Dune

I may have read Dune by Frank Herbert, published in August 1965, for the first time at a friend’s beach house on the Oregon Coast just before the first movie came out in 1984. I was impressed by the book, although not so much by the movie. (Join the club.) I once owned Dune as an audiobook on CDs, and I listened to it several times over the years.

This month I finished listening to audible.com’s version. This version was released in December 2006 and is narrated by Scott Brick, Orlagh Cassidy, Euan Morton, Simon Vance, Ilyana Kadushin, Byron Jennings, David R. Gordon, Jason Culp, Kent Broadhurst, Oliver Wyman, Patricia Kilgarriff, and Scott Sowers.

These are my notes. Spoilers abound.

The world-building in this novel is elaborate and internally consistent. The vision of the Fremen culture is also internally consistent and entirely convincing. Clearly a great deal of research and thought went into this world building.

The novel has its flaws, a few of which I enumerate here.

• House Atreides is a little too noble and honorable.

• The sand worms are clearly impossible, yet we believe in them. It would have been far more reasonable to set this story on a water world covered mostly with oceans and the worms replaced with fierce and enormous whales or giant squids.

• The Baron Harkonnen is a little too cartoonishly corrupt, although he is genuinely frightening when he orders Feyd-Rautha to kill all of the slave women.

• The story of Gurney Halleck’s desire to kill Jessica is not written as well as I would have liked; I found it unconvincing and unnecessary.

• The ending is rushed.

The Baron Harkonnen is a pederast and a glutton. Pederasty cannot be excused, but we understand now that uncontrollable urges to eat are a medical issue rather than a moral failing.

The Baron is a master politician who is, to our incredulity, deliberately blind to the power of the Fremen. Of course, we the readers have the perspective of those who have read many chapters about the Fremen, and we know their abilities.

The book almost collapses under its own weight in the final chapters as Herbert rushes to finish the first volume. Herbert gathers all of the principal characters into a single room and resolves the plot with an unnecessary knife fight between Paul Muad’Dib and Feyd-Rautha.

We are prepared for this knife fight between Paul Muad’Dib and Feyd-Rautha by having witnessed a knife fight by each — Paul’s knife fight with Jamis, and Feyd-Rautha’s fight in the tourney. From these fights, we know that Paul, a formidable fighter, is naive and inexperienced. We also know that Feyd-Rautha is unscrupulous, and we know he will attempt treachery. The moral question in the final knife fight is whether it will be the honorable Paul Atreides or the vengeful and doomed Muad’Dib who fights.

But the final chapters reveal the complexity of Herbert’s universe. There is a great deal to explore in the succeeding books, including the scheming Bene Gesserit, the emperor, the CHOAM company, the Space Navigators Guild, etc. All are dependent on the spice.

The Emperor does not lose control of himself at the end of the book. He behaves more like Augustus than Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, or Nero (the early emperors of the Roman Empire).

What is most contrary to our expectations as readers of the Dune series is that Paul is unable to stop the course of events as the universe careens towards a jihad. Paul is a hero who becomes an antihero.

Finally (writing as a scientist) I found it thrilling to read about Liet Kynes, the planetary ecologist. I took two courses in ecology as an undergraduate at Portland State University, a general introductory course with a research project, and a course called “Biota of Volcanic Landforms”, a three-week course that took place in the Great Basin of Oregon and Nevada. I have never forgotten those courses, and I very nearly decided to get a graduate degree in ecology before deciding more wisely to pursue molecular biology.

It was fascinating to me that the Emperor had a scientist in his employ who was in charge of monitoring and transforming the planet of Arrakis (Dune) from a globe-spanning desert into a planet more suitable for human habitation. What Kynes knows, and most others do not know, is the crucial role that the worms — the makers — play in maintaining the desert environment. It was also thrilling for me to learn about the giant cisterns of water the Fremen had built, furthering their goal, which would span many generations into the future, of transforming Arrakis into a green world.

My rating: Five stars, excellent.