What more can possibly be said about Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune? 

I came to the book as a complete Dune novice, so my first surprise was to discover how alike to Star Wars it was––there were parallels between the planets Tatooine and Arrakis; between the Jedi and the Bene Gesserit; between Luke Skywalker and Paul Atreides; the more I read, the more similarities I encountered.  Was this something new that I had unearthed?  Of course not; it is so widely reported that Star Wars draws inspiration from Dune.

Then there were all the allusions towards multiple Middle Eastern religions, and the role of prophecy and messianic figures in religion.  Had anyone else spotted this?  Multiple readers; hundreds of them; thousands.

There was a powerful ecological theme running through the story––look after your planet and your planet will look after you kind of stuff.  It is a message even more relevant today than it had been at the time when Herbert first wrote the book in 1965, hot on the heels of the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962.  Surely no one could have failed to spot that?  Rest assured, they hadn’t.

And was it just me, or was there something altogether Shakespearean about the warring feudal families of Atreides and Harkonnen?  No, it wasn’t just me; plenty of others have also spotted the same parallels with both Hamlet and Macbeth.

I needed to find something more niche; discover something more obscure to rootle out.  Surely no one had thought to draw the connection between Dune’s reference to the Butlerian Jihad, which had seen the rejection of mechanical technology at a historical period in Dune’s history, and the section entitled Book of the Machines in Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, which discussed the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.  I mean, after all, who reads Erewhon these day?  Plenty of people apparently; it had been widely discussed and analysed.

So, what was left to discover in Dune?  It had been critiqued to death.

There was nothing else for it.  Once I’d given up attempting to discover any new cultural, historical or religious references in Dune, all I could do was to simply settle down and enjoy a thoroughly entertaining novel.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow gets back to basics.