Classic: Dune 2

About halfway through the book, and time for the midway review. I think a summary of the story up to this point is in order.

The book is about a futuristic society living on imaginary planets. A royal family has been 'given' a desert planet as their fiefdom, as part of a larger, much more complicated plan to kill them all which we need not go into. Their enemies turned one of their most trusted household members into a traitor and attacked the stronghold. The Duke was captured alive, but attempted and failed to kill his captor with a poison capsule tooth, which we need not go into. So he's dead, and his concubine and son, now the Duke because he's the only one left, are in the desert sheltering from the people hunting them among a group of native people, who are being slowly hunted down and killed because they can defeat the Emperor's elite soldiers. And that's pretty much where things stand at this point.

 I'm very interested in what is slowly being revealed about the sandworms- the implication is that the Fremen natives secretly ride them around, and they have something to do with the formation of the spice. For one thing, the worm that Paul and Jessica escaped smelled strongly of spice.

Cinnamon!
The smell of it flooded across him.
What has a worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And then he remembered Liet-Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between worm and spice.


For another thing, when Kynes was crawling across the desert, he thought that the pre-spice under the ground would attract a worm- a 'maker', he called it. As in maker of the melange?

I suppose we shall see.

I'm finding that, in its plot complexities, this book is a bit similar to the other adult science fiction I've read- mainly The Cuckoo's Egg and Serpent's Reach. There are a whole bunch of undercurrents woven together into the plot, complexities that have to be teased out from between the lines. There are parts of Serpent's Reach that I still don't quite understand after reading it five times. Great story, by the way.