The Dune series is a landmark of science fiction. Herbert deliberately suppressed technology in his Dune universe so he could address the politics of humanity, rather than the future of humanity's technology. For example, a key pre-history event to the novel's present is the "Butlerian Jihad", in which all robots and computers were destroyed, eliminating these common elements to science fiction from the novel as to allow focus on humanity.[13] Dune considers the way humans and their institutions might change over time.[1] Director John Harrison, who adapted Dune for Syfy's 2000 miniseries, called the novel a universal and timeless reflection of "the human condition and its moral dilemmas", and said:
A lot of people refer to Dune as science fiction. I never do. I consider it an epic adventure in the classic storytelling tradition, a story of myth and legend not unlike the Morte d'Arthur or any messiah story. It just happens to be set in the future ... The story is actually more relevant today than when Herbert wrote it. In the 1960s, there were just these two colossal superpowers duking it out. Today we're living in a more feudal, corporatized world more akin to Herbert's universe of separate families, power centers and business interests, all interrelated and kept together by the one commodity necessary to all.[16]
But Dune has also been called a mix of soft and hard science fiction since "the attention to ecology is hard, the anthropology and the psychic abilities are soft."[17] Hard elements include the ecology of Arrakis, suspensor technology, weapon systems, and ornithopters, while soft elements include issues relating to religion, physical and mental training, cultures, politics, and psychology.[18]
Herbert said Paul's messiah figure was inspired by the Arthurian legend,[19] and that the scarcity of water on Arrakis was a metaphor for oil, as well as air and water itself, and for the shortages of resources caused by overpopulation.[20] Novelist Brian Herbert, his son and biographer, wrote:
Dune is a modern-day conglomeration of familiar myths, a tale in which great sandworms guard a precious treasure of melange, the geriatric spice that represents, among other things, the finite resource of oil. The planet Arrakis features immense, ferocious worms that are like dragons of lore, with "great teeth" and a "bellows breath of cinnamon." This resembles the myth described by an unknown English poet in Beowulf, the compelling tale of a fearsome fire dragon who guarded a great treasure hoard in a lair under cliffs, at the edge of the sea. The desert of Frank Herbert's classic novel is a vast ocean of sand, with giant worms diving into the depths, the mysterious and unrevealed domain of Shai-hulud. Dune tops are like the crests of waves, and there are powerful sandstorms out there, creating extreme danger. On Arrakis, life is said to emanate from the Maker (Shai-hulud) in the desert-sea; similarly all life on Earth is believed to have evolved from our oceans. Frank Herbert drew parallels, used spectacular metaphors, and extrapolated present conditions into world systems that seem entirely alien at first blush. But close examination reveals they aren't so different from systems we know … and the book characters of his imagination are not so different from people familiar to us.[21]
Each chapter of Dune begins with an epigraph excerpted from the fictional writings of the character Princess Irulan. In forms such as diary entries, historical commentary, biography, quotations and philosophy, these writings set tone and provide exposition, context and other details intended to enhance understanding of Herbert's complex fictional universe and themes.[22][23][24] They act as foreshadowing and invite the reader to keep reading to close the gap between what the epigraph says and what is happening in the main narrative.[25] The epigraphs also give the reader the feeling that the world they are reading about is epically distanced, since Irulan writes about an idealized image of Paul as if he had already passed into memory.[26] Brian Herbert wrote: "Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again."[27]
Middle-Eastern and Islamic references
Due to the similarities between some of Herbert's terms and ideas and actual words and concepts in the Arabic language, as well as the series' "Islamic undertones" and themes, a Middle-Eastern influence on Herbert's works has been noted repeatedly.[28][29] In his descriptions of the Fremen culture and language, Herbert uses both authentic Arabic words and Arabic-sounding words.[30][31] For example, one of the names for the sandworm, Shai-hulud, is derived from Arabic: شيء خلود, romanized: šayʾ ḫulūd, lit. 'immortal thing' or Arabic: شيخ خلود, romanized: šayḫ ḫulūd, lit. 'old man of eternity'.[32][31] The title of the Fremen housekeeper, the Shadout Mapes, is borrowed from the Arabic: شادوف, romanized: šādūf, the Egyptian term for a device used to raise water.[31] In particular, words related to the messianic religion of the Fremen, first implanted by the Bene Gesserit, are taken from Arabic, including Muad'Dib (from Arabic: مؤدب, romanized: muʾaddib, lit. 'educator'), Lisan al-Gaib (from Arabic: لسان الغيب, romanized: lisān al-ġayb, lit. 'voice of the unseen') Usul (from Arabic: أصول, romanized: ʾuṣūl, lit. 'fundamental principles'), Shari-a (from Arabic: شريعة, romanized: šarīʿa, lit. 'sharia; path'), Shaitan (from Arabic: شيطان, romanized: šayṭān, lit. 'Shaitan; devil; fiend'), and jinn (from Arabic: جن, romanized: ǧinn, lit. 'jinn; spirit; demon; mythical being').[28] It is likely Herbert relied on second-hand resources such as phrasebooks and desert adventure stories to find these Arabic words and phrases for the Fremen.[31] They are meaningful and carefully chosen, and help create an "imagined desert culture that resonates with exotic sounds, enigmas, and pseudo-Islamic references" and has a distinctly Bedouin aesthetic.[31]
As a foreigner who adopts the ways of a desert-dwelling people and then leads them in a military capacity, Paul Atreides bears many similarities to the historical T. E. Lawrence.[33] His 1962 biopic Lawrence of Arabia has also been identified as a potential influence.[34] The Sabres of Paradise (1960) has also been identified as a potential influence upon Dune, with its depiction of Imam Shamil and the Islamic culture of the Caucasus inspiring some of the themes, characters, events and terminology of Dune.[7]
The environment of the desert planet Arrakis was primarily inspired by the environments of the Middle East. Similarly Arrakis as a bioregion is presented as a particular kind of political site. Herbert has made it resemble a desertified petrostate area.[35] The Fremen people of Arrakis were influenced by the Bedouin tribes of Arabia, and the Mahdi prophecy originates from Islamic eschatology.[36] Inspiration is also adopted from medieval historian Ibn Khaldun's cyclical history and his dynastic concept in North Africa, hinted at by Herbert's reference to Khaldun's book Kitāb al-ʿibar ("The Book of Lessons"). The fictionalized version of the "Kitab al-ibar" in Dune is a combination of a Fremen religious manual and a desert survival book.[37][38]
Additional language and historic influences
In addition to Arabic, Dune derives words and names from a variety of other languages, including Navajo, Latin, Dutch ("Landsraad"), Romani, Hebrew ("Kefitzat haderech", in Hebrew "קפיצת הדרך", meaning contracting of the path), Serbo-Croatian, Nahuatl, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit ("prana bindu", "prajna"), Russian, Turkish, Finnish, and Old English.[39][40] Bene Gesserit is part of the Latin legal phrase quamdiu se bene gesserit "as long as he shall behave himself well" seen in grants of certain offices (such as judgeships) meaning that the appointee shall remain in office so long as he shall not be guilty of abusing it. Some critics miss the connotation of the phrase, misled by the Latin future perfect gesserit, taking it over-literally (and adding an unwarranted passive) to mean "it will have been well borne", an interpretation which is not well supported by the Bene Gesserit doctrine in the story.[41]
Through the inspiration from The Sabres of Paradise, there are also allusions to the tsarist-era Russian nobility and Cossacks.[42] Frank Herbert stated that bureaucracy that lasted long enough would become a hereditary nobility, and a significant theme behind the aristocratic families in Dune was "aristocratic bureaucracy" which he saw as analogous to the Soviet Union.[43][44]
Environmentalism and ecology
Dune has been called the "first planetary ecology novel on a grand scale".[45] Herbert hoped it would be seen as an "environmental awareness handbook" and said the title was meant to "echo the sound of 'doom'".[46] It was reviewed in the best selling countercultural Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 as a "rich re-readable fantasy with clear portrayal of the fierce environment it takes to cohere a community".[47]
After the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, science fiction writers began treating the subject of ecological change and its consequences. Dune responded in 1965 with its complex descriptions of Arrakis life, from giant sandworms (for whom water is deadly) to smaller, mouse-like life-forms adapted to live with limited water. Dune was followed in its creation of complex and unique ecologies by other science fiction books such as A Door into Ocean (1986) and Red Mars (1992).[45] Environmentalists have pointed out that Dune's popularity as a novel depicting a planet as a complex—almost living—thing, in combination with the first images of Earth from space being published in the same time period, strongly influenced environmental movements such as the establishment of the international Earth Day.[48]
While the genre of climate fiction was popularized in the 2010s in response to real global climate change, Dune as well as other early science fiction works from authors like J. G. Ballard (The Drowned World) and Kim Stanley Robinson (the Mars trilogy) have retroactively been considered pioneering examples of the genre.[49][50]
Declining empires
The Imperium in Dune contains features of various empires in Europe and the Near East, including the Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, and Ottoman Empire.[51][32][52] Lorenzo DiTommaso compared Dune's portrayal of the downfall of a galactic empire to Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which argues that Christianity allied with the profligacy of the Roman elite led to the fall of Ancient Rome. In "The Articulation of Imperial Decadence and Decline in Epic Science Fiction" (2007), DiTommaso outlines similarities between the two works by highlighting the excesses of the Emperor on his home planet of Kaitain and of the Baron Harkonnen in his palace. The Emperor loses his effectiveness as a ruler through an excess of ceremony and pomp. The hairdressers and attendants he brings with him to Arrakis are even referred to as "parasites". The Baron Harkonnen is similarly corrupt and materially indulgent. Gibbon's Decline and Fall partly blames the fall of Rome on the rise of Christianity. Gibbon claimed that this exotic import from a conquered province weakened the soldiers of Rome and left it open to attack. The Emperor's Sardaukar fighters are little match for the Fremen of Dune not only because of the Sardaukar's overconfidence and the fact that Jessica and Paul have trained the Fremen in their battle tactics, but because of the Fremen's capacity for self-sacrifice. The Fremen put the community before themselves in every instance, while the world outside wallows in luxury at the expense of others.[53]
The decline and long peace of the Empire sets the stage for revolution and renewal by genetic mixing of successful and unsuccessful groups through war, a process culminating in the Jihad led by Paul Atreides, described by Frank Herbert as depicting "war as a collective orgasm" (drawing on Norman Walter's 1950 The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare),[54][55] themes that would reappear in God Emperor of Dune's Scattering and Leto II's all-female Fish Speaker army.
Gender dynamics
Gender dynamics are complex in Dune. Within the Fremen sietch communities, women have almost full equality. They carry weapons and travel in raiding parties with men, fighting when necessary alongside the men. They can take positions of leadership as a Sayyadina or as a Reverend Mother (if she can survive the ritual of ingesting the Water of Life.) Both of these sietch religious leaders are routinely consulted by the all-male Council and can have a decisive voice in all matters of sietch life, security and internal politics. They are also protected by the entire community. Due to the high mortality rate among their men, women outnumber men in most sietches. Polygamy is common, and sexual relationships are voluntary and consensual; as Stilgar says to Jessica, "women among us are not taken against their will."
In contrast, the Imperial aristocracy leaves young women of noble birth very little agency. Frequently trained by the Bene Gesserit, they are raised to eventually marry other aristocrats. Marriages between Major and Minor Houses are political tools to forge alliances or heal old feuds; women are given very little say in the matter. Many such marriages are quietly maneuvered by the Bene Gesserit to produce offspring with some genetic characteristics needed by the sisterhood's human-breeding program. In addition, such highly placed sisters were in a position to subtly influence their husbands' actions in ways that could move the politics of the Imperium toward Bene Gesserit goals.
The gom jabbar test of humanity is administered by the female Bene Gesserit order but rarely to males.[56] The Bene Gesserit have seemingly mastered the unconscious and can play on the unconscious weaknesses of others using the Voice, yet their breeding program seeks after a male Kwisatz Haderach.[33] Their plan is to produce a male who can "possess complete racial memory, both male and female," and look into the black hole in the collective unconscious that they fear.[57] A central theme of the book is the connection, in Jessica's son, of this female aspect with his male aspect. This aligns with concepts in Jungian psychology, which features conscious/unconscious and taking/giving roles associated with males and females, as well as the idea of the collective unconscious.[58] Paul's approach to power consistently requires his upbringing under the matriarchal Bene Gesserit, who operate as a long-dominating shadow government behind all of the great houses and their marriages or divisions.[57] He is trained by Jessica in the Bene Gesserit Way, which includes prana-bindu training in nerve and muscle control and precise perception.[59] Paul also receives Mentat training, thus helping prepare him to be a type of androgynous Kwisatz Haderach, a male Reverend Mother.[57]
In a Bene Gesserit test early in the book, it is implied that people are generally "inhuman" in that they irrationally place desire over self-interest and reason. This applies Herbert's philosophy that humans are not created equal, while equal justice and equal opportunity are higher ideals than mental, physical, or moral equality.[60]
Heroism
I am showing you the superhero syndrome and your own participation in it.
— Frank Herbert[61]
Throughout Paul's rise to superhuman status, he follows a plotline common to many stories describing the birth of a hero.[62] He has unfortunate circumstances forced onto him. After a long period of hardship and exile, he confronts and defeats the source of evil in his tale.[63][64] As such, Dune is representative of a general trend beginning in 1960s American science fiction in that it features a character who attains godlike status through scientific means.[65] Eventually, Paul Atreides gains a level of omniscience which allows him to take over the planet and the galaxy, and causes the Fremen of Arrakis to worship him like a god. Author Frank Herbert said in 1979, "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."[66] He wrote in 1985, "Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question."[67]
Juan A. Prieto-Pablos says Herbert achieves a new typology with Paul's superpowers, differentiating the heroes of Dune from earlier heroes such as Superman, van Vogt's Gilbert Gosseyn and Henry Kuttner's telepaths. Unlike previous superheroes who acquire their powers suddenly and accidentally, Paul's are the result of "painful and slow personal progress." And unlike other superheroes of the 1960s—who are the exception among ordinary people in their respective worlds—Herbert's characters grow their powers through "the application of mystical philosophies and techniques." For Herbert, the ordinary person can develop incredible fighting skills (Fremen, Ginaz swordsmen and Sardaukar) or mental abilities (Bene Gesserit, Mentats, Spacing Guild Navigators).[68]
Zen and religion
Early in his newspaper career, Herbert was introduced to Zen by two Jungian psychologists, Ralph and Irene Slattery, who "gave a crucial boost to his thinking".[69] Zen teachings ultimately had "a profound and continuing influence on [Herbert's] work".[69] Throughout the Dune series and particularly in Dune, Herbert employs concepts and forms borrowed from Zen Buddhism.[69][70] The Fremen are referred to as Zensunni adherents, and many of Herbert's epigraphs are Zen-spirited.[71] In "Dune Genesis", Frank Herbert wrote:
What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fugue like relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape. As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul's gift of prescience - the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."[60]
Brian Herbert called the Dune universe "a spiritual melting pot", noting that his father incorporated elements of a variety of religions, including Buddhism, Sufi mysticism and other Islamic belief systems, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism.[72] He added that Frank Herbert's fictional future in which "religious beliefs have combined into interesting forms" represents the author's solution to eliminating arguments between religions, each of which claimed to have "the one and only revelation."[72][73]
Asimov's Foundation
Tim O'Reilly suggests that Herbert also wrote Dune as a counterpoint to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. In his monograph on Frank Herbert, O'Reilly wrote that "Dune is clearly a commentary on the Foundation trilogy. Herbert has taken a look at the same imaginative situation that provoked Asimov's classic—the decay of a galactic empire—and restated it in a way that draws on different assumptions and suggests radically different conclusions. The twist he has introduced into Dune is that the Mule, not the Foundation, is his hero."[74] According to O'Reilly, Herbert bases the Bene Gesserit on the scientific shamans of the Foundation, though they use biological rather than statistical science.[74] In contrast to the Foundation series and its praise of science and rationality, Dune proposes that the unconscious and unexpected are actually what are needed for humanity.[74]
Both Herbert and Asimov explore the implications of prescience (i.e., visions of the future) both psychologically and socially. The Foundation series deploys a broadly determinist approach to prescient vision rooted in mathematical reasoning on a macroscopic social level. Dune, by contrast, invents a biologically rooted power of prescience that becomes determinist when the user actively relies on it to navigate past an undefined threshold of detail. Herbert's eugenically produced and spice-enhanced prescience is also personalized to individual actors whose roles in later books constrain each other's visions, rendering the future more or less mutable as time progresses. In what might be a comment on Foundation, Herbert's most powerfully prescient being in God Emperor of Dune laments the boredom engendered by prescience, and values surprises, especially regarding one's death, as a psychological necessity.
However, both works contain a similar theme of the restoration of civilization[75] and seem to make the fundamental assumption that "political maneuvering, the need to control material resources, and friendship or mating bonds will be fundamentally the same in the future as they are now."[76]
