Dune, The Most Important Sci Fi Series Ever?

- The planet is Arrakis, also known as Dune.

And y'all, it's a mess.

December of this year, we were supposed to see the arrival of director Denis Villeneuve's interpretation of the 1965 novel, Dune.

Which had previously, and rather infamously, been brought to life by David Lynch in 1984.

And then again, in a three-part mini series on the Syfy channel in the early 2000s.

Now many sci-fi nerds, including myself, were both excited and nervous about this new adaptation directed by Villeneuve.

But owing to the ongoing plague of eternity, the release has been pushed back to next year, allegedly.

So in lieu of that, y'all have to use this video to tide you over.

What is Dune?

Why must the spice flow?

And what's with all the sand?

I hate sand.

It's course and it gets everywhere.

(upbeat music) Dune is a 1965 science fiction novel by American author, Frank Herbert, and is the first installment in the Dune Saga, which is made up of five sequels written by Herbert himself.

And several subsequent books made under the collaboration of Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son, and writer Kevin J. Anderson.

They are, controversial.

While not an instant bestseller, it was a massive critical success.

Winning both the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 1966.

Dune itself would eventually be called the best-selling science fiction novel of all time in 2003.

Taking place in humanity's distant future, the universe is now a feudal interstellar society in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs.

With the most important being the desert planet Arrakis.

You see, Arrakis is the source of the Spice Melange.

- Spice.

- Which extends your life, gives you cool mental abilities, and is essential for space navigation.

And it absolutely must flow.

You think with a planet that important, it would just belong to everyone.

But I guess, they were going for realism.

The current galactic ruler, the Emperor Shaddam IV, is what we would call an insecure hater.

He sees how popular this one guy, Duke Leto Atreides, has gotten, and takes advantage of a blood feud between House Atreides and their rivals, House Harkonnen, to destroy the Atreides family.

So Arrakis, which previously belonged to the Harkonnens, is given to Duke Leto with the intention that he and his family will move to this sandy, mostly inhospitable planet in order to protect the Spice Melange.

"What could go wrong?"

she said.

Enter Paul.

Paul is the heir of House Atreides and at the ripe age of 15, he is ready to be the protagonist of a science fiction series.

Paul is like The Chosen One over 9,000.

Prophetic visions.

Yup.

Super rich.

Yes.

Heir of a tragic family.

Yes.

The super-powered child, as the result of a centuries long breeding program and positioned to be a prophet to a group of very specifically coded sand-people?

Specific, but yes.

Spoilers from this point on by the way.

There is an ambush and Paul's dad is captured, but he kills himself using a cyanide capsule.

Paul and his mother, Jessica, meet with the Fremen, the native population of Dune.

They see Paul as a prophet and he takes on the Fremen name, Paul Muad'dib.

After training, getting a new stabby younger sister, a girlfriend named Chani, and taming the sand worms, the massive nightmare snakes that live in the wild and from whose poop, the spice is made, Paul ends up getting revenge for the death of his father.

Yay!

After he defeats the Baron Harkonnen, who is also his, "Surprise grandfather," I guess, Paul requests an audience with Shaddam IV and threatens to destroy the Spice Melange unless he gets to marry the emperor's daughter, Princess Irulan, and the emperor abdicates in favor of Paul, who, I reiterate, is a teenager.

Yay?

Anyway, that is like the super SparkNotes summary.

What makes the first book in the saga so compelling, is how it sets up all these themes that Frank Herbert later deconstructs.

Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr., noted Libra, had been a pulp writer, photographer and journalist before he started doing research for "Dune" in 1959.

The endeavor took him six years and more than 400 pages of writing to complete.

Making Dune much longer than most science fiction at the time.

Kevin Mulcahy, in, "The Prince on Arrakis: Frank Herbert's dialogue with Machiavelli," explains that, "Herbert was writing at the height of the Cold War.

From the conception of Dune to its publication, a presidential campaign centered around fears of a 'missile gap', read in their historical context, Dune, and to a lesser extent, the sequels are subversive texts.

Herbert dramatize in Dune, an unpleasant political truth.

People can not free themselves of Machiavellian leaders until they first free themselves of their desire to be led."

Jennifer Simkins, an English teacher in New South Wales, Australia also points out that the Dune novels, "Suggest that, blind acceptance of social structures, and the mythic patterns that inform them, leads to the intellectual stagnation of humankind.

For Herbert, science fiction is a mode that helps us understand what it means to be human by examining established myths."

the Dune Saga highlights Herbert's ever going concern with leadership.

He had always expressed at the first book and the character of Paul, was meant to examine human tendency to follow charismatic leaders.

Except you don't particularly get that element until the second book, Dune Messiah, which puts the "D" in deconstruction.

You see in the first book, Paul hijacks the Fremen's religion in order to gain power and revenge.

Which is like, "Yay, white boy power fantasy, pew, pew."

However, it soon becomes a power that Paul cannot control.

As a result.

When we open Dune Messiah, we are told that the Fremen started a jihad in Paul's name, across the galaxy that kills, 60 billion people across the known universe.

(book slams) Colonization is bad, okay?

One of Paul's visions that he gets from being special is that the future of humanity could go down a path where it will stagnate and destroy itself.

Thus, Paul thinks that the only way to prevent this future of eventual human extinction is to engender such oppressive, horrible leadership, that humanity will never follow a leader, again.

Sounds legit?

His not-official wife Chani dies.

Leaving a pair of chosen one twins named Luke and Leia.

Excuse me, I mean Leto II and Ghanima.

And when this happens, he goes into a state of despair and pretty much abdicates his power because he can't be full Vader.

Also that is shade for Star Wars, not Dune, just so we're clear.

Children of Dune, the third book in what we could call the first "Dune Trilogy," sets that the next phase of the series with a new "Protagonist" in Paul's son, Leto II.

Both of his children have similar powers to him, but it is Leto who is destined to become the God-Emperor.

And he does so by being as evil as he needs to be in order to ensure the survival of the world.

So let's talk about Paul again, the "hero" of our story.

At least at first.

One of the things that is often debated, is if Paul would fall under what you could call, a "White savior" character.

In many genres, including science fiction, there is this trope of a white or white-adjacent person coming into a black or indigenous community, or in this case, a black, indigenous coded community, and becoming their leader by doing what they already do, but better.

Paul is both.

a white savior played straight in the original Dune, but a deconstruction in later books.

In Dune Messiah, he compares himself to Hitler.

At one point saying, "He killed more than 6 million.

Pretty good for those days.

Statistics, at a conservative estimate, I have killed 61 billion, Sterilized 90 planets, completely demoralized 500 others.

I've wiped out the followers of 40 religions."

Everything about his character is set up to be this noble hero who wants to do good, but his visions are a trap.

Paul does not want to subject the world to living under a human God.

And that is criticized by some in the text as being weak.

But often, as is the case, especially with Dune, just because the text says one thing, doesn't mean we are meant to take it as such.

Especially considering that his son ends up turning into a giant human-sand worm hybrid with only a human face in two T-Rex arms.

This physical transformation highlights a point brought up again in Mulcahy's piece.

"Herbert's Dune novels demonstrate the inevitable consequences of political manipulation.

One cannot use others without being tainted.

People cannot accede to their own exploitation without surrendering some of their humanity."

Paul's fate is ultimately to be killed by one of his own acolytes who doesn't recognize him.

A kind of poetic irony.

Simkins later explains that, "The depiction of Paul in Dune as a stereotypical hero activates the readers' awareness of the hero schema before the dangers of absolute rule are illuminated in the sequels."

Herbert explains, "Dune was set up to imprint on you, the reader, a superhero.

I wanted you totally involved with that superhero.

And then I wanted to show what happens."

Herbert is both addressing this imperialistic mindset, but also using it as the basis of a plan that was supposed to lead the world into salvation.

All the while asking if any of this maneuvering is worth it.

Would things have ended differently, if Paul had just gotten revenge for his father's death and left it there.

In my opinion, I think that Herbert is using Paul's story to show how these ideas are toxic and corrosive.

With Leto's transformation being a physical manifestation of all of that.

I mean, who wants T-Rex arms?

I mean, Leto's plan is to repress humanity for thousands of years, so that when he dies, they'll yeet into the stars and beyond, which is basically the same plan, as a parent in a fairy tale who puts their child in a tower, rather than just say, "Hey, don't touch spinning wheels.

Curse."

Or like how after world war II ended, everyone looked at each other and agreed, let's never have another authoritarian again.

Yeah!

There are also still issues with the way that the Fremen are used and become weapons.

Because despite the text being critical of that, it doesn't give them any more humanity.

They remain ciphers.

I think David M. Higgins, speculative fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, put it best.

Although a tad harsher than I would, when he said, "Herbert essentially offers a critique of territorial imperialism while upholding the axioms of capitalist accumulation that motivate modern imperial exploits in the first place.

Herbert offers a western audience a way to have their cake and eat it too.

Readers are invited to distance themselves from identification with imperial oppressors and to identify with decolonizing nationalists overcoming the tyranny of imperialism."

T. Dune is hard to adapt because it is just the beginning of a much larger story.

We have only touched on the first three books in this video, and it has still encompassed enough for a whole semester of philosophy 101.

A filmmaker who sees Paul as a savior, can't really comprehend the fullness of the story.

In some ways, that is the trap of Dune.

Only seeing the surface-level entertainment that is meant to deliver these intense messages.

As Herbert himself once said, "If you want to get anything across, you have to be entertaining first.

If you start standing on a street corner, people will tune you out.

But analogues give you a marvelous device for getting past that screening system, because people can be caught up in the drama of the story, be deep into the problems of it.

Then later on much later on, they say, 'Oh, my God, he was talking about this.'

And they come out of it with a brand new view of what's happening in their world."

At least you hope so, anyway.

Dune is an iconic work of science fiction.

And while we should be critical of it, and discuss the ways in which it is dated, there is no denying it has had a huge impact on the genre, And ask some really compelling questions.

Even if it didn't always deliver on the answers.

The spice must flow.