With the recent release of another film version of Dune, it’s probably appropriately topical for CK to make some comments about this terrific book and whether it has any relevance to the real world in which we live today.
First, let’s note that CK is an author. He appreciates great books. CK would like to acknowledge that he completely agrees that Dune and Dune Messiah are great books. Not just good, but great. Children of Dune is pretty good too, and after that, in CK’s (often humble) opinion the standard drops off without ever becoming bad. Frank Herbert was always a promising Sci-fi writer, but with Dune he reached greatness and set a new high bar, which is what great writing does.
So I’m delighted to see a serious effort at making a great film out of a book that is now more than 65 years old. The original Dino de Laurentiis movie was an over-ambitious disappointment, although not terrible given the technologies of the day.
It says something about the quality of Dune that it’s still somewhere near the cutting edge of Sci-fi 65 years after being published. Not many of the tens of thousands authors who seriously try ever get to write one book of that quality. Frank Herbert wrote two.
So what makes Dune such a great book?
First, let’s note that it’s not without flaws. LoTR has flaws and so does Dune. One example would be that this amazing Spice anti-senescence drug doesn’t seem to make anyone actually live any longer, even though that’s supposed to be why it’s so valuable.
Who cares? Provided the book delivers enough to thrill we’ll all happily suspend disbelief and ignore the flaws. LoTR delivers. So does Dune - big time. Dune sparkles like a brilliant diamond, new wonders dancing off every other page. Even the appendix is a shear joy to read.
And Dune Messiah is technically even better. Less brilliant and sparkling than Dune, but more thought provoking and pretty much flawless its composition, it’s a study in how to write a sequel that addresses some really tricky open ended questions left hanging in the first book.
One of the things that makes Dune and Dune Messiah so great is the way the many diverse forms of power are included within the narrative and back story.
Power has many forms, but Dune plays with:
· Military Power
· Economic Power
· Ethical / Religious / Spiritual Power (notably the Bene Gesserit).
· Political Power
· Information power (note the importance of spies, controlling information that gets out to others, prescience and propoganda etc.)
· Social Power - such as the use of arena popularity to influence the masses (and the ruling elite).
· Personal Power - the influence of players through interpersonal qualities, - beauty, courage, honesty, loyalty, fear, sexual desire, etc.
· Magical Power - as in the Guild’s ability to warp space, the Bene-Gesserit truth sayer abilities, Paul Maud’dib’s prescient abilities, and the Worm ability to create spice - which (in the early books) can’t be synthesized in a lab.
Technological power is also included, but reduced by use of the restrictions of the Butlerian Jihad.
This is highly unusual and one of the great strengths that makes the first two books of the Dune series such outstanding fiction. Most novels only deal with two or three types of power in any one book.
So - in terms of the realism of the power plays and political structures in Dune as compared with the complexities of real life, yes- it’s quite remarkably more realistic and nuanced than most novels.
Decades later The Game of Thrones included this kind of realism too, but set in a world of older technology and magic, so clearly further removed from our world.
So - does this realism in Dune mean it has relevance to our current world issues?
Not really.
Let’s do a comparison.
In Dune the political structure of the Empire is an Imperial Feudal society. In Feudalism, aristocrats rule with dynastic structures, and everyone else ‘has their place’. It is difficult to move from one level in the feudal structure (trusted retainer, merchant, peasant farmer - 3 examples) to another level. This is classified as ‘restricted social mobility’.
The major institutions are established and strongly supported. Technological change is restricted, so it doesn’t significantly change the established political and institutional orders. The economy is strongly controlled through the feudal aristocracy through CHOAM, etc.
Our reality
There’s very little feudalism left on our planet in 2020. Saudi Arabia might be closest.
Technological change is rampant, and business disrupters and changing business models are occuring twice a decade.
The last century saw the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the British Empire (the largest empire the world has ever known), and the rise of the US ‘Empire’. A new Empire structure is being tried with Europe, but is having difficulties with Brexit etc. By 2027 it is estimated that China will pass the USA as the world’s largest economy.
This is a world of little stability and constant rapid change. Our political realities reflect this.
Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind correctly identifies the arrow of history as being one of increasing unification through empires.
But we are now approaching the end game of this. It is almost impossible for major empire powers (such as the USA or China) to take over other peoples / nations any more. There have been no major wars between empires in the last 70 years (almost unprecedented in human history). The great challenge now is how it is possible to unite 200 plus nations and the major players / hegemons:
· USA
· China
· Europe
· India?
with the diverse complexities of:
· Middle East
· South America
· Africa
· Russia
· Islam - (Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Indian Moslems, etc)
to achieve true globalisation.
Meantime, we are still all trapped on a single planet with a single biosphere. Ecological realities, including sixth largest extinction event in the planet’s history are significant influences on global politics.
In the midst of all this are ‘global’ organisations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, The International Court of La Hague, etc.
And one notes that the USA largely ignores the International Court and is currently talking about defunding WHO.
While Covid-19, a single virus, can turn the globe on its head.
And we have a mix of Republican Democracies, Constitutional Democratic Monarchies, True Monarchies, Dictatorships, Pseudo Democracies (such as Russia), Communist Single Party States, and a mix of other systems.
That could hardly be further away from the single stable feudal empire structure depicted in Dune.
Economically, we have all sorts of value sources, ranging from power (fossil fuels, green energies, nuclear, etc.), information, Information Tech, High tech including nascent AI, Nascent Space Industries, agriculture, marine, as well as good old manufacturing, and stuff like timber, construction etc. etc. It is still concrete construction that puts out 20% of CO2 emissions on this planet.
This is very very different to a Galactic Empire where one product - Spice, accounts for a massive percentage of all the wealth of CHOAM.
Further Differences
In Dune, one of the great problems is the restrictive stability of the Empire. Frank Herbert introduces a racial genetic concept that humanity will be driven to the chaotic frenzy of a Jihad in order to ensure that genes are distributed throughout the populace. Paul Atreides / Maud’dib finds his prescient powers trapped by this drive for a jihad he cannot prevent.
This is fiction. It has no clear scientific validity. Karl Marx’s ideas on the rebellion of the masses against the bourgeois proletariat are dubious, but do have some acceptance within sociological thinking. Frank Herbert sought a similar concept without referring to Marxism. Fiction needs its own plot devices to make a story, and this was one.
Our 2020s reality struggles with real world plots, from the ecological to the technological.
Conclusion
Dune contains an unusually high degree of reality in its interplay of diverse forms of power and political depictions which is one of the things that makes it an outstanding series (first two books especially), but it is very far removed from the political complexities of our world in the 2020s.
Hope this helps.