Dune is a novel rich in ideas as well as imagination…. (p. 41)

Recalling the origins of Dune, Herbert says:

It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, a society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

                                              (p. 42)

[Detail] by painstaking detail, Herbert constructed a world, in an exercise of ecological imagination as gradual, as delicate, and as complex as such a planetary transformation itself might be. (p. 43)

[Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune,] is not merely a prophet...