There are three great novels that I read as an early adolescent that I would take to a desert island if I ever needed to be set up for decades of rereading: The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “Watership Down” and “Dune.” I’ve written more in the past on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and even on Richard Adams’s great rabbit epic than on Frank Herbert’s magnum opus. So I can’t let the occasion of “Dune: Part Two” and its imperial command of the box office pass without some kind of comment. The first is about the story’s contemporary resonance. What’s getting less attention, and what I want to highlight, is the larger civilizational dynamic that the book sets up, and how it speaks to our own moment.

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Persons: Richard Adams’s, Frank Herbert’s, Denis Villeneuve’s, What’s