I recently finished reading Children of Dune and I have a lot of thoughts about it as a series so here they are. These books are fifty years old now and incredibly famous so they probably aren’t going to be original thoughts. I’ve structured everything here around the question of what Dune is “about”, per the meme above. This post is going to have a lot of spoilers in it so heads up if you care about that, but also this may not be intelligible to you if you haven’t read Dune. Also on the topic of spoilers: at some point before reading the second book I went and “spoiled” a lot of the series for myself on the fan-wiki and still ended up loving Messiah and Children. My belief is that the events of the Dune books are so out-there but also so dependent on internal monologue that while you can spoil the literal play-by-play of events, doing that doesn’t spoil the full effect of the prose. Also a lot of the things that happen in the Dune books sound really silly if you just literally describe them, and I’ve listed my favorites below the cut.
Things that happen in the Dune saga: Duncan Idaho is repeatedly cloned and is a recurring character in every book (oh but this time also a genius, oh and also sexy in order to seduce a teen girl), Paul compares himself IRL Earth dictator Hitler, Alia gets possessed by a ghost, Leto II fuses with sandworm babies to become immortal-superhero-worm-boy-man. My favorite scene, in the first book, is when Jessica drinks poison, goes on a vision-quest where she talks to her fetal daughter, barfs up the poison, everyone drinks her vom, and then they have an orgy. Can’t wait for Denis Villeneuve to adapt that part. After spoiling myself, I thought there was no way some of this content could be compelling, but Frank Herbert stuck the landing.
Anyway, what is Dune about? What follows are my Dune thoughts.
It’s a deep exploration of a culture molded by its environment
One of main themes of Dune is the exploration of how humans can be sort of molded for some purpose, whether by their culture, their environment, or by intentionally shaping others or oneself. It’s also Lawrence of Arabia in space, and a commentary on Western nations fighting over the resources of the Middle East. The interaction between these themes makes the portrayal of the Fremen come off as kind of… weird, to me. Because on one hand, they’re being used as a collective to explore this theme of how environment can impact a culture, but also they’re very clearly Middle-Eastern-coded while the aristocratic characters are European-coded. So you have this contrast between the level of focus on Fremen culture and society as a whole vs. the very individualized lens through which it portrays the Atreides family, and it really exacerbates the white savior plot beats inherited from Lawrence of Arabia.
The Fremen are the planet Arrakis’ native people, and their way of life has been shaped to a huge extent by the planet’s harsh desert environment. It’s characterized by extreme survival measures such as wearing suits that recycle literally all of your body’s moisture, and resisting the urge to cry lest you lose moisture to the environment. The books have an obsession with the Fremen and their culture to the exclusion of any other culture to the extent that it dehumanizes them a bit, in my opinion. It tends to frame Fremen individuals (especially unnamed ones) as pure functions of their culture and as a bloc to be wielded by the Atreides family rather than as diverse individuals. To be fair, it’s not like the reader isn’t told that there’s internal diversity in Fremen culture, I just wish it was shown more through the perspectives of average Fremen people. The only real Fremen perspectives you get are Chani and especially Stilgar, who is posed as the resident arch-traditionalist sort of ideal of a Fremen man, and it doesn’t really cut it for me overall because of how far they both are from the average Fremen person. I guess you also have Leto II and Ghanima who are Fremen characters with a lot of perspective afforded to them, but they don’t count because their thought processes are so off-the-wall, and they view their own culture in a very anthropological way. One of my favorite parts of the series so far was the brief bit with Otheym the war veteran in Dune Messiah, because it was the clearest picture of how Paul’s actions have effected normal(ish) people.
On the topic of Dune being a white-savior story, my hot (?) take is that it is, but in aesthetic only. I’m not super sure what Paul saves the Fremen from because they already had an active plan to save themselves. The Fremen would have terraformed Arrakis and wrested control of the spice monopoly with or without Paul’s help. But, by organizing themselves around Paul’s cause they are able to gain huge amounts of political power that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. On top of this, they end up having their culture and religion become dominant one throughout the known universe. This isn’t to say that Paul and Jessica don’t exploit the shit out of the Fremen for their own political gain because they absolutely do, Paul and Jessica have candid discussions about how to influence the Fremen to their benefit, but it’s a more bidirectional relationship than just that. So it’s not about oppressed people of color being saved by a white man, it’s about them being manipulated to serve a white man’s purpose. Which is definitely ethically worse in-fiction, but might play less into a prevalent and harmful trope as a narrative.
It’s about People who are reduced to being Things
Where Dune uses the Fremen as the means of exploring how environment might shape people, it uses Paul to explore how people might shape people. So, in the lore of Dune, tens of thousands of years before the events of Dune, the technological singularity was achieved, and after a war between humans and AI the humans won and “thinking machines” were made taboo. The resulting technological gap was then filled by eugenics and human conditioning, which was used to manufacture people that provide specialized services in place of computers. There are a variety of organizations that fill this role, but Paul, as the Main Character, has the traits of ALL OF THEM. He’s:
- the end-result of the Bene Gesserit breeding program
- trained by his mother in how to read people, control them with vocal intonation, and have fine-grained control over individual cells in his body
- trained by a mentat to do Big Data problems in his head and be hyperaware of his surroundings
- the galaxy’s best swordmaster teaches him combat
- he gets the prescient abilities of a Spacing Guild navigator from ODing on spice
- he accidentally undergoes the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother ritual to unlock his genetic memory
It’s pretty ridiculous how big Paul’s protagonist syndrome is in this regard. He grows up thinking that it is all just preparing him to be a good monarch, but after unlocking his genetic memory and precog abilities he’s horrified to discover that he’s essentially been manufactured without his consent to be an incredibly powerful pawn. The scene when he then flips out at his mom for making him into… something, is fascinating. From that point on his character arc centers around taking control of his own fate, and denying those who created him control over him (except I guess his Mommy <3).
There are a ton of other characters who have to grapple with the condition of being reduced to their utility. Jessica, for example, is just meant to be a link in a genetic chain, but defies her orders and exerts her autonomy out of love to bear Leto a male heir instead of the intended daughter. The mentats are also an interesting case - there’s a dichotomy in Dune between how Piter and Thufir are treated, the Harkonnens treat Piter like a piece of furniture while Thufir is a trusted member of the Atreides household. The fact that Thufir is treated like a person instead of a tool creates a bond to Duke Leto that drives all of Thufir’s decisions after Leto’s death. Dr. Yueh is conditioned to be unable to do harm, but this is again overriden by love, and fear. And then in Messiah Hayt/Duncan 2 sort of knows he’s a manchurian candidate but doesn’t know what the kill phrase might be, and also inhabits the body of a dead man that all of the other characters used to know, and this causes him stress surrounding his autonomy and personhood. His pre-death friendship with Paul eventually overrides his programming and he is able to regain the memories of his first life. So you have all these characters who are grappling with their relationship to what they’ve been conditioned to do, and in a lot of cases their human emotion and will is able to overcome that conditioning.
Paul is the extreme example of this theme. One one hand, he was essentially created by the Bene Gesserit to be their psychic boy to use to gain power I guess. On the other hand, the culture of the Fremen had been manipulated, again by the Bene Gesserit, such that he and Jessica fit into their messianic prophecy. And then on a third hand, as the son of a duke, he’s been educated for leadership and space feudalism. So there’s an immense amount of pressure on Paul from a bunch of different angles, and a ton of parties want access to the power he wields, and this comes into conflict with Paul’s own morals and sense of self-preservation. As soon as his prescience comes into full-force, he’s constantly angsting over his sense of free will, because knowing all possible futures means that all outcomes are now his choice. In the first book, his whole shit is about how he can stay alive and regain his family’s political power and defeat his enemies WITHOUT becoming his allies’ messiah and triggering interstellar religious war. His decision at the end of Dune to exact retribution for his murdered infant son, to do what HE wants instead of the optimal thing for humanity, is the thing that causes him to fuck this up. For the whole second book he is essentially plagued by guilt over this (this is where he compares himself to Hitler), and when he eventually tries to avoid further deification by faking a natural death, this also fails and leads to religious turmoil that his son has to clean up. Paul is trapped by his visions insofar as, when you’re given ultimate control over your fate, how much agency do you even have when there is a single outcome that is clearly better than all others? And what do you do if your own morals come into conflict with what you have to do to reach that outcome? How much do the ends justify the means, if some of the ends avoid human extinction? Paul decides that the ends do not justify the means and he basically absolves himself of responsibility, but he regains his sense of humanity when he rejects deification.
Interestingly, Paul’s unfinished business is left to be cleaned up by Leto II, who, since he is more of a hivemind made up of his ancestors’ egos than an individual, seems to be less concerned with how his actions reflect on himself or impact the people immediately around him. He’s more willing to do what he feels needs to be done because he has access to thousands of lifetimes worth of context. It’s also interesting that after all the trouble gone to manufacture Paul and his circumstances, Leto II was such an accident-baby that Paul couldn’t even predict his birth, and he ultimately is what ruins Paul’s rejection of godhood by picking up where Paul left off to become the God Emperor.
It’s about eugenics
If you couldn’t tell from that last section, eugenics are a huge part of the Dune books. The key instances of this are the Bene Gesserit’s “breeding program” to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, as well as the Spacing Guild Navigators and mentats (I think?) which get their prescient/computational abilities in part from their breeding. Mostly, I think it’s a logical conclusion of a sci-fi society that excludes computers, the implication being that you’d need to alter humans to achieve the same results as a thinking machine. It’s kind of a weird take on eugenics, because while the books in general imply that some humans are inherently genetically “better” (which I hate and will get in to), the focus of the explicit human breeding tends to be on producing specific traits in an individual rather than “improving a population.” As far as I can tell no one’s being like, culled, for having suboptimal traits. Of course with eugenics there’s always the question about what it “working” even means. For the guild navigators and mentats this is obvious, they’re engineered to have the mental capacity to navigate at lightspeed/run MS Excel in their head. But regarding the Bene Gesserit, I have no idea why the Bene Gesserit WANT a Kwisatz Haderach that bad. Like, yeah, someone that can see the entire past and future would be incredibly powerful, but I don’t get what they plan to do with this individual once they actually get them. They already HAVE power, and exert a huge amount of influence over both interstellar politics and culture, and its all in the service of this breeding program, but then what? It seems like the Kwisatz Haderach breeding program has become almost religious in nature, insofar as the Bene Gesserit are so dedicated to it that they’ve stopped asking what the point even is. So it’s funny that a Kwisatz Haderach pops up at last and then uses his advanced perception to realize that the sisterhood is trying to use him and refuses to play ball. It’s extra double funny in Messiah when the guy from the Tleilaxu is just like “oh, you’re trying to make a Kwisatz Haderach by breeding people without their knowledge over thousands of years? We’ve been using genetic engineering to just make those for ages!”
The real dicey eugenics stuff comes up in the juxtaposition between the Fremen and Sardaukar. The latter are the emperor’s elite personal army that no one can beat, and its revealed that the reason they’re so good at war is that they’re made up of people raised on an inhospitable planet where the conditions basically weed out the weaklings and mold the survivors into rutheless warriors. The Atreides family realizes that they might be able to beat the Sardaukar if they get the Fremen on their side, the logic being that the Fremen are a naturally occurring instance of this. This turns out to be true, and the Fremen defeat the Sardaukar. So on one hand you have the story’s villains performing this eugenics on purpose, whereas the protagonists leverage a naturally occurring pheonmenon (as much as the Fremen having been essentially chased off of every planet before colonizing Arrakis is naturally occurring). In both cases, though, there’s like this underlying assumption that these groups are not only useful militarily but in a lot of ways “better” than normal people. It’s a very feudal model of human worth where one’s quality as a person is measured by how good one is at “survival”, where “survival” necessarily includes warfare. This is taken seriously enough that in Children of Dune basically every character is lamenting the lax habits of the new generation of Fremen post-terraforming, as if it makes you lesser to not want to live in an inhospitable wasteland. I’m not sure how much of this is an actual conclusion about real people that you’re meant to draw vs. info filtered through the perspective of the books’ feudalist characters, though.
My opinion that this perspective on human value is wack bleed into my opinions on whatever The Golden Path is. I suppose I should read God Emperor before developing too much of an opinion on this, but it seems super bizarre to me. I disagree with Herbert’s apparent premise that humans need an iron fist to innoculate them against centrailzed hierarchy. Not on a “would this work” basis but on a “human nature” basis. The premise seems to be that if allowed, human society will settle into a comfortable peace which makes them soft, while living as the Fremen do, in small loosely-associated groups, constantly in a battle for survival, is ideal for perpetuating the species. The books have this undercurrent of implying that the Fremen and Sarduakar are these ubermenches in like the actual Nietzchean way where they’re some sort of logical linear upgrade to humanity. My question is just sort of, why must that be the case? What makes them better than other people, actually? If it’s their survival ability and willingness to make brutal, cutthroat decisions, I don’t thinkt that’s an inherently good thing, like ideally I feel like we should be trying to create a society where people don’t have to be fighting for survival at every turn, if possible. There’s an implication that this is needed for protecting humanity against an some external threat, but if there’s nothing specific this is just a hypothetical and not worth making peoples’ lives worse for. If these people are better because of their values or something, that’s just nothing. Maybe its the spice that does it? It’s implied that the Fremen are more communal and work together more effectively than normal people because their high-spice diets unlock latent telepathic abilities. I think that’s a thing? Cool if true, but anyone can just eat a ton of spice and that isn’t what The Golden Path involves.
At any rate, my opinion here is that the amount of emphasis on genetic supremacy, eugenics, genetic memory, genetic determinism (why is it framed as BAD - outside of politics - that Paul and Alia are Baron Harkonnen’s grandchildren??), etc. seems sus. All around, there’s some cool sci-fi ideas to explore but mark my words, there are going to be alt-right weirdos who take Dune (2021)’s weird human breeding ideas at face value when it comes out.
It’s a warning to “not follow charismatic leaders”
People on the internet say that Frank Herbert said that Dune is about “not trusting charismatic leaders” and I hereby invoke Death of The Author to not agree. In my opinion, for this to be true, the books would show you the negative fallout of “trusting a charasmatic leader”, but it in practice it only shows the leader’s reaction. You don’t really see how this impacts the majority of people, you are just told that bagillions of people are dead and Paul feels bad about that. To use Paul’s own Hitler comparison, it’s like if someone were to write a book about why folling the nazis was bad, but then the book was from Hitler’s perspective and he’s just like “waah woe is me I didn’t mean to kill this many people, I just wanted my fascist goals to be achieved without people dying, somehow.” If that is what Herbert was going for, I feel like it would have worked better to write the story from the perspective of mostly Fremen characters (again, I want more Fremen characters!) to show how they grapple with the aftermath of following Muad’dib on his jihad, and whether or not they got what they wanted and whether or not it was worth it. In my opinion, this facet of the story is more about “not forming a cult of personality”, becuase that’s what’s really being shown here, Paul’s cult of personality spiralling far, far beyond his control.
Another way to reframe this is that it’s about not centralizing power in one individual (which as I understand it is gone into more in God Emperor), but again, we’re shown this from the perspective of the person that power is centralized on, and they just realize that this is bad for humanity, instead of being shown the effect of it being bad for the humans it is affecting. This, coupled with the above bit about the way ideal human society is framed, gives me anarcho-capitalist vibes. Social hierarchy is opposed but the emphasis is on the competition between isolated groups of humans instead of on the inherent communality in that idea, and the reader is invited to empathize with the powerful over the powerless.
It’s about worms
Dune is solidly science-fantasy and the fantasy half of that is pretty low-magic. I’d say a good 90% of the weird sci-fi stuff is grounded in something speculative rather than fully made-up, like yeah people could evolve in various ways if living on planets for thousands of years, yeah maybe people could figure out how to intone their voices to control people or have granular control over their cells like the Bene Gesserit, and all of the eugenics and behavioral conditioning stuff seems possible. If not possible, it’s all framed as possible and implied that there’s an in-universe science to it, and that anyone can learn, for example, how to move individual muscles in your body - Jessica teaches this to Farad’n in Children of Dune. But that isn’t the case when it comes to the sandworms.
It’s implied that all of the life on Arrakis was brought their by the original human colonists in a long-forgotten epoch, and that it’s since had time to adapt to the harsh environment. But the worms were there first. The sandworms are the only alien life in the Dune saga - everything else on every planet is just descended from former Earth-life. Their biology unlike any real animal, they’re not even really worms, the book describes them as having features of an animal, a plant, and even a fungus at different points in their lifecycle. I feel like every time a worm is mentioned in Children of Dune Herbert just came up with one more weird-ass feature they had. At one point they’re described as having vents that exhaust oxygen, implying they’re what’s keeping the air breathable. The juveniles form impermeable barriers deep in the ground that trap the water that would kill the adults, and their poop is what becomes melange, the “spice” that lets you see the future and extends your life. Also, when you drown a worm, it creates a substance that gives you access to the memories of your same-sex ancestors and also breaks down the mental barriers between groups of people high on it. Neither of these substances is ever explained in that specific of a way, to the point that it’s not clear that anyone in this universe has a complete understanding of how they work or what they do. Additionally, no one knows where the sandworms came from, but they know it is not Arrakis. The geology of Arrakis implies that it used to be a green planet with bodies of water, and it is known that a population of sandworms will quickly desertify their habitat, so its implied that the worms are an invasive species brought from… somewhere else? Even Leto II, who has the memories of most of humankind, does not know how they got there, which implies that whatever got them there wasn’t human. The sandworms, the only aliens, are the source of all of the magic and mystery in the Dune universe.
They’re also what enables the society of Dune to function at all. Analagous to oil, spice powers international travel - you need the prescience from a spice high to be able to navigate spacecraft at lightspeed. The fact that spice is only found on Arrakis creates the resource conflict that spurs the plot of the books. Without the worms, Dune’s empire just would not work. Leto II realizes this in Children of Dune - the terraforming of Arrakis is making it more suitable for humans but will eventually drive the sandworms to extinction, and this would lead to the collapse of interstellar human society. The relationship between the sandworms and power is then made literal when Leto merges with the sandtrout to become a half-boy, half-sandworm demigod - as the heir of the empire he controls the political power, and now as a literal sandworm he controls the key resource as well. So in conclusion, at the center of it all, Dune is about worms.