At first blush, writing a novel that takes place on another planet seems like an easier proposition than, say, creating a historical fiction set during the Victorian era. The author of the historical novel must get the costumes and settings right, avoid anachronisms, make sure the language is idiomatic, and never violate our understanding of how things really were during the period in question. And we haven’t even begun to consider matters of plot, character development, etc.
The sci-fi writer, in contrast, can just make it all up . Mermaids, flying buildings, the proverbial bottomless cup of coffee . . . anything goes, as Cole Porter once said. What could be easier than that?
Yet when we encounter a book such as Dune , it becomes clear that imagining a whole new world is, in fact, a project on a grand scale. Anthropologists sometimes talk about “thin” and “thick” descriptions of cultures—a terminology originated by Clifford Geertz, but now borrowed by other fields. The “thin description” may describe a certain aspect of a social situation, but lacks the rich contextual information that only the “thick” account can convey. Frank Herbert’s Dune is the novelistic equivalent of the “thick” ethnography—indeed, almost a textbook case of what such a "thick" narrative looks like.
And what Herbert achieves is all the more striking, given that so much sci-fi is woefully thin. It is one thing to postulate the existence of intelligent life in another part of the universe, it is a much different (and more challenging) task to situate this alien culture in a rich world, fully equipped with distinctive flora, fauna, ecology, traditions, institutions, religious beliefs, ancestral conflicts, technologies, myths and other cultural bric- a-brac. The richness of this contextual framework is what typically sets the finer works of speculative fiction apart from the rest.
Only a few authors have achieved this at a very high degree. Herbert belongs in that select group that includes J.R.R. Tolkien (and his Middle-earth), C.S. Lewis (and Narnia) and J. K. Rowling (and her magical variant of modern-day Britain). It should come to no surprise that each of these authors ranks among the most popular writers of the last century, and has attracted a notoriously loyal group of fans. Even if “serious” literary critics fail to recognize the achievement of creating the “thick” description of an alternative world from scratch, millions of readers clearly appreciate the “degree of difficulty” involved. If fiction were diving, creating a realistic Dune would be the equivalent of a backward double somersault with two- and-a-half twists.
I realize full well that I am fighting against the literary establishment here. For them, a work such as Dune —whether they have read it or not (mostly the latter, let’s be honest)— exists simply to be derided and dismissed. Its popularity and ardent fan base, far from adding to the book’s credibility, only serve to make it all the more suspect. I probably fell, unthinkingly, into this same camp, until my strange mid-life crisis as a reader set in, which led me to immerse myself in the disdained classics of conceptual fiction—books, let me assure you, I had not read as a teenager. Nostalgia for my youth, a sentiment that sometimes flares up when I listen to the oldies station on the radio, plays no part in my championing of these works. Yes, I admit it, I didn't read Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, etc. until I had a few gray hairs.
The plot of Dune is your typical jumble of stock situations and narrative archetypes. The novel is set primarily on the desert planet Arrakis, a barren wasteland which would be worthless except that it is the source of the valuable spice mélange, known for its ability to prolong life, as well as enhance vitality and alertness. Duke Leto Atreides I has brought his family to Arrakis, where he will take over the valuable spice trade. But this gift is actually a trap hatched by his enemies, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Emperor Shaddam IV. Although the Duke has a powerful and loyal entourage, the battle for survival on this inhospitable planet will ultimately depend on his concubine Lady Jessica and especially his son Paul.
The plot, as summarized here, is straightforward and little different from what we might find in hundreds of pulp fiction novels. Yet what distinguishes Dune from your run of the mill adventure story is the rich tapestry that Herbert weaves around his plot, and his ability to address big themes—ranging from ecology to religion—without being heavy-handed. In fact, those who believe that books set on distant planets are mere escapism, without serious thematic content and the "deep inner meaning" of more serious novels, might be surprised by what they find inside the covers of Dune .
To some extent, Herbert never really extricated himself from this story—although he wrote books about other subjects, he kept coming back to the scene of his greatest triumph. Sequels are a curse of the creative mind. We often find that the very imaginative souls best capable of forging a richly conceived fictional world are least able to leave it behind and move on to other projects. One is again reminded inevitably of Narnia, Middle-earth and Hogwarts. In the cases of Tolkien and Herbert, their sons even stepped in to keep the wheels turning in the imaginative universes left behind by their illustrious fathers.
Although Dune has become an acknowledged classic within the sci-fi world, this thick-description novel was slow in finding an audience. Close to twenty publishers rejected the novel (although one reportedly noted that this might be the “mistake of the decade”), and Herbert was eventually forced to cut a deal with Chilton, an imprint best known for its auto manuals. Sales were slow at first—even though the book won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Many readers were no doubt put off by the sheer size of the work, and by the fact that they needed to consult a lengthy glossary at the back of the book if they hoped to understand the fictive landscape that Herbert had created for their delectation. In short, Dune hovered on the brink of becoming one of those heinous “two bookmark novels,” such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire , in which the reader must dance back and forth in the text.
Yet the enthusiasm of those who made the plunge into Dune eventually overcame all of these obstacles. Again like Rowling (turned down by nine publishers), Herbert demonstrated that his grandiosity of vision was only a flaw in the minds of those who proved unable to rise to the occasion. For the readers who gave themselves up to the world of Dune —and this is unmistakably one of those books that you must give yourself up to, or you might as well not read it at all—the supposedly extraneous trappings of the author’s “thick” description were the best part of the story.
This book continues to find a receptive audience, and reward those who make the effort to master its intricacies. It has even survived a poorly received David Lynch film and a lackluster TV movie—and, needless to say, the scorn of the literati. Yet the high culture snobs who look down on this book would perhaps do well to spend some time immersed in its pages. They might just learn something about the possibilities of “thick” descriptions in literature that they won’t find in the other books on their nightstand.