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History See other History Articles Title: Frank Herbert's Dune Frank Herbert's 1963 Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of The Rings is to fantasy: the most popular, most influential and most critically-acclaimed novel in the genre. Herbert's novel was a revelation: before Dune, even the most well-written science fiction had been mostly "wonderful gadget" stories, or political commentary expressed through exaggeration. It had never occurred to anyone that science fiction could offer the literary depth of Dostoevsky, the intricate "wheels within wheels" intrigues of Shakespeare or so deeply fulfill the heroic epic form behind Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Mahabharata, and Beowulf. Lucas has often acknowledged Dune as an inspiration. In early drafts of the Star Wars script the influence was much more obvious - the story was full of feudalistic Houses and dictums, and the treasure the Princess was guarding wasn't the Death Star plans, but a shipment of "aura spice." The final version of Star Wars is related to Dune mostly in spirit: a science fiction heroic fantasy treated seriously. Of all the ideas George Lucas inherited from Frank Herbert, the subtle lesson was how to use science fiction to create myth. Frank Herbert (1920-1986) was an unusually bright boy who grew up with sporadically alcoholic parents during the Great Depression. He spent a lot of time alone, out exploring nature or swept away by "love affairs" with authors including Ezra Pound, Guy De Maupassant, Marcel Proust and Ernest Hemingway. On his eighth birthday Herbert announced his intention to be a writer when he grew up. By the time Herbert was twelve he had read and absorbed the complete works of William Shakespeare. Herbert spent the first half of his life working mostly as a reporter. He had a formidable mind, but success eluded him. In 1956 he published his first novel, Dragon in the Sea, about submarine warfare in the near future. Herbert observed that it was silly to use giant metal ships to transport liquids which weigh less than water, and so invented the idea of a giant rubber balloon, shaped like a sandworm, which could be dragged acorss the ocean's surface by a much-smaller, much less-expensive boat. Beginning in 1958 the British Dunlop company began to produce and sell Herbert's idea, as the Dracone Barge. The name "Dracone" (Latin for "dragon") was an overt acknowledgement that they got the idea from Herbert's novel. Arthur C. Clarke and Fritz Leiber recommended that Herbert take legal action, but he discovered that the two-year "discovery period" after publication of his book had elapsed, so it was too late to file patents. As he neared 40, Herbert began to grow anxious about ever achieving his dream: to become an accomplished, rich and famous author. He resolved to buckle down and sculpt his masterpiece. Herbert devoted the next 5-7 years to researching and writing "the desert novel." He had two primary starting points: first, his life-long misgivings about what he called the "messianic impulse in human society." That is, he observed that people seem to have an inbuilt hunger for a powerful, charismatic leader to whom we can surrender our responsibility for making difficult decisions. Hebert observed that even the best leaders are humans, those humans have flaws, and elevating any man to a position of god-like power tends to magnify those human flaws to dangerous proportions. Worse, even if the original leader resists the temptation to abuse power, the bureaucracy which springs up around him will outlive him, and over time a bureaucracy becomes more and more incented to prioritize its own needs over the needs of people.
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#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
Interesting - thanks for posting. Dune will be my next reading assignment.
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