If you liked Dune

01 / Movie · 1962 · David Lean

Lawrence of Arabia

Matches: A chosen one you should question

A British officer is embraced by the desert tribes he joins in revolt, and starts to believe the legend they build around him.

Herbert drew on T. E. Lawrence's story when he wrote Paul Atreides, and you can see it in every scene of an outsider becoming a desert people's prophet. David Lean's desert photography is also the model for every sand-and-sky composition in Villeneuve's film. Like Paul, Lawrence comes to believe the legend, and the film makes you worry about him for it.

It runs nearly four hours with an intermission, and its portrayal of Arab characters reflects its era.

02 / Movie · 2017 · Denis Villeneuve

Blade Runner 2049

Matches: Monumental scale

A replicant officer uncovers a secret that could change what it means to be human, in a future of rain, smog and orange dust.

This is Villeneuve working at the same monumental scale just before Dune, with Roger Deakins's Oscar-winning photography doing what Greig Fraser's does on Arrakis. If what you loved was the feeling of the image itself, the huge empty spaces and slow reveals, this is the closest match.

It is long, slow and quiet. It works best on the biggest screen you have and with no distractions.

A princess in a poisoned, post-war world tries to understand the toxic jungle and its giant insects while two kingdoms prepare to burn it.

Nausicaä shares Dune's ecological heart: a hostile landscape that turns out to be a living system the powerful refuse to understand, and giant creatures treated with awe. Hayao Miyazaki made it just before Studio Ghibli was founded. Its heroine is the hopeful mirror of Paul, a savior who refuses violence.

The film compresses a much longer manga, so some politics move quickly.

A thief is pulled into the early days of a rebellion against the Empire, and the series shows exactly how ordinary people are crushed or radicalized.

Andor is the Star Wars story for people who liked Dune's politics more than its mysticism. It is about how an empire works day to day, through bureaucrats, prisons and the economics of occupied planets, and how resistance gets built from those pressures.

The first three episodes are a slow setup; the series finds its pace after them.

A robed figure crosses an enormous desert toward a distant mountain, sometimes alongside another anonymous player you can only communicate with in chimes.

Journey turns the feeling of Dune's sand into play. Sliding down golden dunes, sheltering from wind and walking through ruins of a lost civilization make the desert feel both beautiful and indifferent. There are no words in it at all, and like Villeneuve's film it plays as myth.

It is short, about two to three hours, and has almost no challenge. That is part of its design.

A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and sets up a plan to shorten the dark age that follows, a plan that plays out over centuries.

Foundation is the other great foundation stone of political science fiction, and reading it shows how differently Herbert and Asimov saw history. Where Dune is about one man changing the universe, Foundation is about forces too big for any one person.

The characters are thin and change every few chapters. It is a book of ideas more than people.

A group of pilgrims travels to a world where a murderous creature waits by mysterious tombs, and each tells the story of why they came.

Hyperion matches Dune's density, its blend of religion, politics and far-future technology, and its sense that faith can be a weapon. Structured like The Canterbury Tales, each pilgrim's story is in a different genre, so it is also one of the most varied books in science fiction. It won the Hugo Award.

It ends without resolving its main story; you need the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion.