Dune

Dune

A fifteen-year-old boy sits across from a very old woman in a dim room aboard a heighliner. She places a small black box on the table between them. She tells him to put his hand inside it. He feels nothing at first -- just a faint warmth -- and then the pain begins. It starts at his fingertips and spreads upward through his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder, burning as though every nerve is dissolving in acid. He screams inside his own skull. He does not move his hand. Against his neck he feels the tip of a needle -- the Gom Jabbar, dipped in a poison so fast-acting that it would stop his heart before he finished falling. She tells him, quietly, that she will kill him if he withdraws his hand before she permits it.

This is how Frank Herbert opens his universe. Not with spaceships. Not with battle. With a question: what is a human being, really? Paul Atreides, heir to House Atreides, sits in that box while the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam measures the boundary between animal reflex and conscious will. Animals, she explains, would yank the hand free and accept death over pain. A human being -- a true human being -- can override the body. Can hold still. Can choose.

Paul holds still.

He passes the test. He has no idea what it will cost him.

Dune was published in 1965 by Chilton Books, a Philadelphia house best known for automotive repair manuals. The manuscript had been rejected by roughly twenty publishers before Chilton's editor Sterling Lanier took a chance on it, initially publishing it in two hardcover volumes. Herbert had spent six years writing it after it was serialized in Analog Science Fiction magazine in two parts -- "Dune World" in 1963 and "The Prophet of Dune" in 1965 -- and the research behind it stretched further back than that. To 1957, when he traveled to Florence, Oregon, to write an article about a government project attempting to stabilize coastal sand dunes with poverty grass. The dunes fascinated him. The way a single ecological intervention -- planting grass to catch windblown sand -- could set in motion a cascade of changes that would eventually transform the entire system: that concept became the seed of a novel. He never finished the article. Instead he spent the next several years reading ecology, desert survival, the history of Islamic prophecy, the mechanics of colonial resource extraction, and the psychology of charismatic leadership. What emerged was not a simple adventure story. It was an ecosystem of interlocking ideas held together by one of the most fully realized imaginary worlds in literary history. The novel won the inaugural Nebula Award and the Hugo Award in 1966. It has never gone out of print.