I’ve been a fan of Dune through David Lynch’s 1984 movie; the miniseries in 2000; and, mostly, through the 2001 game Emperor Battle for Dune. It was one of the first games I played over the internet with my friends and I have a great deal of nostalgic fondness for the story, the world, and its characters. I decided to finally read the book last year before the release of the new movie.
Dune has built up a massive following since its release in 1965. Before Star Wars and Star Trek, Frank Herbert had built a universe set in the future based on a feudal system. It’s an imaginative science fiction novel with elements of kings and queens, battles and alliances, and loyalty and treachery common to the fantasy genre. The Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, the Spacing Guild, the Imperial Sardaukar, and the Bene Geserit are all separate factions with separate designs on power. That power comes from control of the desert planet Arrakis – the only source of the spice Melange in the known universe. The spice is used for space travel and also acts a psychoactive drug that amplifies awareness and prolongs life. Also, giant sandworms guard this spice! It’s an absorbing universe and everything I had seen so far had led me to believe I would like this book.
50 years on, Dune is still very impressive in scale. Although the world is complex, the story is a simple one. The protagonist of the story, Paul Atreides, is stranded on the desert planet of Arrakis when his family is betrayed and killed by a rival family. From here it feels like a coming of age story. Through exposure to the spice, Paul realizes that the world around him is not the world he thought it was and from here he grows into a leader like his father. Eventually, he evolves into the prophetic Muad’Dib destined to rule the universe before embarking on his revenge in the book’s climax. It’s a very by-the-numbers story with everything after the opening betrayal going off without a hitch.
Paul’s mother, Jessica, acts a secondary protagonist and her thoughts, concerns, decisions and self doubting are all laid out for us to see. For political reasons, she’s the Duke Atreides’ concubine as opposed to his wife. Although she does love the duke, her situation seems precarious. Through the events of the story, and her interactions with the Fremen, and her relationship with her son, she ends up coming to terms with her role in the story and recognizes her own importance. I ended up enjoying this part of the story more than the main plot. As a framing device, Dune is interspersed with quotes from the world’s historical texts collected by the Emperor’s mostly unseen daughter and the relevance of these quotes is tied off in the book’s haunting conclusion. While Jessica is a character living a story, characters like the Emperor’s daughter are only going to be wistfully studying and compiling the feats of the main characters. Let us hope she finds solace in her books because she won’t be doing much else – a rather poignant way of ending of a 600 page story!
I walked out of the Dune 2021 movie before it finished. Right at the point where Paul and his mother are stranded in the desert. In the movie, Paul doesn’t undergo any brutal change in awareness because of the spice and instead teaches his mother “the sandwalk” he learned earlier in the movie to avoid attracting the attention of sandworms. This point in the book was very much a slog anyway and nothing I had seen up till that point led me to believe that it would be any better in the movie. It might have been a mistake to read the book just before the movie – certain ambiguous parts of the book don’t translate well to the silver screen and the massive scale of the book with all its characters is difficult to capture cinematically. Some of my favorite parts in the book are completely omitted in the movie. Doctor Yueh isn’t a fully fleshed out character and the main villain Feyd (played by Sting in the 1984 movie) is completely omitted. I also wasn’t really enamoured with the casting choices in the new movie either or the changes in the story.
The novel Dune offers a visionary glimpse of a bleak future with themes of environmentalism and globalism as relevant today as they were in 1965. The book does do these themes a lot more justice than the recent movie (or the previous movies for that matter). However, my expectations were quite high for this book and while reading it, I felt like I was rereading a story I had already read a hundred times. In some ways, this is true – I did already know the plot – but the problem is that the characters also seem to know what the plot is. Paul’s revenge seems inevitable – the historical quotes, the Bene Geserit prophecy, and the prescient knowledge conferred by the spice makes the outcome seem entirely expected. There’s no real surprises for anyone involved. As an exercise in worldbuilding, Dune is amazing and definitely on par with other renowned fictional worlds. But if you focus on the main story, it feels like it’s just going through the motions.
