Part of the cottage industry surrounding Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi epic is re-appraisal. Its various anniversaries and periodic re-emergence into the footlights of popular culture prompt waves of editorial commentary praising its longevity, analyzing what made it so beloved, looking at its flaws with fresh eyes (or alternatively, recycling old complaints about its approach, structure and writing quality), and generally trying to come to terms with why so many people still care about this story and this universe. It’s undeniably not just one of sci-fi’s most famous creations, but also one of its weirdest; and as we start to see more details emerging about the forthcoming Dune film from Dennis Villeneuve, we’re also in the early stages of another rash of these kinds of reappraisals of the book (or books, plural) on which that film is based.
This piece is something of a reaction to some of those re-appraisals: Emmett Asher-Perrin’s analysis of the White savior narrative in the text, for instance (The Escapist posted a take similarly discussing the Mighty Whitey trope, but for my money, Asher-Perrin’s article is less cutesy, more convincing and more thorough). Or the recent, much more broadly-based and trenchant analysis of the novel by freelance editor and podcaster Oren Ashkenazi at Mythcreants. These reads, and others like them, have prompted me to take my own crack at coming to terms — perhaps in a bit more detail from a writer’s perspective —not only with why Dune continues to have an audience but with how this curious, fascinating and sometimes-awkward artifact of mid-Sixties sci-fi ever came to have the reach and readership it acquired.
This isn’t a new question for me. I’ve read Dune in its entirety more times than I can readily count. Each time through, a part of me has looked at my own reaction from the outside and wondered: Why is this material so compelling to me? How is this still a page-turner? How was it ever one? I decided against that kind of processing in the past, but the questions have always nagged at me, and I find them nagging enough now that I finally need to write some thoughts down.
First Things First: What This Piece Is & Is Not
I’m not here particularly to attack or refute perspectives critical of Dune. I’m a fan of the novel, full disclosure, but I’m not so much of a fan that I can’t abide the notion of its having flaws, even deep flaws. (I’ve been a BIPOC reader of mostly-White-dominated SF for most of my life, after all; I almost literally eat deep flaws for breakfast.) There are plenty of criticisms of Dune that I understand. Complaints about the sometime-awkwardness of its prose style, for example, or characters that feel less than fully-realized, or the weirdness of its decision to keep most of its story’s thrills, spills, and derring-do offstage: they’re all valid as far as they go. They may not be the full picture, but those quirks are all very much there; indeed, they’re things I’ve noticed since I was first a fan of the book.
Likewise, there are, realistically, other snags for the modern reader of at least some persuasions that may have been less noticed when Dune first launched, but would be hard to avoid or excuse in a book written today. Is there unmistakable ambient sexism and racism woven into the intricate world and narrative Herbert creates? Is the Mighty Whitey trope very much present? Yes, and yes. Have central conceits of the story like, say, its millennia-spanning eugenicist selective breeding program or the reality-altering powers of psychedelic drugs aged particularly well beyond the Sixties? Not especially. Would or should a writer today feel compelled to make the absolute choice between Vitalism and the Reign of the Machine that Herbert’s setting is pervaded by? There’s a solid case for No there, as well. Are there some forms of hand-waving in conceiving the book’s setting and technology that push allowances for hand-waving close to their limit? Sure.
Herbert, of course, very much complicates many of the tropes about race, sex, and social class that pervade Dune, creates new layers of context through which to view them, and so on. I’ll be talking about some of that below. I’m not the guy, however, who will tell you that White Savior critiques of Paul Atreides’ story arcs are irrelevant because he’s not strictly-speaking a “hero,” or because his arc critiques the notion of heroes. The story must make him a hero in order to critique his status and function as one, after all: and there is a specific kind of hero it makes him, and a specific set of tropes that form his backdrop and his story that makes this easy to identify. Whether the book completely subverts the appeal of that kind of hero is ambiguous at best.
Decades-old novels very often come with baggage, in other words, and I’m not here to deny the existence of Dune’s. On the other hand, I’m not here to provide yet another itemization of that baggage, either. That ground seems to me to be capably covered. I’m here to look more closely at the attractions the text offers, attractions that for over five decades have pulled readers past the various flaws the book’s creator drew from his cultural moment, imported from his inspirations or generated from his own foibles. What were the factors that elevated this flawed but compelling text and created a cultural legacy that, whether its detractors like it or not, remains relevant and powerful decades later?
Breaking the Rules: 3 “Mistakes” That Worked to Herbert’s Benefit
Dune was far from being a critical darling or commercial phenomenon on its release. Many of the complaints of critics then were much the same as those of detractors since: that its prose style was odd, or too dense, or otherwise unappealing. That its structure robbed the narrative of conventional sources of suspense and excitement, and that it seemed to avoid conventional sci-fi “action” to an almost perverse degree. That it withheld too much information from the reader, and its characters spent too much time talking about obscure and oddly-conceived philosophical or religious ideas. That it was too long, and yet that its final act seemed rushed.
These complaints were all, to be sure, describing loose “rules” of a certain register of adventure sci-fi and fantasy writing that Herbert undeniably broke, arguably with outright verve, throughout Dune. And I think that it’s at least in part from these very “mistakes” that the book developed the original fan base whose word of mouth eventually carried it to success.
First “Mistake”: The Prose Style
The odd, distinctive prose style of Dune is certainly one of its calling-cards. Leaving aside the epigraphs that start each chapter — almost a sub-discipline of their own within the work that would carry on to later books in and beyond the series — it feels disorienting at first. Conversations are quick and clipped save for the moments when one character or another shifts abruptly into discussing larger ideas or their understanding of the sweep of history. Dialogue serves up curious and alien perspectives and ideas that the wider narrative often doesn’t explicitly explain or comment upon. Point-of-view can switch back and forth abruptly within the same scene, with more-than-occasional internal monologue or commentary interspersed throughout. Descriptions are sparing and aim for functionality more than elegance.
The overall effect can seem strange, even offputting at times. Even for fans of the writing, it would be hard to say that Herbert has the gift for the elegant evocation of voice and place of, say, a Toni Morrison. In many ways, his approach can be described from a certain perspective as workmanlike: adequate to the task of getting a scene across, and (seemingly) no more than that.
But that description misses the aggregate effect of what we might call the Dune “style.” Its spare approach to detail and nuance isn’t an error, and it isn’t insufficiency of talent. It’s a considered approach with specific trade-offs. The biggest feature, for a novel like Dune, is precisely the way this approach to serving up the main body of the story breaks down small pieces of information about the characters and the setting and lets the reader experience them as a rush of information that can sometimes take a moment (or more, or even a re-read) to parse. That this can be alienating to some degree is the point: this is a novel that takes place in a far-future, profoundly alien setting, despite its being peopled by humans who seem superficially familiar. The curious and scattershot presentation of these people and their setting accentuates the alienness, the sheer weirdness of what we’re witnessing, and to the extent that it withholds as much information as it gives it brings home that sense of alienness powerfully.
In this sense, Dune’s oddly-calibrated and sometimes disjointed-seeming prose is a specific application of what I’ll call enigma, here meaning a deliberate strategy of obfuscation that couples with what the text does reveal to present the setting and the action itself as an intriguing mystery at the most basic level. Some readers, of course, simply and understandably bounce right off this, which is the biggest trade-off. Others, though, it engages: they want to know more about this setting, these characters, why they speak and interact the way they do. Take this passage, in which the Lady Jessica encounters a Fremen character called the Shadout Mapes (meaning something like “housekeeper”) in House Atreides’ palace on Arrakis:
“I know the Dark Things and the ways of the Great Mother,” Jessica said. She read the more obvious signs in Mapes’ actions and appearance, the petit betrayals. “Miseces prejia,” she said in the Chakobsa tongue. “Andral t’re pera! Trada cik buscakri miseces perakri — “
Mapes took a backward step, appeared poised to flee.
“I know many things.” Jessica said. “I know that you have borne children, that you have lost loved ones, that you have hidden in fear and that you have done violence and will yet do more violence. I know many things.”
In a low voice, Mapes said: “I meant no offense, my Lady.”
“You speak of the legend and seek answers,” Jessica said. “Beware the answers you may find. I know you came prepared for violence with a weapon in your bodice.”
“My Lady, I . . . “
“There’s a remote possibility you could draw my life’s blood,” Jessica said, “but in so doing you’d bring down more ruin than your wildest fears could imagine. There are worse things than dying, you know — even for an entire people.”
“My Lady!” Mapes pleaded. She appeared about to fall to her knees. “The weapon was sent as a gift to you should you prove to be the One.”
“And as the means of my death should I prove otherwise,” Jessica said. She waited in the seeming relaxation that made the Bene Gesserit-trained so terrifying in combat.
Now we see which way the decision tips, she thought.
We’re introduced in the space of a few brief paragraphs to an obscure ancient language, to a subtle demonstration of how the Bene Gesserit manipulate forms and rituals, to a display of how the Bene Gesserit are trained to both read others and control themselves… and to a chilling but elliptical threat whose real content we can only guess at. We’re invited to wonder: is Jessica reading Mapes’ motives rightly? What is it that Mapes fears in that threat? Is it something the Lady Jessica would, or could, actually carry out, or a reference to something more spiritual? What is she saying in that short passage of Chakobsa? What does the reference to “Dark Things” and “Ways of the Great Mother” signify?
For some of these questions, we’ll get answers in various amounts of time. For others, we’ll have to furnish our own answers from some combination of ambiguous cues in the text and our own preferences. But throughout, we’re being drawn in, challenged to ask questions about this world and how its underlying pieces fit together. For the reader base that Dune enchanted, that challenge was and is irresistible, and it’s a basic part of what makes the narrative tick. And the prose of Dune is doing this constantly, from the first page to the last of every scene, which is no mean feat and reveals its seeming “clumsiness” to be deceptive.
The very rudeness and apparent patchwork nature of the novel’s most basic building blocks are, in other words, among the most underappreciated parts of the formula that makes it work. The considered and careful nature of this textual strategy is evident in how difficult it ultimately proved to duplicate, even for Herbert himself: he was still using a similar technique in later non-Dune novels like The Dosadi Experiment, but arguably to much less effect. Its deployment in Dune, by contrast, proved ultimately to be lightning in a bottle.
Second “Mistake”: The Structure
Dune’s detractors sometimes accuse it of abandoning the sources of tension, sense of stakes, and moment-to-moment uncertainty that come together to make a conventional adventure narrative exciting. Technically, they’re not wrong.
For instance, Dune very often refers to what would in a different novel be bravura action sequences in passing, as events that happen off-stage: the daring Atreides raid on the Harkonnen spice stockpiles on Giedi Prime, for example, or fifteen years of Paul building the Fremen resistance on Arrakis and proving himself among them (which in the hands of a different writer would be material for a whole novel on its own). A wider galaxy of intrigue and thousands of contending Houses is gestured at but not much described given the narrative’s focus on Arrakis. We get scattered hints at the broader canvas, passing mentions of the Emperor’s degenerate familiars and his narrow-but-firm domination of CHOAM, complaints about allies in the Landsraad who vocally support the Atreides but do little else but talk, elliptical accounts of Great Houses falling, and mention of Houses “going renegade” and leaving the Imperium as others in the Atreides’ position have apparently done (an option the proud and confident Atreides reject).
Couldn’t the intrigues of other worlds and Houses have featured more, the idea of “renegade Houses” been explored more, the diversity of the setting been given more space? Well, sure, they could have. In a different author’s hands, they probably would have. They might even have been the meat of the story, as similar machinations are in George R.R. Martin’s equally magisterial series A Song of Ice and Fire. These critiques are absolutely valid… to a point.
Herbert does, indeed, abandon a focus on conventional action — aside from his apparent and particular love of knife-fighting scenes, which almost always signal crucial turning-points in the story or points of character development — and largely ignores conventional sources of tension and suspense. And setting-wise, it indeed is laser-focused on Arrakis save for passing references to other worlds, brief excursions in a few chapters, and passing mentions in the epigraphs. The structure of Dune is designed around characters on or concerned with Arrakis wrestling with and talking about ideas more than it is around action set-pieces, with a couple of notable “exceptions.”
In service of this goal, the structure of the novel telegraphs — to varying degrees depending on the details you notice — what the story’s end-point is going to be, at least in rough outline. In fact, Dune goes much further in this direction than even some of the detractors tend to realize. For example, one of the key methods it uses of introducing information and describing characters is the epigraphs that start each chapter. Many of them come from the pen of a character named Princess Irulan, who we don’t meet in the main narrative until very late in the proceedings. She’s writing from a future in which House Atreides was betrayed on Arrakis by Dr. Wellington Yueh, and in which a person named “Muad’Dib” emerged triumphant from the struggle on that planet and became a messianic, semi-deified figure whose childhood companions, pithy utterances and random pearls of wisdom are instructional material even for young children. (She also provides considerable insight into the character of her father, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, whom we encounter only as a presence in her epigraphs before the final act.)
Many of the epigraphs’ narrative revelations come well before the events in the “main” text, and the closer the reader pays attention to those epigraphs, the less doubt they can be in about who will ultimately “win” on Arrakis and to whom the future belongs. This is not to say that sequences like Jessica and Paul escaping the Harkonnens and fleeing a sandworm or Paul confronting Jamis aren’t thrilling, but the thrill is a bit attenuated by a surrounding narrative that explicitly tells us, if we’re reading attentively (and again, just in outline) where it’s all headed. The canny reader might even deduce long before the final act that Irulan is Muad’Dib’s wife in the future she’s writing from, and possibly that she’s a fairly lonely woman who spends much of her time producing histories and commentaries on her near-divine spouse.
So, without the conventional sources of adventure-tale suspense — Will the Hero win? Will the Good Guys win? Will House Harkonnen triumph and Evil reign across the Galaxy? —hasn’t Dune simply abandoned the use of suspense as a narrative device just generally? Well… no. It simply refocuses it.
This switch of focus is the detail that most detractors either simply miss or don’t find engaging; like the novel’s prose style, it’s a trade-off, a gamble that there will be enough readers who do find it engaging for the novel to take off. And as we know over five decades on, it worked. The central action in Dune isn’t about conventional action-movie goals and dilemmas. It’s about an underlying driving force: prophecy, or more precisely prescience, the faculty enabled by the spice melange. What are its limitations? Its advantages? Its traps and pitfalls? Does the prescient vision happening in this moment or that one really matter? Can it be used to evade fate? Is fate even a thing? What is the precise nature of the future the Hero is begetting? Does he want it? Would humanity want it? Can he find a way to escape an apparent fate he finds horrific? Is horror even a factor in the choices he must make?
All of the action in Dune revolves around first setting the stage for this extremely complicated central problem, and then answering it… or at least providing Paul Muad’Dib’s answer to it, which is not necessarily the definitive one. Its questionings of the role of the Hero, of the supposed wisdom of various factions who assume themselves to be possessed of it, of the nature of evolution and human destiny itself, all stem from this central source of suspense. Prescience is a problem — not a superpower, not part of a Magic System, but just a fundamental problem of human existence at this point in history — and the story is about trying to resolve that problem and figure out to what extent prescience is even useful.
This problem isn’t subtle in Dune. The novel is very explicit about it at almost every major turn of the narrative. Most of the major story beats are governed by it. It comes clearest in the epigraph to Chapter 25:
Muad’Dib could indeed, see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad’Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.” And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning “That path leads ever down into stagnation.”
-from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan
This quote is the clearest explanation of the problem Dune is working through, and it also provides an explanation of the scenes Herbert chooses to dramatize. We usually see Paul and his story when they come to one of the “narrow doors” through which time passes: the flight from the Harkonnens, the duel with Jamis, choosing his tribal name with the Fremen, encountering Gurney Halleck in a moment of peril his prescient sight hadn’t foreseen… and most of all, in the final confrontation with the Padishah Emperor and the duel with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a scenario which seems to come out of nowhere (and that has no conventional tension) if you haven’t been engaged with this motif. At all points in the narrative, only the general outcome is certain, not any specific version of it: and Paul is trying through most of it to battle the version that involves a violent Jihad washing out from Arrakis, an endeavor in which he not only (and surprisingly) fails, but in which he ultimately reconciles himself to his failure using a rationalization whose worthiness we can only guess at (both in this novel and its sequels).
These are powerful, resonating, fundamental themes about the Big Questions of human life that proved more than adequate to propelling a story without (or at least with less presence of) the more conventional sources of suspense common to adventure fiction. It’s no wonder the novel had an impact at a deep level with the readership it did find, and it’s no wonder that this “mistake” helped propel it to prominence.
Third “Mistake”: Enigma, or “Withholding Too Much Information”
We touched on enigma earlier when talking about Dune’s prose style: the way in which Herbert draws readers in by obscuring as much as he reveals even at the basic level of character dialogue and scene description. But enigma is part of Dune’s worldbuilding and narrative in a much larger sense as well, and it’s one of the “mistakes” that frustrates critics the most.
It’s commonly said of Frank Herbert that part of the reason he deliberately didn’t try to answer all possible questions in his worldbuilding is that, since he was telling a story that questioned the authority of heroes and saviors, he wanted the reader free to question the writer’s authority, too. If people shouldn’t turn to heroes for answers, why should they turn to him? This sounds neat — almost too neat — and I’ve no idea whether it’s actually true. But it’s certainly true that Dune’s worldbuilding leaves very large, very deliberate gaps in the reader’s information, and that it does compel us to furnish our own answers to some pretty big questions. For example:
Does the idea that nobles are simply better than everyone else have authorial endorsement? Our friend Oren from earlier certainly thinks so (see in his piece under “Space Feudalism”). But the full nature of the situation is considerably more ambiguous than he seems to realize. Part of the reason for that is that the very language the nobles use to describe themselves contains alien usages of familiar words: “human” means something to the people of this universe much more specific than being Homo sapiens — the Bene Gesserit in particular seem to use it to denote a specific kind of self-discipline — and having noble rank doesn’t automatically make you “human” by these terms. Members of some of the Houses are very aware that the society they’re living in is stultified and degenerate or “twisted,” in the throes of decay: most certainly the paranoia of life among the nobility has authorial endorsement since everyone from the Harkonnens to the Atreides clearly lives in constant awareness of the possibility of assassination. Most of all, though, there are powers in the universe to which the Houses, in general, are not superior at all: the Bene Tleilax barely get a mention in Dune (they’ll appear in later books), and the Bene Gesserit are closely entwined in the nobility, but the Guild, the Imperial Sardaukar and the Fremen all stand apart from the Noble Houses and in their different ways illustrate the power not of breeding, but of training and of the influence of environment.
There is no single answer as to how this all fits together. The idea of noble superiority isn’t necessarily defused by this ambiguity: degenerate or not, the Great Houses have a certain cool factor about them, family dynasties each with their own distinct traditions, schools, and secrets ruling multiple planets; and ultimately, it’s the nobles who form the grist of the eugenic plot to create the Kwisatz Haderach superbeing. But do they necessarily need to be? You don’t need noble blood to produce extraordinary ability in the Dune universe, characters like Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck are proof of that. Is the Bene Gesserit fixation on noble bloodlines simply a way of using the closed character of aristocratic society to provide a kind of “controlled environment” for their prolonged experiment? Is it possible that fixation is part of why the whole business takes so long (they’ve been at this, so far as we can tell, for many thousands of years)? The Bene Gesserit, the Great Houses and the overall structure of Imperial society are all described just enough to raise many of these questions, but not to answer them.
The same goes for knowledge and philosophy in this universe. The society of Dune visibly lives on the legacy of forebears and schools of thought that have been governing the way people think for generations. Everyone comes equipped with pithy quotes and abstruse philosophical sentiments that make them sound as if they believe themselves the heirs to a tradition of the “science” of governing or a vast reservoir of knowledge about the “human” condition. Sometimes these ideas are delivered in just the register to make them sound convincing, and at other times they simply sound bizarre, like this rather infamous quote from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam of the Bene Gesserit:
“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”
Many a reader has come across that passage and blinked in confusion. How does that even make sense? It… pretty clearly doesn’t? Why isn’t escaping the trap and informing your fellows of the threat so you can all hunt it down the better option? This has the ring of a thing that has been repeated and received by rote for generations, long impervious to actual analysis.
And that raises some key questions: is that which is portrayed as received wisdom in Dune meant to be actual wisdom to be taken seriously, as part of the development of genuine capabilities in this futuristic society that developed human instead of machine potential? Or is some of it meant to sound like wrong-headed or nonsensical ideology that’s become embedded along with everything else, with the characters of the setting struggling to tell the difference? I think the Reverend Mother Mohiam is presented clearly as showing the coexistence of both false and true knowledge, with its bearer simply unaware of the gaps. What’s not clear is where knowledge ends and falsehood begins in the bigger picture. Clearly some of the Dune universe’s received wisdom quotes represent real knowledge from which real capabilities have derived. At other times they feel more like some stray thought someone jotted down at some point that became ossified into tradition; or they feel like simple rationalizations.
This explicitly has effects on the narrative. Everyone in Dune is playing everyone else for their own purposes. The reasons events unfold the way they do is that none of these factions knows as much as they think they do, or can anticipate as much as they think they can. That this is a considered strategy on Herbert’s part and not just a mistake or an omission comes clearest, I think, in Paul’s arc. He spends the novel struggling against a terrifying fate as either the leader of or the inspiration for a bloody interstellar jihad. As he comes to terms with the failure of that struggle in the end, we get this piece of internal monologue:
The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the new strong mixtures survive. All humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment, experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier.
As he thinks this, Paul has reached the realization that neither by his life or his death in his final confrontation with the Emperor can he stop what he’s created on Arrakis. And yet, this piece of final “wisdom” that he comes to has a familiar ring to it… because it precisely echoes something Reverend Mother Mohiam claims at the novel’s beginning.
“I see in the future what I’ve seen in the past. You well know the pattern of our affairs, Jessica. The race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity. It’s in the bloodstream — the urge to mingle genetic strains without plan. The Imperium, the CHOAM Company, all the Great Houses, they are but bits of flotsam in the path of the flood.”
Are we really seeing Paul attain a fresh insight here, or are we simply seeing his mind fall back on old Bene Gesserit platitudes at the realization of having failed in his struggle against his “terrible purpose”? It’s impossible to tell for sure.
Certainly, though at the climax of the tale as he steps through a last “narrow door” of time Paul is in greater command of his prescient faculties than ever before, these powers still are not infallible and neither is his understanding of them: he comes face to face in the novel’s final pages with an intimate of the Emperor’s, Shaddam IV’s ace in the hole, an agent named Count Hasimir Fenring who is a might-have-been Kwisatz Haderach himself and invisible to the prescient sight. (Not that it’s clear whether the Emperor even realized this.) We don’t get the sense, at the end, that Paul has ascended to ultimate wisdom: only that he’s stepped out into a wider, more unpredictable world that he understands even less about than he did Arrakis.
There are trade-offs, as always, when telling this kind of story: a story that ends but does not really resolve, that leaves endless questions to be turned over and picked at. Some readers, simply, want the resolution. The uncertainty offends them, and it turns them off; it’s just incomplete world-building. Others, however, thrive on this kind of uncertainty: it’s what keeps them coming back, over and over, to a novel and a world. All the elisions, gaps and uncertainties in Dune served that function for the readership it found. They still serve it today.
Of course, there’s another, more workaday reason not to try to answer every possible question: it can multiply the difficulties of simply finishing the novel. Picking and choosing the questions one chooses to explore leaves room both for the reader and their interpretations and gives the author space to breathe. A Song of Ice and Fire is an instructive example here, much more the kind of world-building and storytelling that people who don’t care for Dune tend to be looking for, and of course a phenomenon in its own right. Having tried to explain its world more clearly and follow the stories of a much larger cast of characters than anything we see in Dune, the final volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire are now so deep in tangled plot threads that the author is still struggling to write them years after the television series inspired by his books (and completed in part from his notes) came to an end. A clue, perhaps, that there’s also something pragmatic to be said for the “mistake” of giving the reader incomplete information.
The Further Virtues of DUNE
Dune’s appeal of course consists of a lot more than the “rules” Herbert broke. Plenty of readers simply like its characters, enjoy the story — which for all its unconventionality is still pretty action-packed, after all — and want to spend time with Lady Jessica and Chani, Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, Thufir Hawat and Liet-Kynes. Well above and beyond the unusual appeal of some of its unusual decisions, the novel has plenty of straightforward appeal, too. It means many different things to many different readers, as at the end of the day is true of any novel that attains this wide a following.
You can find those further virtues discussed in plenty of reviews and articles about the novel, or in “why you should read it” videos like this one. All I’ve tried to do above is to augment those perspectives with one that specifically analyzes things that it seemed should have tripped the novel up, but ultimately didn’t. I hope it’s been useful! Thanks for reading.
