Dune

I'm going to be talking a lot about Dune this month, because hey, there's a movie coming out. What you're reading right here is a discussion of the book Dune, written by Frank Herbert, which I just recently re-read in preparation for said movie coming out. I originally read Dune in high school and liked it, but it had been long enough since I'd picked up the book that when I watched the trailer for the upcoming film I realized I didn't actually recall much, if any, detail regarding the characters or plot. About all I remembered was the general feel of the thing, which I can at least confirm I remembered correctly.

That general feel is "weird", in case you were wondering.

So I grabbed the book which has been sitting on my shelf for years untouched, and started reading. I should add that I also just recently finished The Butlerian Jihad and The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert, Frank's son. They're prequels set in the Dune universe that take place like 1500 years before the events of Dune, and they are, at their core, very, very different styles of book to Frank's original sci-fi epic. So going into Dune I kinda had my expectations subverted simply because I had the wrong taste in my mouth already.

So what is Dune? A lot of people have described it as the Lord of the Rings for sci-fi, but I feel like that might be overstating the creative effort, if not the generic effect. Dune is a story set in the far, far future of humanity, in which humans have colonized extensively across the galaxy, and have become so far removed from our own Earthly cultures that they do, in many ways, appear alien to us. Ancient wars with thinking machines have resulted in a society that is both advanced and strangely primitive from a modern perspective arranged in a sort of capitalist feudalism. The story follows one particular family, the Atreides, as they are tasked by a galactic emperor with taking control of the desert planet Arrakis, home to spice and giant sand worms.

If any of this stuff sounds familiar you may want to recall that Dune was published in 1965. So before Star Wars.

Dune's impact on the genre of sci-fi is undeniable. As an individual publication I would venture to guess that it's responsible for more tropes in the genre than any other single work. Asimov's robot books have had a similar impact but those tropes were spread across decades of novels and short stories, and Heinlein's Starship Troopers approaches Dune's influence but primarily only within the realm of video games. And having just re-read Dune, I do feel comfortable saying that this level of impact is justified.

Because Dune was something truly original and even today still completely unique despite the decades of 'homage' that's been created since. It manages to be so without straying so far from humanity as to become fundamentally unrecognizable (lookin' at you, A Planet Called Treason). It shows a vision of us largely divorced from what you might term as 'humanity', and then displays some altered versions of our best values through the actions the characters take to combat the problems they face. All of this is explored through the lens of planetary ecology and political science, as the 'sci' component of sci-fi. It's not purely optimistic or pessimistic regarding the effects of humanity, because it's not a short story or TV show. Frank Herbert took the space available in his format and used it to explore both the positive and negative aspects of humanity as a whole, from willingness to sacrifice for the greater good to frenzy-fueled holy wars that can result from that sacrifice. But he also explored those concepts quickly and in an engaging way, meaning that the book doesn't drag on or feel excessively preachy.

To avoid spoilers I'll wrap up here. Like all of the best sci-fi Dune shows how the things that make us human also make us strong, and manages to do so without being trite, dismissive, reductive, or rude. It stays interesting right up to the end, and leaves you feeling satisfied but also wanting more. It's a classic for all the right reasons, and I'd say the only thing you need to bear in mind if you're going to read it is that the society shown in those pages, despite ostensibly being made up of humans, is going to feel a little inhuman to you.

Congratulations. Pretty sure that's actually the point.