Dune by Frank Herbert
Review
Dune won the very first Nebula award for Best Novel 1965 and shared the Hugo for Best Novel 1966 with Roger Zelazny's ...And Call Me Conrad (better known now as This Immortal). Among sf fans it must be one of the best known books of the genre. With its successors, it has inspired several screen adaptations, a board game, computer games, many tribute websites and even has a relatively vigorous newsgroup. Readers of Locus have three times voted Dune as the best sf novel of all time. I considered writing a joint review of Dune and the next book on my list, Ender's Game. Both are coming-of-age stories of a Messiah figure, who turns out to be the end product of a carefully engineered breeding programme. Both deal heavily with war; both feature apparently incomprehensible and terrifying alien life-forms. Both novels pretty much established their author's reputation, and built a cult of fans who eagerly bought the many sequels (though in both cases the later volumes are generally agreed to be inferior). Both, indeed, are novelisations of stories originally published in Analog. However the two novels are so powerful individually that they deserve separate treatment. Dune is much the better of the two. It must have surely been at least partially an sf response to the challenge of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (to which Arthur C. Clarke compared it on first publication). Apart from anything else, it is a big fat book (longer, I suspect, than any other two of the Nebula or Hugo nominees for its year put together). The human environment of Dune is rather closely related to that of a medieval fantasy, with a feudal system involving Barons, Dukes, and the Emperor who bestows entire planets as fiefs on his followers. Every ruler has a genetically and mentally enhanced Mentat adviser, who fulfills the role of court wizard à la Merlin; the sect of Bene Gesserit are actually described as witches; the giant worms of Dune guard the immense riches of the planet's spice. Herbert did not stretch himself linguistically as Tolkien had - the languages of his Fremen and Bene Gesserit are much more closely based on Arabic and Hebrew than Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin on any real language. On the other hand Dune is the more daring work in its vision of a whole new planetary ecology: the desert, the spice (essential to space travel), the sandworms, and the adaptations made by the people living there to their environment, while Middle Earth is rarely far from pastoral England or chivalric Europe. The only recent sf that I know attempting anything as ambitious as the Dune project are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss. Wisely, each stopped after the third full novel (with a few spin-offs). After 11 September 2001, Dune once again makes interesting reading. The tough, fanatical, yet noble Arabic-speaking sons of the desert clash with the corrupt leaders of an imperialist civilisation, who find that they have much underestimated their foe. However direct parallels with the present day soon run into the, er, sand. The hero who leads the Fremen to victory is himself a child of the evil Empire; and the main goal of the Fremen - to make their planet a garden rather than a desert - is not obviously incompatible with Paul Atreides' plans for political power as Emperor, whereas al-Qaeda want to destroy western civilisation, not rule it.
1
And of course in our time line in 2001, at the time of writing anyway, it seems that the sons of the desert were overrated as fighters. Herbert's portrayal of the difficult encounter between the two cultures is particularly convincing. Most readers will vividly remember the scene early in the book where Stilgar, a Fremen leader, spits on the table before Paul's father, Duke Leto, as a mark of respect, to the consternation of the Duke's men who have not taken in how significant a tribute of water is on this desert world. Equally effective though more subtle (and lengthy) is a passage describing a dinner party hosted by the Atreides family shortly after, in which various local dignitaries give away more than they intend to about the actual political constellation on the planet. The dual role of the Imperial planetologist who is also the Fremen's overall leader, and the careful manoeuvring of the spice smugglers in and out of the two cultural worlds, reflect this encounter and are also a part of the political intrigues which enrich the book - the Byzantine manoeuvring for power between Duke Atreides, Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor; the treachery of Dr Yueh; the ultimately unsuccessful plots of the Bene Gesserit, who as a female class of political advisers in an otherwise male-dominated society, have a better position than most women got in Tolkien. If the portrayal of culture clash and Machiavellian politics are part of the book's success, its biggest weakness is the handling of Paul Atreides' prophetic mission. The philosophical foundations of his role as Kwisatz Haderach must surely smack rather too much of the Übermensch for today's audience; the rather nasty distinction between "humans" and "animals" made in the first chapter by the Reverend Mother is if anything reinforced by the book's ending. While for most of the book one can feel sympathy for the young man born for leadership trying to get to grips with his fate, once he has got into the stage where his plans are coming to fruition, he stops being interesting; even the villainous Baron Harkonnen expires not with a bang but a whimper. There are a few niggling details that never quite gelled for me. I never quite grokked the impunity of the Harkonnen attack on the Atreides in the first place; does the kanly blood feud overwhelm all prospect of punishment for mass murder and invasion of someone else's imperial fief? This galactic empire doesn't seem to be all it is cracked up to be, with Dr Yueh's imperial conditioning apparently broken down by simple blackmail, and the imperial troops regularly whopped by the Fremen. On a more ecological point, one has to question whether the sandworms really have enough food to satisfy their enormous energy needs. I suppose that if spice can get spaceships across gaps of light-years it can fuel a planetary population of sandworms. (I'll add also James Schellenberg's point that the Fremen seem a little too violent among themselves for viability.) However such minutiae can be ignored in the wealth of detail that is Dune. Postscript, 12 December 2001: My posting of this review to alt.fan.dune provoked howls of anguish from diehard fans. One of them did manage to convince me that there was a credible rationale to the Emperor's support of the Harkonnens in their feud with the Atreides, though perhaps the opacity of the Emperor's motivation reinforces my point that it's not one of the book's strengths. I should clarify that the casual finishing off of the Baron, and Paul's perception while fighting Feyd-Rautha that it doesn't matter which of them wins, make the reader (well, made this reader) wonder why we were supposed to care? On Tolkien and women, I found a fun essay defending Tolkien on this point, "Men Are From Gondor, Women Are From Lothlórien", by Cindy "Anwyn" McNew. I was not completely convinced but she makes a good case. On further investigation I found that the author of the Ground
2
Zero / Sacred Center website had picked up on the parallels between Osama Bin Laden and Paul Atreides before I did. Some people have already speculated fancifully that al-Qaeda takes its name from the Arabic translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. There are a lot of reviews of Dune on the web; particularly recommended are those by Jamie Uder, Alan Evans, Sasha Lohmeier and Tamara Hladik. There are also shorter reviews by John Regehr, Kevin "Dart" Allison, Megan C. Morris, Indi Young, Marvin "Techyo" Vermillion, and a whole bunch on allscifi.com. (See also Steve Parker's Hugo Reviews #12a.) Also useful were a review of two books about Herbert by Walter E Meyers and a set of discussion questions on the lambdasf site.
Dune was joint winner of the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Other novels shortlisted for Hugo: The Squares of the City, by John Brunner; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein; Skylark DuQuesne, by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Other winners of 1966 Hugos: ...And Call Me Conrad aka This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny (joint winner, best novel); "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", by Harlan Ellison (best short fiction).
Dune won the 1965 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Other 1965 nominees for Best Novel: The Star Fox, by Poul Anderson; Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs Rogue Dragon, by Avram Davidson; Dr Bloodmoney aka Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick; The Genocides, by Thomas M. Disch; The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, by G.C. Edmondson; A Plague of Demons, by Keith Laumer; All Flesh is Grass, by Clifford D. Simak; The Clone, by Thomas T. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm; Open Prison aka The Escape Orbit, by James White.
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Other winners of 1965 Nebulas: "The Saliva Tree", by Brian Aldiss (joint winner, best novella); "He Who Shapes", by Roger Zelazny (joint winner, best novella); "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", by Roger Zelazny (best novelette); "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", by Harlan Ellison (best short story).
Other awards
• • •
Winner, 1975 Locus Poll for All Time Best Novel Winner, 1987 Locus Poll for All Time Best SF Novel Winner, 1998 Locus Poll for All Time Best SF Novel before 1990
Novel rankings
Ranks of Hugo and Nebula nominated novels of 1966/65 in Tristrom Cooke's Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List (extended list, version of 26 September 2002 (NB I have now added amazon.com sales rank, as of 25 September 2004, as a point of comparison): Cooke Amazon rank rank 9 3055 Dune, by Frank Herbert 34 11,979 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein 171 25,474 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick 461 393,485 This Immortal aka ...And Call me Conrad, by Roger Zelazny Dr Bloodmoney aka Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After 629 50,430 the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick 695 646,329 All Flesh is Grass, by Clifford D. Simak 1304 274,577 Skylark DuQuesne, by E.E. "Doc" Smith 2165 437,187 The Genocides, by Thomas M. Disch 2438 - The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, by G.C. Edmondson 2818 1,213,780 A Plague of Demons, by Keith Laumer 4078 1,072,208 Squares of the City, by John Brunner 361,152 Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs - 1,207,768 Escape Orbit, by James White
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doc_846434439.doc
Review
Dune won the very first Nebula award for Best Novel 1965 and shared the Hugo for Best Novel 1966 with Roger Zelazny's ...And Call Me Conrad (better known now as This Immortal). Among sf fans it must be one of the best known books of the genre. With its successors, it has inspired several screen adaptations, a board game, computer games, many tribute websites and even has a relatively vigorous newsgroup. Readers of Locus have three times voted Dune as the best sf novel of all time. I considered writing a joint review of Dune and the next book on my list, Ender's Game. Both are coming-of-age stories of a Messiah figure, who turns out to be the end product of a carefully engineered breeding programme. Both deal heavily with war; both feature apparently incomprehensible and terrifying alien life-forms. Both novels pretty much established their author's reputation, and built a cult of fans who eagerly bought the many sequels (though in both cases the later volumes are generally agreed to be inferior). Both, indeed, are novelisations of stories originally published in Analog. However the two novels are so powerful individually that they deserve separate treatment. Dune is much the better of the two. It must have surely been at least partially an sf response to the challenge of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (to which Arthur C. Clarke compared it on first publication). Apart from anything else, it is a big fat book (longer, I suspect, than any other two of the Nebula or Hugo nominees for its year put together). The human environment of Dune is rather closely related to that of a medieval fantasy, with a feudal system involving Barons, Dukes, and the Emperor who bestows entire planets as fiefs on his followers. Every ruler has a genetically and mentally enhanced Mentat adviser, who fulfills the role of court wizard à la Merlin; the sect of Bene Gesserit are actually described as witches; the giant worms of Dune guard the immense riches of the planet's spice. Herbert did not stretch himself linguistically as Tolkien had - the languages of his Fremen and Bene Gesserit are much more closely based on Arabic and Hebrew than Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin on any real language. On the other hand Dune is the more daring work in its vision of a whole new planetary ecology: the desert, the spice (essential to space travel), the sandworms, and the adaptations made by the people living there to their environment, while Middle Earth is rarely far from pastoral England or chivalric Europe. The only recent sf that I know attempting anything as ambitious as the Dune project are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss. Wisely, each stopped after the third full novel (with a few spin-offs). After 11 September 2001, Dune once again makes interesting reading. The tough, fanatical, yet noble Arabic-speaking sons of the desert clash with the corrupt leaders of an imperialist civilisation, who find that they have much underestimated their foe. However direct parallels with the present day soon run into the, er, sand. The hero who leads the Fremen to victory is himself a child of the evil Empire; and the main goal of the Fremen - to make their planet a garden rather than a desert - is not obviously incompatible with Paul Atreides' plans for political power as Emperor, whereas al-Qaeda want to destroy western civilisation, not rule it.
1
And of course in our time line in 2001, at the time of writing anyway, it seems that the sons of the desert were overrated as fighters. Herbert's portrayal of the difficult encounter between the two cultures is particularly convincing. Most readers will vividly remember the scene early in the book where Stilgar, a Fremen leader, spits on the table before Paul's father, Duke Leto, as a mark of respect, to the consternation of the Duke's men who have not taken in how significant a tribute of water is on this desert world. Equally effective though more subtle (and lengthy) is a passage describing a dinner party hosted by the Atreides family shortly after, in which various local dignitaries give away more than they intend to about the actual political constellation on the planet. The dual role of the Imperial planetologist who is also the Fremen's overall leader, and the careful manoeuvring of the spice smugglers in and out of the two cultural worlds, reflect this encounter and are also a part of the political intrigues which enrich the book - the Byzantine manoeuvring for power between Duke Atreides, Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor; the treachery of Dr Yueh; the ultimately unsuccessful plots of the Bene Gesserit, who as a female class of political advisers in an otherwise male-dominated society, have a better position than most women got in Tolkien. If the portrayal of culture clash and Machiavellian politics are part of the book's success, its biggest weakness is the handling of Paul Atreides' prophetic mission. The philosophical foundations of his role as Kwisatz Haderach must surely smack rather too much of the Übermensch for today's audience; the rather nasty distinction between "humans" and "animals" made in the first chapter by the Reverend Mother is if anything reinforced by the book's ending. While for most of the book one can feel sympathy for the young man born for leadership trying to get to grips with his fate, once he has got into the stage where his plans are coming to fruition, he stops being interesting; even the villainous Baron Harkonnen expires not with a bang but a whimper. There are a few niggling details that never quite gelled for me. I never quite grokked the impunity of the Harkonnen attack on the Atreides in the first place; does the kanly blood feud overwhelm all prospect of punishment for mass murder and invasion of someone else's imperial fief? This galactic empire doesn't seem to be all it is cracked up to be, with Dr Yueh's imperial conditioning apparently broken down by simple blackmail, and the imperial troops regularly whopped by the Fremen. On a more ecological point, one has to question whether the sandworms really have enough food to satisfy their enormous energy needs. I suppose that if spice can get spaceships across gaps of light-years it can fuel a planetary population of sandworms. (I'll add also James Schellenberg's point that the Fremen seem a little too violent among themselves for viability.) However such minutiae can be ignored in the wealth of detail that is Dune. Postscript, 12 December 2001: My posting of this review to alt.fan.dune provoked howls of anguish from diehard fans. One of them did manage to convince me that there was a credible rationale to the Emperor's support of the Harkonnens in their feud with the Atreides, though perhaps the opacity of the Emperor's motivation reinforces my point that it's not one of the book's strengths. I should clarify that the casual finishing off of the Baron, and Paul's perception while fighting Feyd-Rautha that it doesn't matter which of them wins, make the reader (well, made this reader) wonder why we were supposed to care? On Tolkien and women, I found a fun essay defending Tolkien on this point, "Men Are From Gondor, Women Are From Lothlórien", by Cindy "Anwyn" McNew. I was not completely convinced but she makes a good case. On further investigation I found that the author of the Ground
2
Zero / Sacred Center website had picked up on the parallels between Osama Bin Laden and Paul Atreides before I did. Some people have already speculated fancifully that al-Qaeda takes its name from the Arabic translation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. There are a lot of reviews of Dune on the web; particularly recommended are those by Jamie Uder, Alan Evans, Sasha Lohmeier and Tamara Hladik. There are also shorter reviews by John Regehr, Kevin "Dart" Allison, Megan C. Morris, Indi Young, Marvin "Techyo" Vermillion, and a whole bunch on allscifi.com. (See also Steve Parker's Hugo Reviews #12a.) Also useful were a review of two books about Herbert by Walter E Meyers and a set of discussion questions on the lambdasf site.
Dune was joint winner of the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Other novels shortlisted for Hugo: The Squares of the City, by John Brunner; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein; Skylark DuQuesne, by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Other winners of 1966 Hugos: ...And Call Me Conrad aka This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny (joint winner, best novel); "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", by Harlan Ellison (best short fiction).
Dune won the 1965 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Other 1965 nominees for Best Novel: The Star Fox, by Poul Anderson; Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs Rogue Dragon, by Avram Davidson; Dr Bloodmoney aka Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick; The Genocides, by Thomas M. Disch; The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, by G.C. Edmondson; A Plague of Demons, by Keith Laumer; All Flesh is Grass, by Clifford D. Simak; The Clone, by Thomas T. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm; Open Prison aka The Escape Orbit, by James White.
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Other winners of 1965 Nebulas: "The Saliva Tree", by Brian Aldiss (joint winner, best novella); "He Who Shapes", by Roger Zelazny (joint winner, best novella); "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", by Roger Zelazny (best novelette); "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", by Harlan Ellison (best short story).
Other awards
• • •
Winner, 1975 Locus Poll for All Time Best Novel Winner, 1987 Locus Poll for All Time Best SF Novel Winner, 1998 Locus Poll for All Time Best SF Novel before 1990
Novel rankings
Ranks of Hugo and Nebula nominated novels of 1966/65 in Tristrom Cooke's Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List (extended list, version of 26 September 2002 (NB I have now added amazon.com sales rank, as of 25 September 2004, as a point of comparison): Cooke Amazon rank rank 9 3055 Dune, by Frank Herbert 34 11,979 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein 171 25,474 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick 461 393,485 This Immortal aka ...And Call me Conrad, by Roger Zelazny Dr Bloodmoney aka Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After 629 50,430 the Bomb, by Philip K. Dick 695 646,329 All Flesh is Grass, by Clifford D. Simak 1304 274,577 Skylark DuQuesne, by E.E. "Doc" Smith 2165 437,187 The Genocides, by Thomas M. Disch 2438 - The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, by G.C. Edmondson 2818 1,213,780 A Plague of Demons, by Keith Laumer 4078 1,072,208 Squares of the City, by John Brunner 361,152 Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs - 1,207,768 Escape Orbit, by James White
4
doc_846434439.doc