Why DUNE is One of My All-Time Favorite Books
...in any genre.
I love Dune. I’ve been a huge, huge fan of the novel since I first read it sometime in my late teens or early 20s (I can’t remember exactly when.) I’ve revisited it many times since then, and every time I read it, I find something new to appreciate in the work. It’s that sort of novel, the kind that reveals another layer every time you engage with it. This, I believe, is what all great works of art do.
I do count Dune as a great work of art. It’s in my top five all-time favorite works of literature, not only for its direct merits (a fantastic book to study deeply if you really want to learn a thing or two about the craft of letters) but for its history, for the truths one can learn about the publishing world by observing Dune’s trajectory and character in the context of its landscape.
Anyone who has even a little familiarity with science fiction will agree that Dune was and is a seminal work. Since it was first published in 1965, it has inspired countless other creators in the realm of both sci-fi and fantasy, to the point that I believe most 21st-century people will probably not find it to be such an astonishing work. Don’t mistake me; Dune is delightful to read, and I think any reader who enjoys a sauce of intellectualism on their fiction will find it absolutely mesmerizing. But I don’t think anyone alive today will find the novel’s worldbuilding particularly notable. It’ll feel like standard sci-fi to most modern readers because the sci-fi we all know has been so heavily influenced by Dune. That goes for film and books. But our understanding of science fiction is decidedly post-Dune. It’s hard to overstate how seminal Dune was and is. Almost any popular work of sci-fi or fantasy that has been made since 1965 has the fingerprints of Dune somewhere on it. In some cases, the fingerprints are quite obvious.
It's easy to see why so many writers have found a wealth of inspiration in Dune. The fictional setting is incredibly well fleshed out with a sense of deep lore and long history. And the story itself is just… cool. It’s pacey, it’s high-stakes, it’s got antagonists you can boo and hiss at, and protagonists who aren’t so easy to cheer on (at least, not if you’re reading the novel closely.) It’s a complex, complicated, enthralling story. No wonder it has inspired the creation of so many other works.
Yet very few of the works that borrowed heavily from Dune have achieved or sustained the popularity of the source material. In six decades, it hasn’t yet gone out of print, while other popular works that lifted its tropes may have had flash-in-the-pan success, but didn’t stick around.
And that’s what brings me to the other aspect of Dune—the one people don’t tend to notice, or don’t think about as much. I believe it’s the uniqueness of Dune that has kept it resonant and popular all these years, why it continues to be discovered by new generations of readers while its would-be imitators have petered out and lost their appeal for subsequent generations of readers.
Because we live in a post-Dune reality, it’s difficult to understand just how notably unique the novel was in its time. For whatever reason, when he wrote Dune, Frank Herbert didn’t feel any obligation to stick to the “rules” of science fiction, such as they were during his time, or even to the genre’s conventions. He knew what those rules and conventions were. For more than a decade before Dune’s publication, Herbert had published quite a few short stories in the biggest sci-fi magazines—and those were well-paying markets at the time. He’d published a novel, too, set in the near future. He knew what sci-fi was “supposed” to be like back then, what the readers were looking for. But those conventional features that appealed to the broad sci-fi market didn’t suit the story he wanted to tell. So he discarded all convention, and the work is stronger for it.
Dune is unquestionably sci-fi, leaning as it does on such set pieces as genetic engineering and space travel. Yet there are no computers, and the main characters fight their deadly battles with blades and poison, which gives the setting a distinctly Medieval feel despite that it’s set about ten thousand years into humanity’s future.
The setting and general worldbuilding aren’t the only features of the book that shun the very idea of convention. How can you tell Dune hasn’t retained its popularity because of its setting (awesome though that setting is)? Just look at the prequels. After his death, Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson explored the world Brian’s dad had made through several prequel novels. The prequels are perfectly enjoyable works of sci-fi, and they do have the advantage of being set in the same world as Dune itself. But they aren’t anywhere near as popular as the original.
Why?
The difference can only lie in the missing ingredient: Frank Herbert’s voice.
What you encounter when you first read Dune is a totally unique voice, one unlike any you’ve read before in fiction. Engrossing, weird, startling, it swings between cold, analytical distance and soaring emotional passages that could make any literary afficionado weep. (The scene where Duke Leto experiences his last moments of life is, in my opinion, a gold-star example of elevated prose.) The omniscient narration never settles into one character’s head for long, which creates a sense of unbalance and suspicion that perfectly enhances the emotional tone of the story. Herbert’s bold, commanding voice is master-level craftsmanship, and it does not give a fuck for your conventions.
I think we all have something important to learn from Dune right now, at this moment in art history. That goes for creators of all kinds, not only writers. It’s the books and the authors who don’t feel restricted to “the rules of writing” that become immortal, the way Frank Herbert and Dune have done. And as we move across this new horizon, into this strange reality where generative AI is a thing, I think it’s going to be even more beneficial for writers to find their voices and use those voices in unique ways.
I don’t think this is the time for rules. I think it’s the time for breaking them, as hard and as fast as we can. And I think anyone who has the courage to do that… well, there are no guarantees in the creative life. But I do know one thing: nobody’s talking about the books that felt safe to publishers sixty years ago.
Don’t be safe. Be brilliant.
And go read Dune.
The most important thing Dune did for me is something people don’t talk about enough. Frank Herbert wrote a philosophical science fiction novel that broke into the mainstream.
The ideas that later became clichés were never the point. They were just the surface. Beneath them, Herbert was starting conversations about power, faith, ecology, what it means to be human.
If it weren’t for this book, I’m not sure I’d have had the courage to write the way I do.
I read it in 1968 and it still stands out as so astonishingly memorable I loved it and generally don’t care to read sci-fi but for all the reasons you mentioned and then some it’s in a class of it’s own. You’ve inspired me to reread it after all these years thanks!