Ancient Geeks episode 46: Frank Herbert's Dune, the novel

Dune-A-Palooza begins! It's the first of our three part series covering Dune, on the page and on the screen. In this episode, we discuss the original 1965 novel. If you were a science fiction fan, you read this book. Even if you weren't a science fiction fan, there's a good chance someone recommended it to you.

Both Steven and Tom devoured the book in our teens, when it became the touchstone for what truly great science fiction could achieve. Hear us talk about the origins of the novel, our early reactions to it, and our reactions again after re-reading it many years later. Good thing it escaped the obscurity of the auto repair publisher who originally printed it...

A fantastic setting, in every meaning of that word! Great characters! Intrigues! Meditations on political power! High tech that's also low tech! Tragic fates! It's all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

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© 2025 Tom Grant and Steven Taylor