Thoughts on Dune - Part 1

I have known about the Dune series for nearly my entire life.

I have said many times that the greatest gift my mother ever gave me was a deep love of books. The many different apartments and houses we lived in were always crammed full of books. Hardcovers by Stephen King gleaned from flea markets, piles of pulp scifi salvaged from cardboard boxes at rummage sales, crates of fantasy worlds pulled from the basement of the public library book sales. We did not have a television for a good chunk of my childhood (not because I am that old but because we were that poor) and books were the most constant source of entertainment we had.

I think I was four or five the first time I asked my mother about the Dune series. I had noticed the three books that she had been carrying around in her purse that week, brown battered hard backs without a dustcover, all at the word Dune on the spine. I ask her if it was a series and what it was about. She smiled and after a long pause she told me it was about a world that was completely covered in desert and was very important to a space empire. “Oh, that sounds interesting,” I said and promptly went back to reading my Encyclopedia Brown story and didn’t give it another thought.

A few years later, I encountered the first Dune movie. We were at some friends of my mom’s and all the adults had moved into the kitchen to drink and play cards and smoke a little dope. My sister and I, along with the friend’s kids, were sent to the living room with a pile of rented video tapes with the Dune movie among them. We watched that movie third that night, but it was the only one that I really remember. I had just started really getting into science fiction that year. My grandmother had gotten me into Asimov with the lure of robots that thought, which then led me to Ender’s Game at my local library and (blissfully unaware of the problematic author) that had become my favorite book ever.

But the Dune movie was something completely new to me. Massive spaceships, an empire that reached across the stars, female priest that were practically wizards (WIZARDS IN SPACE!!!), and the enigmatic visuals and storytelling of David Lynch made for a movie that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I was sucked in, well as much as you can be sucked into a movie when watching it with half a dozen children ranging in age from seven to fourteen.

On the drive home that night, my sister sleeping in the back seat, I told my mom about this amazing movie and I tried to explain its plot that I barely understood and how epic it. I had, of course, completely forgotten about the conversation a few years before, so I felt like I was showing her something that would blow her mind. She laughed when I told her how, in the movie, the Fremen were taught how to use their own Voice as a weapon and how this made them almost like super soldiers that could take on the Star Empire. “Sounds like they changed a lot,” she said as the car sailed through the inky black of the Michigan back roads and we talked about the move and book the rest of the way home.

Later that week, I scoured through the books at home to find the copy of Dune I knew we must have to no avail. I found other Dune books, God Emperor and Chapterhouse if memory serves, but no Dune. I added it to my list of books to check out at the library and then never got around to it. What can I say. I was deep into the Star Wars Extended Universe and Dragonlance at the time and would often forget other books existed.

A few years later, the SciFi channel announced that it was going to be showing a new adaption of Dune. It was a miniseries that would be shown over three nights. They proclaimed it was as faithful an adaptation to the original novel, so faithful in fact that they called it Frank Herbert’s Dune. Now this was the time, I knew I had to get the book read before I watched this (and I knew I HAD to watch this) so off to the library I went again and although I did leave with a pile of books, Dune was right at the top and was the first thing I dove into when I got home.

My first reading of Dune, I was amazed at how easy it was to read. I don’t know, dear reader, if you have read any of the “classics” of science fiction, but they can be very dense. Authors such as Asimov or Clarke do build amazing worlds and have grand ideas that shaped the way their reader thought about the world and the technology that man was already filling the Earth with. But their prose? It can be dry at times, with wooden dialog and some time woefully underwritten characters. Especially if that character was a woman. But Dune? I was drawn in fully from the first page of the book and I don’t think I moved until I had finished the entire first act. And I am not trying to say that Herbert was a perfect writer, he wasn’t. But the story, oh it was so good. I devoured that book over the weekend, only taking a when my mother would force me out of my bedroom to eat something healthy.

So, I was ready the next week when the miniseries launched and me and my mom were right there on the couch, watching it on our the 27 inch CRT television. And it was, fine. It was fine. It was certainly a mostly faithful adaptation and it did add a few things I loved. For instance, I loved the way that the it took the character of Princess Irulan, who was nothing more than chapter headings and a token prize at the end of the book into a more realized and fleshed out character that actively was plotting on her own, for her own reasons. But, for a story that took place around a galaxy spanning empire, the shows felt rather small and contained. Say what you will about the David Lynch film, but it had ambition and felt epic in scope. The miniseries, well if felt like SciFI was trying to be epic, but just did not have the money to get there.

And that was what Dune was to me for many years, an amazing book with two adaptations, one gonzo, epic and not the same story at all and the other a very faithful, albeit small, miniseries. I knew about the books that came after, but I never read them, mostly because the consensus in talking to others was that the first book was great, and they lost quality quickly after that. So I reread the original a few dozen times over the years and would occasionally use the miniseries as a way to share this amazing world with friend and partners. But that is was Dune was to me.

Then, at the end of last year I heard they were making another movie adaptation, this time directed by Denis Villeneuve.

If you don’t know that name, I bet you know some of his films. Sicario. Prisoners. Blade Runner 2049, Arrival. Yeah, the man makes good films. More importantly, he makes interesting films. So, yeah, I am pretty hyped to see this (and judging by the trailer that just dropped I am right to be so). I knew that I was going to be reading the book again this year.

At the same time, John Scalzi released the Last Emperox series, his own take on a galaxy spanning space empire facing upheaval and change. The third and final book dropped early this year. I was quick to buy it and devoured it. And it was good. A fast-moving tale with interesting characters and a fun plot and heaps of political intrigue. But the series also left me wanting to re-read Dune.

So, I did. And then, wanting more of that space opera vibe, I read Dune Messiah for the first time. And then I read Children of Dune, also for the first time. I know that I am going to read the rest of the Dune books that Frank Herbert wrote, but I want to digest this story so far. And that is what we are going to do here on the blog for the next few weeks, a look at the first three books of the Dune series and their various adaptations. Not reviews, just looks at what these stories seem to be trying to say and how I personally feel about them.

So, see you here next week with a personal look at the first novel (and the movies) of Dune.