Note: Spoilers for decades-old books lie ahead.
Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was first published in the mid-1960s, and six decades later, it feels more relevant now than ever before — not so much because it predicted the imminent future, like the plague novels (“Zone One,” “Station Eleven”) that preceded the coronavirus pandemic, but because its message has a universality that readers apply to whatever contemporary issue they choose.
What exactly it has to say depends on whom you ask. Is Dune a call to arms about human-made ecological catastrophe? A warning about the perils of religion and false gods? A call to curb our reliance on oil? A political commentary on colonial rule? An antiwar polemic?
The full six-book series is all of those things, a Choose Your Own Adventure of meaning and message. Even Herbert himself, in a foreword to the fifth book, “Heretics of Dune,” could not decide on any one definition of the novels: “It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah. It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine. It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics. It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls. It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance. Potable water was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance whose supply diminishes each day. It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones …”
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It’s worth noticing that Herbert mentioned the messiah myth first, before environmentalism. He clearly wanted “Dune” to convey a panoply of Big Ideas, though there’s a reason his concerns with the natural world have proved the stickiest in popular consciousness: The six books chronicle a dry desert planet re-greening itself over the course of thousands of years, then drying out again. Arguably, the main character of the series is the planet Arrakis.
But those concerns accumulate slowly, over the course of multiple books. The first book, even at some 800 pages, is all setup. That’s why it cut quite naturally into two movies for the current Denis Villeneuve adaptation: The first is world-building, the second is messiah myth/prophecy fulfillment. After surviving a betrayal by a rival house that eliminates most of his clan, Paul Atreides flees to the desert of Arrakis and assimilates with the nomadic Fremen. He has visions that point to Arrakis’s ecologically lush future, but mostly he’s focused on revenge against the Harkonnens and the emperor. And when he gets it, he looks a lot less heroic.
Things get much more interesting beginning with the second book, “Dune Messiah.” Paul’s ascension to the throne and his embrace of the messiah myth have resulted in a galactic jihad in his name that has killed billions of people. Soon, Herbert also shows how false gods beget false gods. Toward the end of the third book, “Children of Dune,” Paul’s son, Leto II, declares that his father “tried to stand as a supreme moral symbol while he renounced all moral pretensions. He became a saint without a god, every word a blasphemy.” But by the fourth book, “God Emperor of Dune,” Leto II has become a far more terrible false god than his father ever was. (To quote “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”)
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The ecological progression of Arrakis plays out in parallel to the bloody jihad. In the first book, Paul uses his vision of a green Arrakis as a bargaining chip in his revenge plot: “From the throne … I could make a paradise of Arrakis with the wave of a hand,” he tells ecologist and Fremen leader Liet-Kynes. “This is the coin I offer for your support.” But does Paul really care about anything other than power? It takes thousands of years for Arrakis to become a temperate planet with rivers and trees, making the sandworms — giant monsters that produce the spice that powers space travel — almost extinct; the events at the end of “God Emperor” trigger the planet’s transition back to desert.
But as Ryan Britt frames things in his recent Dune history, “The Spice Must Flow,” Herbert “played up” the ecological element of his story only after it was featured in Stewart Brand’s zeitgeisty Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. “The public perception of Dune as an ecological science fiction novel is perhaps the most important factor in its immortality,” Britt writes in his book.
The Dune-as-ecofiction camp likes to point out that Herbert conceived of the first novel after reporting a nonfiction article about an effort on the Oregon coast to use grass to keep sand dunes back from the roads. But in a 1980 essay titled “Dune Genesis” in the sci-fi magazine Omni, Herbert wrote: “I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders. … While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon.” Inspiration is not the same as effect, of course, but it seems clear that the messiah myth predated the ecological theme.
None of that is to ignore what the series has to say about computers. The first book is set 10,000 years after the Butlerian Jihad, a revolt against machines that can think like people. (Sound relevant to today’s explosion of artificial intelligence?) In the first few pages of “Dune,” after Paul withstands a pain test from the Reverend Mother, she tells him: “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Paul replies by quoting from a religious text, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.”
The Butlerian Jihad is what eliminated computer navigators, leading to the reliance on spice for space travel and establishing the system of colonial rule that is in place on Arrakis, where spice is harvested. For those at the bottom in the world of Dune — even the Fremen, whom Paul ostensibly liberates from Harkonnen rule — there is no real escape from long-entrenched power systems, and the series is full of such entities: the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, CHOAM, Landsraad. It might be reasonable, then, to also treat the series as a meditation on power struggles and the common people crushed beneath the feet of titans.
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All told, Dune is about everything people think it is, sometimes all at once: false gods, religion, oil and wars fought over oil, colonial rule, technology that can think like humans, climate change.
But sometimes with an epic space opera, it’s most fun to put aside the grand statements — all the weighty Meaning that supposedly legitimizes the time we spend reading these thick volumes — so we can simply enjoy the weirdness. And the Dune books get much weirder, and more rollicking, after the first volume, when Herbert brings back Duncan Idaho, the ludicrously named sword master of House Atreides.
Duncan Idaho, who dies halfway through the first book, outlives everyone else in the series after the Tleilaxu — genetically altered humans from the planet Tleilax who boast the best biotech — create a “ghola” from his remains and try to program it to kill Paul. So Duncan returns in the second book. And in the third book, and the fourth, and the fifth — like a running joke that still lands every time. The Duncan Idaho gholas keep on coming, often as the central agents of change in the books as well as a source of screwball chaos.
For me, more than any of Herbert’s Big Ideas, the lasting image from the series is an endless line of Duncan Idahos. A little silly, a little strange, yet always heroic. After all, sci-fi is supposed to be fun.
Daniel Roberts is a business journalist who has written about and reviewed books in a wide range of publications. He writes a Substack newsletter called Writing About Reading.
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