One can eas­i­ly imag­ine a read­er enjoy­ing both The Lord of the Rings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fan­ta­sy were pub­lished in the form of a series of long nov­els begin­ning in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; both cre­ate elab­o­rate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecol­o­gy and lan­guage; both seri­ous­ly (and these days, unfash­ion­ably) con­cern them­selves with the theme of what con­sti­tutes hero­ic action; both have even inspired mul­ti­ple big-bud­get Hol­ly­wood spec­ta­cles. The read­er equal­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Her­bert turns out to be a more elu­sive crea­ture than we may expect, but per­haps that should­n’t sur­prise us, giv­en Tolkien’s own atti­tude toward Dune. “It is impos­si­ble for an author still writ­ing to be fair to anoth­er author work­ing along the same lines,” Tolkien wrote in 1966 to a fan who’d sent him a copy of Her­bert’s book, which had come out the year before. “In fact I dis­like DUNE with some inten­si­ty, and in that unfor­tu­nate case it is much the best and fairest …