The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear is perhaps one of the most famous passages from a 20th century SF novel. It certainly is a powerful truism and it is one of the things that people first associate with Frank Herbert's Dune. Published in 1965, Dune was the first winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966, in addition to winning the Hugo Award that year as well. I first read it and its five sequels in the Fall of 2001 and while I have not read the others since this, this is the third time total that I have read Dune and the first since April 2008. It is always interesting to see how a reader's reaction to a text evolves over time. Sometimes, the text "improves" with a re-reading (this happened when I re-read Moby Dick at 23 after hating it at 17) and sometimes the text seems to have more flaws than was the case on the initial read. For Dune, it is a mixture of both.

Dune is one of the earlier "ecological" SF novels, predating the first Earth Day by five years. As such, there is a powerful unspoken character, the planet Arrakis, who comes to dominate the narrative much more than any of the human protagonists. Harsh, seemingly unyielding and full of dangers, Arrakis appears at first glance to be untameable, but ultimately it is the taming of this planet that drives much of the novel. From the awesome Shai-Halud (or the huge sandworms) to the water-preserving stillsuits that the Fremen wear to the cataloging of the effects that the spice melange has on its users, Herbert develops a vividly-rendered desert environment that contains an aura of mystery and danger. Arrakis indeed is by far the most realized and dynamic of the characters that appear in this novel.

The human conflicts, whether it be between the Houses of Atreides and Harkonnen, between the Emperor and the Landsraad or between the Fremen and the Harkonnen, are nowhere near as well-developed. Despite the interesting choice of naming the name of Paul Muad'Dib after the mythological Greek house of Agamemnon, very little is made of this purported connection with Greek tragedy. Perhaps Paul's father Leto I, fated it seems to die and with everyone expecting it, may seem at first to fit the tragic role, this is undercut by Herbert's sloppy narrative.

The characters in Dune rarely seem to be "human" in their thoughts, actions, or mistakes. In large part, this is due to Herbert's unfortunate tendency to overuse internal monologues, with several scenes containing multiple characters, each of whom will be shown to say something, only to be followed with their internal monologue indicating whether or not "truth" was spoken. Below is a scene where Duke Leto, his Bene Gesserit concubine Jessica, the water-shipper Bewt and the Imperial Planetologist Kynes interact:


Obviously, this scene is meant to convey much - Kynes coming to realize the goal of the Atreides, the pointing out of the other source of wealth on Arrakis, Jessica's hopes for her son Paul, and Leto's resistance to manipulation. However, there just is not much "life" to this passage, nor is there in the majority of similar passages in the novel. The characters are there, thought overwhelms action overmuch, and the end result is that there is a sense of staticity about the characters; they rarely show plausible character development. They are little more than the background to the war for the environment.

There are other concerns that cropped up when reading this novel. It is interesting how 45 years ago, women, even those of societies in the imaginary 200 centuries after our time, are little more than domestic help or are seen as vague threatening nunneries that seek to manipulate men. Jessica and Chani are defined much more by whom they love (Leto, Paul) than by what they themselves accomplish. While certainly not a topic that would have dominated SF talk as much back in the mid-1960s, Herbert's treatment of women certainly would raise eyebrows in the early 21st century. His treatment of homosexuality is even more troublesome for the modern reader. The only homosexual character that appears in this novel is the main villain, Baron Harkonnen and in one chilling passage, he requests that his Mentat, Pietr, send him a male youth that has been drugged, since he hates him to be thrashing about. The connection between homosexuality and pedophilia certainly is a troublesome issue, especially in light of the global rise in cases of reported pedophilia in recent years.
However, these concerns, which I noticed much more on this re-read than I had during my initial 2001 read or my 2008 re-read, only dampen the effect of the novel. Herbert's Arrakis is one of the more powerful settings that I have read in any fictional work and perhaps is one of the more fully-realized secondary-world creations. Not just the complex interactions between desert and its organisms, but also how well Herbert mixes in religious faith and tradition with these interactions of humans and environment. Although there were a few times where the symbiotic relationships seemed a bit too strained and unrealistic, on the whole, the novel as a whole works because of the sense that the "real" story was unfolding around the action involving the human groups. It will be interesting to see if this strong environmental presence will be seen in the succeeding novels (my memory of those is faint, to be honest) or if the irritating narrative quirks mentioned above will overshadow any interesting developments. Will note that I will wait to the second volume to discuss Herbert's concept of jihad.

On the whole, Dune is a very flawed novel that, despite its many flaws, is a very powerful read, especially for those readers intrigued by the idea of a fiction considering how environments can shape people and their beliefs. Certainly, it has been a very influential novel, as evidenced by some minor elements present in the next series I shall review, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. In many ways, its status as being one of the most influential American SF novels is justified; attention to how the human and environmental elements interact is done to a much larger scale here and perhaps served as a precursor to sweeping SF trilogies such as the Mars novels that Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in the 1990s. This re-read served not only to strengthen my appreciation for the series, but also to make me more aware of how a novel can contain troubling flaws and yet still be a worthwhile read. Highly recommended for most, with caveats noted in several paragraphs above.