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Have you ever read the first book in a series and thought, wow, this is pretty sweet...then you pick up the next one and it sucks? Well, that happened to me. I read Dune, by Frank Herbert and according to the cover of the book, it is one of the all time greatest sci-fi novels ever written. So I think, okay, I'll give it a whirl.

The story is set 10,000 years in the future, so there is intergalaxy travel, force fields to protect those inside and deciet around every corner. It's about a royal family, the Atreides, who are going to take over control of another planet, Arrakis whose sole planetary output is a spice that allows the person who eats it to have a prescience and see into the future. The spice is the most valuable commodity in the entire known galaxy. The current royal family in control of Arrakis, the Harkonnens are the archenemy of the Atreides. So we've established our good and bad guys.

Now our good and bad guys are both trying to stay on the good side of the emperor and remain an important contributor to the galactic economy. The spice that is a product of the planet Arrakis is imperative to the guys in charge of the interplanetary transportation, the Guildsmen, to safely navigate from one galaxy to the next. Without it the trade between planets would cease to exist and chaos would ensue.

The story unfolds with our good guys ending up on the short end of the stick and how they fight back and overthrow the bad guys. I enjoyed how the main character matured and grew into his role. I also liked how the author switched between different points of view on the fly between characters within a scene, allowing the reader to understand each characters perspective as the story played out.

However, I'm certainly not on board with the rest of the readers who think that it is a masterpiece and most likely the best sci-fi book of our time. It was an interesting story, but it just didn't pop for me.

So I pick up the next one in the series thinking I'll get a glimpse into the story arc that the author has created (there are 6 books by the original author, then a bunch more by his son) and follow the adventure. Turns out that I can't take it any more. I realize now one of the aspects of the author that really annoyed me was his failure to get to the meat of the story and send our cast of characters on their adventure. It wasn't so bad in Dune, but in Dune Messiah the author seems be taking his sweet ass time establishing the adventure.

Combine that with the fact that I found a used bookstore and bought 10 used books for 5 dollars, my patience and desire to stick to the story and carry on with the adventure bottomed out. I moved on to The Silence of the Lambs. Much more interesting. I've seen the movie, so I know what's going to happen, but as always, the book is better.