Dune’s Half-Century

The Dragon in the Sea received some nice reviews. Anthony Boucher praised it in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the New York Times compared it to sea-going works by C.S. Forester and Herman Wouk. But readers found the novel confusing, and it didn’t sell particularly well, leaving the 36-year-old Herbert uncertain where to turn next. So he accepted a commission to write something called “They Stopped the Moving Sands.”

However much that sounds like a 1950s sci-fi title, the commission was actually for a non-fiction magazine article about Oregon’s sand dunes and the Department of Agriculture’s attempt to halt their drift by planting them with poverty grasses. The dunes were amazing, Herbert explained in a 1957 letter to his agent: In their undulations, they could “swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways.” He was piling up notes for the article at a furious pace. So many notes, in fact, that he never finished “They Stopped the Moving Sands.” 

Instead, he emerged five years later with a 500-page story called Dune, serialized in 1963 by Analog magazine and published in 1965 as a book by Chilton—best known for its car-repair manuals—after more than 20 other publishers had refused it.

What’s left to say now about Dune, exactly 50 years later? It was a monstrous doorstopper of a book, in the days when sci-fi novels were often short enough that Ace could publish two of them, upside-down to each other, in a single thin volume. With Dune, Frank Herbert (1920-1986) made the breakthrough in science fiction that J. R. R. Tolkien had achieved in fantasy—both of them showing all subsequent writers in their fields how to build what we might call Massively Coherent Universes: with clashes of culture, technology, history, language, politics, and religion all worked out in the story’s background. 

At the same time, Dune is an occasionally sloppy book and oddly paced. It sprawls when it might be compact and shrinks when it might be discursive. How could an author extend his plot maneuvering through hundreds of pages—and then be satisfied with an ending so rushed that even the death of the hero’s infant child in the final apocalyptic battle is only a side note? 

Meanwhile, the prose is sometimes weak, striving for the memorable epigrams it can’t always form. The psychology of the minor characters is ignored at some points and deeply observed at others, which makes those characters flicker in a peculiar way between the two-dimensional walk-ons of myth and the three-dimensional figures of novelistic realism. And the third-person narrator keeps his distance from them by printing what they’re thinking in italics, just so we understand that this is, like, you know, mental speech. 

In fact, the book contains so much italics—with the many poems, song lyrics, and extended quotations from fictional sources printed the same way—that the reader wants to bang it against the nightstand once or twice a chapter. Add up all the problems, and you can see why those publishers rejected Herbert’s manuscript. It had a thousand chances to fail and only one chance of succeeding—which it grasped by being so relentlessly, impossibly, irresistibly interesting. 

Dune won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award for the year’s best science fiction, produced multiple attempts at film versions, spawned five sequels from Herbert (plus another dozen by his son), and became perhaps the most-purchased science fiction book of all time, selling at least 12 million copies.

As far as plot goes, the story is, at its root, a straightforward, old-fashioned tale of a hero. A young man suffers the loss of his rightful inheritance and is forced to hide among a backward people—who, he discovers, are actually brilliant warriors. So he convinces them that he had been chosen by destiny to lead them, a messiah come to claim them. He forms his new people into an army, and together, they reclaim his lost inheritance. 

At the same time, Herbert drops hints throughout the novel that he’s morally suspicious of his own root plot—“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” as one visitor warns the backward folk—and the sequels to Dune would develop those hints into a full renunciation of messianic heroes. 

But it’s hard to renounce heroes unless you have one to start with, and Dune remains more popular than its sequels in part because Herbert accepts the mythopoetic conventions of his heroic tale.

Paul Atreides is the hero’s name—or Muad’Dib, as he comes to be called. As the story opens, Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides, has been granted control of the desert planet Arrakis, sole source of a psychotropic spice called melange, used by both interplanetary pilots (to obtain the glimpses of possible futures they need to navigate space) and a powerful group of religious women (for their empire-preserving soothsaying). The spice makes the planet a treasure trove for the duke, but he suspects his move to Arrakis will prove dangerous.

As, indeed, it does. The emperor, who has uneasy control over a vast span of space, fears the growing power of the duke, and so he arranges the gift of the spice planet as a trap, working with Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, personal and political opponent of the Atreides family, to attack them before they can fully settle on their new planet. 

The attack seems successful, killing the duke and giving the Harkonnens control of the planet’s spice. But the young Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica, escape into the harsh desert, where they fall in with a nomadic people called the Fremen, profoundly mystical and utterly brutal, with a culture completely adapted to their water poverty and their oppression by the planet’s imperial rulers. Renamed Muad’Dib, Paul is the pebble that causes an avalanche: The millions of Fremen hidden in the desert rise up to defeat the Harkonnens and the emperor—and more. Paul may take his place as the new ruler of known space, but even he cannot control the Fremen, who begin, by the novel’s end, to spread their religious jihad-by-the-sword across the universe.

As a story, Dune is not at all bad, but its real fascinations come from the Massively Coherent Universe behind the story. Herbert’s first move of genius was to invent “personal shields,” force fields that render guns and lasers—the whole panoply of distance weapons—ineffective, thereby creating a swashbuckling setting of knives, swords, and the direct physical contact of martial arts. 

His second move of genius was to place his story 21,000 years in the future, long after human technology had made the innovations necessary for the science-fiction elements of the book. In part, that feeds the sense of a stagnant empire and a stagnant human race that needs the Fremen’s universe-shattering jihad. In greater part, though, it allows the author to dismiss the gee-whiz physics of space travel and space weapons. The science in Dune focuses not on physics but on cultural anthropology and, especially, planetary ecology.

Here’s where those USDA-approved poverty grasses on Oregon’s sand dunes come in. Giant worms are responsible for both the lack of free-flowing water on the planet of Arrakis and for the production of the melange spice. And the Fremen have a vision of reclaiming the water trapped in the cycles of the spice desert, reducing the worms’ range, and transforming the rest of the planet to a green paradise. On a schedule they imagine will take hundreds of years to complete, they plant grasses and creosote bushes to lock down the dunes, set out dew collectors to claim every possible drop, and herd the worms away from their plantings.

When Dune first appeared, the ecological notion of a planet as a whole, living, breathing thing still felt fresh and powerful—the planet as seen from outer space. In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt worried about the changes in human perspectives wrought by the existence of orbital spacecraft, while the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog signaled the hippies’ happy embrace of the vision of a planetary ecosystem. But of course, it was the hippies who won, and Dune became one of those strange books that “spoke to a generation,” in the language of the day: There was a dog-eared copy of the novel in the back of every Volkswagen microbus, alongside Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Whether that was the author’s intention—whether any of those authors was really pitching what the tie-dyed crowd of the era made of him—remains beside the point. Still, it’s worth remarking that Frank Herbert doesn’t quite fit the modern environmentalism he’s often credited with having helped to found. The Fremen in Dune, given their vision by a visiting imperial ecologist, don’t want to preserve the planet or erase the human footprint on it: They want to run roughshod over the whole thing, terraforming their desert world to within an inch of its life.

The science of genetics, too, plays a major role in Dune, with the Bene Gesserit, the league of women soothsayers and witches, nearing completion of their millennia-long project to breed a messiah—an effort that Paul (through his Bene Gesserit mother, Jessica) short-circuits by becoming that messiah a generation too early. 

What caught the zeitgeist of the 1960s was not so much the genetics as the religious mysticism that runs through the book. Sweeping tales of cultural anthropology, the rise and fall of empires, had been a staple of science fiction since Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of the early 1950s. Where those stories typically equated religion with superstition, however, Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change—from the Butlerian Jihad that (centuries before Dune begins) had swept away the intelligent computers that threatened humanity to the mystical feeling, shared by almost every important character in the novel, that the moribund culture of the current empire has endangered the future of the human race.

Herbert cleverly uses a Persian-sounding vocabulary for the people and things of the imperial court and an Arabic-sounding vocabulary for the people and things of the planet Arrakis, signaling the parallels of Muhammad’s Muslim rising from the desert to topple a superior but decadent power. (How the Greek-sounding names of the House of Atreides are supposed to fit into that narrative is a problem the author never quite fixes.) But the religion in the book isn’t exactly Islam: It’s some mix of Old Testament text, Islamic sensibility, and Zen enlightenment that makes absolutely no religious sense—unless one reduces religion entirely to its mystical elements. 

No wonder the hippies loved Dune. It shows a universe of powerful, ancient, and rule-bound institutions having reached a kind of equilibrium with one another, including the space pilots’ monopolistic guild, the Bene Gesserit witches, the emperor’s Sardaukar troops, the Suk medical school, and the planet-ruling houses. In the 1960s, it seemed a metaphor for the American institutions of the 1950s that the counterculture wanted to overturn with a new mystical power.

For all that, Frank Herbert presents a deeply grim view of the human prospect. The bulk of people are mere animals, living brute and meaningless lives. Their ostensible betters are mostly monsters, preying on the universe. And the genuinely human path between those inhuman alternatives is narrow, difficult, and unlikely. Even Paul Muad’Dib, with his messianic spice-driven visions of possible futures, has difficulty seeing how to save humankind from its stagnation without destroying it in the unleashing of his jihad.

For all its flaws and oddities, this much certainly remains true 50 years on: Dune is a big book. Big in text, of course, with 576 pages in this new deluxe anniversary edition, which includes an introduction by Michael Dirda. But big in imagination, too. Big in its universe-building and big in its sweep. Big in its sales and big in its impact. To read Dune, even now, is to be drawn into a world of big characters, big ambitions, big thoughts, and big consequences. What more could you want from a science-fiction novel? 

From any novel, for that matter? 

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.