Such issues are weighty enough to sink a weaker book, but I'm still with the 12 million rather than Ballard. There's a strange overuse of the word 'aye' to signal agreement … Characters have a tendency to give long speeches explaining plot points. The villain of the piece, Baron Harkonnen, is absurdly camp and seems motivated only by one-dimensional evil. There are plenty of other criticisms I could add to his list. 'The novel contains almost no element of imagination other than its original premise … it describes in elaborate detail the unending dynastic feuds of two warring families … The narrative of immense length and repetitiveness is fitted out with a map and appendices, interminable italicised excerpts from sacred and devotional texts, and a mixture of jaw-cracking pseudo-Arabic and ruritanian names, together designed to impress the unwary as 'literature'… The only relief for the reader is the overweening seriousness of this vast text and its unintentional humour ('Ikhut-eigh reads one entry in the glossary, see Soo-Soo Sook').'īallard is on shaky ground when it comes to the lack of imagination and interminability of the excerpts (they are all short!) but he's damn right about the unintentional humour, the po-faced gravity, the elaborate detail and the daft names.

His categorical dismissal is worth quoting at length. JG Ballard, for instance, writing in the Guardian, eloquently proved how well time can make a fool of the best critics. So it's curious to think of a time when it was only really generating interest within the (still small) science fiction community a time when reviewers could approach the book without preconceptions and do what reviewers do best: completely fail to spot its potential. The joint 1965 Hugo award winner, Frank Herbert's Dune, has sold more than 12m copies and has been credited with inspiring everything from Star Wars to Earth Day via a song by Iron Maiden.

Frank herbert the great dune trilogy