What is ‘Dune’? An introduction to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic.

Are you newly Dune-curious after watching the glorious debut trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming adaptation? Well, Mashable has you covered.

If you’re already well-acquainted with the spice, Melange, and you know the difference between Stilgar and a stillsuit, you’re not going to learn much here. But Dune is a vast and sometimes confusing sci-fi universe, and total newcomers might want to understand what they’re stepping into before seeing how Villeneuve brought it to life.

So, without further ado, let’s take a trip to Arrakis.

Excuse me? Arrakis?

The Dune you’ll be introduced to in Villeneuve’s two-part adaptation of the first book centers the majority of its action around the desert planet of Arrakis. Sandworms live there. It’s also the only place to find the spice. But let’s come back to Arrakis in a minute. The real question we should start with is….

Why is Dune such a big deal?

Dune is both the title of a book that published in 1965 and the name applied to the series of books that followed from author Frank Herbert, though he technically never finished telling the story before his death in 1986. Decades later, Herbert’s son Brian formed a creative partnership with sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson, and together they actually did finish what Frank started.

That’s a whole, wild tale unto itself. When the senior Herbert, who suffered from pancreatic cancer, died of a pulmonary embolism not long after a surgery, he was already at work on his next Dune story. But it was a solo effort, and so when Frank died suddenly the future of the series went with him. Or so everyone thought. 

A decade later, Brian learned from the estate attorney that there were previously unknown safety deposit boxes in his father’s name, located in St. Louis. There among all the notes, Brian found an outline for “Dune 7.” Soon after, he found another 1,000 pages of reference material. And so he teamed up with Anderson to continue and ultimately complete his dad’s vision.

The two didn’t just write “Dune 7,” which eventually split into two books, Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007). They also fleshed out the “Duniverse” as a whole with prequel trilogies and spin-off books about the noble houses featured in the original series, the different factions vying for influence, and the distant history that led directly to the events of Dune.

The senior Herbert’s work has long been recognized as essential science fiction. The story’s fantastical ideas are as vivid and colorfully detailed as they are J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. But Dune is also notable for the way its story comments on how our social makeup, scientific development, and governing practices would evolve under a different set of circumstances.

A lot of this is tied up in Frank Herbert’s views on human evolution and survival, his personal politics, and his understanding (and yes, appropriation) of various religious beliefs and traditions. But that’s a conversation best had only after you’ve consumed and formed an understanding of Dune.

Is the Duniverse really that big?

Oh yeah, it’s real big. The first few books cover a relatively short stretch of time, but the series as a whole spans tens of thousands of years. And I don’t mean the books just reference ancient events. There’s an entire trilogy set 10,000 years before the events of Dune. There’s also multiple time leaps in the main series (that can be quite jarring when you don’t know they’re coming!).

You see, Dune isn’t some space-age tale of aliens living in a “galaxy far, far away” kind of setting. In fact, the story is set tens of thousands of years into humanity’s future, long after the “Butlerian Jihad” led to the outright banning of all “thinking machines” (aka computers), thus changing the course of technological development. In the time since – and long before the start of the first book – we figured out how to survive and then thrive without AI in our lives.

Much of that survival depends on augmented humans as a replacement for computers. The first book doesn’t get into this in great detail, but in the Duniverse there are several different factions that rely on organic substances (like the spice) or just really intense, lifelong training to bring different skills to the table that would normally be relegated to a computer.

Mentats, for example, are human computers who enhance their powers of comprehension with the use of sapho juice, an addictive drug. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood, meanwhile, is a powerful force in Dune‘s social, political, and religious spaces whose members submit to a lifetime of intense physical and mental conditioning, such that they possess superhuman abilities.

The specifics of each faction are too much to get into here. Part of Dune’s magic as a series is the slow unfurling of its world. In the books at least, you come to understand more of the universe only as those different pieces of it become important to the story. So in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’m going to skip the thorough rundown.

Got it. Then what is Dune, the book, about?

To understand what Dune is about, we need to go over the story’s setup, and it’s here that we head back to Arrakis. The desert planet that’s the source of so much strife and death in Dune – but also humanity’s continuing prosperity – is the only place one can find the spice, melange, which is a super-drug of sorts. But it’s a whole lot more than that, too.

The spice (as many refer to it) bestows a number of benefits on users, including a longer life and enhanced physical capabilities. For some people, it also unlocks prescience, the ability to see into the future. That last feature is what makes the spice an essential commodity for the Imperium. Only the people who are blessed with prescience have the ability to master space travel and become Navigators for the Spacing Guild.

Arrakis, where the spice is harvested, is a pretty hostile environment. There’s no rain whatsoever. The native Fremen, who survive by living underground and wearing moisture-preserving “stillsuits,” aren’t exactly friendly to outsiders, either. Stilgar, who I mentioned in the intro, is the leader (“Naib”) of a Fremen tribe that’s important to the larger story.

Most crucially, harvesting spice on Arrakis involves a deadly game of avoiding the sandworms. These massive creatures dwell deep beneath the sand, but they’re drawn to the surface by exactly the kinds of vibrations that are produced by spice harvesters. When a sandworm shows up, you want to be far, far away.

The many flavors of risk that Arrakis serves up isn’t enough of a deterrent to send the Imperium looking for alternatives. That’s how valuable the spice is to the people of Dune. It’s critical to interstellar commerce, but it’s also a pricey luxury item enjoyed by those who can afford to keep up their habit.

These factors combine to make Arrakis the most valuable territory in known space. The harvesting operation is administered by a combined government apparatus that includes the Spacing Guild; the Landsraad, a political body comprised of all the noble houses in the Imperium; and the Padishah Emperor, sovereign ruler of the known universe who has the last word on most matters.

So. In the Landsraad, the Houses Atreides and Harkonnen are bitter rivals. As the first book opens, Duke Leto Atreides is preparing to move his family to Arrakis – a group that crucially includes Leto’s son and sole heir, Paul. The’re moving because the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV has handed House Atreides control of spice harvesting, an operation previously controlled by House Harkonnen.

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is obviously none too pleased with this turn of events. So the transfer of power on Arrakis is already set up to be a fraught one. The events that unfold from there, which includes the arrival of the Fremen into the story, is the entire substance of Dune. But that’s the basic gist of how things get started.

Hasn’t there already been a Dune movie?

Dune has actually been adapted for screen a couple of times. The best-known version is certainly the 1984 film adaptation from director David Lynch – yes, the Twin Peaks guy. That Dune is exceptionally odd and takes many liberties with Herbert’s story.

If you’ve seen Lynch’s movie and think that’s what Dune is, think again. Many of the broad strokes follow the path laid out in the book, but in Herbert’s work there aren’t any of the weird sonic weapons Lynch introduced, and various characterizations are much clearer in the context of the ongoing plot.

That wasn’t the only adaptation, though. Back in 2000, Syfy (or the Sci Fi Channel, as it was known at the time) released the three-part miniseries, Frank Herbert’s Dune. This version of the story hewed far closer to Herbert’s novel than the Lynch take. It was followed in 2003 by Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune, another three-part miniseries that adapted the second and third books in the series.

The Sci Fi Channel adaptations are strong in their own way. They’re not quite as polished as you’d expect from our current “golden age of television.” There were clearly budgetary constraints that give the whole thing more of a soap opera-y feel. But the miniseries’ also do a great job of capturing Herbert’s complicated stories, and are still worth watching today – though it might be better to wait until after Villeneuve’s Dune if you want to stay unspoiled.

There was also one other notable attempt to adapt Dune for the screen. The French-Chilean cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky set out to develop a movie version back in the 1970s. It ended up not happening, but the failed production eventually became the subject of an excellent 2013 documentary, titled Jodorowsky’s Dune.

If nothing else, the documentary is a testament to the difficulty of adapting Herbert’s original work for film. Dune is an incredibly dense novel, rich with detail and character development but deeply challenging to adapt for any other format. 

We’ll just have to wait and see how Villeneuve’s interpretation fares when his new take on Dune arrives in theaters on Dec. 18, 2020.