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DUNE
Introduction by
Norman Spinrad
Frank Herbert's DUNE is one of the four most culturally-
influential science fiction novels ever written, the other three
being Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, George Orwell's 1984, and
Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.
Of these four novels, DUNE is the longest, most complex, the
deepest by far, arguably the most successful on a literary level,
certainly the most culturally important, and yet the least under-
stood by critical establishments, both genre and general.
BRAVE NEW WORLD, published way back in 1932, became the tem-
plate for the science fictional dystopia, particularly of the
"Friendly Fascism" variety wherein the dystopian reality emerges
from a superficially utopian surface, but read now seems stilted,
schematic, and amateurish; inferior, in fact, to Huxley's own
later science fiction.
1984 is much more skillfully written, far more politically
and psychologically sophisticated, a classic that remains literar-
ily valid long after its political relevance has faded, written by
a so-called "mainstream" writer, who, unlike Huxley, wrote no
other significant science fiction.
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND was written by an acknowledged
master of science fiction who never wrote anything else of signif-
icance, but it is not Heinlein's best novel any more than BRAVE
NEW WORLD is Huxley's. Structurally, it breaks in half rather
clumsily, on a stylistic level it is inferior to THE MOON IS A
HARSH MISTRESS. It has become Heinlein's sigil novel largely
because of its centrality to the evolution of the Counterculture
born in the 1960s and its unfortunate notoriety as the novel that
inspired the discorporative depredations of Charles Manson and his
"Family."
DUNE, as a cultural icon, partakes of some of the aspects of
all three of the other books, but is something much more. Like
BRAVE NEW WORLD, it has become the template for a generation and
more of imitative works, including all too many sequels by Herbert
himself. Like 1984, it is a novel written on a level of sophisti-
cation that will preserve it as a literally classic long after its
cultural relevance has faded.
And like STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND only more so, DUNE was a
formative literary factor in the cultural revolution of the 1960s,
and in a much more positive manner, which is why it is so general-
ly and deliberately misread as a novel centered on "ecological"
issues.
The truth is far more complex and, even today, far more
politically incorrect, and therefore still far more politically
dangerous.
After thirty years and more and millions of copies sold, it
is hard to realize that back in the early 1960s this now famous
and best-selling classic had a difficult time getting published.
And it so happens that I was around for part of the story.
DUNE was first published in Analog, John W. Campbell, Jr.'s
magazine, as two separate "novels" in serial form. "Dune World"
was serialized in 1963-64, and "The Prophet of Dune" in 1965,
though as Frank Herbert told me in personal conversation much
later, DUNE had always been conceived and written as one novel.
And indeed, as an avid reader of each installment of the
"Dune World" serialization as a young writer just starting out, I
was deeply disappointed, not to say outraged, by the way the last
installment seemed to end in mid-air.
By the time Analog began to serialize "The Prophet of Dune,"
I was being published in the magazine myself. But I was still an
avid reader of the serialization. And I was working at the Scott
Meredith literary agency, which was trying to place the novel with
a publisher.
Despite the success of the serialization, this wasn't easy,
and the literary agency finally had to settle for selling the
American trade edition rights for a small advance to Chilton, an
obscure house, who brought out the hardcover in 1965 in a very
modest printing.
Only later, when Ace Books reprinted DUNE in paperback, did
it begin to slowly gather momentum to become the long-term best-
seller that we know it as today.
Why this difficult publishing history of a novel that was to
become an enormous commercial success over time?
The answer must be sought within the pages of DUNE itself.
And understood within the context of the times in which it
was written and published.
#
In superficial plot outline, the story of DUNE seems not only
simple but something of a derivative cliche.
Due in part to the machinations of the Harkonnen clan and its
evil leader Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the Padishah Emperor, ruler
of the human interstellar empire, banishes the hereditary enemy of
the Harkonnens, the Atreides clan, led by Duke Leto Atreides, to
rule the desert planet Arrakis.
Bereft of any other significant economic interest, Arrakis is
the sole source of the "spice" melange, the psychoactive drug that
allows the navigators of the Spacing Guild to move their starships
faster than light through a form of hyperspace and thus maintain
the coherence of this unlikely pseudo-medieval interstellar cul-
ture.
It's all a Harkonnen set-up, in collaboration with the Em-
peror, to destroy the Atreides and gain control of Arrakis and the
spice themselves.
Unrest is fomented, Harkonnen mercenaries arrive, a war
starts, Leto is assassinated, the Harkonnens take over, and his
heir Paul, along with the boy's mother Jessica, flee into the
wilds of the deep desert.
There they are taken in by the Fremen, a Bedouin-like tribe
battling the oppressive rule of the Harkonnens. Through a series
of feats, rituals, initiations, and battles, young Paul becomes
the leader of the Fremen, turns them into a People's Liberation
Army, and eventually not only reclaims his rightful throne but
becomes Emperor himself and a kind of God-King of this fictional
universe.
An oft-told story?
Yes.
Derivative?
Yes?
A cliche?
No.
Simple?
Not at all.
For what we have here in outline is Frank Herbert's version
of what Joseph Campbell argues is the basic human story in his
landmark work of mythic analysis and literary comparative cultural
anthropology, THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES.
The Hero (Paul) is dispossessed of his rightful heritage
(Leto's throne) by the forces of evil (the Harkonnens) and must
flee into the wilderness(the Arakeen desert).
There he encounters his spiritual guide and master who edu-
cates him in mystical and practical lore. Interestingly enough, as
we shall see later, in DUNE, Herbert divides this archetype into
three masters, one for each level of knowledge: Duncan Idaho, his
warrior sensei; the Mentat Thufir Hawat, his mentor in things
tactical and intellectual; and his mother the Bene Gesserit adept
Jessica, his guide to the things of the spirit and mystical
vision.
There in the primal wilderness he also undergoes spiritual and
physical testing and initiations, proves his worth, and gathers loyal
followers and allies (the Fremen).
He descends into the Underworld, the place of the dead, the
world of spiritual and moral darkness, where he undergoes the
ultimate testing, triumphs, and returns to the world of men as the
liberating Lightbringer.
Whether this is the main human template myth may be arguable,
whether this is even the main Western mythic template somewhat
less arguable, but that this generalized tale of The Hero With a
Thousand faces is the structure and inner reality of everything
from the New Testament to Tarzan, from THE STARS MY DESTINATION to
SIDDHARTHA, from the various tellings and retellings of the King
Arthur cycle to the myths of Gilgamesh and Barbarossa, to endless
samurai epics and much of Shakespeare, as well as DUNE, certainly
is not.
So DUNE's superficially simple and derivative story line is
not a cliche but the retelling of one of humanity's deepest and
most powerful myths.
Deep and powerful because it is the story of ourselves as we
would like to be.
Our adolescent selves identify with the young Paul because we
all, one way or another, feel deprived of our rightful place at
the center of the world. We all seek to escape from the usurping
forces of repression into the wilderness of self-discovery where
we will perform feats that will allow us to return to the seat of
power and triumphantly confront the oppressors as the darling of
destiny.
On this level, the tale can, and all-too-often has, become a
psychologically fascist power fantasy; in fiction, and worse
still, in the real world.
And this seductive appeal to egoistic power fantasies is
certainly strong in DUNE, particularly to adolescents, most par-
ticularly to male adolescents, which partially explains the popu-
larity of Frank Herbert's novel, and almost entirely explains the
popularity of the imitative "science fantasy" that was to follow.
But on a deeper level, the level Joseph Campbell addresses,
and a level that is fully present in DUNE, the ultimate adversary
that the true hero (as opposed to the barbarian with a broadsword
or the space cadet with a blaster) confronts in the nethermost pit
of the moral and spiritual underworld is himself. The egoistic
power-tripping self of the superficial level of the story.
And the climactic battle, the ultimate test, is a spiritual
and moral one, between these two aspects of the hero; the false
and the true, the merely physical and the mystical, the warrior
and the man of knowledge, and what emerges to champion the cause
of the people if the hero is successful is not merely an irresistible
warrior, but a true Lightbringer, an Enlightened One, a Bodhisattva.
What makes DUNE such a unique and powerful retelling of the
myth of The Hero With A Thousand Faces is that Paul, however
imperfectly, understands this very dichotomy early on, and strug-
gles with it, however ambiguously, throughout the bulk of the
novel.
And in the end, what can be read as the ultimate triumph on
one level can be read as tragedy on the other. And that is the
level upon which Paul Atreides, become Muab'dib, become the Kwi-
satz Haderach and Padishah Emperor, sees it. His prescient vision
may make him God-King of this fictional universe, but he cannot
escape from the deterministic destiny thereof and the jihad he
will bring, the jihad he has spent so much of the novel trying to
prevent.
This is what is thematically and mystically and dramatically
and psychologically central to DUNE and not "ecology." This is the
visionary core of this long, complex, often-discursive, multi-
leveled novel. This is what makes it a literary classic.
And this, in the context of its time, explains why a science
fiction novel serialized in eight parts in a genre magazine, first
published in small printing by a minor house and then modestly
reprinted by a genre publisher in paperback, could become a cul-
turally-influential book in a much wider context and, over time, a
best-seller.
The so-called ecological theme of DUNE does not stand up to
serious scrutiny because the ecology of Herbert's fictional Arra-
kis is extremely simplified and unrealistically schematic. Arrakis
is a vast planetary desert, its ecospheres only varying somewhat
in degree of dessication, and indeed the main native food chain
seems to consist of only two organisms--the tiny ones that produce
the raw material of the "spice" and the huge Sandworms which graze
upon them and convert it into the precious melange.
It is the melange, in effect Sandworm droppings, upon which
the wealth of Arrakis, and indeed the existence of the novel's
interstellar empire, entirely depends. It is the melange for which
the Atreides and the Harkonnens contend. It is the melange which
is the center of the Fremen culture and religion.
It is the melange which will eventually transform Paul
Atreides into the Kwisatz Haderach, the prescient being who can
see into levels of reality to which all others are blind. The
melange which turns a boy and then a guerrilla leader into a kind of
god.
And though melange is referred to throughout the novel as a
"spice" and consumed in small quantities as such, that is not what
it really is at all.
What it really is is that which could hardly speak its name
in clear in the science fiction of the early 1960s, which explains
why the book was such a hard sell to publishers in 1964 and 1965
even with the terminological obfuscation. Which also explains why
it became a best-seller after the cultural transformations of 1967
once it was published and why it was one of the engines of those
transformations.
Melange is not a fictional "spice."
Melange is a fictional psychedelic drug
Its effects are similar to those of LSD or mescaline or peyote.
Only much more powerful.
DUNE, therefore, is not primarily a novel thematically cen-
tered on ecology. It is centrally a novel exploring chemically
enhanced states of consciousness and their effects not only on
individual personality and spirit but on culture.
One of the very first.
And, after all these years, still one of the most profound.
#
Melange, in even small continuous doses, is addictive, turns
the sclera of the eyeballs blue, has milder psychedelic effects
than LSD, and, like the peyote of the American southwestern de-
sert, an integrated sacrament of the Native American religion, is
thoroughly incorporated into the culture and religion of the Fremen.
On the level of the interstellar culture, it is taken in much
stronger doses by the Navigators of the Spacing Guild, who use it
to attain extreme states of altered consciousness which allow them
to pilot starships through a form of hyperspace, turning them into
transhuman beings as part of the existential bargain.
The Bene Geserit female adepts use it for more visionary
purposes, and dream of creating and/or finding the "Kwisatz Hader-
ach," a male capable of handling the spice on the highest level,
whose consciousness will be freed thereby from conventionally
perceived space and time into a kind of Einsteinian four-
dimensional viewpoint which will enable him to see "the future"
presciently, or, more subtly and profoundly, to surf the geodesics of
probability.
Thus Herbert portrays four levels of both the use of psycho-
active drugs by a society and the corresponding levels of con-
sciousness. The Fremen incorporate melange as the sacrament of a
tribal religion. The Guild Navigators employ it as a pragmatic
technological augment. The Bene Gesserit use it in vision quests and
mind-melding sessions.
Paul Atreides passes through these three ascending stages on
his way to finally employing the drug to achieve the ultimate
level, to become the Kwisatz Haderach, the fully Enlightened One,
able to view the conventional realm of space and time from the
outside, as Einsteinian four-space, a consciousness rendered
therefore prescient up to a point, an Enlightenment that turns out
to be both a godlike power and a tragic curse.
All this is set in a culture which is anachronistically archaic
in a manner which is both rather too familiar and yet interestingly
strange.
Stretching disbelief and contorting technological logic by
staging swordfights in a space-going technology capable of using
atomic weapons and inflicting an improbable monarchical political
system upon it for the purpose of setting a pseudo-medieval ac-
tion-adventure story on alien planets is hardly Frank Herbert's
invention, and these fictional swords-and-spaceships cultures are
almost always implicitly Christian and more or less Catholic.
In DUNE too, we have an Emperor and noble vassals and a hier-
archical feudal system with a theocratic underpinning. But it is
not Catholic or even Christian.
Although the word "Islam" never even appears in the novel and
you have to be rather conversant with the real-world referents to
get it, the religious template in DUNE is Islamic, not Christian,
more Eastern than Western.
The term "Padishah Emperor" certainly points to Herbert's
deliberate decision to do this, since "Shah padi Shah" means "King
of Kings" in Farsi, the language of the Islamic Persian Empire.
Nor is it going too far to suppose that the grudge-nursing
Fremen, exiled on Arrakis after a long and complex interstellar
hegira, are cognates of the minority Shi'ite followers of Ali
persecuted and reviled by dominant Sunni cultures.
And the visionary Bene Gesserit have their similarities to
the mystic Sufis, Muslims who claim their sect predates Islam, and
who emphasize techniques designed to induce direct mystical ex-
perience and insight, rather than ritual, rules, or a belief
system.
Why Frank Herbert chose Islam as the religious and mystical
underpinning of an interstellar culture that is otherwise based on
that of medieval, feudal, Catholic Europe, is perhaps beyond the
scope of literary analysis, a choice made somewhere in the deep
subconscious regions from which artistic creation arises.
However, one can speculate...
While Islam is generally grouped with Judaism and Christiani-
ty, the monotheistic religions out of which it arose, there is one
fundamental difference between Islam and its direct predecessors.
Judaism began as a tribal religion centrally concerned with
the relationship between the history of the Jews and their God and
its Bible was written by diverse hands over a long period of time.
Christianity converted Judaism into a proselytizing universalist
religion based on the story of one transhuman figure, Jesus
Christ, its Bible was written in a much shorter period of time in
four alternate versions (not unlike Lawrence Durrell's ALEXANDRIA
QUARTET), it is basically a biography of Jesus, and its central
concerns are sin, redemption, and morality.
Islam too began as a tribal religion, that of the Arabs, and
was transformed into a proselytizing universalist religion, and
its holy book, the Koran, is also filled with rules and regula-
tions.
But the Koran, unlike either Testament of the Judeo-Christian
Bible, was created by one man, Mohammed, over a very short period
of time in historical terms; directly dictated to him by Allah, if
you are a believer, and certainly in the throes of some powerful
mystical and visionary experience even if you are not, since
Mohammed was an illiterate who had never created a literary work
before.
Thus Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, but like Bud-
dhism, has as its core one man's mystical and visionary awakening
experience. And Mohammed, liked Buddha, made no pretense of being the
Godhead, merely (if that can be the word)of directly experiencing it.
The transcendent goal of Christianity is individual immortality
in a vaguely described but rather concrete heaven, to be achieved by
following the rules. Thus it is basically a religion of morality.
The transcendent goal of Buddhism is the achievement of
Nirvana, the ecstatic reintegration of the individual spirit with
the universal Godhead from which it arose, to be achieved by
meditative techniques. Thus Buddhism is an experiential religion,
whose goal is achieving a transhuman state of consciousness.
Islam stands somewhere between. The Koran is as full of moral
and legalistic prescriptions as the Bible, but it was written by
one man in a state of mystically transcendent consciousness.
And the "heaven" of Islam, salaciously misunderstood by many,
including many Muslims, is described as a state of continuous
orgasm, which, seen on a mystic level, is a state of transcendent
consciousness not unlike the Buddhist Nirvana.
Which perhaps explains why the Sufis, an older and thoroughly
experiential religion, aimed entirely at achieving such states by
ecstatic dancing, drugs, and other such means of transforming
consciousness, could become an aspect of Islam and be generally
accepted as such by the mainstream thereof.
And why alcohol, a drug not known for its psychedelic ef-
fects, is far more acceptable in Christian cultures than marijuana
and hashish, which are far more acceptable in traditional Islamic
cultures than alcohol.
Which may explain why Frank Herbert chose to employ Islamic
mystical and religious referents in a novel whose central themes
are the cultural, psychological, and religions relationships
between a psychedelic drug and the societies based upon it, and
the stepwise visionary transformation of a young boy's conscious-
ness by the use thereof into the transcendent consciousness of a
"Kwisatz Haderach," a being so enlightened that in the end he can even
perceive the ironic tragedy of his own prescience.
#
Which certainly goes a long way towards explaining why DUNE
could not find a major American publisher, inside the science
fiction or in the mainstream, in the early 1960s, before there was
anything like the Counterculture it helped to create.
And why it eventually became a long-term best-seller after
the evolutionary changes in the consciousness of a generation it
did so much to catalyze.
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND may have been the model, for
better and for worse, for much of the hippie life-style--communes
centered around a charismatic guru, an alternate life-style in-
cluding free sexuality, and in the unfortunate case of the Manson
Family, a glib moral rationalization for the discorporation of
inconvenient people--but DUNE did something much more profound.
Reading DUNE can actually transform your consciousness in a
positive manner. It can elevate your spirit. It can take you on a
fictional "psychedelic trip," can induce a visionary experience
that stays with you, from which, in some small or not so small
way, you might emerge as something of a Lightbringer yourself.
A large claim for a science fiction novel?
To be sure.
But if you are reading this, you have the book in your hand,
and the opportunity to see for yourself that DUNE is an empowering
novel.
I can only send you on your way to that experience with the
testimony of my own, published as a part of my autobiography in
the Gale Press CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES.
Here I describe my decision as a 25-year-old who had pub-
lished about four stories and who had had a near-death experience
in a hospital two years previously to leave New York for Califor-
nia:
"And California, San Francisco in particular, for me, like so
many others, was the mythical Golden West towards which Young Men
were supposed to go, the land with no winter, North Beach, the
Sunset end of the Road, the object of a thousand and one vision
quests, the Future itself, somehow, the glorious leap into the
Great Unknown.
Appropriately enough, Frank Herbert and about 300 mg of
mescaline sent me on my way....
Walking west through the Village night on 4th Street, peaking on
mescaline after reading the final installment of the magazine
serialization of DUNE, a powerful meditation on space-time, pre-
cognition, and destiny soon to launch a hundred thousand trips, I
had a flash-forward of my own.
I would be a famous science fiction writer, I would publish
many stories and novels, and many of the people who were my liter-
ary idols, inspirations, and role-models, and former clients,
people I had never met, would come to accept me as their equal, as
their ally, as their friend.
And my life's mission, would be to take this commercial science
fiction genre and turn it into something else somehow, write works
that transcended its commercial parameters....that would help to
open a new Way....
This is what you're here for. This is why you passed through the
fever's fire and didn't die in that hospital bed. This is what you
must do. You must go West to meet your future.
The mescaline talking? An overdose of 25-year-old ego? A stoned
out ego-tripping wish-fulfillment fantasy?
Call it what you will.
Everything I saw in that timeless Einsteinian moment would
come to pass."
That was my description of the prescient DUNE-inspired vision
of my 25-year-old self. Here is the present tense:
"And when I'm really feeling down, I remember a 25-year-old
kid stoned on mescaline, walking across 4th Street to the Village,
high on DUNE, and dreaming those crazy prescient dreams....
He was going to be a famous science fiction writer, he would
publish many stories and novels, and the many of the people who were
his literary idols, inspirations, and role-models would accept him as
their equal, would become his allies, his friends.
And his life's mission would be to take this commercial science
fiction genre and turn it into something else somehow, write works
that transcended its commercial parameters, works...that would
open a new Way....
This is what you're here for.
And so I was. And so I am."
One of the many epithets attached in the novel to Paul
Atreides, Muab'dib, Kwisatz Haderach, is "the Opener of the Way."
As witness the above, certainly something Frank Herbert's
masterpiece was for me.
The Opener of the Way.
Something that DUNE will never cease to be.
end