I always find reading Dune to be a bit of an odd experience. For the first eighty pages or so, things move quite slowly, a large cast of characters - some more significant than others - are introduced. So much is set up with so little explanation that the novel almost sinks under the weight of its own inventiveness.

Then, somewhere around page 100, everything clicks and I am sucked in until the end of the book - appendices and all.

Dune is one of the very few stories that can genuinely be called epic. In scope and depth, the novel is both massive and brilliantly visualised right down to the smallest detail.