Dune Books in Order
Paul Atreides is fifteen when his family moves to Arrakis, a desert planet that produces the universe's most valuable substance. Within a year, his father is dead, he's living with desert nomads, and people are calling him a messiah. The consequences of that last part take thousands of years to play out.
Frank Herbert published the first Dune in 1965 after twenty-three rejections. He wrote five sequels before dying in 1986, each one stranger and more ambitious than the last. The story starts as political intrigue with sandworms and ends with a god-emperor who is literally a worm reflecting on immortality. It's not a typical hero's journey. Herbert was more interested in what happens after the hero wins, and the answer isn't pretty.
The worldbuilding goes deep. Herbert created the Bene Gesserit sisterhood with their mind-body disciplines, the Spacing Guild with their prescient navigators, mentats as human computers, and an economy built entirely around a drug that extends life and enables space travel. Everything connects.
Denis Villeneuve's films (2021, 2024) have introduced the series to new audiences and done something the 1984 David Lynch version couldn't: made money. The books remain the full experience. Herbert packed ideas into every chapter that the films can only gesture at.