I always get mad at nerds for “missing the point” of “seminal works”, so imagine my surprise when reading this one made me mad that almost 60 years’ worth of nerds missed the most interesting points about the book.
When I started reading Dune, I didn’t expect to come out of it with one of my favorite books ever, I just expected to understand a part of the fabric of moderns sci-fi.
I still have an ongoing binge where I visit “seminal works” that have inspired a lot of other things. It’s always fun to see what keeps its luster long after everyone and their giant sandworm have copied it to the point that it becomes Basically Public Domain by Prevalence.
Giant sandworms, water being effectively a currency, tribalistic sand people (this one still ruffling feathers nowadays), the personal body shields or shields that deflect fast things but not slower ones… it’s fitting that for a work so focused on the idea of deriving power from the memories of your ancestors, reading it is like peering into the DNA of Sci-Fi in so many things.
It’s even funnier the lack of any eulogizing to its imagery that the book has. It spends the first few chapters describig a kind of personal shield that deflects things like bullets but then slow things like slower kinfe cuts get through… and then proceeds to go “they bring the attention of sandworms, if a laser gun shoots it it’s basically a nuke, and it made everyone that learned to fight in one useless in a proper fight” before doing away with them.
For the easy comparison, imagine if Star Wars introduced Light Sabers and then went “very impractical” and did away with them.
The thing nobody copied that stood out to me though is, fittingly enough, the human element.
The first chapter has another set of imagery that has been copied in some shape or another. A trial where Reverend Mother Gaius makes Paul Atreides (the effective protagonist of the book) stick his hand into a box that inflicts immesurable pain while holding the Gom Jabar, a Very Lethal Needle to his neck. The trial’s core idea is that a “human” is able to rise above their base instincts, and would be able to withstand pain instead of just running away from it.
There is something to be said about standing pain on the threat of death, and to this day I can’t tell how intentional the hypocrisy in that idea is…
Regardless of that, it’s fitting that this is the opening chapter because the whole novel has a very… sobering focus on the human element of it all.
It’s stated a million times that Paul should be fooling around and being a kid instead of being trained by the Space Witches (the Bene Gesserit) while needing to test all his meals for poison to the point they have distinct names for different types of poisoning.
The underlying political conflict can be summed up as the Emperor being afraid that the Duke Leto would undermine him with his own charisma (a charisma that he fell for too, mind you) so he’s sending him to Arrakis, domain of the Baron Harkonnen who’s family has been on a deadly feud with the Atreides over a personal (though hardly petty) slight.
When Paul awakens to his awareness as the Kwisatz Haderach (the chosen one basically) it’s not a triumphant moment, he’s haunted by the monster freak that he is and lashes out at his mother for making a monster like him. Said mother disobeyed the orders of the Space Witches and gave the Duke a son instead of a daughter (like the witches requested) because he wanted a son and she loved him.
Said mother, Lady Jessica, is acussed of being a spy at the start of the novel and this doesn’t blow up directly, rather, she starts making small but discreet moves like dressing in a way that she knows the Duke loves and it all has the tinge of an unhappy marriage beyond any political intrigue.
Likewise, when Paul starts dating Chani (his love interest and eventual concubine because of political shenanigans), Lady Jessica paints the situation where she rationalizes it over many political factors but has the very obvious air of a mother feeling jealousy over her son’s girlfriend which is… a very normal thing in the real world, especially when it comes to a firstborn male.
In the flipside of that there’s the Harkonnens, who dismiss the humanity and individuality of everyone. People are tools to be used to them, and they indulge in every excess even if it means taking food away from everyone else to gorge themselves. There’s that detail of Baron Harkonnen having a Russian sounding name in the Cold War era and also of his depravity being linked to homosexuality but uh… no yeah, that’s a bit yikes to say out loud. Not a deal breaker while reading because then it feels more incidental rather than the source of it, but it’s still there.
Something surprisingly less yikes is Dune’s depiction of Gender.
You see the space witches and the reverend mothers more specifically have access to the memories of every past reverend mother they succeed, this enhances their usual skills (basically body control to the point they can decide the gender of their baby while pregnant) and the Kwisatz Haderach is supposed to be a male reverend… father who has access to his whole, carefully-crafted line. In particular, access to the male AND female memories, whereas the space witches can only access the female ones.
The very binary depiction of gender that would rise some interesting questions nowadays, because while the understanding of Gender in the public conscious is miles ahead of how it was even 10 years ago (a statement that can hopefully remain in that wording) causing some interesting retroactive realizations all around (read: genderqueer people didn’t pop out of the ground in 2014 at once). But Dune doesn’t feel… hateful.
As a point of comparison, comparing it to Robert E. Howard’s depiction of black people in Conan the Barbarian or H. P. Lovecraft’s depictions of… the Irish, Frank Herbert’s ideosyncracies of Gender lack that same undertone of hate and disgust.
First of all, the cast is populated by women that range from Lady Jessica being the effective deuteragonist of the novel, to any number of the Fremen, to any number of the Royalty. They’re all depicted as deadly (if not MORE so) than the men and treated with the same respect. When the Fremen women are treated as property of their husbands it’s treated with less of an air of “this ideal” and more of “this is just how things are here” without making any women any less deadly as a result.
The result is that it’s easier to turn your brain off to that sort of thing than in other properties because being female just feels like it has that same distinction between Hobbits and Elves in LotR, where they’re just as capable but with different natural capabilities.
It’s… interesting.
Despite this though, the point I try to make is that it makes me ANGRY that in soon-to-be 60 years since it came out, generations upon generations of nerds saw the tragic tale of a genetically-engineered monster that felt strapped to a rocket to becoming Super Hitler and paving the way to Ultra Hitler, where his parents lament that he’s been denied a normal life with a normal family, where cultural engineering made it so his every action will be seen as the coming of a Messiah underlining how everyone is part of an ouroboros of plans and conspiracies out of control. That they saw all this and just went
“Wow cool hero.”