Dune's Place in Science Fiction History: A Few Notes

I remember how when I first read Frank Herbert's Dune I was utterly blown away by it--so much so that I had finished the five sequels in a year's time and years later, in spite of reserve toward his son Brian's contributions to the franchise, eagerly read his continuations of the story for two volumes beyond Chapterhouse: Dune (2006's Hunters of Dune and 2007's Sandworms of Dune).

Looking back on Herbert's saga I still respect its accomplishment--but it is not quite the touchstone that it once was for me.

One reason is that I have read a good deal since--including a lot of still earlier work--and seen that a long development of the genre led up to that, what Herbert produced remarkable in many ways, but not so original as it once looked. The galactic scale empire, the cosmic time scale--all this was frankly old hat in 1965, and in some respects others had outdone it long before. (Certainly an Olaf Stapledon's vision had been even wider and broader and more fundamentally idea-packed.) I can add that Dune's protagonist Paul Atreides came to seem just a late expression of the longtime obsession of the genre, and especially the John Campbell crowd (one should remember that that early version of Dune, Dune World, first ran in Campbell's Analog), with the idea of supermen rising above the rest of the species and shifting its destiny, with the eugenics, psychic powers and esoteric training involved in making Paul a superman all familiar elements of that body of work. Indeed, A.E. van Vogt's likewise macro-scale Null-A space operas seemed especially relevant, their protagonist's "cortical-thalamic" training anticipating Paul's training in the techniques of the Bene Gesserit, while what van Vogt called the "famous cortical-thalamic pause" even came to seem the obvious inspiration to the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear. ("'I am now relaxing . . . and all stimuli are making the full circuit of my nervous system . . . Always, I am consciously aware of the stimulus moving up to and through the cortex'" in van Vogt's version; "I will face my fear . . . permit it to pass over and through me" in Herbert's less clinically biomedical and more poetic version.) Even van Vogt's propensity for opening his chapters with epigrams now seemed a precedent for Herbert's own--a more developed, ambitious, artful usage, but one building on that earlier work nonetheless.

I found myself developing a more critical attitude toward some of those old elements, too. The treatment of artificial intelligence here (essentially banning it) struck me as all too much in line with the awkwardness of science fiction writers in the computer age that Vernor Vinge wrote about in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity"--coming to "an opaque wall across the future" and just not dealing with it. There is also that matter of feudalism-in-space--which seemed more suited to pulpy melodramatics of the George Lucas variety than the more serious stuff Herbert aimed at producing, as I increasingly sympathized with Mack Reynolds' being "sick and tired of reading stories based 10,000 years in the future where all the sciences have progressed fabulously except for one," exemplified by how rather than going forward, or even sideways, we just went backward.

The result was that Dune now looks to me as much monument to the genre's prior growth as foundation for later work, indeed maybe more striking in the first way than in the second--and testament to the limits its writers faced even in this comparatively dynamic era for the field.