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Dune (novel)

1965 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert

  • 47 min read
  • 10 chapters
The front cover of Dune by Frank Herbert
John Schoenherr · Public domain

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Dune is set in the distant future in a feudal interstellar society, descended from terrestrial humans, in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs. It tells the story of young Paul Atreides, whose family reluctantly accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis. While the planet is an inhospitable and sparsely populated desert wasteland, it is the only source of melange or "spice", an enormously valuable drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities. Melange is also necessary for space navigation, which requires a kind of multidimensional awareness and foresight that only the drug provides. As melange can only be produced on Arrakis, control of the planet is a coveted and dangerous undertaking. The story explores the multilayered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion as the factions of the empire confront each other in a struggle for the control of Arrakis and its spice.

Herbert wrote five sequels: Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune. Following Herbert's death in 1986, his son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson continued the series in over a dozen additional novels since 1999.

Adaptations of the novel to cinema have been notoriously difficult and complicated. In the 1970s, cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky attempted to make a film based on the novel. After three years of development, the project was canceled due to a constantly growing budget. In 1984, a film adaptation directed by David Lynch was released to mostly negative responses from critics and failure at the box office, although it later developed a cult following. The book was also adapted into the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune. A second film adaptation, directed by Denis Villeneuve, was released on October 21, 2021, to positive reviews. It went on to be nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, ultimately winning six. Villeneuve's film covers roughly the first half of the original novel; a sequel, which covers the second half, was released on March 1, 2024, to critical acclaim. A third film is set to release on December 18, 2026, based on Dune Messiah, the sequel to Dune.

The series has also been used as the basis for several board, role-playing, and video games.

Since 2009, the names of planets from the Dune novels have been adopted for the real-life nomenclature of plains and other features on Saturn's moon Titan.

Origins

After his novel The Dragon in the Sea was published in 1957, Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, at the north end of the Oregon Dunes. Here, the United States Department of Agriculture was attempting to use poverty grasses to stabilize the sand dunes. Herbert claimed in a letter to his literary agent, Lurton Blassingame, that the moving dunes could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways." Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands", was never completed (and only published decades later in The Road to Dune), but its research sparked Herbert's interest in ecology and deserts.

Herbert further drew inspiration from Native American mentors like "Indian Henry" (the name Herbert's son recalls him using for a man otherwise likely called Henry Martin, of the Hoh tribe) and Howard Hansen. Both Martin and Hansen grew up on the Quileute reservation near Herbert's hometown. According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, Hansen regularly shared his writing with Herbert. "White men are eating the earth," Hansen told Herbert in 1958, after sharing a piece on the effect of logging on the Quileute reservation. "They're gonna turn this whole planet into a wasteland, just like North Africa." The world could become a "big dune," Herbert responded in agreement. Herbert began to consider an inspirational question for his fiction: "What if I had an entire planet that was a desert?" He applied to this to his developing concerns about religious leaders and messianic social changes in history.

Herbert believed that feudalism was a natural condition humans fell into, where some led and others gave up the responsibility of making decisions and just followed orders. He found that desert environments have historically given birth to several major religions with messianic impulses. He decided to join his interests together so he could play religious and ecological ideas against each other. In addition, he was influenced by the story of Lawrence of Arabia and the "messianic overtones" in Lawrence's involvement in the Arab Revolt during World War I. In an early version of Dune, the hero was actually very similar to Lawrence of Arabia, but Herbert decided the plot was too straightforward and added more layers to his story.

Herbert drew heavy inspiration also from Lesley Blanch's The Sabres of Paradise (1960), a narrative history recounting a mid-19th-century conflict in the Caucasus between rugged Caucasian Muslim tribes and the expanding Russian Empire. Language used on both sides of that conflict become terms in Herbert's world—Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes a battle language of humans spread across the galaxy; kanly, a word for blood feud in the 19th-century Caucasus, represents a feud between Dune's noble Houses; sietch and tabir are both words for camp borrowed from Ukrainian Cossacks (of the Pontic–Caspian steppe).

Herbert also borrowed some lines which Blanch stated were Caucasian proverbs. "To kill with the point lacked artistry", used by Blanch to describe the Caucasus peoples' love of swordsmanship, becomes in Dune "Killing with the tip lacks artistry", a piece of advice given to a young Paul during his training. "Polish comes from the city, wisdom from the hills", a Caucasian aphorism, turns into a desert expression: "Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert".

Another potential source of inspiration for Dune was Herbert's alleged experiences with psilocybin and cultivating mushrooms, according to mycologist Paul Stamets's account of meeting Herbert in the 1980s:

Frank went on to tell me that much of the premise of Dune—the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant sand worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Freman (the cerulean blue of Psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserits (influenced by the tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico)—came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.

It should be noted though that this claim by Stamets' is thus far not corroborated by Herberts family.

Herbert spent the next five years researching, writing, and revising. He wrote the majority of the initial Dune manuscript in San Francisco, where his family relocated in 1960 for his wife's job in advertising.

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