Dune

Herbert's 1965 novel is set in a feudal interstellar empire where computers are forbidden, having been banned after a war against thinking machines, so human specialists perform their functions. Mentats calculate, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood breeds and trains for political control, and the Spacing Guild depends on a spice found only on the desert planet Arrakis to fold space.

The plot follows Paul Atreides after his family is given control of Arrakis as a trap, is destroyed by the rival Harkonnens with imperial support, and Paul takes refuge among the Fremen, the desert population whose culture the Bene Gesserit had seeded with a messianic prophecy generations earlier. Paul uses that prophecy, becomes their leader, and takes the empire.

Herbert's stated purpose was a warning about charismatic leaders. He said the superhero is a disaster for humanity, and the novel shows Paul seeing the jihad his rise will cause, killing billions, and being unable to prevent it. Readers frequently miss this, which is why Herbert wrote Dune Messiah to make the point unavoidable. The elements most relevant to a business readership are the treatment of a single resource controlling an entire economy, the ecological argument about long-term planetary transformation, the depiction of a religion deliberately engineered as a control mechanism, and the plans within plans structure of competing factions.

The book is long, the invented vocabulary is dense, and Herbert writes internal monologue heavily. The politics are feudal by construction, and the treatment of the Fremen draws on Arab and Islamic sources in ways that have drawn criticism as an outsider's use of another culture. Read it for the resource-control and manufactured-religion arguments.