Tag Archives: Frank Herbert

Dune Messiah: The Future Is Not Set, But It’s Hopeless

The new movie adaption of Dune has been available for a month, and many people have observed, as if factual, that only the strong fans have read more than the first novel. The publisher claims millions of original series books have sold. The current bestselling paperback list from the Washington Post has Dune leading both fiction and mass market categories, Dune Messiah being second for mass market.

It’s a good story, more sedate than the first one since Paul Atreides is a galactic emperor defending himself against usurpers rather than being a usurper himself. It’s twelve years after the close of Dune. Paul’s beloved wife, Chani, has not been able to bear a child, and his political wife, Irulan, has increased pressure to have the opportunity to bear a child herself. Despite hating the idea, Chani begins to think having any heir is better than none.

But Paul has seen many futures and many shadows he may not be able to avoid. Which path of pain and death will support the most life?

Paul and his teenaged sister, Alia, have prescient abilities, because of the complex eugenic program that preceded their birth and their consumption of melange, the valuable spice of that planet. Their powers of foresight are unmatched by anyone else with prescient talent. The spice awakens all who get enough of it in the right context. But the future is not strictly prophetic nor does their vision catch everything that could be seen, so in some way they see paths and consequences and choose between likely risks and rewards.

That’s the rationale Paul offers for allowing interstellar jihad in his name and his deification by the Freman, even though he distains religion. He knows he is not a god and doesn’t seem tempted to become one. He thinks about the coming jihad in the first book and rants about its work privately in the second book, but the bottom line seems to be a better life for everyone if he accepts their worship and doesn’t shut down their holy war. Countless lives wasted, he says. The blood of millions shed in his name, he says, but what else could he do? This cynical view of religion dilutes all holy things to cultural tradition and zeal to simple-mindedness. I would think a gifted leader could redirection such zeal, but no, war was unavoidable.

Am I right to read this secular outlook as hopeless? Is that the reason I doubt I’ll read the third book?

The Very Modern Cosmos of “Dune Messiah”

Some months ago, I shared with you my thoughts on reading Dune for the first time. You can find those posts by selecting the Dune content tag or asking your erudite. I’ve been reading the second book, Dune Messiah, and I’d like to say a couple things about it.

Herbert’s world appears to be a very modern one. Anything can be engineered to a desired end. Complicated languages and systems have been created and can produce remarkable results–maybe not perfect results according to the grand engineers longing for some utopia, but results that go a long way down that road. You see this in many conversations between characters.

“An attack on my father carries dangers other than the obvious military ones,” Irulan said. “People are beginning to look back on his reign with a certain nostalgia.”

“You’ll go too far one day,” Chani said in her deadly serious Freman voice.

“Enough!” Paul ordered.

Chani isn’t speaking in a serious tone as any of us might, nor is this saying her voice is regularly as serious as death. She’s using a unique Freman manner of speaking that conveys the super seriousness of her intent. Apparently, one never tells a joke in this deadly serious voice–if Freman joke at all–because using this tone ironically could get you killed.

In fact, I don’t think any of the main characters joke. There is a bard-type in the first book who could make people laugh and sing. He doesn’t return in second book. There’s only a dwarf that speaks in riddles half the time–not quite a joker.

The highly scripted use of language parallels the Bene Gesserit technique called the Voice. By pitching their tone of voice and perhaps using select words, the Bene Gesserit are able to verbally strong-arm people. It’s quasi-mystical like many elements of the Dune universe, but it’s also quasi-scientific in a modernist way. Everyone is merely a product of their genetic material, so if you can get a read on them, you can influence them like a punch to the face.

Equal to the mysticism of Dune is the emphasis on eugenics. Paul Atreides himself is the product of generations of genetic engineering designed to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a gifted ruler who would take control of the empire on behalf of the Bene Gesserit who engineered him. The fact that Paul doesn’t hand them any imperial power angers them and sends them back to their eugenic hope that the next generation will be the one they’ve been waiting for.

Realistically, it’s perverted. The universe isn’t so strictly ordered as modernists want it to be. Many organisms cannot be reduced to ingredients and rearranged to produce the strengths you want. This steps into the territory of conspiracy theorists, where everything can be foreseen and constructed no matter the complexity. It’s jarringly otherworldly.

I wonder if this is the main appeal to Dune fans, this highly ordered, godless universe with a chemical stream of mysticism running through it.

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Dune: Cynical and Yet Pro-Life

[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 4: A couple observations on what I’ve read so far.

Paul Atriedes and Lady Jessica, son and mother, are both highly trained in the Bene Gesserit order. Jessica was a nun (if that’s the right word for her position) before being sold to Duke Leto as a concubine. You can see in that statement why nun doesn’t seem like the precise word for her. Others call her a witch and call the Eastern mystical quality of Bene Gesserit ways witchcraft. But what they do doesn’t look like magic at all. It looks like highly accurate intuition, mental processing power, and even kung fu.

At the same time, Jessica frequently criticizes signs of manipulative indoctrination she finds on the desert planet. There’s no indication of universal truths or God Almighty who calls people on every planet to himself. They never speak of faith, only of training. It seems somewhat, but not entirely, secularized.

Contrasted with this is faith of the Fremen, which Jessica would say has been delivered to them by emissaries of the Missionaria Protectiva. This part of the Bene Gesserit order is defined in the glossary as being “charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation.” Paul looks at the honest faith of the Fremen as a seedbed for jihad.

If the Atriedes would speak of universal moral truths or spiritual realities just once, it could remove the cynical smear of every other characterization of faith. But I don’t think they will.

Despite their jaded religious training, they take a remarkably pro-life stance on Jessica’s unborn child. Several times Jessica’s pregnancy has come up, never in the bizarrely clinical way some people talk today, and at a point when she feels compelled to risk her life for the greater good, Jessica asks herself if she has the right to risk the life of her child as well. In 2021 A.D. America, that’s an incredible statement!

I’m a little worried matriarchs of the Bene Gesserit order will emerge to play the part of Big Organized Religion Bent on Evil. Maybe they won’t in this book.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

‘People Overact, Take it Too Far’

[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 3: I recently read the scene in which Paul sees one of the giant worms rise from the sand before him. They have this scene in the trailer for the upcoming film. Remembering that got me wondering if they had the same scene in the 1984 movie.

I know I said I didn’t want to see any more of that movie, but I don’t think the worms were the bad part. I found a WatchMojo video of ten reasons people hate Dune (1984), and now I really have seen as much as I need to see of it. Yeah, there are spoilers, but this movie doesn’t stick close to the book, so it’s matters less. And no worm rising from the sand–maybe that was the good part.

One main complaint is overacting. I remember catching an old sci-fi flick Solar Crisis somewhere in the middle. I think I started watching when Charlton Heston was on screen. After a few minutes, I thought, “Heston is the only good actor in this movie.” At least, he was the only believable figure walking around. Cut to a scene in a spaceship, and I wondered if these were the people who had been looking for clerical and janitorial work when all the real astronauts were deciding who would draw the short straws.

That’s something I’ve appreciated in what I’ve read of Dune so far. The characters, at least the good ones, aren’t peevish and bratty. Actually, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is not only evil, he’s full of bile. He probably wakes up every morning with a leer, but he gets little lime light in Book One, so he doesn’t weigh it down. Duke Leto, the Sean Bean character in this part of the story, has flaws, which Paul notes, but is predominately an admirable man. One of the native politicians feels pressed to like the Duke against his better judgement because he naturally commands loyalty. He inspires fidelity with his passion and generosity.

The overacting, what there may be of it, comes across as cutthroat politics. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is quoted as saying, “Politics is like bad cinema — people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, ‘Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.'”

I hope I don’t get much of it in the rest of Dune. It would ruin the whole experience.

Image by Parker_West from Pixabay

Fear is the Mind-Killer

[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 2: Dune opens just before a scene you’ve probably seen from a movie trailer. Paul Atreides, 15, stands before a revered, old woman for some kind of test that is rarely given to boys. He rehearses “the Litany against Fear” that his mother taught him from her background in the Bene Gesserit rite.

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.

The test he endures is brutal but clean–no blood spilled, just scorching pain. Paul reveres the old woman less by the end because he begins to see she doesn’t have the answers she claims to have.

This introduction to Paul could have gone the direction many lesser stories have gone by having Paul become very proud of withstanding a severe test as well as his acute perception and begin blowing off all responsibility because, darn it, he’s the best. He may think he’s the best, but he hasn’t allowed himself to think it yet, because he is the son of Duke Leto. The family is moving to the sand-planet Arrakis to assume a role given to the duke by the emperor, and at least one other royal house opposes it. The Harkonnens have been ordered to vacate, so Leto Atreides could take control.

Plus, Arrakis is a difficult planet to live on. Everyone wants the spice harvested there, but the harsh environment and sandworms, some of which could swallow a harvester whole, roam the dunes. The worms may even create the spice (if that’s revealed later in the book or other books, I don’t know).

Paul could be a huge jerk in the first book (section) of Dune, but he isn’t. He’s a serious-minded, young man, mature beyond his years. He will be duke one day, if he and his family can survive the treat of this new planet.

A lot of characters are introduced in Dune‘s first book, and though Paul is a central focus, he isn’t the leading man yet. That would be his father. a man of many admirable qualities but perhaps not enough skill to navigate a galaxy of ruthless politicians. I think the story has told us that at this point, but I’m not sure it’s fair to say that a man who is overwhelmed in a shark-eat-shark world lacks governing skills. Maybe he lacks ruthlessness. Maybe survival means cruelty. Maybe surviving, in this case, isn’t the greatest good.

On the other hand, fighting fear and training others to fight it as well may be the greatest good. By fighting the mind-killer, no matter who survives, you may still win.

Reading Dune for the First Time

You’ve likely seen other bloggers writing about the first time they read Lord of the Rings. It seems appropriate to treat Dune the same way. With a new movie adaptation coming up (though I usually don’t see movies until months after they release, if then), I wanted to read the book that’s been sitting on my shelf a while.

I didn’t know anything about the world of Arrakis beyond a few images from the 1984 movie. Having reviewed a bit of the trailer from that movie, I don’t think I’ll spend any more time on it. I watched Zardoz as an impressionable youth. I don’t need anymore rank garbage like that.

I’ve just learned there are 19 books in the series and apparently more on the way, but only six of them are by original author Frank Herbert, so I doubt I’ll make it through even that many.

What I’ve read so far is book one of three in the original book. It’s a great part one, ending on a cliffhanger after all the foreshadowed conflict has crashed on the beach, leaving readers to wonder what happens next.

That foreshadowing though. Granny telling Little Red Riding Hood not to stray from the path easily sets up the idea that she will at least be tempted to stray. But Herbert doesn’t foreshadow as much as foretell. The narrative doesn’t stick to a single point of view but flits between characters, sometimes only for a moment, revealing their hidden motives. I thought I would hate it after a while, but I didn’t. Herbert’s style carries the story pretty well, but I have to wonder why he felt the need to quickly reveal this or that betrayal, when half the time it could have remained unsaid or supposed by one of the two especially perceptive characters.

“He nodded. ‘Of course.’ And he thought: If only there were some way not to do this thing that I must do.

Well, for starters, you could consider avoiding loud whispering that everyone can hear.

That doesn’t touch on the quotations from backstory books that begin each chapter, saying one character is super, super bad or another one is going to die later on. No spoiler alert labels either. The main thing these quotations communicate is that Herbert is working on something of epic length. This won’t wrap up soon, gentle reader; note the gravitas of Princess Irulan’s history.

Despite this, I found book one to be compelling. The gifted, young Paul Atteides, only son of Duke Leto and his mistress Jessica, is remarkably perceptive, asking serious questions an adult should ask. His father works hard to gain and sustain loyal for his royal family, and he has a measure of success, but it becomes plain (that foretelling again) that the deck is stacked against him. A gifted observer or historian may be able to critic the Duke’s decisions and point to critical weaknesses or failures, but the story reveals a man who is trying to do his level best.

While reading, I thought I would see far more similarity to Star Wars, but so far the two stories are not alike. Paul is not some untrained kid hoping to get off his desert planet, and while the Empire is in the background and doesn’t look too good, it isn’t hunting down rebels. The story pits two ruling families against each other with a third, not-entirely-neutral party, a labor union that’s so large it could be an empire of its own. Add to this the free tribes of Arrakis, whom the Empire calls Sand Pirates (not at all like Sand People or Jawas).

I look forward to the rest of it and maybe even a sequel.

Dune at 50

Herbert was a quintessential product of the libertarian culture of the Pacific coast, self-reliant and distrustful of centralised authority, yet with a mile-wide streak of utopian futurism and a concomitant willingness to experiment. He was also chronically broke. During the period he wrote Dune, his wife Beverly Ann was the main bread-winner, her own writing career sidelined by a job producing advertising copy for department stores.

… The prevailing publishing wisdom of the time had it that SF readers liked their stories short. Dune (400 pages in its first hardcover edition, almost 900 in the paperback on my desk) was rejected by more than 20 houses before being accepted by Chilton, a Philadelphia operation known for trade and hobby magazines such as Motor Age, Jewelers’ Circular and the no-doubt-diverting Dry Goods Economist.

“By rights,” Hari Kunzru writes, “Dune ought to have become a big movie. An attempt by the visionary Chilean film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky to bring it to the screen became one of the great “what if” stories of SF cinema…. But Jodorowsky’s prog-tastic project was strangled in the crib by risk-averse Hollywood producers.”

But the story actually did make it to the big screen–as the movie Star Wars. “Herbert knew he’d been ripped off, and thought he saw the ideas of other SF writers in Lucas’s money-spinning franchise. He and a number of colleagues formed a joke organisation called the We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society.”