Dune by Frank Herbert

Dune is perhaps the greatest SF novel of all time, according to many long-term readers of the genre.

Frank Herbert had already won the International (ie British) Fantasy Award for his debut novel The Dragon in the Sea (aka Under Pressure) ten years earlier, but had struggled to sell a second novel.

Dune established Frank Herbert as a major author upon its publication, has stayed in print continuously for over forty years, spawned at least two series, a major motion picture directed by David Lynch, and a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series, it and its sequels have sold millions of copies.

Yet it was nearly never published as a novel. Serialized in two parts in Analog between 1963 and 1965, it is a hard-SF space opera that is also perhaps the first SF novel to focus as much on the politics of power as on fight scenes, to use ecology in such detail, and to have thinly-disguised Arabs as many of its heroes in a magazine that unthinkingly assumed WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) supremacy throughout the galaxy. As if it were not ground-breaking enough in its themes and treatments, the novel ran to almost 200,000 words at a time when 80,000 words was as rigid a limit as the sound barrier was to propeller engine aircraft twenty years earlier.

The story is audacious. The worlds of the Galactic Empire are connected by pilots whose psychic abilities are enhanced by ‘spice’ a drug whose rarity has enabled cartels to become quasi-feudal houses, and those who can co-opt its users to become power blocs.

One such group is the House Atreides, exiled from their own home world of Delta Pavonis IV by imperial decree, to Arrakis, a desert world ruled over until now by the House Harkonnen, against whom the indigenous Fremen have waged an incessant guerrilla war for years.

When open war breaks out between House Atreides and Harkonnen (assisted by Imperial troops in mufti) Paul Atreides -- the teenaged heir to the title of Duke Atreides – is forced into the desert and left to die. Instead he is rescued by one of the Fremen, who ride giant worms hundreds of feet long throughout the world-spanning desert, and who have learned to survive by adapting to Arrakis’ rhythms, rather than trying to impose terrestrial-based lifestyles, as the noble houses have done until now.

In this respect, Herbert’s Fremen can be seen as the advance guard of the revisionist attitudes toward native peoples, as typified by later westerns and their treatment of First Nation People, and the way Australians now view indigenous pre-European inhabitants of that continent.

Atreides takes a Fremen girl as his lover, and adapts their customs, eventually leading a resistance movement against House Harkonnen, who have re-taken their former home world by force, with Imperial assistance. For one of the by-products of the giant worms is ‘spice,’ and the Emperor cannot allow production of the drug to remain in the hands of a family with as much independence as the Atreides.

It took Stirling E. Lanier, then editor at a small-ish independent publishers whose primary field was automotive publications, and himself an SF writer, to champion a book that had been rejected by every major publisher. With an ‘open ballot’ on the first Nebula Awards – that is, any work nominated made the final ballot – Dune took its place on the ballot, won, then collected the Hugo award, and the rest is history.

Cover for the 1999 hardcover

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