What struck me right away about Frank Herbert’s Dune is its ominous sense of scale. There’s this eerie feeling all throughout the books that you are seeing so far into the future, when humanity is so far-flung across the galaxy, and so much has happened since our time that it actually makes our current existence seem totally insignificant. Everything is so weird, so removed from our Earthly expectations that every little nuance seems to stem from an interminable history that hasn’t even begun in our own time. Our world feels tiny by comparison, forgettable.
And that’s kind of a nice feeling at a time like this. We seem to be living in some Hollywood hack’s alternate-timeline sci-fi script right now, rife with stupid dialogue, plot-holes, and dubious morality. But it’s the timeline we’ve got, so I try to keep in mind that eventually everything will be different. Life goes on, ever-changing and evolving, mutating, weirdening as circumstances demand. At times it’s terrifying, but in the end change simply is, whether good or bad, and ultimately we must embrace it, or else be destroyed by it...
Okay I’m getting a little dramatic. But Dune is the kind of series that will pump you up that way, get you ready to dive into the unknown, get you craving that extreme edge of weirdness and the fear that it brings. Because once you know the litany against fear, you can become fully human:
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
Dune’s philosophy and themes resonate so powerfully for me because they draw heavily from Zen Buddhism and Taoism, as well as the psychological theories of Carl Jung, and even the psychedelic movement. Even the most quintessentially sci-fi elements of the story, such as seeing the future or having preternatural bodily control, feel grounded and plausible, because they are extrapolations of real ancient belief systems as well as modern scientific knowledge.
Technology in Dune also follows this kind of historical circularity. It’s eons ahead of our own, and yet the structure of their society most closely resembles feudal empires—due in part to a mysterious “jihad” that took place thousands of years before the story begins; and also because some technology has become so advanced that it effectively cancels out other advanced technology. Shield generators protect people from projectiles, so they’ve gone back to fighting with swords and knives.
The first book in the series contains plenty of action, but never bogs itself down with lengthy and confusing descriptions of it (which I think is a common problem in sci-fi and fantasy). There are a couple of drawn-out knife fights, but these are charged with suspense and carry hefty consequences. Meanwhile the full-on battle scenes go by in a blaze of visceral, free-associated prose that somehow satisfies hundreds of pages of buildup.
I’ve had a hard time writing this recommendation, it’s almost impossible to describe the various aspects of the series in an à-la-carte way. Everything is rooted in its own long histories, all of which are entangled in each other. And it’s this sprawling richness of the Dune universe that makes it such fantastic escapism.
I am not particularly well read in sci-fi or fantasy, but in my experience Dune is rivaled only by The Lord Of The Rings in terms of sheer depth—not just of world-building, but in the actual ecology of those worlds, and the ways in which the narratives interact with that ecology.
The eerie, inordinate scope of Dune, and its bottomless sense of mystery, gave me the same kind of feelings as the original Star Wars movies did when I first saw them as a young kid—back in the mid-90s, when they played the ‘special editions’ in theaters (before the god-awful prequels, and long before these sterile, passionless sequels). This sense of being in a big busy universe full of freaky alien intrigue, dirty and dangerous, cruel and wild and wondrous.
I know that writing a Dune recommendation isn’t exactly original. The series is more popular than ever right now, which is kind of odd because it came out over 50 years ago. That’s partly due to a movie adaptation coming out later this year, one for which I have high hopes based on the director and cast; it’s got me geekin out more than I ever have for a movie.
Furthermore the series was way ahead of its time culturally. It’s non-Eurocentric (mostly), taking place in a trippy future-Bedouin desert society. And it’s more or less egalitarian, in that the female characters are all three-dimensional bad-asses, and just as essential as the male characters.
I read the first three and a half books in the series last year, and although I decided to move on to other things for now, I was continually impressed by how well the story lived up to its own epic scale. It never stops getting weirder, as far as I’ve seen, which is my favorite thing about it.
So, for all these reasons, Dune might just be the perfect escape from our dystopian B-movie reality right now. I recommend it in any case, pandemic or not. Let me know in the comments if you agree, or don’t, or whatever feelings you might have about Dune.
This is my first attempt at writing a recommendation, so I hope you enjoyed it, thanks for reading!
Peace,
Phibson
