Positives:
The world building is incredible, it is well thought out and vivid. The characters and story had great potential and was just enough to hold interest.

Negatives:
The book breezed through and brushed over a lot of things, a lot of telling instead of showing, Herbert neutered the entire book by giving the main character

an almost omniscient power

and having him totally rely on it too much, which created an unbelievable amount of plot contrivance.

This also meant most of the time the story (after a certain point) completely lacked any tension or sense of stakes.

The baron was killed off screen by a 4 year old without any confrontation and a mere mention of him being the grandfather of Paul and Alia.

Final Thoughts:

I believe if Herbert created more drawbacks and gave more consequences of Paul's newfound god-like omniscience and how it wasn't something to be relied upon and instead used as a guide for Paul's already finely attuned observational skills, it would have created more stakes as there was room for human error.

I would have preferred to see Paul grow over the years

spent with the Freman

, instead of a time skip. It would have been more enjoyable to either extend the length of the book to include this part of the journey, or spend this book showing Paul's growth from a boy to a man without it being glossed over and expedited, instead leaving the

end battle

for the next book.

I am dumbfounded why people call this the Lord of The Rings of science fiction. It certainly had the potential to be, but I do believe this was rushed and leaned into the prose too much at the trivial moments and held back with the prose at the vital moments. Show, don't tell. It's a brilliant saying and it's because it works.

Tldr: