Dune

This discussion of Frank Herbert's Dune contains spoilers and presumes the reader has either already read the novel or does not care if he or she learns how it turns out before he or she reads it.

Of course, this notice presumes that the item has readers, so it may all be moot.

Since Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have been churning out page after page of goings on in the "Duniverse" of Frank Herbert's Dune, it might be hard to remember that the original book, published in 1965, owns such a monumental status in science fiction.

It almost didn't. Frank Herbert's manuscript was rejected by 20 publishers before finally finding its home with Chilton -- best known as the house that prints those great auto repair guides. Copies of the first edition have gone for as much as $10,000 in auctions. Herbert had previously serialized it in Analog magazine, but the version he was shopping for book publication was longer and much more elaborate.

The ideas that would become Dune started, Herbert said, when he researched how certain kinds of grasses would anchor sand dunes in place to keep them from overcoming the nearby city of Florence, OR. The idea of sand dunes that could encroach and even cover up parts of a city put his mind to thinking about ecology and gave him the suggestion of the desert planet Arrakis, on which most of the action of Dune is set. His initial ideas about the book were different than what came out; Brian Herbert and Anderson wrote a novel from them called Spice Planet that was published in the 2005 collection The Road to Dune. This version focuses much more on ecological, mystical and theological themes than does the originally published version of the novel.

THE STORY

Some 20,000 years from now, Duke Leto Atreides is the feudal lord of the planet Caladan. But intrigue in the interstellar Imperium has led his enemies to combine forces with the Emperor, who sends Leto and his household to the desert planet Arrakis, called Dune. Arrakis is the home of the giant sandworms, which make a drug/spice called melange. Melange allows spaceship pilots to navigate faster than light ships without harm because it grants a limited prescience or knowledge of the future. The Imperium can't function without melange and Arrakis is the only place to get it, so it seems that the Emperor is giving Leto a great gift. Leto knows better.

His ancient enemies, the House Harkonnen, have had control of Arrakis and Leto suspects that the Emperor plans to use Baron Harkonnen as his weapon to remove Leto. But he can see no way out of the trap so he, his concubine Lady Jessica and their teenage son Paul move to Arrakis. Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, a kind of religious order of women who practice mental disciplines that allow them to detect truth and falsehood. Secretly, they are trying to manipulate breeding among the high nobles of the Empire to produce a male Bene Gesserit, called the Kwisatz Haderach. They suspect Paul may be this person and want to watch him closely; if he is he could help open up human knowledge and awareness beyond anyone's imagining.

On Arrakis, the Baron's plot comes to pass; Leto is killed and Paul and Jessica are thought dead after they barely escape into the great desert. There they are found by a tribe of Fremen, the tribes who dwell in Arrakis's deepest desert. Eventually they are accepted by the tribe and Paul's abilities and experiences with the melange spice push him to leadership among the Fremen, who call him Muad'Dib. Two or so years later, at the head of their nearly invincible army, he attacks the forces of Baron Harkonnen, who has returned to the planet. The Baron is defeated and killed; Paul becomes heir to the Emperor through an arranged marriage to Princess Irulan. Although he will never marry his true love Chani -- the mother of the son killed in the raids -- because she is a commoner, he pledges to her that his marriage to Irulan is for state reasons only and that it will never be a real union.

OTHER WORDS

Herbert's several years of studying the effect of grasses on the dunes in Oregon sparked some serious consideration of ecological matters, and ecology plays a large part in the story of Dune. The gigantic sandworms that make the melange spice come from a kind of jellyfish-like life form called "sand trout." When sand trout came to Arrakis, they began encysting its water supply, because water was dangerous to the adult sandworms. Eventually they changed the biosphere from a normal wet planet to one almost devoid of water, which allowed the sandworms themselves to flourish. Some of them are hundreds of yards long. Paul's escape and connection to the Fremen is aided by the Imperial Planetologist, in fact, a man who has helped the Fremen calculate the amount of water they will need to reintroduce a more human-hospitable envrironment.

Many of the themes of the novel can be seen through ecological lenses. The Harkonnen forces dimiss the Fremen as a rabble, unable to organize or fight in any coordinated fashion, and believe their efforts to wipe them out have rendered them irrelevant. But they control only a small portion of the planet and they ignore vast sections of the deep desert, failing to realize that the harsh environment has bred a very tough group of people who are anything but an undisciplined rabble. Duke Leto is betrayed by a member of his household he thought incorruptible, as a garden might be overgrown by a weed that at first looks like an ordinary plant. Paul's choice of "muad'dib" as his public Fremen name connects him to a tough little creature (related to a kangaroo mouse), that fits into the desert rather than try to force the desert to fit it.

Reading Dune again as an adult shows a number of these features maybe not appreciated earlier. The large role of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist who helps Paul and Jessica escape, shows to better advantage to readers who look for features other than the main growth of a hero narrative. Through Kynes' teaching, the Fremen have gathered water to ease the harsh desert character of their planet. He holds an almost prophetic significance for them, and his aid to Paul is later viewed in a sort of John the Baptist manner when Paul's role with his movement reaches messianic levels.

Dune also is one of the rare science fiction works to really grapple with religion and its centrality to human life. Rather than dismiss or ignore it like many writers do, he demonstrates how the Fremen's devotion to Paul as their leader does take on worshipful aspects. Paul's prescient visions, brought on by exposure to the melange spice, help fuel this even against his own wishes. He fears the vision of Fremen armies sweeping the Imperium in a jihad to bring worlds under his control, even as some of  the choices he has to make bring that vision closer to reality. Characters will quote "The Orange Catholic Bible," a syncretistc work made many thousands of years earlier by a conference of religious and spiritual leaders that combines teaching and ideas from many religions. The Fremen are the descendants of "Zensunni Wanderers," a persecuted sect of "buddhislamists" who follow a combination of Buddhism and Islam.

Some of the ideas and teachings that might result from this combined sect show in the organization and words of the Fremen, but Herbert doesn't spend a lot of time following them up. Of course, he already has a long novel and so his room to dally in the literary alleys of his universe is limited.

The length probably also kept Herbert from telling how Paul rose in leadership of the Fremen and how they squeezed the Harkonnens back to a small part of the planet. We close a section with Paul beginning to learn Fremen ways and we rejoin him when he is an experienced desert warrior only needing a solo ride on one of the sandworms to cement his status. The gap is a little jarring.

Herbert also fumbles the narrative as he brings it to a close. Paul's sister Alia, conceived just before Duke Leto's death, sneaks a poisoned needle with her when she is captured and kills the evil Baron Harkonnen as the Fremen defeat both Harkonnen and Imperial forces. On the one hand it's fitting, as the Baron's mode of operation has been behind-the-scenes manipulation and exploitation of his enemies' weaknesses. That he dies from poison at the hands of a seemingly helpless child fits, but it leaves the major confrontation to be between Paul and the Baron's nephew, the mostly heretofore offstage Feyd-Rautha.

Paul's infant son dies as well in an Imperial counterattack, but Herbert gives neither he nor his consort Chani any onscreen grief; we only learn about this tragedy through an offhand comment from someone else.

Reading Dune now, some 35 years after tackling it for the first time, I can see a good deal more humor lurking in Herbert's dialogue and narrative. It's more adult, subtler and -- forgive the phrase -- much drier than teenage me could see. But it has to labor pretty hard to leaven Herbert's Cecil B. Demille-styled dialogue and his frequent returns to Paul's impending feelings of dread. Dune also takes knocks because the female characters generally only react to what the men around them are doing instead of acting on their own and because the only overtly gay character is the evil Baron Harkonnen. Those are mostly unjustified complaints; much of the story we have comes from the work of the Bene Gesserit  sisterhood, after all. It's their plan that has created the foretold Kwisatz Haderach, and it's Jessica's choice to bear Leto a son that disrupts that plan. As for the Baron, I don't remember thinking of him as gay, since he never references relations with adult men. He's a pederast more than anything else, and that trait's used by Herbert as one more example of how he's governed by his appetites. Another is his weight -- he's said to be 400 kilos, which is more than 800 pounds and he uses personal anti-gravity devices to help bear his grotesque bulk.

UNNECESSARY WORDS?

Though Dune's concluding sequences may be a little bit weak, they definitely provide an ending. But sequels followed, and they can be roughly sorted into three groups. The first are two more books that purport to complete Paul's story, 1969's Dune Messiah and 1976's Children of Dune. These make the original Dune trilogy. Each, frankly, provides a good ending point for the narrative even though they only serve to weaken the strength of the story in the original novel.

But Herbert later released three more Dune novels and had the outline together for more, which were eventually finished by a collaboration of his son Brian and sci-fi novelist Kevin Anderson. This second group of sequels carries the story forward several thousands of years and finishes out with gholas (or special kinds of clones) of the original characters preparing to remake a planet into the image of the destroyed Arrakis after defeating a ghola of Baron Harkonnen and the forces that brought him back. When the last novel of a series brings you back to the same place you started, you way very well wonder why you spent the money. Neither Herbert's own work or the Brian Herbert/Anderson collaboration offer the same depth of ecological and theological reflection of the original novel.

The third group of sequels are actually "prequels" that chronicle events leading up to the universe we entered in the first book. They cover events many thousands of years before those of the original novel as well as those that happen a few years before that curtain goes up. Some newer ones are "interquels," or stories set inside the timeline of the original trilogy. They also fall short of the first Dune's reflection on the human condition and the other issues central to that novel. They can be omitted without losing any of the impact of Dune as a standalone. Although these hundreds of thousands of words are supposedly intended to explore the "Duniverse" in more detail and depth, they really only serve to -- and again, please forgive the phrase -- water it down.