Having violently dispensed long ago with computer technology-they now operate on the commandment, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a human mind”-humanity operates instead on mental power bred through various semi-secret societies’ eugenics programs and enhanced by a drug called spice melange mined on the titular desert planet Arrakis. To give just one hint of the novel’s imaginative intricacy, it ends with a 23-page glossary of terms specific to the setting.ĭune is set in a far-future intergalactic empire run on feudal lines, with power distributed among an Emperor and his court, various aristocratic Houses, a kind of intergalactic senate, a commercial consortium, and a spacefaring guild.
Herbert drops us into a strange, complicated, and self-consistent universe with no preliminary exposition, and he lets us find our way if and as we will. So despite Dune’s being an imperial romance and adventure novel of intrigue, it requires almost as much attention as Joyce or Faulkner.
But by the time Herbert published Dune in the mid-1960s, science fiction, especially in its New Wave variant, was itself often modernist in method: its novels demanded immersion before understanding, and they almost begged to be reread before they could be read for the first time. It’s not easy to read, either: “ grand littérature,” I recall Jodorowsky complaining in the famous documentary about why he couldn’t film the novel, both words meant in the half-pejorative, semi-laudatory sense that the novel is complicated and a bit confusing, as in the anecdote about an uncouth sailor who’d gotten his dirty hands on Lolita only to complain that it was not the pornography he’d been expecting but “goddamn lit’acha.” Popular fiction or genre fiction has since modernism supposedly been at the opposite pole from literary fiction, the former a transparent populist entertainment and the latter a recursive and elitist art object. What the hell, I thought, I’ll read Dune.
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