>>76908085 & 6 are essentially one book that is so massive it had to be split into two volumes that are merely huge. I'm just happy that Frank Herbert lived long enough to finish the core series as he envisioned it. He died criminally young. It makes me want to weep whenever I realize that he could have written books for another 15 or 20 years. He was just beginning to collaborate with some younger authors, such as Bill Ransom with The Jesus Incident (a book that rivals Dune in scope and intensity). A glimpse of what might-have-been.
I also always recommend The Dosadai Experiment as another work of his that was contemporary to Dune, and just as out there. Dune was a social and political thought experiment about scarcity, using water and spice as allegories to petrochemical dependance. The Dosadai Experiment is a thought experiment about intense population concentration in a hostile environment with limited resources and no escape. It's really something of a companion novel to Dune from a sociological perspective ... in addition to being a head-exploding story.
