Review:
Dune, by Frank Herbert
| Series: |
Dune #1 |
| Publisher: |
Ace |
| Copyright: |
1965 |
| Printing: |
September 1990 |
| ISBN: |
0-441-17271-7 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
537 |
The Atreides family, distant cousins to the imperial family, have ruled
the planet of Caladan for twenty generations. Caladan is a wet farming
world, comfortable and pleasant, but not horribly important. But House
Atreides is feuding with House Harkonnen, and, at the start of
Dune, that feud maneuvers Duke Leto into giving up his holdings and
moving his family to take possession of Arrakis.
Arrakis is a desert planet, previously controlled by Baron Harkonnen. It
is unrelentingly hostile, home to smugglers and dangerous local desert
dwellers called Fremen. But it's also one of the most important planets
in the galaxy, since it's the sole origin of the chemical called melange,
or spice. Spice permits a limited form of prescience, which allows the
navigators of the Spacing Guild to successfully steer ships across the
interstellar void. Arrakis's production of spice is what makes
interstellar travel, and therefore all of interstellar civilization,
possible.
Dune is the story of Paul Atreides, son and heir to Duke Leto
Atreides. His mother, Lady Jessica, is one of the Bene Gesserit, a
secretive order of women devoted to mental and physical discipline and to
the long-term genetic improvement of mankind. He is not supposed to
exist; Lady Jessica was supposed to only bear a daughter of Leto. But he
may be something special, the long-sought (but also dangerous) Kwisatz
Haderach who can unite male and female Bene Gesserit powers. The Bene
Gesserit take great interest in him from the start of
Dune. More
surprisingly, so do the Fremen of Arrakis; from the moment he arrives
there, he seems to be fulfilling prophecies of theirs that are partly, but
not entirely, ones planted by the Bene Gesserit long ago. The feud with
the Harkonnens, the unstable place of Arrakis in galactic politics, the
dreams of the Fremen and the Imperial ecologist on Arrakis of
terraforming, Bene Gesserit plans, Paul's abilities, and the legends of
the Fremen all combine in a complex mix of politics, battle, and clashes
of culture.
Dune is an acknowledged SF masterpiece, one of the best-known
classics of the genre. It's usually found in short lists of the best SF
novels ever written. It spawned five sequels by Frank Herbert (about
which more in a moment), as well as numerous additional sequels and
prequels by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert. It's been adopted for
the screen twice, not to mention board games, video games, and numerous
other projects. This is my second reading, the first in about twenty
years, but the story was still immediately familiar from having seen films
and having discussed and read about the universe.
This is not science fiction in any strict sense.
Dune is science
fiction in the same way that
Star Wars is: a futuristic gloss on
top of power structures inspired by feudalism, heavily mixed with
mysticism, mental powers, magic, and implausible but convenient science
that creates the story effects the author wants. Both Bene Gesserit
powers in general and Paul's abilities in particular are effectively
magic. There is some hand-waving explanation of their ability to verbally
control other people as taking advantage of specific pitches and
intonations that people are vulnerable to, but it's effectively
spell-casting (and is a direct inspiration for Jedi mind tricks). All of
the mysticism (and there's quite a lot of it in
Dune, including
race memory, precognition, and even molecular transformation) resembles
the Force from
Star Wars more than anything scientific.
Dune is epic fantasy told on a science fiction stage, complete with
a young protagonist coming into his powers and dangerous and sometimes
hostile mentors.
What
Dune gets right, and what has put it so high in the pantheon
of great science fiction, is the world building. Herbert sets the story
tens of thousands of years into the future of humanity and then
effectively projects the feeling of deep history over everything in the
novel. This is the kind of book that has appendices with more background
information; more to the point, it's the kind of book where you may
actually read them out of curiosity. Mankind has a vast interstellar
empire (Herbert's universe, like Asimov's
Foundation universe,
admits no aliens) governed by a system akin to the early British monarchy.
An emperor rules in balance with the Great Houses, who meet in a sort of
parliament. But against both is a third force: the Spacing Guild, who
maintains a monopoly over all interstellar travel. (And the Bene Gesserit
form an underground, secretive fourth power base.) Herbert plays with
vast swaths of time and great forces of history as well as very good epic
fantasy and better than nearly all SF I've read.
The detailed world-building is equally good. Nearly all of
Dune
takes place on the desert planet of Arrakis, which has a
lovingly-described ecology and local culture built entirely around
scarcity of water. (The details of that ecology are much of the plot and
mystery of the book, so I won't spoil them further.) While I doubt the
precise details hold up to close scientific scrutiny, this is an obvious
precursor to the great ecological stories of later SF, such as Kim Stanley
Robinson's
Mars trilogy. The details
all feel right and hang together in satisfying ways, while also generating
the great Sand Worms of Arrakis, a key ingredient in several of the best
set pieces in the history of SF. This is the sort of book where the
fascinating details and discoveries about the world do as much to keep one
turning the pages as the plot, although the plot is also satisfyingly
twisty and tense.
Unfortunately,
Dune doesn't get everything right. The amount of
mysticism involved is a bit much, and at times the drug-trip mystical
experiences of viewpoint characters turn into excessively purple prose and
nearly incomprehensible descriptions. Those mystical experiences also
involve race and genetic memory, a concept that's just scientific enough
to be unbelievable. A few of the other scentific cheats are also rather
blantant; for example, Herbert constructs an elaborate, artificial
technology of shielding that seems designed primarily as an excuse to add
sword combat to a futuristic story, and I have always struggled to suspend
disbelief about the way lasers and shields interact in
Dune. The
Spacer Guild's monopoly on interstellar travel can be explained; their
monopoly on local orbital space, or even the high stratosphere, both vital
to allow certain things on Arrakis to remain secret, are much more
dubious. Herbert mostly doesn't try to explain these things, and as with
Star Wars the less explained the cheats are, the better they work
as part of the story. But the technological background doesn't hold up
against much examination.
Worse, for me, is the general quality of the writing. Herbert does some
things very well, such as world-building, and avoids awkward infodumps.
Characterization and pacing are both fairly solid; he does a good job with
Paul and Jessica in particular, and I've always liked the Fremen. But he
wants to put the reader in everyone's head, frequently by giving character
thoughts as italicized dialogue, and to enable that he uses a perspective
that I always find distracting.
Most fiction is written in tight third person. This means that the
viewpoint character for any given section of the book is referred to in
the third person, like all the other characters, but the reader has
special access to their thoughts and emotions. We get to know what
they're really thinking and feeling, not just the impressions they give to
others, while the non-viewpoint characters are shown only from external
appearances and the thoughts of the viewpoint character. Some books hold
to the same viewpoint character throughout, but more commonly books move
between viewpoint characters at scene breaks to provide more angles on the
book's events.
First person, in which the story is told by a specific character as if
they were telling a story or writing it down, is the most common
alternative. Third person objective, in which we don't get any special
insight into the internal thoughts of any of the characters, is less
common but still unsurprising.
Dune does not use any of those perspectives. Instead,
Dune
uses wandering third-person omniscient, in which we get the inner thoughts
and emotions of a character in a scene and then a few lines later the
inner thoughts and emotions of a different character. This is the sort of
thing that may or may not bug you depending on how much you've read, how
deep the expectations of perspective are ingrained, and how much you
notice perspective. It drives me nuts. I subconsciously align with the
viewpoint character of a section, and pay attention to the ways that
authors indicate which character will be the viewpoint character at the
start of a scene. Herbert's constant flitting from character to character
makes me dizzy. We get the verbatim thoughts of everyone almost
indiscriminately, making me feel like I'm randomly hopscotching through
the scene.
For me, this does two things: it hurts my ability to get engrossed in the
story, since I'm constantly thrown out of my normal reading mode when the
viewpoint unexpectedly shifts, and it makes the writing feel repetitive.
One keeps hearing about the same thing from multiple perspectives, and at
times the story bogs down in everyone's internal dialogues rather than
showing character reactions and letting the reader draw their own
conclusions. I think it tries for a cinematic perspective, but ends up
making the story feel muddled.
The other flaw, which I didn't notice originally but which leaped out at
me during this re-read, is that Herbert's world-building uses quite a few
stereotypes. The most notorious, and most widely discussed, is of course
the Fremen. Herbert draws heavily on Arab and Islamic culture even beyond
the obvious similarities of people living in a harsh, arid climate. He
borrows some rather loaded terms and cultural markers, such as
jihad, to construct a culture of potential religious fanatics.
This is not all bad; the Fremen are clearly portrayed as the good guys,
which is a refreshing change from more typical current portrayals of
Islam. But it becomes clear that they have aligned their entire culture
around influences from outside, and the whole plot of
Dune can be
fairly characterized as an instance of "what these people need is a white
man." Paul (and Kynes before him) joins their culture as well, but Paul
becomes a better native than the natives, while simultaneously bringing
his outside perspective. It's the sort of plot that is more widely
noticed today than it would have been in 1965.
Another major example of this, and one that I found more blatant, is that
Herbert turns the Harkonnen into hissable, one-sided villains and uses
some nasty stereotypes to do it. The insane torturer is consistently and
repeatedly described as effeminate, fat is used as a marker of moral
inferiority and evil, and the primary villain is homosexual and prefers
drugged young male slaves. Here too, this sort of characterization
short-cut was more common in 1965, but it's not appealing and makes the
(already rather camp) scenes set among the Harkonnen even less enjoyable.
Less clear-cut is the way women are handled throughout
Dune. I do
have to give Herbert some credit, particularly for the era in which he was
writing. There are powerful female characters in
Dune, including
both Jessica and Alia, who have their own independent power and
successfully pursue their own agendas throughout. The effectively
all-female Bene Gesserit is a major political power in the story and is
treated by the other players with respect as well as fear. But it's hard
not to also notice the general position of women as subservient to men,
not only in the general culture of the Great Houses but also in the more
positively-portrayed Fremen culture. Indeed, the subservience of women is
even worse in Fremen culture, where they're treated like property and
where being killed by a woman is a sign of shame. Again, Herbert deserves
some credit for doing better than a lot of 1960s fiction, but the sexism
fairy has still been at work here.
None of these flaws change the fact that
Dune is a masterpiece.
Herbert brings together history, world building, ecology, politics, and a
compelling coming-of-age story about a messiah figure into a fast-paced,
sweeping epic with a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. I think they do
make it a flawed masterpiece, but it's still one of those SF novels that
everyone should read at least once.
Sadly, it's also a masterpiece that I think has suffered from its own
success in the form of sequels, prequels, and a ton of supporting
material. This is one of the problems that truly excellent world building
can lead to.
Human history is fractal: any specific detail can be examined in more
depth and will usually lead (provided that information is available at
all) to even more fascinating detail. The best world building conveys
that impression of depth. That's what Herbert achieves here with hints,
notes, and asides: the sense that galactic history is a vast ediface with
the same fractal complexity as real human history. It makes for a
compelling background, but it also inspires people to dig into that
background and flesh out all of the details the way that we do with human
history. But this doesn't actually work; invented history created by one
person simply cannot be fractal in the same way. Human history is
endlessly complex because it was generated by the complex interactions of
many people. Invented history is an illusion that hints at complexity by
building the same surface, but one mind, or even a small number of minds,
cannot generate the same depth. The result is that if one digs too deep,
one removes that convincing surface and ends up with a mundane,
simplistic, and unsatisfyingly fake set of events.
I think that's what's happened with all of the supporting material that's
been written around
Dune since its original publication.
Dune is of a piece, a single story that's deeply enjoyable on its
own terms and leaves the reader with a satisfying impression of
complexity. The systemic excavation of that complexity lessens it and
reveals too much of the illusion. Yes, I want to know more about the
Butlerian Jihad, but that's the point: the
wanting is the sign of
succesful crafting of imagined history. Reading the definitive account is
more likely to leave me unsatisfied than to lead to the recursive
curiosity that human history can create.
The sequels to
Dune written by Herbert himself are, for me, another
matter. Some reviewers level the same criticism at them: that Herbert
dives too far into background best left unexplored. But they have the
advantage of moving forward, telling more of the story set off by Paul,
and the end of
Dune is a clear setup for a sequel. One of Paul's
goals throughout most of the book has been left unaccomplished. I don't
think Herbert dove too deep into his creation; rather, my problem with his
sequels (all of which I've read, although it's been some years now) is
that he took the story in a direction that I actively disliked and found
painful to read.
Regardless, the general consensus is that the sequels aren't as good as
the original, and while
Dune doesn't fully resolve its story, it's
complete enough that it's possible to stop here. Stopping is the general
recommendation, although I still may re-read and review the sequels at
some point.
Followed by
Dune Messiah.
Rating: 8 out of 10
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