Dune by Frank Herbert

This was not my first time at this rodeo. I first read Dune somewhere around age 15, and I re-read it (and its sequel, Dune Messiah, and sometimes the third book, Children of Dune, and always the then-last book in the series, Chapterhouse: Dune) many times. In fact it was something of a yearly ritual of mine, to pick up Dune and whichever sequels I chose during the holidays every year for a very satisfying re-read. I estimate that I’ve read books 1, 2, and 6 at least a dozen times each, and book 3 perhaps half a dozen times. (I only bothered with books 4 and 5 once each; they didn’t do it for me.)

However, life is short and there are so many great books out there that I will never have time to read, and over the years I became a busier person. When you only finish about a book a week, you become much more selective about what you spend your precious reading time on, and you think hard before going back to something you are already thoroughly familiar with. So, I gradually lost my annual Dune habit. In fact, when my stepson became interested in Dune earlier this year, I realized that it had been at least 15 years since I’d read it—maybe more; I think the last time was around the time the TV miniseries came out in 2000.

It was time to revisit Arrakis.

For anyone who has not read Dune (and also, I hope, not seen any of the screen adaptations—all of them so far are hugely problematic in my opinion and I would be sad to think that they were your first experience of this universe, though if you’re already a fan they’re worth watching)—for anyone not already familiar with this work, the incredible thing, the thing that impressed the hell out of everyone back in 1965 when it was originally published and still impresses new readers today, is the world-building. Nobody had attempted anything like it before, and damn few have succeeded since.

In Herbert’s universe, humanity has spread to the stars and their interstellar civilization is still recovering from a cataclysmic war, the Butlerian Jihad, which resulted in a universal ban on “thinking machines” (basically any computer at all). Humanity, partly as a result of the jihad, has attained amount and degree of diversity that is unimaginable by today’s standards. Some people, even some entire peoples, have been genetically modified and/or deeply, intensively trained to take the place of the thinking machines that previously made an interplanetary civilization possible.

All of these people are knit together in a neo-feudal empire ruled by a theoretically absolute ruler, Emperor Shaddam IV. He holds the Landsraad (a political entity composed of all the noble houses under Shaddam’s rule) and CHOAM (the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, an organization that controls all above-board trade in the known universe) in his imperial pockets. However, his power is balanced by that of the Spacing Guild, who hold an absolute monopoly on all interstellar travel, and a shadowy sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose motivations are hard to discern and whose members are everywhere.

All of these organizations are completely dependent on a highly addictive substance called melange, or more often, simply “spice.” Spice confers health and longevity in small doses and a variety of utterly necessary mental powers (no computers, remember? But interstellar civilization) in large doses.

And this spice, it turns out, can’t be synthesized. It can only be mined, and only on one planet: Arrakis, nicknamed “Dune” because the entire planet is a deep-desert ecosystem, aside from small habitable areas near the poles. Mining spice is incredibly dangerous; special mobile factories must be flown into the deep desert, where they face constant danger from the planet’s “wild” inhabitants, the Fremen; immense, unpredictable, and astonishingly destructive coriolis storms; and, most of all, the planet’s signature lifeform, the sandworms.

Sandworms vary in size from merely half a dozen meters to large enough to swallow an entire spice factory in one gulp. And swallow them they do, given the opportunity; the sandworms protect the spice sands. Always, without exception, a sandworm will appear at any excavation site. The question is when, and whether a given worm is sighted early enough for the mining machinery and personnel to be safely evacuated.

Arrakis, then, is existentially important to the Empire, and also extremely difficult to govern. As the story begins, Duke Leto Atreides has just won Dune as a fiefdom from his enemy, the morally and physically disgusting Baron Harkonnen. Leto, his Bene Gesserit concubine, Jessica, and their 15-year-old son, Paul, all must leave their beautiful homeworld to take possession of this incredibly tough nut. Of course it’s a trap; Leto and his family are slated for betrayal and assassination. The noble duke nevertheless does his best to successfully govern Arrakis in spite of his powerful enemy’s plots.

He fails, of course. (It would only be a mildly interesting story if he succeeded.) But his son and concubine survive, spirited away to the deep desert, which turns out to be more inhabited than anyone but the inhabitants realized—and it turns out they have plans of their own for their planet. The destiny of the entire human universe will hinge on one fifteen-year-old boy and the fallout from an evil baron’s petty machinations.

This is a book that contains a vast civilization, a carefully-thought-out planetary ecosystem, and a fascinating array of characters. For me, though, it’s a book of moments. I can thumb through these moments in my mind as easily, and almost as meaningfully, as my own memories. There’s the moment when Jessica is overseeing the unpacking in their new home and trying to decide whether she can get away with not displaying the portrait of her duke’s father and the taxidermed head of the bull that killed him in the dining room. The moment when Paul uses a compass, a few precious drops of water, and some real Boy Scout ingenuity to save his and his mother’s life when they are buried in sand. The moment when Paul and Chani meet and he recognizes her from his dreams.

There are a thousand such moments in this book. Reading it is like dipping my hand into a chest full of pearls and coming up holding a strand where one perfect orb follows another, and another, and another, each one deeply lustrous, and each following the next because how could it be otherwise? I honestly can’t tell to what degree the vividness, clarity, and (once you’ve read them) inevitability-in-retrospect of all the moments is a function of how well-written the book is, and to what degree I feel that way because I read it repeatedly at an impressionable age. I do know that inevitability is a large part of what the book is about, and that Herbert won both the Hugo and the Nebula for it in large part because he had created such a believable universe. It’s considered a classic for a reason.

If you’ve never read this book, read it. If you haven’t read it in a while, revisit it. It stands up to the test of time.