Ecology aside, Herbert could have written a novel in which Arrakis had been nothing but a source of scenery and exotic action scenes. Dune would still have been a viable, albeit less memorable, novel if Herbert had focused on the politics of the vast, interplanetary Imperium to the exclusion of the everyday life of his desert planet.
Instead, he made Dune's ecology a driving force behind the politics of the Imperium by introducing the commodity of spice. Without spice, the Imperium and all its major players would collapse. Spice makes Arrakis the center of the universe by making the politics of the Imperium an extension of the planet's ecology. Moreover, by linking the Imperium's society to Dune in this way, Herbert could apply his interest in the planet's ecology to the rest of the universe.
The result was a stunning level of detail. Dune is filled with the history, laws and customs of the Imperium, each new bit of information contributing a brush-stroke of nuance to Herbert's sprawling canvas where perspective ranges in dizzying variety from the microcosmic world of flukes and water droplets to the cosmic pageantry of galactic history.
Although New York Times critic Gerald Jonas wrote that "to read the Dune trilogy [as the series was at the time] is to plunge into someone else's obsession," Herbert always seemed casual about the books, claiming simply that he was just writing a good story and that he was glad people liked it. However, he compiled vast collections of notes on the Dune universe over the years, squirreling some away in safe deposit boxes where they lay hidden for decades. One has to wonder if Jonas wasn't right about Herbert's obsession.
The word spreads
If Herbert was obsessed with Dune, he had no trouble finding others to share his interest. While it probably benefited from its early serializations in Analog, the paperback was an immediate hit in the science fiction community. It won the first "best novel" Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965, and shared the fan-given 1966 Hugo Award with Roger Zelazny's ...And Call Me Conrad .
More importantly, Dune -- like The Lord of the Rings and, to a lesser degree, Stranger in a Strange Land -- broke out of the SF ghetto and invaded the mass consciousness. By the time Children of Dune, the third book, appeared in 1976, Dune and Dune Messiah had together sold over a million copies, and the series was getting notice in the New York Times Book Review.
After that, the books gained momentum. The hardcover print run of Children of Dune was 47,000 copies. Five years later, God Emperor of Dune had a hardcover print run of 120,000 copies. Over the years, Berkley published several tie-in books, including Willis McNeilly's Dune Encyclopedia (1984) and The Maker of Dune (1987), a posthumous collection of Herbert's thoughts edited by Tim O'Reilly. A board game produced in the early 80s is a collector's item today and is still in print in a French edition.
Dune even made it to the silver screen with a big-budget production and a large, well-known cast. David Lynch's 1984 movie was eagerly anticipated by fans, and while it was a commercial disappointment -- grossing only half its then-enormous $45 million budget in theatrical release -- it was one of the very few SF films to even attempt a faithful adaptation of its source material.
An earlier attempt at filming the movie in the 70s never got off the ground, but would have featured designs by Jean Giraud and H. R. Giger, a soundtrack by Pink Floyd, and Salvador Dali as Emperor Shaddam IV.
After Herbert's death, the flow of new Dune-related material understandably decreased. His son, Brian, published selections from Herbert's voluminous notebooks in 1988 as The Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune, but, while Brian considered writing a novel set in his father's universe, he would not realize this ambition for another decade. Instead, Arrakis lived on mostly in reprints, and in two computer game and a short-lived card game.
As for the reprints themselves, the Dune universe continues to gain new fans despite the fact that the cliffhanger ending of Chapterhouse: Dune, the sixth book, would be left permanently unresolved by Herbert's death. Bantam Books was sufficiently confident of the series' popularity to offer Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson $3 million for three prequels to the series.
Their first book, Dune: House Atreides, was published in October, 1999, and looks set to reopen the floodgates into the parched imaginations of Herbert fans. A Dune roleplaying game is on the way from Last Unicorn games, and Sci-Fi Channel miniseries is in pre-production for airing in 2001.
Second moon rising
So why now? What's bringing about this flood of interest?
Some of it's just good timing. According to Brian Herbert, the new novels only got rolling when a lost cache of Herbert's notes was discovered, providing detailed clues to his plans for a seventh Dune book. It probably didn't hurt that Bantam Books was losing the popular Star Wars license to Del Rey and casting about for a new SF franchise.
As for the roleplaying game, Last Unicorn had been developing the game for years and it's apparently just a happy coincidence that it's appearing at nearly the same time as a new novel.
But there's more to it. Dune has a surprising vitality. It's taught in college courses, and, like The Lord of the Rings, it's a saga fans regularly reread. Ultimately, the reason these new books and adaptations are coming out is because there are a lot of fans and they want more Dune.
In his SF history The Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss likened the appeal of Dune to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land . As with Stranger, he wrote, Herbert's readers "can indulge in a fantasy life of power and savor a strange religion."
What self-disrespecting gawky adolescent wouldn't thrill to a tale of great deeds and mystic knowledge? Since Paul Atreides, the central figure of the first and still most popular books, is such a quintessentially adolescent hero, Aldiss seems to have a point. Paul is a boy who develops great powers, leads full-grown men, and becomes ruler of the universe.
Past the power fantasy
On the other hand, Paul doesn't live happily ever after. By the end of Dune Messiah, he has lost everything, even his sight, and sacrifices himself to the desert. Even in the first book, his victories are problematic. Paul struggles desperately to avoid the bloody jihad he foresees, but every step he takes brings him closer to it. Herbert also cuts off the story abruptly at the moment of triumph, preventing the reader from fully enjoying Paul's success.
These are clues pointing to a layer of meaning underneath the power fantasy and mysticism, one that gets back to the heart of Herbert's simple idea for a long novel. Paul Atreides is a good and noble man, but he causes war and suffering with all his best intentions.
"The bottom line to the Dune [series] is: Beware of heroes." Herbert wrote that in 1981, and that's still a moral that bears powerful resonance as we worry about the future and the people who are supposedly going to help us through it.
It's also a hidden moral, which is why we reread Dune as we grow older. When we're young, we thrill to the adventure and it's the heroic aspects that catch our attention. We wish we were Paul.
When we're older, we begin to see the tragedy in the intrigues and death surrounding the House of Atreides.
And in the end, as we read and reread the book, we see that every one of the many details Herbert laid out partakes in the deeply ambivalent nature of the worlds he gave us, the heroic and tragic aspects alike. Thufir Hawat's designs show both his heroic trustworthiness and the tragic need to constantly check one's own home for treachery. The desert is both remorseless killer and the forge of the formidable Fremen, who themselves are both noble savages and vicious killers. Even Paul Atreides is both Atreides and Harkonnen. The thing contains its opposite; triumph and tragedy always take turns.
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