1965 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. In the distant
future, plots whirl within plots, and the control of the most valuable
planet in the universe is a poisoned chalice.
To me this book prefigures much that is right and much that is
wrong with soft science fiction. The reader is thrown into this very
alien culture with little explanation: what matters about starships
("Heighliners") is that they go from A to B and you need Melange to
make them go, and that's all you're going to learn, so they remain as
strange to the reader as they do to the characters. The excuse for the
absence of computers is the "Butlerian Jihad", and since everybody in
the world of the book knows what that was nobody sees any need to
explain it further. (That Herbert's heirs and assigns did, eventually,
write the novel that explained it further shows how much they missed
the point. Or wanted the money.)
But while the setting is clearly decadent and decaying, and Herbert
does his best to show the weight of over ten thousand years of
civilisation pressing down on everyone, it's perversely thin. If you
poke it with a finger, you may find that that particular spot was only
made of soggy cardboard. Take the personal shields, for example, which
are clearly here to give an excuse for mêlée combat in a high-tech age
and prevent people from simply settling their differences with lasers:
The white-hot beams of disruptive light could cut through any known
substance, provided that substance was not shielded. The fact that
feedback from a shield would explode both lasgun and shield did not
bother the Harkonnens. Why? A lasgun-shield explosion was a
dangerous variable, could be more powerful than atomics, could kill
only the gunner and his shielded target.
…yes, and so with all these fanatical people about (some of whom are
most definitely suicide bombers), they don't build a bunch of boxes
each with a laser and a shield and a timer, and leave them around
somewhere they want blown up; and they don't issue lasers to their
most suicidal fanatics with instructions to shoot shielded people;
because… because…?
It's a pity the writing is so heavy-handed and stuffy. We learn that
there's going to be a Big Betrayal from the people who are plotting
it, from the traitor himself, and from everyone who's going to be
betrayed, who can work out that there's something bad coming… all well
before it actually happens. It's trying to be lush but there's never
much human connection.
(And the one homosexual character is apparently portrayed as such, and
as a pæderast, only because he would otherwise be missing some traits
that Herbert regarded as negative, and he has to have all of them.)
In some ways the best-developed character is the planet Arrakis itself
(inspired by Herbert's visits to the Oregon Dunes) and the Fremen who
have learned to live with it rather than copying their home
environment within it. Yes, all right, there's a lot of noble savagery
and primitive meaning simple (especially in the matter of the
carefully-seeded messiah legend), but there's still a great deal of
interest here.
It all comes to feel as though it's been set up to make the particular
story Herbert wants to tell not only possible, as would be the case in
any novel, but inevitable. (What can psi powers do? Whatever the
plot needs them to.) And with some of the players running a
multi-generational breeding programme in order to produce just the
right sort of human mutant, inevitability is almost a theme: someone
broke the rules of that programme, but all she did was bring the
endgame on early.
The main redeeming feature, in the end, is the end: when all is
done, and Paul Atreides has not only kept the planet but made himself
Emperor, he has lost, in that he's now such a hero to the Fremen of
Arrakis that they will inevitably go out into the universe pillaging
and burning in his name even if he tells them not to. (Somehow. Oh,
right, the Spacing Guild suddenly doesn't control all the starships.
Or something.) Was it worth nearly 200,000 words of hero's journey to
get to that final break-away? I'm not convinced.
Followed by Dune Messiah, but I'm inclined to regard this book most
favourably when it stands alone.
Reread for Neil Bowers'
Hugo-Nebula Joint Winners Reread.
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