By Kabir Babar

FIFTY years ago, the manuscript for a lengthy science fiction novel was finally accepted by Chilton Book Company, a publisher of engineering manuals, after more than 20 rejections by various publishing houses. The novel, initially slow to generate sales, eventually went on to sell almost 20 million copies. Dune, often cited as the greatest science fiction book ever written, and its author Frank Herbert (1920-1986) changed the face of the genre.

Dune is set on the desert planet of Arrakis, millennia after a man-machine war has elevated human talent over machine consciousness, and when one of the most powerful commandments of the “Orange Catholic Bible” is “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind”. As such, the book is infused with a futuristic medievalism in which feuding political dynasties engage in vendettas and hand-to-hand combat while enlisting the services of specialised groups of humans with advanced mental faculties. The narrative revolves around the rise to power of Paul Atreides, a renegade who is believed by the mysterious desert-dwelling Fremen of Arrakis to be the Mahdi, the Lisan al-Gaib, the promised messiah who will lead them to paradise.

It is through this variety of peoples and causes that Dune emphasises the psychological and sociological aspects of perennial human drama over the technological. With the exception of the science of ecology, which is given great prominence in the book, Dune is thematically dominated by religious, historical, political, and economic motifs. This is why Dune, unlike much of science fiction, does not appear too dated by the technological developments of the last half-century. Indeed, the book’s relevance has only increased over time. Its dissection of governmental and corporate entities contending for the valuable, life-extending resource of the “spice mélange” presaged the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Its championing of the ecologically-sensitive principles of the water-conscious Fremen resonates with our climatically-challenged present. And its commentary on the messiahship and jihad engendered by the central character of Paul will be only too familiar to modern readers.

A key moment in the gestation of Dune was a visit by Herbert to Oregon, where the US Department of Agriculture had successfully planted poverty grass to stabilise rapidly shifting sand dunes encroaching upon civilisation — demonstrating to him the power of the desert. But many other aspects of Herbert’s life experiences contributed to Dune’s development. Brian Herbert’s insightful study of his father, Dreamer of Dune, reveals how the elder Herbert’s stint as a journalist and involvement in politics affected the book’s political content, and how exposure to Native American culture informed its ecological themes. The biography also details how Herbert took almost a decade to craft Dune, reading hundreds of books and learning numerous languages along the way.

The results of this diligence are readily apparent. Integrated into the text are quotations from religious and philosophical texts such as the Quran, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching. The influences of Islamic eschatology, Zen Buddhist philosophy, Greek mythology, Jungian psychology, and Middle Eastern history are ascertainable on almost every page. The isolated and persecuted Fremen waiting for deliverance are reminiscent of both the Jews and the Arab Bedouin. The figure of Paul invokes T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “[...] I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars [...]”

Dune was not the first science fiction book to intelligently explore religious impulses: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, to name just two examples, had appeared a few years earlier. But few writers have been able to convincingly weave together so many different strands of intellectual thought; an indication of Dune’s multiple facets is the fact that it has been taught at university classes in the US, ranging from literature and psychology to comparative religion and architecture.

While Herbert regarded himself as an entertainer, he also believed that writing without some insight into humanity was pointless, and that science fiction was the only genre which attempted to define what it is to be human. “Science fiction,” he said, “enables you to create different kinds of drama in ways that aren’t available to you in any other medium”. This view of science fiction as a uniquely powerful genre has been echoed by numerous other writers, but Dune is one of the few works that truly fulfils the promise ascribed to the genre. Arthur C. Clarke, of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, once wrote: “Dune seems to me unique among modern s-f [science fiction] novels in the depth of its characterisation and the extraordinary detail of the world it creates. I know nothing comparable to it in s-f or fantasy except The Lord of the Rings.”

The impact of Herbert and his work has been considerable, for in addition to inspiring books, games, music and films, Herbert’s ideas have extended beyond the arts. His visions have stimulated the inventions of engineers. His ecological outlook energised the environmental awareness movement of the 1960s. Astronauts have shown their appreciation by naming astronomical features after the fictional planets of his books. And for many, on a personal level, Dune is an outstanding and instructive commentary on historical forces and the nature of power and statecraft. The book has also been translated into dozens of languages.

This recognition was not inevitable, however, despite the premonition of one publisher that his rejection of the book was probably the mistake of his lifetime. The first of five sequels that Herbert wrote, Dune Messiah, was rejected for serialisation by editor John W. Campbell, who had initially serialised Dune in the magazine Analog.

Campbell disapproved of the direction in which Herbert was turning, saying that science fiction readers “want heroes — not anti-heroes. They want stories of strong men who exert themselves, inspire others, and make a monkey’s uncle out of malign fates!” Ironically, Campbell, who had once said that science fiction “[...] took as its domain, all conceivable societies, past and future, probable or improbable, realistic or fantastic, and dealt with all events and complications that were possible in all those societies”, failed to appreciate Herbert’s intention, which was specifically to expose heroics for what they often are: an accidental confluence of circumstances, or else a manipulative opportunism masquerading as natural brilliance.

The seeming need for individuals and societies to unthinkingly attach themselves to heroes disturbed Herbert, who saw charismatic men like Gen George S. Patton and US president John F. Kennedy as potentially dangerous leaders because of their ability to create a fervent following. “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero”, warns one character from Dune. But one feels that here, in the specific if not the general, Herbert erred somewhat when he solely blamed the uncritical adoration of JFK for the US embroilment in Vietnam. And Dune is not above conceptual criticism either; some of its notions, such as accessing the collective unconscious or genetic memory, are scientifically flawed.

But Herbert himself would have been the first to recognise his own limitations, disturbed as much by the cult around himself as he was by that around others. Despite its flaws, Dune continues to inspire, educate, and entertain millions, and has lost none of its mystique. What Jorge Luis Borges said of Olaf Stapledon’s masterwork Star Maker can equally apply to Herbert’s magnum opus: “It is the very essence of true literature — a book which changes its reader”.