Although he had published a handful of stories and, in 1956, one excellent novel of psychological science fiction ( The Dragon in the Sea, also known as Under Pressure), he mainly earned his living as a journalist, for a while as night photo editor at the San Francisco Examiner. Characters include elite samurai-like warriors, sadistically decadent aristocrats, mystical revolutionaries, and, not least, those monster worms, which barrel along under the desert surface with the speed of a freight train, then suddenly emerge from the sand like Moby Dick rising from the depths.įrank Herbert (1920-1986) was approaching forty when he began to work on Dune. Before Star Wars, before A Game of Thrones, Frank Herbert brought to blazing life a feudalistic future of relentless political intrigue and insidious treachery, a grandly operatic vision-half Wagner, half spaghetti western-of a hero discovering his destiny.
Nonetheless, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen has brutally exploited Arrakis and its people for years, thus acquiring a sizeable fortune to underwrite his own outsized ambitions, which may extend to the Imperial throne itself.Įven now, half a century since it first appeared in 1965, Dune is certainly still “the one”-it continues to top readers’ polls as the greatest science-fiction novel of modern times. Mining ‘spice,’ however, is not only difficult but also exceedingly dangerous, mainly because the operations attract gigantic, voracious sandworms, some as long as four hundred meters.
When ingested regularly, this expensive and addictive spice yields a remarkable effect-it can prolong a human life by two to four times the normal span. Īrrakis, the desert planet sometimes known as Dune, is the only place in the universe where melange can be found.
Feature illustration: © Sam Weber for The Folio Society’s edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
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