I recently finished Frank Herbert's run on his epic masterpiece/cash cow, Dune and felt like a friend had died. It was that great. No more to go, over, Dune Done.
If you are unaware of Dune I recommend going immediately to a bookstore and grabbing a copy of the first in this six book series. Dune is the story of a space Messiah on a desert planet. That's the elevator speach, but it's as unappealing as saying that 100 years of Solitude is about a mythical town in South America.
Dune features a Galactic system of conspiring feudal houses, a religious sect of witch-women (Bene Gesserit), a race of business men who have privatised and monopolized space travel, and another sect of people who are (the Spacing Guild), human computers, a sect who monkey around with genetics, and giant, fire breathing, oven stomached, village eating, hallucinagen manufacturing worms.
The only version to purchase has a cover that looks like this.
Dune takes place hundreds of years after the robot purge in a universe where machines are suspect. All houses vie for power over the desert planet, Arakkis (Dune), because Dune is the only place to find the spice which gives people psi powers. It gives the Spacing Guild the power to fold space, and it gives the Bene Gesserit, the witch women, limited prescience and contact with the memories of every one of their ancestors. Using that knowledge and honing their bodies to Batman-level excellence in reflexes and ninja level metabolic control they run a multimillenia long eugenics program to mature the human race.
Everything runs in smooth tension until one witch goes rogue, falls in love, and has a child, Paul Atreides, who trained by weapons master Duncan Idaho becomes the Messiah.
In book two we see the results of his jihad.
Join Scoenherr is the only Dune cover artist as far as I'm concerned. He's as subtle with his palette as he is with his content.
In book three we see his children discover their abilities. Fairly standard.
The third book, Children of Dune, ends with Leto Atreides covering himself with sandworm babies (sand trout) and gaining super human strength and invulnerability.
Sandworms are gargantuan monsters with furnaces in their bellies who destroy anything that moves rythmically on Dune's surface. They create the spice as a biological function.
These covers are the best. They say everything by saying very little.
The second half of the series is where the true awesome begins. It seemed that way this summer when I dive into them. I had read the first three before I turned twenty, so it's possible that my judgement was inaccurately closed by a teen-something's ignorance. They may be just as great as the last three, but I remember thinking of Messiah and Children, "Good, but not as good as Dune." In fact, the reason that I didn't continue reading them was the third book's title. I thought that it was blasphemous. I was a hardcore Christian at the time.
Now that I study this image I wonder how Leto got enough food down his throat to feed that monstrous monster body. Maybe his face grew...
In God Emperor of Dune, we see Leto 300 years later. His baby sandworm skin has turned him into a sandworm and he's running a long term plan that goes beyond anything the Bene Gesserit had devised. He can see the distant future and is the puppeteer of all of humanity. He's become the God Emperor. But like all God Emperors he dies at the end. Herbert is an American modern, and we hate being told what to do.
3000 years later Heretics of Dune shows the Bene Gesserit are still dealing with the results of Leto Atreides' plan, his golden Path. There's been a mass scattering of humanity behind the galaxy. And a race of berserker women (The Honoured Matres) have returned and destroy everything in their path. Will humanity survive? Can the Bene Gesserit stop their invasion? The conflagration ending is jaw dropping and unexpected and only three guys and a shifty third player survive. But they take a captive, two actually counting the shift third player, three of you count their own guy Duncan Idaho, the guy from the the first book 3300 years ago.
This is my favourite of the covers. It's the most elegant. You can see that this is a structure and that it looks like a sandworm. It's a thing called a No-ship. No-ships are invisible to radar and clairvoyance. It's parked on Chapterhouse. This image is a double meaning and metaphor. Read the novel and discover the Japanese 9-dan haiku level elegance for yourself; I won't speak it here.
The series ends with the author's death, unfortunately, just as he was going strong. Chapterhouse Dune begins Ten years after Heretics closes, and the threat of the Honoured Matres is still coming. Chapterhouse is the hidden planet where the Bene Gesserit keep their base and records, which are extensive and detailed (not to mention redundant, considering they each remember everything from every one of their ancestors). Will the Honoured Matres discover is location? The book ends with an unprecedented set of reversals.
The Honoured Matres versus the Reverend Mothers is a battle between super who and I'd, or between body and mind/soul. between consumption and harmony. It's an intricate metaphor that he never nails down, hammers out, or bludgeons is with.
Them's the plots. But that doesn't do these books justice. They are full of tension and drama and philosophy and ideas. Ideas about history and religion and government as well as sci-fi ideas like the mentats, characters who can record and analyze data better than computers. Odeas like the hallucinagenic spice which opens minds. Also, Herbert takes stock ideas, like cloning, to the next level. In the books they routinely restore memories to a ghola, a clone made from the cells of a corpse. I personally love the No-ship, which takes cloaking to the next level. Herbert put nuns in space and takes them to the next level. They kick ass, can read your mind through the most minute bodily movements, and will have sex with whomever they need to control ("imprint")or exract DNA from. Also, he invented bullet-time and took that to the next level 15 years before The Matrix. Frank Herbert was a genius.
I've told you nothing. Just a few bare bones that I haven't even connected. I've left out almost all the big reveals. I may have even made it sound boring. Herbert's writing is seductive and the pages turn themselves. His action sequences are exactly the right length, vivid, refusing the temptation to go on and on. And his tension filled discussions, those moments when two parties are trying to learn something from each other without telling anyone anything, because revelation brings death, those moments of spy-talk, are generous, and sizzle.
A million stars and planets to this notable contribution to the literary canon. I wish Herbert could have survived to write more. I may succumb to the temptation to read the works churned out with his son's name on them, though that would surely sully the wonder. I can tell what level they're hovering at just by the ham-fisted covers.
Sure enough. After writing the above sentences I looked up a review of the son of Herbert installments; he and his team completely fumble the ball.
Here's a link to a brilliant think piece analizing Herbert's intentions for "Dune 7" based on the trajectory of the first six novels. It focuses on his big ideas. Big ideas are what make great fiction.
The review I refer to is the second one on this feed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dune/comments/44esav/what_did_frank_herbert_really_intend_after/
If Heinlein is the Dean of science fiction, then Frank Herbert is its Herman Melville, who is the American Shakespeare, who is the greatest fiction writer in the English language. Untorture that metaphor, sit down with Dune, and tell your friends and family that you won't be around for a while; you just got saved.
