Book review: Dune

Mulan is finally old enough to read Frank Herbert's Dune books.

A few weeks ago, over the school holidays, I re-read Dune, the first in the six-book series (Herbert's son, Brian, has also continued his father's story with over a dozen more Dune books).  It was something like the fourth time I'd read it, but this time my aim was to decide whether it would be suitable for Mulan.

I passed it to an initially sceptical Mulan, who at the time was several books into reading Terry Pratchett's huge Discworld series (Mulan had got into Discworld after we watched the Soul Music movie).  But she gave it a go and quickly got addicted.  The Discworld books were mostly abandoned; in Mulan's opinion Dune is much more exciting.

I buried my nose in the second book, Dune Messiah, trying to keep ahead of Mulan (the books do mature as they go along), but she caught up and passed me while I was part-way through the third book, Children of Dune.  Mulan finished the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, ahead of me and started on the fifth book, Heretics of Dune.  However she said it's not so interesting and slowed down (reading other books instead).  I have now caught up and re-passed Mulan, and have just finished book five.

As I say, the books do mature.  The later books expand the thought-provoking social commentary, and there is increasing sexual content (on re-reading, I realise the fifth book is probably a little too sexually mature for Mulan right now; the fourth book was okay).  Mulan and I have agreed it would be best for her to pause in the series and maybe come back to it in a year or so.  (I first read the fifth book when I was 13.)

In Mulan's opinion, the first and third books were the best in the series so far.  In part this is because of the direct, exciting storytelling in those books, and in part because teens/children were the dominant characters.  Mulan also didn't like the way later books in the series were set in different times and had mostly completely different characters.

We also watched both the David Lynch movie and the more recent TV miniseries versions of Dune.

(The movie is a mess!  It's pretty incoherent.  And they seriously damage the plot by turning the "weirding" fighting style into merely a technological super-weapon.  But, as Mulan rightly pointed out, the TV miniseries is even worse!  They have basically turned a deeply thought-provoking story into a US-style soap opera.  It is Americanly beautiful people transparently telegraphing their every overly-emotional shallow thought.  Both the movie and TV miniseries were fun to watch for fan value only.)

I think there are at least four things that are great about the Dune books:

Firstly, it's an un-put-down-able story.  It's event-filled and exciting, with plenty of action and adventure.  The first book by far does this the best, and in my opinion it gets weaker as it goes on, but the others are also pretty good.

For a teenage reader we get an initially very relatable and likable main character in the form of 15-year-old Paul Atreides.  Paul is a nice guy -- smart, hard-working and well-intentioned.  As the son of a Duke, he's been given a great education by some of the best private tutors around (yep, he homeschools!).  While Paul has had a comfortable, secure, privileged life, he has still worked hard to make the most of his rare and lucky opportunities.

The excitement comes about because from the beginning of the book we learn that Paul's family is required to leave their comfortable, secure ancestral family home and travel to another planet to take charge of the business operations there (yes, Dune is a futuristic science fiction story).  This generates the conflict and excitement, because the previous owners of the new planet are the multi-generational enemies of Paul's family.

This leads into the second aspect of what, in my opinion, makes the Dune books great.  In my opinion, Dune is an especially aspirational and inspirational story for young adults.  It presents role models who strive to do the best they can, and to be the best they can.  Teenage Paul, as our first role model, listens to his teachers and parents, and wants to do well.  He enjoys learning, and gains satisfaction from his achievements.  He questions, challenges and thinks.  He makes mistakes, but he learns from them and incorporates the learning into who he is.

(In the second book things become more Greek-tragedy-like, in the sense that these smart, educated, well-intentioned and seemingly-right-at-the-time choices can still lead to awful outcomes.)

Soon we come to learn that Paul is part of a 100-ish generation breeding programme to create a super-person.  So, it turns out he is a little too perfect and idealised.  But nonetheless I think young Paul still remains an aspirational figure and role model for teenage readers.  Certainly he was that for me when I read Dune as a young teenager.  Dune was part of the package which inculcated my love of learning and willingness to push myself to the best of my ability.  Reading Dune made we want to get up and do challenging stuff, both physically and mentally.

Thirdly, Dune is beautifully written.  I recall reading somewhere that Herbert wrote Dune with Haiku poetry in mind.  That makes sense to me.  Dune is often like poetic prose.  It flows in a style that is unique to Herbert, inviting multiple re-readings with new rewards and discoveries.  It is the sort of style of writing that captures the emotions.  One can let the words flow, creating an overall feel, sometimes without pinning down the exact meaning of every single phrase,  To put it more cynically, Dune is an incredibly clever emotion-manipulator, which creates a certain frame of mind.

And this leads us into the fourth great aspect.  Dune is a deep, opinionated commentary on society, politics, religion and humanity as a whole.  It talks about the big questions of life, the universe and everything.  It challenges one's thinking about what is important in life -- what we are doing and where we are going.  Who are we?  What are our fundamental values?  What is the meaning of life?  The later books especially get into this a lot, with frequent deep conversations between characters or inner monologues contemplating what the right thing to do is.  Moreover, the book presents no easy answers -- characters frequently disagree and compete, but almost all of them are presented in sympathetic ways.

To me, those are the key things which make Dune great.  It is for these reasons that I passed the book to Mulan, and I highly recommend it to any thinking teens.

Nonetheless, Dune is far from perfect.  And re-reading it now as an adult shows more of these flaws.

As I see it, the biggest flaw is related to its seductiveness.

I read Herbert as having strong political views that he often promotes in his books (his other, non-Dune novels typically have similar political themes).  He brings these views into his storytelling, sometimes indirectly but also sometimes directly through authorial explanations or character conversations.  That's great.  Lots of writers are like this and it almost always adds depth to a great novel.  But I think it's important to flag this right at the beginning.  These political views are not merely entertainment that we can discard when we finish reading the books.  Readers do absorb the political views of novelists as they read their novels; it's important that we draw these out explicitly so we are not absorbing these views uncritically.

Moreover,  Herbert was a very clever writer.  Not only is his poetic prose beautiful, but he also knew how to phrase ideas in such a way so as to make these ideas more appealing to his readers.  Again, it's important to pick this out explicitly, so we are not tricked by his rhetorical force.

One common rhetorical approach that Herbert uses in Dune is one that is also used by various popular speakers in the world today (consider certain popular YouTube opinionators!).  The general method they use is to appeal to the reader's strong attraction to logic and reasoning, but without actually being rigorously logical.  To be convincing, Herbert and others rely on the fact that while their readers/listeners like the idea of logic, these readers/listeners generally haven't spent the time necessary to develop their own skills in understanding logic.  This means that Herbert and others can use superficial linguistic structures of logic, or assert that they are being logical, while at the same time use rhetorical misdirection to blur the intermediate steps between initial plausible assertion and desired conclusion.  The reader/listener is wowed and believes the conclusion.

With this in mind, in Dune (especially in the later books) Herbert created several compelling characters who are notably intended to be super smart or super knowledgeable.  This creates a plausible authority as Herbert's mouthpiece.  These characters start out by making clear and seemingly straightforward universal assertions which we might plausibly accept as true.  They also might make a few clear steps in basic reasoning.  This makes the reader feel as though they are smartly thinking alongside the super-smart character.

But intermingled with this, Herbert, through the character, also makes less clear assertions (which may or may not even be real assertions), which often use non-literal language that is multi-interpretable.  Herbert is especially brilliant at this pseudo-reasoning in seemingly-real-but-actually-nonsensical language.  This is done to reduce the reader to follower rather than active logic-analyser.  The reader is then brought along to the desired conclusion by emotion and poetic feel rather than by active reasoning.  The reader doesn't bother to try to figure out the hard bits in the supposed reasoning, assuming that since they understood the first bit, and since the character has been set up as super-smart, then the next bits should also be sound, too.

Occasionally, Herbert has another character doubt the super-smart character.  At this point the super-smart character may verbally abuse the simpleton for missing the "clear reasoning" or not being advanced enough.  The reader is also thus made to feel shamed to question the reasoning.  Sometimes, during this process the super-smart character might even wow himself, as we are told that he (usually it's a he) has reached a new high level of conscious awareness.  This intermediate-stage water-muddying may happen, with great rhetorical flourish, over a few pages, to further wow the reader.

Finally, Herbert presents the reader with his desired political claims, as if it has been reached by objectively rigorous reasoning.  Sometimes the conclusion is presented explicitly, but sometimes it is presented somewhat indirectly so as to make the reader think that they are also super-smart to have deduced the conclusion by themselves.

All this might sound silly and obvious when phrased in this way.  But as I say, Herbert is an excellent writer, and does this extremely well.  I never saw through much of this when I first read it as a young teenager.  Teenage me was Herbert's target reader -- excited by reasoning, but not especially skilled at it.  Sadly, middle-aged me is a bit more cynical, and unfortunately on this latest re-reading I am finding some of Herbert's rhetorical flourishes more amusing than inspiring.

(Mulan tells me that she was bored by parts of the books that did this, and while she read all the main text she sometimes skipped the italicised bits at the beginning of each chapter.)

Ironically, the Dune books are often precisely about these sorts language manipulations posing as reasoning.  There are prolonged discussions in the books about the uses of language manipulation to control others.  As I see it, the Dune books are themselves an object lesson in what they are warning us against.

To summarise, I think it is essential that as readers we explicitly recognise Herbert's rhetoric for what it is.  His writing is beautiful and challenging, and definitely worth reading.  But we need to also think critically as we read, so that we don't fall for Herbert's seductive writing and accept his political views unquestioningly.

Now onto the content of what I think we need to think critically about.

The central themes of Dune are about humanity and what it is to be human.  The Dune characters are human, and they repeatedly emphasise that they are human.  So it can be easy to confuse humans in the story with humans in the real world -- that is, mistakenly think that since we are all humans, what is said about them must also be true about us.  Thus, it can be easy to leap to the conclusion that the values and attitudes promoted in the story should likewise be promoted in our real world.

Consequently, I think that as we read the Dune series we need to evaluate the content of it with two main things in mind.  Firstly, we need to look at to what extent the Dune universe and Dune humans are factually and physically the same as (or different from) us real-world humans.  And second we need to look at the political, social, religious and moral claims that follow from these physical facts.  If we are physically different, then it is quite likely that our social and political values and systems will be different, too.

This, obviously, is a huge task.  There are many issues that stand out for me; I'll mention a few as examples:

One issue has to do with sex.  Not sex as in reproduction, but sex as in biological male and female.  Dune universe humans are very clearly divided into males and females (plus the genetically engineered sterile hermaphrodite Face Dancers).  

In Dune, males and females are distinctly different in far more ways than they are different in our real world.  Moreover, many of these differences in the Dune world are not merely a matter of degree, but a matter of kind.  That is, in Dune, males often have distinctly "male" properties and abilities, and females have distinctly "female" properties and abilities.  There are abilities that females have that males cannot have, and vice versa.

Herbert leaves unexplained how this could possibly be.  Given what we now know about the complexities of sex differences in our real world (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones, etc, etc), Herbert's either-or sex distinctions are not compatible with our current best scientific evidence.  I read Herbert as presenting an essentialist view of sex in the Dune universe, which is simply factually false in the real world.  That's okay in a fictional story world -- writers can imagine whatever they like.  But we shouldn't mix this up with real world evidence.  We need to remember that Dune universe humans are biologically different from our real world humans.

(For a very good quick introduction to real-world biological facts about sex, take a look at this video.)

Besides the potential for scientific confusion between fiction and fact, this may also lead us into thinking wrongly about people's roles in society.  In the Dune universe these huge biological differences between males and females result in huge social difference between the sexes.  In the Dune universe males are better suited to some roles while females are better suited to other roles.  In the Dune universe social role differences may be permissible because Herbert has written in these "factual" differences which explain it.  Herbert's super-smart characters sometimes even directly explain how these fictional Dune-world "facts" logically necessitate distinct sex roles.

In our real world this would be clear sexism and sexual discrimination.  The biological facts in the real world don't lead to these sorts of social role sex differences shown in the Dune universe.

I have no idea if Herbert really believed that these sexist attitudes were also justified in our real world.  But I think it is clear that his in-story "logical explanations" can influence the thinking of readers who are unaware of the real-world facts.  I think there is a genuine danger that Herbert's seductive language can help to normalise these sorts of sexist attitudes in our real world.  As we read Dune, we need to combat this and keep reminding ourselves that real world humans are not like this.

Related to this, homosexuality is mentioned a few times in the Dune books, and mostly in a negative way.  In the Dune universe homosexuality is typically presented either as a perversion or else something to merely tolerate in young adults as they experiment.  This is shown most clearly in the fourth book, where Herbert uses the super-knowledgeable character to lecture us on (Dune) human sexuality.

Again, it is important to remember that while this may be the case in the Dune universe (Herbert, as the writer, is allowed to do whatever he wants with his fictional characters) it is both factually and morally wrong in our real world (not to mention hugely offensive).  Again, let's not be seduced into these awful views when we leave the Dune universe and re-enter our real world.

A second issue has to do with psychology.  As I understand it, Herbert was hugely influenced by Carl Jung, and included many Jungian themes in his writings.

One theme has to do with what Herbert calls "ancestral memories".  A big part of the plot of the Dune books is the ability for humans to "remember" the memories of their ancestors.  It seems that this is (mostly) done via individual cells that are passed on from parents to child (secondly, they also have a Vulcan-like mind-meld which also passes on memories).  In the Dune world, individual human cells contain entire life-history memories, and certain humans are able to consciously unlock these, to be able to "remember" being their parents, grandparents, and so on into the far distant past.

(As a side note, a huge plot hole in the Dune books is that Herbert didn't seem to realise that this would mean that children would only be able gain the memories of their parents from before they were conceived/born.  Children would not have access to the memories of their ancestors' later life -- that is, after childbirth.  Throughout the story Herbert assumes that ancestral memories are super-wise/knowledgeable, but actually they would not be.  They would only be memories of young adults, and while there would be hugely many of them, they would not be memories of older, wiser seniors.)

Ancestral memories is, of course, complete nonsense in our real world.  It is merely fun fiction.  But we do need to remember this when we get to Herbert's discussions of how society should be.  Again, we shouldn't be seduced into preferring some sort of social system without considering how much that society requires Dune-universe "facts" that are nonsense in our real world.

A third issue has to do with what sorts of beings have moral consideration.  In Dune, Herbert always frames these discussions in terms of whether someone is "human" or not.  In the Dune universe they have various "tests for humanity," where one is typically killed if one fails to show one's humanity.  These are not biological tests of DNA or whatever; rather they are psychological tests to make sure that the being acts in what they consider to be a "human way."

In contrast to this, in our real world, conversations on this topic are typically framed in terms of "persons" rather than "humans".  This is because we consider that focusing on humans only is speciesist -- it fails to consider the moral worth of other beings who deserve moral consideration.  Defining personhood turns out to be quite complicated, but we might think it has to do more with the ability to feel, think, future plan, have conscious awareness and so on.  And it is quite clear that some non-humans may do this (it is also quite clear that many Dune-universe non-humans do this).

(Some real-world thinkers even prefer to frame the conversation in terms of "sentience", rather than "person" or "human", which is a wider category that necessitates giving moral consideration to even more beings.)

By framing the Dune conversation in terms of "humans" rather than "persons" (or sentience), Herbert immediately eliminates from moral consideration other types of beings.  So, when in the Dune universe humans come into conflict with non-human beings (artificial intelligence, genetically engineered beings, etc), there is no need for our Dune heroes to see these beings as deserving of life.  If these other non-humans are a threat (or even if they are merely an inconvenience) our Dune heroes coldly eliminate them without reflection.  Herbert repeatedly phrases the issue as a matter of political power and survival -- the opposition has no moral worth, and humans must be powerful to eliminate them.

This speciesist attitude that dominates Dune deserves pointing out.  Again, Herbert's seductive language may make readers assume that this is the right (or even only) approach to dealing with non-humans.  Instead, we need to remind ourselves that this Dune-universe attitude is morally repugnant, and deserves strong criticism.

But this human-focused attitude also fits in with Herbert's grand overall goal in the Dune universe.  For Herbert in Dune, the most important thing is that humanity survives into the far distant future.  This number one value is presented as an absolute, and never questioned (at least that I could see).

Apparently, nothing ever outweighs this future-humanity value.  In the Dune universe, trillions of human deaths is acceptable, as long as humanity continues into the future.  And as I say, in the Dune universe non-humans are considered even less.

This is clearly a hugely controversial claim, and one that deserves challenging.  As readers, we need to keep this in mind.  Are the horrific things that these main Dune characters do for the supposed greater good of humanity's survival really the right thing to do?  Is a humanity surviving into the distant future really worth more than the wellbeing of currently existing people?

(Interestingly, when I have presented this future generations argument to my students in the context of climate change, generally these students have a hard time morally connecting with humans just a few generations into the future.  They often remain unconvinced that we ought to make certain sacrifices for the sake of humans in 100 or 200 years time.  In contrast, in Dune, one of the main characters criticises another for her short-term attitude when her plans did not consider anything more than 50 generations into the future.)

One of the main methods that characters use throughout the Dune series to advance this overall humanity-first goal is to challenge individual humans to reach their full potential.  These challenges are not gentle -- they are life and death challenges that often result in death.  But the important thing in the Dune universe is that at least some humans survive and grow, and that they then breed and pass this survival on to the next generation.  For Herbert, it is about the weak being eliminated and the strong surviving and reproducing, creating a stronger humanity.  In Dune, breeding programmes are developed to encourage optimal human growth.

(My admittedly limited understanding of biology is that this is not the way that evolution works, but I won't try to get into the details here.)

This may make sense if our number one value is the continuation of humanity.  But this value absolutely needs questioning.  I would argue that a better society is precisely one in which our weakest members are protected, not eliminated.

To repeat, the Dune books are an incredibly seductive defence of the above extremely controversial moral views.  I think it's easy for a reader to come away from reading these books having the emotional mindset that deaths and abuses are okay for the sake of some ideal future goal.  Moreover, this emotional mindset will be defended with the equally emotional mindset that this is all completely rational and scientific.

Fourthly, dotted throughout the Dune books (especially the later ones) Herbert, through the mouths of his authoritatively knowledgeable characters, makes claims regarding the ineffectualness of all governments.  The suggestion is that government is necessarily a bad thing because of corruption, excessive red tape and slow bookish record-keepers who get distracted with irrelevancies. Unfortunately, no details are given beyond this caricature (in-book discussions of this topic fit the pattern of rhetoric I described above).  Herbert contrasts this with the superior effectualness of strong individual characters who trust their own instinctive judgement to Get Things Done.

Finally, here's a possible danger of the Dune books as I see it: Young people (particularly young men) who like the idea of logic and reasoning, but haven't (yet) put the hard work in to develop some proficiency in reasoning may get emotionally sucked into certain themes in thinking, justifying these themes to themselves with the thought that it is based on strict science and reasoning (when it really isn't).  These themes may be sexist, homophobic, cold-hearted and unsympathetic.  Moreover, these young men may insulate themselves from criticism by being overly suspicious of social authorities such as governments and universities and instead believing themselves to be among the superior.

To summarise my opinion of Dune in a few lines, read with a decent amount of critical awareness Dune can be an incredibly thought-provoking, inspiring, exciting, beautifully written, positive book series.  But read uncritically, through its clever rhetoric it can emotionally led one to an overly simplistic way of thinking that is dangerously harmful.  Read it with caution.  But have fun.  It's hugely worth it.