Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels by David Pringle

Author:David Pringle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary Reference Works
ISBN: 9781473208070
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

[1965]

48

FRANK HERBERT

Dune

Why has Dune been such an enormously popular novel? Its British paperback publisher asserts that it is ‘the finest, most widely acclaimed Science Fiction novel of this century.’ Hmm. It is a fat book, as bestsellers tend to be, and it contains many well-tried ingredients. It is part ‘hard sf’, part Ruritanian romance, part family saga. It embraces everything from cynical realpolitik and courtly intrigue to religious aphorisms and mystical rhapsodies. It has a large cast of characters, including a youthful hero and a strong feminine presence (the hero’s mother). It ranges from high estate (counts, princes, emperors) to low (the noble savages known as the Fremen). It has an exotic setting—the desert planet Arrakis with its giant sandworms— and it encompasses a great deal of action, from individual swordfights to vast armoured battles. It contains hints of torture and sexual depravity. It depicts the use of drugs in order to expand the powers of the human mind, a theme which undoubtedly helped make it popular with the campus readership of the late 1960s. And with its emphasis on hierarchy, messianic leadership and militaristic virtues it gives off a faint musk of fascism—an aroma which, I regret to say, does make for popularity.

Above all, it is a yarn. It moves along for almost five hundred pages, building a world for the reader to get lost in. The book has many complexities, perhaps even some profundities, which make certain intellectual demands upon the reader, yet at times it is crudely written:

A chuckle sounded beside the globe. A basso voice rumbled out of the chuckle: ‘There it is, Piter—the biggest mantrap in all history. And the Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?’

‘Assuredly, Baron,’ said the man. His voice came out tenor with a sweet, musical quality.

The fat hand descended on to the globe … ‘I invite you to observe,’ the basso voice rumbled. ‘Observe closely …’

That is Hollywood fustian at its most ’orrible. To be fair, the passages which deal with the hero, Paul Atreides (known as Muad’Dib), are usually better written than those which describe the villains, but Dune remains an odd blend of the vulgar and the genuine highflown. Blood-and-thunder clichés jostle with ingenious speculations, and I suppose that very mixture goes a long way towards explaining the book’s commercial success.

There is no need for me to attempt an explanation of the plot here. Personally, I detest all the courtly-intrigue stuff—it is as though Herbert wants his readers to live in an eternal Middle Ages of the mind. For me, the book comes to life when Paul and his mother get out into the desert and begin to roam with the Fremen. The hard-sf element of the novel, the careful construction of the ecology of Arrakis, its landscapes and wildlife, is appealing, and of course the sandworms are marvellous. I wish the book told us more of the worms and less of the Harkonnens. It was probably

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