Rereading Dune fifteen years later
I first read this at sixteen, in a beat-up mass-market edition with a cover that had nothing to do with the contents, and what I retained was: sand, worms, a boy who becomes important, a knife fight. Rereading it in my thirties, most of what I retained turns out to be the least interesting part.
What holds up completely is the ecology. The long patient explanation of how water moves through a closed system, how a people organise their entire culture around not wasting it, how a planet could be changed on a scale of centuries by people who will not live to see it. That material is still remarkable, and it is doing something few novels attempt: it makes a landscape into the primary actor and lets the humans be consequences.
What holds up less well is the way people talk. Nearly every conversation is two experts fencing, each aware of six layers of implication, and about a third of the time the layers are genuinely there. The rest of the time it is a lot of narrowed eyes. I had forgotten how much of the book takes place inside characters' heads in italics, and how often the italics tell you what the dialogue just told you.
The plot structure surprised me on the reread. It is far more of a political procedural than an adventure. Long stretches are about supply, obligation, who owes whom, which house controls which contract. Sixteen-year-old me skipped those pages to get to the worms. They are the good pages.
I also noticed how fast the ending is. The last movement compresses years into a handful of chapters and then stops almost mid-stride, and I remembered it as a triumph but it reads now as something colder and more ambivalent than triumph.
Recommended as a reread specifically. If it has been long enough that you only remember the sand, you have not read the book you think you read.