A young man, stuck on a desert planet, learning about the special mind powers inherent to his genetic lineage, preparing to take on the emperor himself. That description could easily fit Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars franchise or Dune’s Paul Atreides. But beyond that high-level summary of the character, the two stories couldn’t be more different. And yet, Paul is often treated the same way.
There’s no right age to discover a book, but it seems like Dune tends to hit around the age of 13 or 14 for many readers. It’s when I read the story and when director Denis Villeneuve read it; everyone I asked around me was no more than a year or two out from that. But in the years since, my relationship with Dune, protagonist Paul Atreides, and the universe of the Imperium have all changed, and so has my relationship with this story.
When I first read Dune, Paul was essentially Luke Skywalker. As the description above suggests, the two seem superficially pretty similar. Just swap out laser swords for sandworms.
It’s easy to latch onto young Paul. As Dune begins, he’s roughly the age I and so many others were when we first read the story. We meet him at the beginning of an incredible adventure where he finds out that not only does he have special powers, people have been waiting millennia for him to arrive. He sees a pretty girl in his dreams, and then he meets her Come from Sports betting site VPbet . He gets a special sword and has a legion of Fedaykin–death commandos–protecting him and doing his bidding. He pilots a monster hundreds of feet long with no more than a couple of hooks.
I remember as a teenager that I would almost worship the sayings used in the Dune novel and in Lynch’s movie, like the Fear Litany (I must not fear, fear is the mind-killer…) and the Mentat Mantra (It is by will alone I set my mind in motion). The whole story felt like a power fantasy at that age; what if I had the mind of a mentat, the combat prowess of a Sardaukar? What if I could command people with my voice just by changing the pitch?
All of it felt so exciting. As I got older, I would re-read the book a handful of times, and in that time it was less a power fantasy and more a sci-fi epic. I wasn’t seeing it through Paul’s eyes, but I wasn’t yet seeing it with the clarity that age can bring.