On the Shoulders of Giant Sand Worms

One of the perks of living in a house-house is the ability to double down on holiday decorations. I loved our old apartment. We were there for five years, it was the first place my wife and I officially lived together (the occasional overlap with one of us waiting on a new lease notwithstanding). We were a five minute walk from a great coffeeshop, my favorite bagel place in the area, and bang-up kebabs. But we had absolutely no room to keep anything. A crash course in the benefits of vertical storage and a natural proclivity for Tetris, while helpful, had its limits. So when judging items on space vs utility metrics, the once-a-year-for-two-weeks crowd was a tough sell.

Now however we have what I consider infinite storage. Gone are the days where I shoved what amounted to thick glass ashtrays under the legs of the bed to eke out an extra inch needed to accommodate an Ikea bin. Today we have an actual bona fide storage room. Four walls, a ceiling, shelves. A veritable temple to our seldom-used crap. So when my parents moved earlier this year I seized the opportunity to take custody of their old Halloween decorations and join them to our own burgeoning collection of Target discount-bin masked animal figurines.

As a result I’m sitting in a living room with an indubitable explosion of witch silhouettes, icicle-style spider lights, artificial gourds, and candy dishes and getting comfortable on the couch to watch… what? I’m going to make an undeniably controversial statement here and say there isn’t really a bounty of choice when it comes to Halloween movies. Don’t get me wrong- we have a couple standbys. Hocus Pocus will make an appearance at some point, along with It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. And we already watched Nightmare Before Christmas (though if we’re all being honest that falls more into the latter holiday category than the former). Otherwise-we’re left with horror films.

Look. I get Halloween isn’t really a celebration with a moral to the story. Christmas we toss on films focusing on overcoming commercialism and extolling the merits of being home for the holidays. Valentine’s Day gives us romance, the 4th of July love letters to jingoism and baseball. I’m just as ready as the next guy to throw on a twelve hour loop of Spooky Scary Skeletons but I never quite felt the urge to watch a slasher flick and call it a celebration. BUT. I’ll try anything once. And so a few years ago we had a couple over to watch some of the OG scary movies. Carrie. Rosemary’s Baby. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And they were…okay?

They weren’t bad per se. Everything just felt a little muffled. The suspense wasn’t too suspenseful. The grotesque merely unpleasant, the jump scares hop scares at worst. I’d seen those same elements used to better effect in other films and so walked away wondering what was all the fuss. And then it hit me- those other, more recent movies used those elements and techniques BECAUSE the originals pioneered the concepts. Innovation happens in leaps and bounds- rarely does the first person to introduce an idea perfect it. “If I have seen further,” said probably any number of people, but maybe Isaac Newton, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

And so, to bring this home (and in honor of this weekend’s American release of its latest film version), I want to breakdown a book which while difficult to compare to modern science fiction really set the stage for genre in its current iteration: Dune.

A quick recap of the setup

I’ll stay relatively spoiler-free here for those of you planning to take your first steps into the Dune universe with Denis Villeneuve’s now-released film. That said I still need to discuss a couple concepts (including prophecy surrounding the lead) and some of the character archetypes. So, consider this fair warning and absolution of any liability for ruining a surprise. Purportedly inspired by coastal sand dunes near Florence, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest and psilocybin from his personal cultivation of magic mushrooms. Frank Herbert originally published Dune as a set of serials in an American science fiction magazine beginning in 1965.

Set some tens of thousands of years in the future, Dune opens with House Atreides, one of the Great Houses governing the known universe under the rule of the Padishah Emperor. Wary of the house’s rising popularity and power, the Emperor commands the Atreides to abandon their lush waterworld of Caladan and replace their rivals House Harkonnen as administrators of the desert planet Arrakis. Home to killing heat and thousand-foot sandworms that consume anything in their path, Arrakis is the only location of the compound melange (also known as Spice), a substance that extends youth, vitality, and lifespan. And, more importantly a mental stimulant and hallucinogen that enables navigators to guide interstellar travel. Fearing a trap but unable to reject his duty, Duke Leto, patriarch of the Atreides, brings his concubine Jessica (member of the secretive matriarchal order the Bene Gesserit), son Paul, and the rest of his household to the planet nicknamed ‘Dune.’ Central to Leto’s plans are an alliance with the native Fremen, assorted tribes with cultural and physical adaptations to the planet and masters of desert warfare.

Legacy and reception

The novel was well-received at the time of it’s publication, tying for 1966 Hugo Award and winning the inaugural Nebula. Contemporary reviews (with a few exceptions) were wildly supportive, praise coming from such notables as Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan. The story spawned prequels and several film screen adaptations (with varying levels of success). You’re likely to see posters and tattoos with iconic phrases like ‘Fear is the Mind-Killer’ or ‘The Spice Must Flow.’ I first read Dune sometime in that pre-teen window and loved it. It was one of the driving forces behind my continued passion for the scifi genre a full two decades later. But then in the hopes of getting my wife into the story I listened to it with her again and it was…good? Fine? I had the similar reaction rereading Dune as I did watching those old horror movies from the 60s and 70s.

I’ve read so much wonderful science fiction and fantasy in the ensuing years that some of the tropes from Dune felt underdeveloped or with middling execution and I struggled a bit with why a book that had such an impact on me seemed to fall flat on a reread. And then I realized it’s because the book had that same impact on other authors as well. Herbert introduced concepts and ideas on which other authors took 50 years to elaborate and iterate. I’d argue the same grace should be given to authors like Tolkien (a master or worldbuilding but with a relatively binary description of good and evil), Larry Niven with Ringworld, or the aforementioned Clarke. So in tribute to that I’m going to run through a series of concepts in other popular stories I’ll unilaterally attribute to Dune and ignore the strong likelihood Herbert himself was inspired via other sources.

• The Shadowy Matriarchal Organization: As mentioned earlier Jessica belongs to a organization known as the Bene Gesserit. Exclusively women, the Bene Gesserit advise leaders, wield magic (though they wouldn’t call it that), and pull strings behind the scenes to meet their own ends. In other words, Robert Jordan’s Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time. Both organizations even have their eventual prophesized male messiah (the Kwisatz Haderach and the Dragon Reborn) but are immensely distrustful of men with powers in the meanwhile.
• The Single Biome Planet: Arrakis and Caladan are a desert and waterworld, respectively. Giedi Prime, the home world of the Harkonnen, is an Ecumenopolis, industrialized from pole to pole. Star Wars takes these single biome planets and brings them to an extreme. The desert worlds of Tatooine and Jakku home to the Skywalkers and Rey. The ice planet Hoth from Empire, the forest moon of Endor from Jedi. We see city-planets in the forms of Coruscant from the prequels and Geonosis and Hosnian Prime. Luke’s hideaway in the sequels, Ahch-To, is ocean peppered with rocky islands just like Caladan.
• The Encyclopedic Advisor: Herbert introduces highly trained humans called Mentats meant to replace computers in a society where thinking machines are outlawed. Highly trained strategists, knowledge repositories, and calculators, many of the Great Houses retain Mentats as trusted advisors. The Atreides Mentat, Thufir Hawat is particularly renowned and passes his training onto Paul. I’ll argue George R.R. Martin places his Maesters in a similar role in A Song of Ice and Fire; highly trained advisors assigned to the service of lords and often mentors and tutors for their heirs.
• The White Messiah for Arab Warrior Culture: This theme obviously gives me pause. White savior appears in all sorts of stories (think John Smith in Disney’s Pocahontas, whatever the guy’s name was in Cameron’s Avatar, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). There are obvious power dynamics at play, and I know the role is historically accurate at least in terms of my latter example. And the stories are supposed to be ‘feel good’- the overlooking of non-white people as savage and the underestimation thereof is at the villain’s own risk. But central to these stories is the idea that these cultures needed an outsider to unite them and were somehow incapable of doing so on their own. BUT- back to the theme at hand (which was almost certainly based on T.E. Lawrence aka Lawrence of Arabia)- Paul as the prophesized savior of the Fremen who will lead them to paradise. Rand as the Aiel Car’a’carn in The Wheel of Time. Arlen Bales as the Shar Dama Ka of the Krasian people from Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle. There are a wealth of Arabic-like warrior races with outsider messianic figures in modern fantasy, for better or (most likely) worse.
• Charismatic Megafauna Symbiosis with the Magic Stuff: The sandworms are of course one of the more iconic visuals from the Dune series. Hundreds of meters long with their yawning mouths, we learn that sandworms not only serve as the demi god-like natural hazard in harvesting Spice, but are in part responsible for the existence of Spice at all. The mulefa in His Dark Materials are found to have a symbiotic relationship with the giant wheel-trees (in turn fertilized by the elementary particle central to the series, Dust). Even Nibbler’s people in Futurama produce in the most literal and scatological sense the dark matter driving interstellar travel

I’m going to call it for now, but we could dive into others like court intrigues, feints within feints, the space age use of stone age weapons. Any other concepts from other stories have an origin in Dune? Let me know in the comments!