on top of that, it was revolutionary for it's time. Nothing like it. 

How though? I got fairly far into the book and got little out of it. Does it pay off in some way down the line? Is it just a really, really slow burn? World seems cool but I was sold on it being star wars for adults. What made it revolutionary?

Btw. I quit the book when Paul is with the desert people and then it's a few years later, a bit after that. 

At the time of Dune's release, the most common sci fi novels were of the Sword and Planet genre, think John Carter of Mars, great universe also, but, common action scifi, Frank comes and introduces this lore rich universe that focused more on the politics, the humanity of the human race, just themes that no other scifi universe was offering. I highly implore you to give it another chance. Don't focus too hard on the characters, but more on the universe and it's lore. I think the book is fantastic from start to finish, but really picks up a bit after where you stopped. As I said though, it is a very long book. Almost 1,000 pages. 

I forget how old this book actually is..I may well do so, I have a few audible tokens so I could use it as background while playing games. I do know Paul becomes a great hero and I'm very much interested to see what the visions are all about. Thanks man. 

Of course, dude! Nothing like a good book to escape reality. My favorite character in the book was an early character, Dr. Yueh, which was my main reasoning for hating the new movies, they did Dr. Yeuh dirty. Legit, cut out all of his dialogue from the book basically, such an important character. 

Dune (talking about the book) is so many things. Aside being scifi adventure story and power play like GoT or Godfather, it gets to so many themes: society, religion, evolution, economy, ecology, and how all of these interact.
I feel the biggest idea is speculation about to what extremes a human being can be developed and evolved, physically and mentally. There are variety of superhero like capabilities. Some of those slip to scifi/fantasy, but many are a good question of how far could human go. And this gives characters that are admirable the same way as Sherlock Holmes or Batman. Which is what's wrong with the new movie (still haven't seen 2), these pinnacles of humanity have been nerfed to whiny b*tches.
Yet every character is somehow slightly flawed, whether by guilt, obsession for duty, cold bloodedness, arrogance... (Duke Leto is the only really too perfectly good person. But even for him, I mentioned obsession for duty; Atreides could've gone renegade and avoided all of this happening...)

Lots of great stuff mentioned here. I'll add a couple more:

Novels: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Read this and you'll see where Mass Effect got some of its ideas. Massive scope.

Games: SOMA. Fucking fantastic setting and story.

**EDIT**

Oops. I guess I didn't read the "last 10 years" part. Revelation Space is still awesome though.

SOMA deserves to be up there, I found it a bit of a drag to play so I'd not score it a 10 but the ending twist/scenario made it so worth every second and the themes it deals with are intense.

I'll add revelation space to my amazon wishlist, Alister Reynolds name seems familiar.  

He's a great writer. I recently re-read Pushing Ice from him. Great novel (separate from the Revelation Space series) that starts not all that far in the future yet ends at the end of time. I'm tempted to re-read the Revelation Space series as well.

I can also recommend Lary Niven's Ringworld, where Halo got its ideas from.

Great North Road from Peter F. Hamilton is also one that stuck with me. Lots of suspense and amazing ideas for solving crimes in the future.

Well, I suppose I could recommend Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars all 3 novels by Kim Stanley Robinson. Originally released in the 90s, gave a very vivid and strong view on how cultivating Mars would be. He wrote a new one a few years ago called Red Moon, but just wasn't as good or gripping as the Mars series.