Yeah, that's smart too. And how the "Spacefaring Guild" requires spice to navigate the best routes between the stars. Oil for transport. Everyone brought to their needs by Pauls' threat to switch off the oil supply. It's all so smart, Herbert was a hypergenius I think.
DUNE is (one of?) my favorite fiction reads and I have to resist turning all "fanboy" over it sometimes.
I love the sensation in DUNE that I'm inside a fully fleshed-out universe where the vision is so large I can't even see the edges, but here's one thread you might find interesting.
...that said...
I never really "got" the rest of the series. Never felt like Paul and his actions were acceptably justified beyond "yeah we would've all died out, trust me".
Separately, the whole, uh, female superpower thing came off as eye-rolling simp-nerd fantasy that wasn't up to the standard of the first book. It wasn't even spice-induced, it was just /muscles/ taking over mens' minds.
> Never felt like Paul and his actions were acceptably justified
I actually like what Hurbert did with paul. He made someone that was a god amongst man and then completely destroyed his legacy. Paul both was and wasn't a hero depending on the perspective of the person in the story. Herbert did a good job of showing the dangers of worshiping an authoritarian leader.
Children of Dune is my favorite thus far (just finished God Emperor… and don’t intend to continue the series).
With that being said, Frank Herbert certainly (IMO) is a genius of pure vision and worldbuilding but he is a serviceable writer at best.
By the aforementioned fourth book, he no longer has anything to add to his consideration of prescience/fate and is increasingly focused on sexuality. And his writing on sexuality is about as un-sensual as I can imagine.
I've found that "escaping from one's editor and writing things you think are cool or sexy" is a common hazard of being a successful author, especially in SFF. Look at George R.R. Martin's complete inability to actually finish a damn book, or Robert Jordan's insistence on incorporating detailed descriptions of people's clothes alongside gobs of spanking and ceremonial nudity. And those are series I enjoyed despite their flaws.
The sex stuff is a bit weird and cringe, but they're still great books. I just re-read Heretics again as I'm making my way through the whole series again and frankly in many ways it's the best book of the series if you can get past the weird sex stuff.
Paul Atreides actions really are never acceptabl\y justified because the later books basically show them to be unjustified. Or at least contradictory. It's a bit confused, but he is shown to be a brutal genocidal dictator, and his son even more so... Paul even alludes to Hitler at one point... It's just that Herbert makes them the protagonist and makes it confusing for the reader how sympathetic they should be.
And we basically just have to take Leto II's word at face value that he was preventing humanity's extinction, but...
By the time of Heretics, Herbert was basically coming right out and saying that prescience in fact alters the timeline rather than "just" predicts it. Which is kind of crazy if you think of two things:
1) Every Guild Navigator using the spice induced prescience to plan and fold space is altering reality
2) Spice comes from an alien being. The only aliens in the Dune universe.
(disclaimer: I don't count Brian Herbert's books & and whatever might be in there... what I read of those made me not want to read more)