[REVIEW] Frank Herbert, Dune
Apr. 8th, 2006 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldA while back, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
acrabtree strongly encouraged me to read Frank Herbert's famous novel Dune. When I told him that, in fact, I'd owned the 1999 Ace paperback edition for two years but hadn't cracked the pages open, he upgraded his suggestion to a command. It seemed like a good idea, so why not?
At first reading I was taken aback by the relative simplicity of the ecological themes of the book. All ecological systems are limited in their complexity by the durability of the most fragile elements? Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is only one of the science-fiction magnum opuses I've read that touches upon the nature of life systems. It then occurred to me that this book was written just a few years before Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught on fire, again. Frighteningly enough this idea was quite new at the time.
The character of Baron Harkonnen stood out for me. I've concluded that, in the Dune narrative, Harkonnen isn't evil because he is gay, but rather that his sexual orientation was one sign of his evil, for instance manifesting itself with his fondness for raping drugged doubles of Paul Atreides. Again, frighteningly enough this conceit was probably quite new and even progressive for the time. Might I note here the grace of my late birth?
These two notes aside, Dune is actually a compelling novel about the nature of power. Paul Atreides is fated, by his genealogy and by his residence among the Fremen of Arrakis, to become a man of enormous power, the Kwisatz Haderach capable of godlike feats of power and with vast armies of followers. Herbert did a remarkable job of capturing Paul's ambivalence about his fate, knowing his inevitability as the same time as he mourns it. The distancing of the Atreides heir from his potential humanity that the reader sees at the end is sad. It's a pity that the sequels weren't quite up to snuff, though I'm sure I'll read them..
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acrabtree strongly encouraged me to read Frank Herbert's famous novel Dune. When I told him that, in fact, I'd owned the 1999 Ace paperback edition for two years but hadn't cracked the pages open, he upgraded his suggestion to a command. It seemed like a good idea, so why not?At first reading I was taken aback by the relative simplicity of the ecological themes of the book. All ecological systems are limited in their complexity by the durability of the most fragile elements? Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is only one of the science-fiction magnum opuses I've read that touches upon the nature of life systems. It then occurred to me that this book was written just a few years before Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught on fire, again. Frighteningly enough this idea was quite new at the time.
The character of Baron Harkonnen stood out for me. I've concluded that, in the Dune narrative, Harkonnen isn't evil because he is gay, but rather that his sexual orientation was one sign of his evil, for instance manifesting itself with his fondness for raping drugged doubles of Paul Atreides. Again, frighteningly enough this conceit was probably quite new and even progressive for the time. Might I note here the grace of my late birth?
These two notes aside, Dune is actually a compelling novel about the nature of power. Paul Atreides is fated, by his genealogy and by his residence among the Fremen of Arrakis, to become a man of enormous power, the Kwisatz Haderach capable of godlike feats of power and with vast armies of followers. Herbert did a remarkable job of capturing Paul's ambivalence about his fate, knowing his inevitability as the same time as he mourns it. The distancing of the Atreides heir from his potential humanity that the reader sees at the end is sad. It's a pity that the sequels weren't quite up to snuff, though I'm sure I'll read them..
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