The Great Dune Trilogy by Frank Herbert

First published: 1979 (as The Great Dune Trilogy); Dune (1965; serial form, Analog, 1963-1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984), and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985)

Type of plot: Science-fiction epic

Time of work: The remote future

Locale: Several planets in the galaxy, principally Arrakis, also known as Dune

Principal Characters:

• Duke Leto Atreides, the head of an aristocratic Imperial family
• Jessica, his concubine, a member of the Bene Gesserit
• Paul Atreides, their son and heir
• Alia, their daughter
• Chani, a Fremen girl, later Paul’s concubine
• Leto II, and
• Ghanima, the twin children of Paul and Chani
• Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, head of an aristocratic family feuding with the Atreides
• Stilgar, the leader of a tribe of Fremen, natives of Dune
• Duncan Idaho, a liegeman of Duke Leto
• Doctor Yeuh, the Atreides’ doctor, who betrays them

The Novels

Ever since the publication of God Emperor of Dune in 1981, it has been inaccurate, strictly speaking, to refer to the “Dune Trilogy,” and subsequent books in the series have given the term even less validity. Nevertheless, there is one sense in which these first three works may be thought of as a unit. Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune show a unity of time and characters that makes it appropriate to group them as a single story; it is a story which is continued, to be sure, but one whose next installment takes place thousands of years after all but one of the characters of these three works have become dust. In that sense, then, a “Dune trilogy” still exists. Although a changed Leto II appears in God Emperor of Dune, that book has new characters, new concerns, and new themes.

It is difficult to summarize the intricate plot of the first three books, for if science fiction has an epic, this is it. The story moves with the grandeur of history and paints large pictures on a canvas crowded with characters and incidents. Yet all of those incidents revolve around a single commodity and its possession—the spice melange. Millennia from now, an empire of thousands of worlds is held together only by a network of spaceships that fly faster than the speed of light. For navigation at those tremendous velocities, human reactions are too plodding and, because of a religious war thousands of years in the past, computers are forbidden.

In order to navigate their ships, the members of the Spacing Guild, which has a monopoly on the piloting of interplanetary craft, ingest melange in order to extend their senses and, in a way, read the future. Yet of all the worlds of the Imperium, only the planet Arrakis, which is also called Dune, produces the spice, as the by-product of giant creatures known as the sandworms. Whoever controls Dune, then, will eventually control the empire.

As the story opens, Duke Leto Atreides, hereditary ruler of the planet Caladan, has recently gained a signal victory in his family’s carefully regulated feud with another noble house, the Harkonnens: The Atreides have gained possession of Dune. The Emperor, however, aware of Leto’s popularity, judges him too dangerous a figure to control the spice planet; consequently the Emperor arranges with the Harkonnens to have Leto betrayed and murdered soon after Leto’s family arrives on the planet.

Leto’s son Paul and Paul’s mother Jessica escape to the vast deserts that almost cover Dune. Neither mother nor son is ordinary. Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, an organization of women dedicated to a single purpose: the breeding of a god. For centuries the Bene Gesserit have possessed a kind of extended awareness that allows the Reverend Mothers access to the consciousnesses of all their predecessors. Through selective, if secret, breeding, they have tried to produce a male capable of the same kind of consciousness. Jessica, supplied to Leto as a concubine, was part of the plan.

The Bene Gesserit have staggering powers, among them the ability to decide the sex of their children. To enhance their plan, Jessica was to bear a female child by Leto, but the plan failed when Jessica fell genuinely in love with Leto and gave birth to Paul instead. Paul therefore has had the benefit of Bene Gesserit training from his mother, and, when his latent abilities are unlocked by a massive dose of spice, he becomes the messiah that the Bene Gesserit had hoped to produce, yet one outside their control.

The Fremen, independent and fierce dwellers in Dune’s harshest regions, become the fitting tool for Paul to use. At their head, he leads them from the desert, defeats the elite troops of the Emperor and forces his abdication, and becomes Emperor himself, an event with which the first book, Dune, concludes.

Dune Messiah shows a much different Paul, however, one aghast at the effects of his rule. The Fremen have conquered the empire for him, but at a cost of millions of lives. With the vision of alternative futures that his prescience gives him, Paul is tempted to try to decide the best course for humanity. This choice he refuses to make. He becomes blinded by a conspiracy against his rule; he leaves his infant son and daughter, Leto and Ghanima, in the care of his sister Alia, and goes off into the desert to die.

Some critics have argued that Children of Dune, the third part of the story, warns of the dangers of following a charismatic leader, even one as personally appealing as Paul. The story begins nine years after Paul’s disappearance. His sister Alia, ruling as regent for Paul’s children, has nearly destroyed the old Fremen ways. Her mother, Jessica, took a large dose of melange while pregnant with Alia, and as a result Alia gained access to her ancestors’ awareness while still in her mother’s womb. Throughout her life she has been struggling against the attempts of those personalities to take control of her in a kind of demoniac possession; as the story opens, she fails in the struggle. The personality of Baron Harkonnen takes control of her, and she establishes an oppressive religious tyranny.

Leto recognizes the threat that he represents to “Alia” and, like his father before him, escapes to the desert for a time of testing. There he gains an awareness of the future outstripping even Paul’s. Under Paul’s ecological programs, Dune has flowered into a green planet. Yet Leto foresees that humanity’s choices will narrow to a chilling few unless he acts. His only choice is to choose the “Golden Path,” to transform himself into an inhuman monster who will live for thousands of years, to rule his empire pitilessly until humanity becomes so independent that each man and woman will no longer need leaders at all. This is the path that he chooses. With inhuman strength, he destroys the irrigation systems that have brought prosperity to Dune and sets his foot on the road that will lead him to empire.

The Characters

This massive work is filled with scores of memorable characters, each distinctively created by an author skillful at his work. The sheer number of characters does not tax the reader’s memory because of a schema that Herbert adopts: He divides the characters into sets along political lines, and each set is made up of characters who stand in a parallel relation to the other characters in the other set. For example, Duke Leto heads House Atreides, Baron Harkonnen heads his own house, and so on. Each of these leaders employs a mentat—a human computer: Leto’s is Thufir Hawat, Harkonnen’s is Pieter de Vries. Each has a war leader: Duncan Idaho for Atreides, “Beast” Rabban for Harkonnen. Each has a scion: Paul among the Atreides and Feyd Rautha among the Harkonnens. When Paul becomes the leader of the rebel Fremen, the set of characters who surround him will come to occupy almost the same positions: Paul can serve as his own mentat, but in the Fremen Stilgar he will find his battle leader, and from his love of Chani will come his heirs, Leto II and Ghanima.

Each of the great power blocs also has a character more mystical than mental, serving as adviser to (and sometimes manipulator of) the bloc. The Emperor Shaddam has a high-ranking member of the Bene Gesserit, the Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam. She analyzes his enemies for him, depending on her more-than-natural powers to be of service. Within Duke Leto’s circle, Jessica, his concubine, has been trained by the Bene Gesserit and possesses the same kinds of powers. There is, however, a similar class of “witch-women” within the Fremen, their own Sayyadina. After her flight into the desert with her son, Jessica will add the powers of the Sayyadina to the training provided by the Bene Gesserit and serve Paul in a much more profound way than she had been able to aid Leto.

Herbert’s Galactic Empire has no alien races as such, but some of the “humans” have been so changed that they are scarcely recognizable as human beings. These groups are nevertheless composed of memorable, recognizable individuals. One such group is the Spacing Guild, whose consumption of large amounts of spice has made their chief navigators unfit for a normal human environment. One of them appears early in Dune Messiah, swimming in something like a gigantic fishbowl, surrounded by the clouds of melange-laden gasses without which he can no longer survive.

Another group of “aliens” are the Face Dancers—skillful impersonators and athletes from the planet Tleilax. They have been severely modified both by genetics and by surgery to fit them for the overt role of entertainers and the covert one of spies. They illustrate well that even those characters who play relatively small roles have an unforgettable uniqueness about them.

Each reader may well favor a different character from the rich offering that Herbert has presented. Especially in Dune, Herbert surrounds the young Paul with a brilliantly drawn cast of mentors: the musician and swordmaster Gurney Halleck; the battle-wise Duncan Idaho; the Fremen leader Stilgar; even the traitor, Doctor Yeuh. Each of them is as individually marked as are the major characters; there are no cardboard characters in Dune.

Critical Context

As one might expect, those readers who had lionized Herbert for what looked like advocacy of the ecological movement reacted with coolness to the sabotage of their vision in Children of Dune. Yet in fairness to the author, Herbert can hardly be blamed for not writing the book that someone else wanted to read. If readers of the first part mistook his theme, it needs to be stated that Herbert did not originally separate the work into three volumes but saw it as a single story. A second objection is harder to explain away: To the claim of the book’s admirers that it illustrates Herbert’s constant rejection of easy answers to human problems, one might reply that the reclaiming of Dune was no easy answer.

The religious themes of the book, the tensions between prophets and the religions that grow up around them, have been a second center of critical discussion. The books never show institutionalized religion (or governments, for that matter) in a favorable light. Throughout the works runs a distrust of anyone conceding responsibility and decision making to another. One wonders, however, if this suspicion is valid, given that nowhere in any of the books is a representative or elected government shown.

Even the figure of Paul provoked some readers, among them John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Although Campbell had published Dune in serial in his magazine, he rejected the later parts of the story, complaining mainly about the change in the character of Paul. Whereas Paul had been an agent in the movement of the plot of the first book, he decides in the second and third that he does not like what he has done, and passively retires from power, accepts a preventable blinding, and flees into the desert from the society that he has made. Those who, like Campbell, prefer activity to passivity found an unexpected change.

Nevertheless, the popularity of the Dune series shows no sign of lessening. Subsequent volumes have been best-sellers, although their action is far different from that discussed here. It may well be that today’s readers (and many future ones) will turn to Dune and its sequels for the same pleasures that its first readers found there: a sweeping story of action on a galactic scale, with a cast of characters both large and colorful, both heroic and thoughtful.

Bibliography

Barton-Kriese, Paul. “Exploring Divergent Realities: Using Science Fiction to Teach Introductory Political Science.” Extrapolation 34 (Fall, 1993): 209-215. Barton-Kriese argues that concepts such as freedom, equality, and environmental protection can be portrayed meaningfully in science fiction, offering students a chance to see common things, incidents, and realities in an uncommon light. He explores Herbert’s Dune, as well as other science-fiction classics, to support his contention.

DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “History and Historical Effect in Frank Herbert’s Dune.” Science Fiction Studies 19 (November, 1992): 311-325. DiTommaso addresses the complex relationship between the many plots and themes of Dune and the history of the Imperium. He contends that Paul Muad’Dib is the catalyst who ignites the inertial forces of history and is able to use his heritage as a stepping stone to godhood.

Mulcahy, Kevin. “The Prince on Arrakis: Frank Herbert’s Dialogue with Machiavelli.” Extrapolation 37 (Spring, 1996): 22-36. Mulcahy shows how Dune uses science fiction to raise important questions concerning the function of government and the relationship between rulers and their subordinates. He argues that Herbert’s work can be viewed as an examination and refutation of Niccolo Machiavelli’s political thought.

Palumbo, Donald. “The Monomyth as Fractal Pattern in Frank Herbert’s Dune Novels.” Science Fiction Studies 25 (November, 1998): 433-458. Palumbo asserts that there is a link between chaos theory and the usage of monomyth in Herbert’s Dune trilogy. He examines the dynamics of ecology as revealed in the views of imperial planetary ecologist Dr. Kynes as well as the myth of the hero as portrayed in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).

Parkerson, Ronny W. “Semantics, General Semantics, and Ecology in Frank Herbert’s Dune.” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 55 (Fall, 1998): 317-328. Parkerson discusses the association between organisms and their environment as well as the social, political, economic, and language ecologies portrayed in Dune. He shows how Herbert’s use of general semantics emphasizes a theme of power, notion of consciousness, and structure for human thought and behavior.