I read Dune when I was much younger, recently reread it, and am moving on to the sequels.
Both these articles seem great and I look forward to reading them whenever I get far enough into the series that I’m not worried about spoilers. I’ve noticed a lot of lazy discourse flying around online recently calling it imperialist/racist/orientalist because of some of the obvious features of the story. Even from the first novel the situation is obvliously more complex, but again this requires closer attention than most people seem ready to give.
For example, one might be put off by the “Orange Catholic Bible” being the predominant religious text, at least among the Houses, but we learn in an Appendix that this is not in any meaningful sense a Christian text but rather the secularized wisdom of all the world’s religions as produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. This idea could be critiqued in turn but many don’t get that far…
