Frank Herbert - Dune

Denis Villeneuve's recent two part film of Frank Herbert's Dune novel have reawakened interest in the author's multi-volume work. Dune was a significant milestone in science fiction, a novel that linked aspects of the 1960s counter-culture, with emerging ideas around religion, ecology and resistance. When I first read the novel after seeing David Lynch's less successful film in 1984 it immediately became a favourite, though the sequels never grabbed me and I gave up half way through the third book. I did return to the original Dune, but hadn't read it for two decades when the new films were released. Time for a re-read I thought.

How does it hold up? In short I was impressed. The novel works on a number of levels, but hasn't dated to the extent that some science-fiction of the era has. One reason for this is that the novel is low in technological detail. Unlike the various film dramatization we don't see any space flight. The "ornithopters" are simply fast moving flying machines. Herbert's great technical detail is to make the Spice that is mined on Arrakis a drug essential to plotting space travel. But the lack of details means that the reader (and film maker) can fill in what they need.

But reading the book today it is notable how much it works as a story of religious inspired anti-imperialist resistance. There are two aspects to this. Firstly the influence of Middle Eastern ideas in general and Islam in particular to the religious of the Fremen. These indigenous inhabitants of Arakis, a sand world protecting the Spice, become in the contemporary mind, the Arab masses and oil. Watching the first of Villeneuve's films it was hard not to see this particularly in the treatment of the Fremen by the Harkonnes. The more morally just rule by the Duke Atreides, which still insists on the extraction of Spice simply becomes a liberal dose of imperialism, reflecting a world, or galaxy, that runs on oil/Spice.

Reading the book in the 1980s I probably missed the religious influences and references. I did not, of course, forget the sandworms. But re-reading Dune today what I noticed was the way the sandworms are only the tip of a complex ecological system. In fact the ecological orientation of the novels is one of its best aspects - contributing both to the world-building and the plot itself, particularly the position of Liet Kynes the imperial planetologist, whose role is sadly minimised in the films. Kynes' death is one of the great moments in the novel, reflecting as he does, on the world beneath.

Dune today stands in the shadow of the two most recent films. But it deserves to be read as a brilliant work of highly original science-fiction. It works best, I suspect, if read before heading to the cinema. But because it fleshes out a strange, but simultaneously highly recognizable galaxy, it is worth reading even if you've seen the movies.

Frank Herbert's brilliance in Dune was the create a world that seems endlessly familiar. But that's because it is ultimately a film about how imperialism relates to rare and essential resources. As such its a story for all our times.