A Dune Companion: Characters, Places and Terms in Frank Herbert's Original Six Novels (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 62)

Stick with the glossary in the back of Dune, you will be much more complete in your knowledge of the dune universe. Save yourself the ten bucks.

The first half of this book is a virtually illegible sixty-page essay about how Dune is like fractals because "X within X within X", and, aside from a few mildly interesting points about the monomyth, is basically pointless, and reads like a student trying to impress their professor with their thesaurus skills.The second half is a large glossary of terms seen in the original Frank Herbert novels. While comprehensive, this glossary is misleading in that it seems to cherry pick facts from the Brian Herbert "expanded Dune" novels, as well as what seems to be the authour's own speculation, particularly with regards to birth and death dates of minor characters. If these obscure dates are referenced somewhere canonical, I have never seen them, and the authour provides no sources himself.As a minor additional nitpick, the ebook version has a lot of typos.I don't recommend this to anyone. Hardcore Dune fans will find much a more insightful analysis of Dune in Tim O'Reilly's book "Frank Herbert", available free by the authour online, and a more entertaining non-canonical reference guide to the Dune universe in the Dune Encyclopedia, edited by Dr. Willis McNelly.