I found myself reading Dune again last week and enjoying it even more the second time around. The first time was as a teenager. I was helping out the pastor of our community church with yardwork. He wanted to plant some pine trees about the perimeter of his property, hoping they would provide some shade in the near future. He invited me into the house for something to drink. The interior had a rustic quality, more like you would expect to find in the Adirondacks than in Northwest Florida. He had been a pastor in New York City before moving down to Santa Rosa Beach. The cold soda went down smoothly. I noticed a paperback copy of the book on his table and asked about it. He said I could take it home with me if I wanted. He had just finished reading it.
Dune was how I imagined Mars. I had a 1973 National Geographic map of the planet pinned up in my room. Ever since Mariner 4 sent back pictures from the red planet in 1965 people had been wondering more about it. The surface didn't look much different than Monument Valley or any other canyonlands in dry places around the world. Frank Herbert used these early images of Mars as a debarkation point for his science fiction adventure that occurred in some distant galaxy where rival houses were locked in battles not much unlike Renaissance Europe. Seemed like Shakespeare was another source of inspiration. We had been reading Macbeth in literature class.
I came back after a couple weeks to talk about Dune with the pastor. He was opened minded, not like the Bible-thumpers usually associated with the South. He told me of the Islamic influences. Herbert was obviously fascinated by Arab culture as well, he said. I didn't think much about it at the time other than Arabs were seen as the bad guys ever since the OPEC oil crisis. He said Arab culture gave us many things, not least of all algebra and chemistry. Not my favorite subjects but I could see their importance.
Dune had captured pretty much everyone's imagination by the late 70s. Herbert had written more books and a cult of sorts had formed around him. Children of Dune was the latest in the series but first I had to read Dune Messiah. There was talk his first book would soon be made into a movie. That didn't happen until the mid 80s. It was much later that I learned that Alejandro Jodorowsky actually had first dibs on the project back in 1970. You can buy the original storyboard if you have at least 25,000 euros to burn. Frank Herbert was very excited about it and took an active role trying to gain financing but production never got off the ground. Ten years later David Lynch took a crack at it with mixed results.
It wouldn't have been very difficult to write a script as the original narrative is filled with both internal and external dialog. It has the feeling of a Terrence Malick movie. However, the technical challenges would have been immense as no one had done a science fiction movie on a massive scale like this until Star Wars came out in 1977. Not surprisingly, George Lucas pilfered Dune to a great extent. His Darth Vader was a lot like the Baron Harkonnen and the relationship between Luke and Vader very much similar to that between Paul and Harkonnen. I think this is one of the reasons why Lynch's Dune came across as a dark copy of Star Wars. So many people had already seen this story played out before.
I never much liked the Star Wars franchise as it seemed so derivative. Herbert on the other hand had built not just a world but an entire universe around his characters, which he worked on until the end of his days. He had written six novels in all, the last finished shortly before his death in 1986, having spent more than 20 years on the subject. No one had ever done anything like this since Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
But, Dune didn't have the holding power of Lord of the Rings. It was like the epic science fiction series was buried in a sand storm on Arrakis, not to be uncovered until recently when Denis Villeneuve took another stab at it with a star-studded cast and special effects that struck just the right note. However, you have to be a fan of the novel to really appreciate what Villeneuve did. He followed the story virtually scene for scene and created the settings pretty much as one would imagine them, using Herbert's notes to guide him. It will be interesting to see how the second half of the novel plays out on the screen this Fall.
The best part about Dune is that it reads just as strongly today as it did when I first read it nearly 50 years ago. Given some of the events taking place recently, even stronger. Today there are actually colonization efforts being led to put people on Mars despite the rather limited knowledge we have about the red planet. I think Dune served as a cautionary tale above all else in trying to exploit planets we have only a marginal sense of. Elon Musk reminds me of the petulant Piter De Vries in the first novel, who met a rather quick ending.
According to scientists, Mars hasn't had running water in 3 billion years, making it virtually uninhabitable by any carbon-based life forms. The best we can hope to find are ancient fossils like ones we find in the red canyons of the Southwest United States. To try to terraform a planet like this with our limited abilities would be pure folly. All we could really create are terrariums for human beings, which begs anyone to ask why we couldn't improve our existence here on earth by better managing our resources? I think that is what Frank Herbert would have liked us to do. He was very active in the ecology movements of his day. However, you can't stop someone who is deluded by the idea that he can be king of a planet if he can get his rocket there first.
There is also another question that comes to mind. Given that Mars had water and still retains some at its polar caps, was it inhabited at some point in time? Further, what is the status of our solar system? Scientists appear to argue over whether our sun is expanding or contracting. Some even argue that our solar system has maintained this configuration since its inception, although that argument seems to be losing ground. If Mars has essentially been a dead planet for 3 billion years, the argument would favor contraction, and that Venus would better represent the future of carbon-based life, not Mars. Basically, we still have a lot to learn about our solar system before we try to terraform planets.
It will be a long time in the future before we are successfully able to travel any great distances in our solar system, much less our galaxy which extends far beyond our wildest imagination. Human beings are not really cut out for space travel as we know it. Even the best stillsuit would only get us so far in the cosmos. Our bodies would atrophy in zero gravity without constant physical conditioning. You can't expect our bodies to be of any use confined to some kind of suspended animation, as we so often see in science fiction movies, assuming we could somehow stop the aging process. It is best to leave such long distant travel to space probes and robots, but alas our imagination refuses to accept the fact we are earthbound creatures. This may be one reason we have never seen any real aliens on this planet. They are just as bound to their planets as we are to ours.
Anyway, it is still fun to read how people imagine the cosmos and Dune is well worth reading. Herbert tells his story in the best sense of science fiction. He brings you into his imaginary world and for a brief moment you imagine yourself on a desert planet in a galaxy far, far away learning to ride enormous sandworms to battle the Harkonnens and Sardaukars. Great read!
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