Frank Herbert’s Dune is a science fiction novel about Paul Atreides, the 15-year-old son of Duke Leto who travels to the desert planet Arrakis. After House Atreides is overthrown, Paul becomes a messiah-like figure to the native people of Arrakis, the Fremen, and he fulfills a millennia-long prediction that a man will be born with immense prescience that will allow him to see the past and future.
Herbert writes with a limited third-person perspective that can switch between characters from paragraph to paragraph, and is at times ambiguous or omniscient. Some chapters follow Paul and the people who surround him, like his mother, Lady Jessica; other chapters follow House Harkonnen, the sadistic enemies of House Atreides, or the Padishah Emperor, the ruler who supported House Atreides’ destruction. The novel takes place over approximately three years and is divided into three parts. In Part 1, House Atreides falls—Duke Leto is killed, and Paul and Jessica flee into the harsh desert of Arrakis. Part 2 chronicles Paul’s adoption by the Fremen, where he is viewed as a legend and called Muad’Dib. He learns more about the mysteries of Arrakis, including enormous sandworms and melange, AKA spice, the substance produced only on Arrakis that slows aging and allows some people to gain knowledge of the future. Spice is required for safe space travel, so it’s immensely valuable—Paul plans to leverage it to get revenge and to help the Fremen. Part 3 depicts Paul’s success: By the end, House Harkonnen is dead, Paul controls the spice, Arrakis is safe, and Paul is promised to the daughter of the Emperor, making him next in line to the imperial throne.
Dune was first published serially, and it was printed in hardcover in 1965. It made Frank Herbert famous, and it is widely regarded as one of the best works of science fiction of all time. It won a Hugo Award and the first Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold nearly 20 million copies. Herbert published five sequels, and other authors have continued to write novels in the Dune franchise. Dune was slow to become popular, however, largely due to its complexity and strangeness, and many influential people in the science fiction world didn’t like it even after it was famous (including J. R. R. Tolkien, who refused to review it).
The novel took nearly a decade for Herbert to write, from conception to completion, and he used what he called “a technique of enormous detail.” The novel develops themes found in much of Herbert’s body of work, including ecology; critique of government; the intersection of politics, religion, and power; human evolution and survival; and ethical philosophy.
Brian Herbert writes in the afterword to Dune that Herbert “liked to say that Dune could be read on any of several layers that were nested beneath the adventure story of a messiah on a desert planet,” and that Herbert “intentionally left loose ends” to send readers out of the story with bits of it still clinging to them. Because Dune is so complex, this guide is not exhaustive; there are many other themes, motifs, quotes, and characters to be explored.
