re:mote voices

Title: Dune
Author: Frank Herbert
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

The Guild has a monopoly on space travel, using “spice” to feed their prescient ability to navigate through the void. This spice can be found on only one planet. Arrakis, a desert hell hole nicknamed Dune. Where water is scarce and giant worms attack adventurers.

Frank Herbert drops the reader straight into the narrative in this the first of his Dune novels; something that was originally published in three serialised parts before being collected in one volume. Dune offers the planet of Arrakis and two families – the Harkonnen who were in charge of the spice planet and the Artreides who are just taking control as the novel starts. Within the context of this novel we find that there is a feud between these families, though the history and reasons for this are never particularly explained. However, while the Harkonnen are leaving the planet, they are doing so to set up a trap for the Artreides family, planning to wipe them out with the Emperor’s blessing.

Herbert’s style is interesting, he presents us with the base line plot, who is on the two sides, and who will be responsible for betraying the Artreides to the Harkonnen, all pretty much from the start. So that before we know it the Artreides have been betrayed, the Duke is dead, and the Harkonnen are back in control of Arrakis. However the plan doesn’t go to plan, with Paul Artreides escaping to join the nomadic and ferocious Fremen. Throughout Herbert provides us with the idea of prophecy and legend, and with each layer of that he follows it with the idea that Paul is the centre of those stories, and that he will change everything forever.

Thematically this can be considered to be a novel that remains as relevant today. At the core of the conflict are commodities. The first and most obvious is the need for spice to fuel industry, spice being a ready parallel for oil; with the cultural heritage of Arrakis having some links to the middle east type area. The second is the need for water to fuel life, something that we may find that brings around conflict to a greater degree than oil in the future – a more recent example of this being Ian McDonald’s current novel River Of Gods, which pitches factions against each other during an Indian drought. Of course ideas like spice as a drug, and the precognitions that come with that for some, invite some parallels with the work of Philip K. Dick, one of the contemporaries of Herbert that I am particularly familiar with.

Dune is a tightly written novel. Herbert doesn’t waste time with epic battles and confrontations. There is a lot in these 400 or so pages, that some modern writers would have taken the same again to tell. The result is a sparse, raw work, which may have been written nearly 40 years ago, but it is eminently readable and says something about how things have changed in the time since then. Dune was written for a different market, where author’s didn’t necessarily have the same luxury of word count as some of today’s writers.