Dune

By: Frank Herbert

Narrated by: Scott Brick, Orlagh Cassidy, Euan Morton, Simon Vance, Ilyana Kadushin, Byron Jennings, David R. Gordon, Jason Culp, Kent Broadhurst, Oliver Wyman, Patricia Kilgarriff, Scott Sowers

Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Long-listed, Audible.com Best of the Year, 2007

Long-listed, Audible.com 100 Audible Essentials, 2007

Audie Award winner, 2008

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Léa Seydoux, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family—and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction. Frank Herbert's death in 1986 was a tragic loss, yet the astounding legacy of his visionary fiction will live forever.

©1965 Frank Herbert (P)2007 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC

Critic reviews

Audie Award Winner, Science Fiction, 2008
Nebula Award winner, Best Novel, 1965
Hugo Award winner, Best Novel, 1966

"Unique...I know nothing comparable to it except Lord of the Rings." (Arthur C. Clarke)

"One of the monuments of modern science fiction." (Chicago Tribune)

"Powerful, convincing, and most ingenious." (Robert A. Heinlein)

Essential – more than once

If your only experience with Dune was the horrific movie, read on.
The mini-series was much better, but does not hold a candle to the original novel.
If you read and loved the original, you may be surprised how much you will enjoy this audible version.

Dune is more than great Sci-Fi, it is great fiction. I recently re-saw the mini-series and immediately wanted to experience the unabridged original again. The book was even better than I had remembered. The prose, the characters, and the story are all superior.

I was surprised there were quite a few subtle nuances in the story that I had not picked up on in my pervious several readings. I enjoyed this immensely as this is rare in all but the best of fiction.

Unfortunately the rest of this series does not live up to this powerful beginning, but not to worry, Dune stands alone. I strongly recommend this book even if you really disliked the movie. There are images and characters in this novel that have affected me strongly since my childhood and influenced me as a person. There are few works of fiction that I both enjoyed and appreciated as much as Dune.

I generally don’t like music or sound effects in an audio book, but here the sound-effect are light and don’t distract from the story. The narration, although not perfect, is quite good. This audio edition does the work justice.

Strange World, Stranger Presentation

I'm a big Heinlein fan and the was my first Herbert "read", definitly won't be my last!. My throat is still dry after experiencing the world he creates. I don't usually care for "produced" stories with sound effects, background music, and multiple actors reading. Your mind's vision and interpretation of the characters and scenes changes to that of the director. Dune, however, pulled it off nicely. Like a well acted movie, these voices became the characters. Be warned though, the book switches back and forth between multiple actors and a single reader, I liken this to watching a movie where the main actor changes with every scene, very hard to grasp at first and I'm not sure why they did it. Should have been one reader or multiple readers, but not combined.

Satisfyingly different from the movie version

I was a bit hesitant to read this book. I enjoyed the movie, but found it to be pretty flawed, with the antagonists being ridiculously and unbelievably evil. My great relief in reading this book was finding Frank Herbert had written them much better than that.

I was constantly surprised by the nuance in the book, compared to the movie. Much more thought was given into the politics of the situation, and the characters had quite a bit more moral ambiguity and fragility.

On the other hand, some of the grandiosity of the movie is absent from the book. Some highs are not as high as I was expecting them to be.

Overall an excellent read. I wish I hadn't ever seen the movie so that I could have gone into it fresh.

great work

I am a great admirer of Frank Herbert's work, and I got this book without hesitation. The audio is a high quality dramatization, and I enjoyed it very much, but there were some details that a production as well devised as this should have taken care of, such as speakers switching the role they had previously, so, suddenly the baron Vladimir Harkonnen has the voice of Thufir Hawat, which I found unsettling. Besides minor points like this, it is a great work.

Great reading, Great listening

I was blown away by this book when I first read it probably 30 years ago and am so glad I decided to listen to the audio version because it is also wonderful. As so often happens, I haven't seen a movie rendition that came close to satisfying the personal vision I'd created based on the book, however, the audiobook was practically right on the money. The varied narration voices made it one of the best audiobook experiences I've ever had. I can see how it might not work as well if you've not read the book so by all means, pick up a copy and read it. It's right up there with the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings as far as wonderful sci-fi/fantasy.

I liked it a lot

I almost didn't listen to this because of all the bad reviews of the production. But I figured I'd give it a shot and if I hated it, I'd return it. Fortunately, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The big complaint about the way they mixed in audio-drama interludes seems to be that sometimes you hear a character being voiced by someone different than the main narrator (Simon Vance). I have listened to enough books in which the narrator switches between male and female readers, based on the primary point of view of the chapter that I just don't find it distracting. The whole cast of narrators was excellent, and once I realized who was the audio-drama voice for each character, switching back and forth was fine. And the fact that there were background sound effects was neither distracting, nor did it really add anything. It just was.

I have only two minor complaints. One is that the sound mixing wasn't as spot-on as it should be. Sometimes the volume was a bit higher or lower than the rest of the book.

My other complaint is that nowhere that I can find is there a list of who voiced which of the characters during the audio-drama interludes. I would very much like to know who voiced the Baron, but I've had no luck figuring it out. He did a great job making the Baron's voice fit his character in a way that added to the experience for me, and I'd like to know if he's read anything else.

Classic science-fiction/high fantasy hybrid

Dune is one of those books that shaped my life as a reader. My parents gave it to me a gift when I was a kid in the 1980s, after I got excited about the forthcoming David Lynch film (which turned out to be a mess). At that age, I didn't entirely get what the book was about, but I found the universe fascinating. Mind control powers, sandworms, dukes, barons, spice harvesters, stillsuits, Fremen, weird religious stuff -- it was way more far-out than Star Wars (my template for science fiction at the time).

I later read Dune again in high school or college, but coming back now as a much more worldly adult, it's a whole new experience. Now I can admire how brilliant and original Herbert's world construction is. Set tens of thousands of years in the future, Dune's universe retains only a few traces of Earth history, the bits that still linger within now-ancient "new" religions and societies. Also, computer technology and robotics have been rejected at a cultural level because of a past war involving them, and societies now rely on humans that have been specially bred and trained to perform advanced thinking. This is really high fantasy in science fiction clothing.

It's probably not necessary for me to recount the plot in much detail. The noble Atreides family, one house within a feudal galactic empire, takes over administration of the desert planet Arrakis from its enemy house, the Harkonnens. With this post, the Atreides also gain control of the production of a drug crucial to the affairs (and politics) of the galaxy. However, the situation turns out to be an elaborate trap, and the young Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica must flee to the tough, tribal people of the desert, the Fremen. From there, Paul begins to discover a destiny that lies in his genes, in the religious lore of the Bene Gesserit, and in the planet Arrakis itself.

More than just escapism, Dune is a work of literature with many layers and intermixed issues. It could be, depending on how you read it, a complex drama about human politics; a complex drama about religion, prophecies, and messiahs; or a complex drama about the dangerous intersection of politics and religion, as the young Paul goes from being someone to be admired to someone more and more to be feared. There are some ideas about ecological stewardship, when humans live on the margins of survival. There are some ideas about how being able to see the future might affect human choices. Nearly all science fiction or fantasy novels that explore any of these themes, especially any that feature someone “going native” among barbaric people, can’t escape the shadow of Frank Herbert’s towering vision.

No, Dune isn’t by any means a perfect novel. As with certain other classics that awed me as a kid (e.g. Lord of the Rings), maturity makes it somewhat less mind-blowing. Now I recognize the more derivative plot elements and character types, not to mention the more tedious parts of the story, where Herbert has made his point and we're just waiting for him to get on with it. His desire to impress readers with the Fremen gets a little tiresome, too; after a while, I found myself wishing the enemy forces could have gotten it together and won a few battles, just to show those know-it-alls.

But, never mind. If you like science fiction or fantasy at all, this is undeniably one of the reference works you should read at some point, because it set such a high bar for rich world construction and thematic complexity. It's not hard to see the debt owed to Herbert by all subsequent space opera -- watch popular movies like Star Wars or Avatar, then see if you recognize the crude imitation.

Unfortunately, the most recent audiobook production is unevenly put together. A cast of voice actors performs the dialogue of different characters, which would have been great if this had been done consistently, but much of the dialogue is also handled by the main narrator. Thus, Paul sometimes sounds like the teenager he is, and sometimes like the middle-aged man he isn't. Likewise, the Baron Harkonnen is much more in character when his deep baritone is in effect, which makes its absence distracting. Someone told me that the production was expanded from an abridged version, which would certainly explain things. However, the musical vignettes that accompany certain passages and Princess Irulan's interludes work quite well.

What an epic tale

I must admit I am a Science fiction person, so was always going to like the story... having read the book when younger and watched the TV show. However the Audio book was just amazing, it has been produced in an epic manner and it is impossible not to get dragged into the story.
I used it to pass time on two very long trips and it made them fly past, the first leg of 13 hours I was almost disappointed to arrived as it meant I had to put a hold to listening to the book

Great story, rough performance

Story was great. As with all sci-fi, it takes a little while to be fully introduced to the setting and get the action rolling. Once Book I was over, I was completely absorbed in it.
The performance had a couple of rough patches, though. Since there were several different voice actors, I thought that each would stick with a single character throughout the story but they did not. There were several occasions when a certain voice would be used for a character during an entire chapter but the next chapter it would be a totally different voice. This made it hard to follow at times because several characters would share a voice or there just wouldn't be consistency for one character.
Music played at the end and beginning of each chapter which I thought was very odd initially but I started to appreciate when I was trying to time my pauses to the chapters.

High Cheese-factor

I love this book. I’ve read it twice before, when I was a teenager and later, as an adult. The 1984 movie was a fantastic adaptation for its time, and seemed to align well with how I envisioned the story when I read it.

This audio book, however, is really let down by the casting and performances. I would have happily listened to the narrator read the story to me - he’s quite good, and understands the tone of the tale. His vocalizations of the various characters are really nicely done. The dramatic vignettes, however, are just cheesy. The actors, while quite talented I’m sure, we’re poorly chosen for their respective characters. I couldn’t get past the fact that the voice actor for Paul, had a British accent, while his parents voice actors sounded like they were from Ohio (i.e., the US’s most neutral accent). It was also clear that each actor was recorded separately; Paul, for example, always having a significant amount of reverb added to his voice while Gurney, who sounded like a California native, had a very dry recording with very little effects added. It was just a sloppy production.

All that said, I STILL really enjoyed the book. I wish it had been a better production, but it’s such a grande, expansive story, that even a so so production couldn’t take all the goodness out of it. Again, the main narrator was very, very good.