetarian.
I've seen several like this so far, and they really grate on me. Sure, it's a stylistic choice and one's mileage may vary, but I just don't care for it. I'm not thrilled with the italicization itself, for that matter, but that's not Herbert's fault; a parade of college profs drove that formatting option from my brain.
But along the same lines, I'm not a big fan of the so-called third-person-omniscient point of view. Ursula LeGuin has famously defended it as the most difficult POV, and I simply disagree. When the author can reveal any character's thoughts in what amounts to real-time, I find too often that this option can become a crutch or perhaps a substitute for a different method of characterization. Herbert's got a lot of subterfuge and scheming going on in his story, so it's understandable that he'd resort to this narrative device, but I still don't like it all that much.
Now, a word about the edition I'm reading. It's a small font, which is fine, but sometimes it's reduced by about half a point for no apparent reason, because it doesn't usually cut down on lines-per-page or anything. I don't know what could explain it, other than a deliberate choice to switch typeface mid-page, but to what end?
But hey, those are pretty much my only complaint abouts the book. At first I also didn't like how the Bene Gesserit were mentioned on every other line, but that has waned, and I understand now that it serves to establish the importance of the BG in the goings-on, so that's okay.
Anyone care to share their thoughts about this work? For now, lets omit discussions of the sequels and stick to the first book.
Thanks!