LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.


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LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 0932.story" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Frank Herbert's 'Dune' holds timely -- and timeless -- appeal
The late author's epic of a desert planet anticipates contemporary issues and poses a lasting challenge to filmmakers.

By Scott Timberg
April 18, 2010

Half a century ago, a middle-aged newspaperman with a few obscure books to his name sat down to pursue a pet obsession based on a story that had never sold.

The ensuing 1965 novel -- in which his agent had no confidence -- sagged at first. But within a few years, it was a pop-culture sensation, and this year, on its 45th anniversary, "Dune" is one of science fiction's best-known books and probably the field's bestselling novel.

The mystery of why some works continue to speak to us is heightened with a book like "Dune": Frank Herbert's desert-planet epic not only remains popular and well-known, but this tale has anticipated many of our contemporary concerns. Its saga of dueling great houses, the fight for a rare resource and a young aristocrat's coming of age was set 200 centuries in the future. But it grapples with numerous issues pressing in the 21st: the fragility of the environment, the shortage of fossil fuels, the threat of religious jihad, the unpredictable effects of mind-bending drugs.

"It was the SF book that everybody in the mainstream culture was reading," recalls Northern California novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. "But it wasn't like Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle,' which was essentially a mainstream novel. Herbert was doing hard-core SF in the anthropological and world-building sense. People went for its huge back story taking off from [the prophet] Mohammed's life."

That the novel was planned and researched during the Eisenhower and Camelot years -- before widespread Muslim fundamentalism, OPEC, mainstream narcotics use and other issues that seem to inspire the narrative -- underscores the author's prescience. The book also helped galvanize the environmental movement: Set on a world far from ours, its rich description of a water-poor planet is credited by some as the inspiration for Earth Day.

Because of its huge following, fast-moving plot and opportunities for special effects, "Dune" has repeatedly attracted other artists -- it's been the source of a video game, a board game, numerous posthumous sequels and several adaptations. And though a 1984 film was widely considered a failure and two subsequent Sci-Fi Channel miniseries were made, Paramount recently selected a director for a big-budget movie.

The inspiration

"I am a political animal," Herbert said in a 1983 promotional interview. "And I never really left journalism. I am writing about the current scene -- the metaphors are there."

The novel was sparked when, in the late 1950s, Herbert flew to Florence, Ore., in a small chartered plane to write about a U.S. Department of Agriculture effort to stabilize sand dunes with European beach grasses. The author was struck by the way dunes could move, over time, like living things -- swallowing rivers, clogging lakes, burying forests. "These waves can be every bit as devastating as a tidal wave . . . they've even caused deaths," he wrote his agent, beginning an article, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," that was never published.

Despite his agent's indifference, Herbert dug in: He was fascinated by the project and superimposed the history of another sandy place -- including Arabs and Islam's Mohammed -- into an adventure novel originally called "Spice Planet."

When he hit his stride, Herbert was writing 70 pages a week.

At the time, science fiction was at the tail end of its Golden Age, dominated by brisk tales of interstellar war and planet hopping. Several icons of midcentury were doing major work -- Robert Heinlein, for instance, published his campus sensation "Stranger in a Strange Land" in 1961 -- but the field's energy was flagging, and the magazine market had imploded. (A 1961 fanzine was titled "Who Killed Science Fiction?") Herbert and his gargantuan manuscript were turned down by dozens of publishers but eventually accepted by Chilton, a small press known for auto manuals.

Herbert's story of young aristocrat Paul Atreides, along with maps, appendixes, glossary and epigrams ran to more than 500 pages. After almost two years, the book took off in 1967. The novel was a hinge between new and old, says Annalee Newitz, editor of science fiction blog io9.

" 'Dune' functions nicely as a transition between classic SF -- focused on space opera and astro-politics of the kind Isaac Asimov and other golden age authors wrote -- and the next generation," she says. "In the '60s, we saw a shift away from science fiction focused on space travel and space politics to anthropology. You aren't rushing between planets, you've landed on one and you talk about that one" -- including its biology and sociology.

Writers had imagined life on other planets and written of environmental catastrophe. But the scale of "Dune" was unprecedented, comparable, as Arthur C. Clarke said at the time, only to "The Lord of the Rings."

"The planet was something you could really feel," says Robinson, whose latest novel is "Galileo's Dream." "Herbert spent a lot of time outdoors -- you can see it in the writing, he's seen things you can only see if you've been there. It's physical and expansive."

Still, the novel's pulp roots show.

"Parts of it are almost poetic," says Rob Latham, who teaches science fiction at UC Riverside. "But the villains are comically ridiculous. Baron Harkonnen could have been played by Sydney Greenstreet or Charles Laughton, say -- 'swishy.' And I don't know what we're supposed to think of the eugenics. There are all sorts of half-baked ideas in there."

'A real mess'

Thanks to the novel's success, plans for a "Dune" film began as early as 1971, when producers wanted David Lean, whose "Lawrence of Arabia" is in some ways a precursor, to direct. Another early version would've enlisted Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Gloria Swanson, Hervé Villechaize and Alain Delon in a 10-hour epic -- before financing evaporated.

Today, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch and starring Kyle McLachlan and Sting has gained cult status. An endless shoot in Mexico City and the dunes of Chihuahua engaged 1,700 people: As the costs stretched, Lynch's film was sliced to two hours, and he was denied final cut. Roger Ebert, not known for his vitriol, called the movie "a real mess . . . incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless." Lynch all but disowned the movie and rarely discusses it in interviews.

Herbert, however, deemed Lynch's baroque film "a visual feast."

The current adaptation comes from the wreckage of a project that was to be helmed by "Friday Night Lights" creator Peter Berg and with Charlize Theron as Jessica, Paul's mother. After considering Neill Blomkamp (political-SF sleeper "District 9") and Neil Marshall (low-budget hit "The Descent"), Paramount opted for Frenchman Pierre Morel. (Chase Palmer, a relatively unknown writer, will work with an existing screenplay by Josh Zetumer.)

Morel -- director of "Taken" and "From Paris With Love" -- has discussed his aim to make the film faithful to the novel, which he says he's read 10 times.

Optimists hope that the director can do for Herbert's book -- and maybe its sequels -- what Peter Jackson did with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," finding a balance among action, story and ideas.

It could also, of course, be cheap. "If they want to reawaken it as a film franchise," says io9's Newitz, "it's hard to imagine that it would not just be action-packed, with a video-game tie-in."

Lasting effect

For a book that's enjoyed such critical and popular success and continued interest from Hollywood, the legacy of "Dune" is not especially clear.

It's not quite New Wave -- which developed in the late 1960s -- not an antecedent to cyberpunk, nor a precursor to the recent space-opera renaissance. "It's some kind of singularity," says Latham.

"Dune" both channeled and stoked a greater environmental consciousness in SF: Important later novels by Ursula Le Guin, John Brunner and Octavia Butler looked at planetary ecology.

The original novel's most evident influence is on the science-fiction tradition of world-building, for which it raised the bar considerably. Writers and scientists had been envisioning other planets for a century, but not this deeply: The rituals by which the Fremen, the planet's desert people, deal with water are especially well imagined.

Many consider Robinson's trilogy about the terra-forming of Mars the best-realized exercise in the form since Herbert's. Robinson calls "Dune" a big influence: The book showed him, he says, that "you could talk about the future of the wilderness. It gave me courage. I knew that people were willing to read at great length and that the world could be a character."

But Herbert's future vision of a galaxy with numerous populated worlds seems out of step with the deflated present. "The future," says Robinson, "doesn't look to be off-planet in any near-future time frame."

A less encouraging descendant of the original "Dune" novel is the large number of other Dune novels. The first sequel, the much slimmer "Dune Messiah," came out in 1969; Herbert published the sixth of the original series, "Chapterhouse: Dune," in 1985. And though Herbert died the following year, while recovering from cancer surgery, Dune's universe has been extended by his son Brian and journeyman writer Kevin J. Anderson.

Some think these posthumous prequels and sequels have confused the legacy by dumping less serious books into the marketplace. "They've gone from something profound and thought-provoking," says Newitz, "to being something like candy, like the 'Star Wars' novelizations."

Whatever the book's influence and implications, the original continues to attract readers: It's sold an estimated 10 million copies. To Latham, it remains "a weird kind of in-between thing."

"It culminates a pulp tradition, with ridiculous villains and a pseudo-medieval empire set in outer space, and some bad writing," he says. "Then it has these '70s elements -- environmental concerns, drugs and mystical experiences. And somehow it managed to coalesce all of them."
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

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Freakzilla wrote: And though Herbert died the following year, while recovering from cancer surgery, Dune's universe has been extended by his son Brian and journeyman writer Kevin J. Anderson.

Some think these posthumous prequels and sequels have confused the legacy by dumping less serious books into the marketplace. "They've gone from something profound and thought-provoking," says Newitz, "to being something like candy, like the 'Star Wars' novelizations."
I was up late last night and saw that Chiggie had linked this up at his blog. I thought it was a well-done article in an overall sense, but I just about passed out from joy when I saw the dismissal of TheKeith as a rent-a-hack. And that's what the Times author is saying, make no mistake: he can't actually say "hack" in a major newspaper, so he settles for "journeyman." Absolutely classic! :lol:

As for the majority of the article, I thought it was quite good. The guy obviously knows his stuff. And I think it's interesting that he wrote such a quality piece without relying on the HLP for anything. Maybe he's dealt with them before ... maybe he knew that if he went down that road, he'd just end up on the other end of a phone conversation where TheJacket talked about himself the whole time.

The other thing that struck me ... I can't believe how long it's been since FH died. And that it's the 45th anniversary year of Dune. Wow.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Freakzilla »

I picked it up at DN, I made sure to highlight the good parts over there:
Scott Timberg wrote:Some think these posthumous prequels and sequels have confused the legacy by dumping less serious books into the marketplace. "They've gone from something profound and thought-provoking," says Newitz, "to being something like candy, like the 'Star Wars' novelizations."
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by SandChigger »

Yeah, Byro's all over it like flies on shit over on Twitter: he's Twatted it twice, one direct link and a second to where he's reposted it on Facebook.

So I figure he hasn't actually read it all the way through (not that with his demonstrated reading ability it really matters), or he's enjoying the jibe at Kevin J(ourneyman) Anderson, too. (Teg came up with that one, btw.) Maybe ole Byro is chaffing at the bit a bit? ;)

Nah ... geldings are supposed to be docile, right? :laughing:
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by SimonH »

Freakzilla wrote:I picked it up at DN, I made sure to highlight the good parts over there:
Scott Timberg wrote:Some think these posthumous prequels and sequels have confused the legacy by dumping less serious books into the marketplace. "They've gone from something profound and thought-provoking," says Newitz, "to being something like candy, like the 'Star Wars' novelizations."
awesome. :D

glad someone with a bit of journalistic oomph has said what needed to be said
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

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SandChigger wrote:Yeah, Byro's all over it like flies on shit over on Twitter: he's Twatted it twice, one direct link and a second to where he's reposted it on Facebook.

So I figure he hasn't actually read it all the way through (not that with his demonstrated reading ability it really matters)
most likely that I reckon, he just saw what looked like praise and wet his pants of joy...
it is quite telling that that praise is only directed at Frank, with the occasional pat on the head for Lynch.
Morel is even mentionned before the hack; who is relegated to the role of a(n obnoxious)footnote :lol:

I wonder how they're going to spin this, will Byron ban the man? Ho wait he can't! :mrgreen:

I know it is probably a coincidence but check out who is mentionned as being relevant to Dune before the journeyman and in quite more praising terms:
"Dune" both channeled and stoked a greater environmental consciousness in SF: Important later novels by Ursula Le Guin, John Brunner and Octavia Butler looked at planetary ecology.
yes that's right, the journeyman's own personal "critical darling"!!

This keeps getting better!

Awesome find Freak!!
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Mr. Teg »

Byron's response, "...not just cherry-pick two sentences that fit some agenda."

:roll:

PUSSY
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

Mr. Teg wrote:Byron's response, "...not just cherry-pick two sentences that fit some agenda."

:roll:

PUSSY
is that really what he said or just what he probably'd say?

because if he is I'd like to answer that we had to cherry pick to find where his hero was mentionned in an article about Dune in a big newspaper.
And it was not in flattering terms.

This is a professional critic, not some pussy lips internet random bloke asking chichen questions and getting the same old prechewed bullshit, or one of those raving mad sycophants...


EDIT
he actually posted it on the official Dune facebook page, i don't believe it...
well there goes the benefit of the doubt for this one, he is made of fail too
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Mr. Teg »

lotek wrote:
Mr. Teg wrote:Byron's response, "...not just cherry-pick two sentences that fit some agenda."

:roll:

PUSSY
is that really what he said or just what he probably'd say?
Yes, he did direct quote.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

well what to expect from someone who defends the journeyman than not to be able to read properly what he refers to...

If he could use what passes for brain in his thick skull he'd realize it is the ONLY reference to the journeyman, all the praise is for Frank...
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Freakzilla »

Mr. Teg wrote:
lotek wrote:
Mr. Teg wrote:Byron's response, "...not just cherry-pick two sentences that fit some agenda."

:roll:

PUSSY
is that really what he said or just what he probably'd say?
Yes, he did direct quote.
...and he deleted my post of the quote about the hacks. :roll:
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

yeah

PUSSY!!!

edit

definition of journeyman from wiki
A journeyman is a trader or crafter who has completed an apprenticeship. A journeyman is a craftsman who had fully learned his trade and earned money but was not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for judgment. If the work were deemed worthy, the journeyman would be admitted to the guild as a master.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

crap I get a boardware failure on Dungnovels...
can't post...
unless it is some sort of agenda?

:lol:

if someone who CAN post there with time on his hands would like to transmit my reply
boardadmin wrote:Let's focus on the entire article and not just cherry-pick two sentences that fit some agenda.
cherry picking was the only way to find mention of the journeyman...

Have you even read the article?

It is full of praise for Frank, even finds a few kind words for Lynch and hope that Morel doesn't cock up...

so you can delete our posts here as much as you like, there is nothing you can do about the fact that people are speaking up, and that has NOTHING to do with any "agenda"

Or do you suggest that Scott Timberg is in on that infamous agenda?
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Freakzilla »

lotek wrote:crap I get a boardware failure on Dungnovels...
can't post...
unless it is some sort of agenda?

:lol:

if someone who CAN post there with time on his hands would like to transmit my reply
boardadmin wrote:Let's focus on the entire article and not just cherry-pick two sentences that fit some agenda.
cherry picking was the only way to find mention of the journeyman...

Have you even read the article?

It is full of praise for Frank, even finds a few kind words for Lynch and hope that Morel doesn't cock up...

so you can delete our posts here as much as you like, there is nothing you can do about the fact that people are speaking up, and that has NOTHING to do with any "agenda"

Or do you suggest that Scott Timberg is in on that infamous agenda?
Posted,slightly edited. :)
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

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is it the c word?
:lol:
thanks :)

EDIT

yeah it was :mrgreen:

good edit anyway, no need to give the idiot an easy way out by being rude
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Freakzilla »

I get the feeling he hasn't read the article and that if someone like me had posted it first he'd have deleted it. :roll:
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

pfff
posting stuff you haven't even read...
how...

retarded for want of a better word...


EDIT

he claims he did read it, and I can post again on DN!
thealmightybrownnose wrote:If I did think Scott Timberg had an agenda, I most certainly wouldn't have posted the article, would I? I liked the article. It was well-written, even if I don't agree with every single line written in it.

My point was that YOU took the only two lines that had anything critical to say about the new authors and decided to pull it out and make it front and center. Why? Why, out of the entire two page article, did you decide to do that? On the official Dune Message Board?
HypnoFrog wrote:Because I didn't write it, a professional critic did, and you posted a link to it here. If a lowly FH fan posts that kind of opinion it gets deleted. I merely quoted what doesn't normally get seen here.
SomeGuyWithAnAgenda wrote:not the only two lines that said anything critical but the only two lines that said anything at all

that is a major difference and it deserved to be put forward...

Quote:
If I did think Scott Timberg had an agenda, I most certainly wouldn't have posted the article, would I?

yeah why am i not surprised?
Last edited by lotek on 18 Apr 2010 10:27, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Freakzilla »

boardadmin wrote:
Allizkaerf wrote:Yeah, never mind what the professional critic in the major newspaper says about the new authors (or other "critical darlings").

:roll:

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

I thought the entire article was excellent.

cherry picking was the only way to find mention of the journeyman (KJA)...

Wiki defines journeyman as:

A journeyman is a trader or crafter who has completed an apprenticeship. A journeyman is a craftsman who had fully learned his trade and earned money but was not yet a master. To become a master, a journeyman had to submit a master work piece to a guild for judgment. If the work were deemed worthy, the journeyman would be admitted to the guild as a master.

Have you even read the article?

It is full of praise for Frank, even finds a few kind words for Lynch and hope that Morel doesn't mess up...

Do you suggest that Scott Timberg is in on that infamous agenda?

:lol:
If I did think Scott Timberg had an agenda, I most certainly wouldn't have posted the article, would I? I liked the article. It was well-written, even if I don't agree with every single line written in it.

My point was that YOU took the only two lines that had anything critical to say about the new authors and decided to pull it out and make it front and center. Why? Why, out of the entire two page article, did you decide to do that? On the official Dune Message Board?
***************************************************
Allizkaerf wrote:Because I didn't write it, a professional critic did, and you posted a link to it here. If a lowly FH fan posts that kind of opinion it gets deleted. I merely quoted what doesn't normally get seen here.
:P
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

:lol:
damn you last minute edits!
SomeGuyWithAnAgenda wrote:not the only two lines that said anything critical but the only two lines that said anything at all

that is a major difference and it deserved to be put forward...

Quote:
If I did think Scott Timberg had an agenda, I most certainly wouldn't have posted the article, would I?


yeah why am i not surprised?
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by TheDukester »

Yeah, he didn't read the whole thing before posting — that's pretty obvious.

Now he's backtracking and acting like he's the "bigger man" for deciding to leave it there.

:techie-pressanykey:
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by SandChigger »

He used to be a "bigger man". But appears to have lost weight. He's definitely lost relevance.

Yeah, he's the "big man" for leaving the link to the article. He'd look even stupider now for deleting it. But he still deletes critical comments like a no-balls piece of shit.

And of course the coward never engages anyone anywhere he can't delete posts or ban them.

He's towing the line of Kevin's "non-engagement" directive. Kevin's his boss and calls the shots.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by lotek »

again he shows he didn't read the article,
his argument being we were very quick to single out the only thing critical about "the new authors"(he can't even say their name) just doesn't hold:

it is the ONLY thing said about thenewauthors!!!

This is just too precious, and yet kind of frustrating how dumb these people are and how easy it is to catch them with their pants down if I may say so :)

http://forum.dunenovels.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3402" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I said wrote:not the only two lines that said anything critical but the only two lines that said anything at all

that is a major difference and it deserved to be put forward...

Quote:
If I did think Scott Timberg had an agenda, I most certainly wouldn't have posted the article, would I?

yeah why am i not surprised?
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Omphalos »

boardadmin wrote:My point was that YOU took the only two lines that had anything critical to say about the new authors and decided to pull it out and make it front and center. Why? Why, out of the entire two page article, did you decide to do that? On the official Dune Message Board?
Perhaps because the purpose of that board is to discuss BH and KJA issues? Duh! What an idiot. Anecdotal evidence of why he went to nursing school and not medical school.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by Freakzilla »

boardadmin wrote:
Allizkaerf wrote:Because I didn't write it, a professional critic did, and you posted a link to it here. If a lowly FH fan posts that kind of opinion it gets deleted. I merely quoted what doesn't normally get seen here.
You quoted two lines of a two page article. It got deleted because it served an agenda that I won't allow here: that being the continual bashing of the new authors. Pulling that information out of the lengthy article served an obvious purpose. One that we're not going to allow here. If you want to be fair, then the entire article should be quoted, not just those two items. Which is why I posted the link to it. I thought that was fair. Obviously you did not.
Fair enough...
Frank Herbert's 'Dune' holds timely -- and timeless -- appeal
The late author's epic of a desert planet anticipates contemporary issues and poses a lasting challenge to filmmakers.

By Scott Timberg
April 18, 2010

Half a century ago, a middle-aged newspaperman with a few obscure books to his name sat down to pursue a pet obsession based on a story that had never sold.

The ensuing 1965 novel -- in which his agent had no confidence -- sagged at first. But within a few years, it was a pop-culture sensation, and this year, on its 45th anniversary, "Dune" is one of science fiction's best-known books and probably the field's bestselling novel.

The mystery of why some works continue to speak to us is heightened with a book like "Dune": Frank Herbert's desert-planet epic not only remains popular and well-known, but this tale has anticipated many of our contemporary concerns. Its saga of dueling great houses, the fight for a rare resource and a young aristocrat's coming of age was set 200 centuries in the future. But it grapples with numerous issues pressing in the 21st: the fragility of the environment, the shortage of fossil fuels, the threat of religious jihad, the unpredictable effects of mind-bending drugs.

"It was the SF book that everybody in the mainstream culture was reading," recalls Northern California novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. "But it wasn't like Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle,' which was essentially a mainstream novel. Herbert was doing hard-core SF in the anthropological and world-building sense. People went for its huge back story taking off from [the prophet] Mohammed's life."

That the novel was planned and researched during the Eisenhower and Camelot years -- before widespread Muslim fundamentalism, OPEC, mainstream narcotics use and other issues that seem to inspire the narrative -- underscores the author's prescience. The book also helped galvanize the environmental movement: Set on a world far from ours, its rich description of a water-poor planet is credited by some as the inspiration for Earth Day.

Because of its huge following, fast-moving plot and opportunities for special effects, "Dune" has repeatedly attracted other artists -- it's been the source of a video game, a board game, numerous posthumous sequels and several adaptations. And though a 1984 film was widely considered a failure and two subsequent Sci-Fi Channel miniseries were made, Paramount recently selected a director for a big-budget movie.

The inspiration

"I am a political animal," Herbert said in a 1983 promotional interview. "And I never really left journalism. I am writing about the current scene -- the metaphors are there."

The novel was sparked when, in the late 1950s, Herbert flew to Florence, Ore., in a small chartered plane to write about a U.S. Department of Agriculture effort to stabilize sand dunes with European beach grasses. The author was struck by the way dunes could move, over time, like living things -- swallowing rivers, clogging lakes, burying forests. "These waves can be every bit as devastating as a tidal wave . . . they've even caused deaths," he wrote his agent, beginning an article, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," that was never published.

Despite his agent's indifference, Herbert dug in: He was fascinated by the project and superimposed the history of another sandy place -- including Arabs and Islam's Mohammed -- into an adventure novel originally called "Spice Planet."

When he hit his stride, Herbert was writing 70 pages a week.

At the time, science fiction was at the tail end of its Golden Age, dominated by brisk tales of interstellar war and planet hopping. Several icons of midcentury were doing major work -- Robert Heinlein, for instance, published his campus sensation "Stranger in a Strange Land" in 1961 -- but the field's energy was flagging, and the magazine market had imploded. (A 1961 fanzine was titled "Who Killed Science Fiction?") Herbert and his gargantuan manuscript were turned down by dozens of publishers but eventually accepted by Chilton, a small press known for auto manuals.

Herbert's story of young aristocrat Paul Atreides, along with maps, appendixes, glossary and epigrams ran to more than 500 pages. After almost two years, the book took off in 1967. The novel was a hinge between new and old, says Annalee Newitz, editor of science fiction blog io9.

" 'Dune' functions nicely as a transition between classic SF -- focused on space opera and astro-politics of the kind Isaac Asimov and other golden age authors wrote -- and the next generation," she says. "In the '60s, we saw a shift away from science fiction focused on space travel and space politics to anthropology. You aren't rushing between planets, you've landed on one and you talk about that one" -- including its biology and sociology.

Writers had imagined life on other planets and written of environmental catastrophe. But the scale of "Dune" was unprecedented, comparable, as Arthur C. Clarke said at the time, only to "The Lord of the Rings."

"The planet was something you could really feel," says Robinson, whose latest novel is "Galileo's Dream." "Herbert spent a lot of time outdoors -- you can see it in the writing, he's seen things you can only see if you've been there. It's physical and expansive."

Still, the novel's pulp roots show.

"Parts of it are almost poetic," says Rob Latham, who teaches science fiction at UC Riverside. "But the villains are comically ridiculous. Baron Harkonnen could have been played by Sydney Greenstreet or Charles Laughton, say -- 'swishy.' And I don't know what we're supposed to think of the eugenics. There are all sorts of half-baked ideas in there."

'A real mess'

Thanks to the novel's success, plans for a "Dune" film began as early as 1971, when producers wanted David Lean, whose "Lawrence of Arabia" is in some ways a precursor, to direct. Another early version would've enlisted Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Gloria Swanson, Hervé Villechaize and Alain Delon in a 10-hour epic -- before financing evaporated.

Today, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch and starring Kyle McLachlan and Sting has gained cult status. An endless shoot in Mexico City and the dunes of Chihuahua engaged 1,700 people: As the costs stretched, Lynch's film was sliced to two hours, and he was denied final cut. Roger Ebert, not known for his vitriol, called the movie "a real mess . . . incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless." Lynch all but disowned the movie and rarely discusses it in interviews.

Herbert, however, deemed Lynch's baroque film "a visual feast."

The current adaptation comes from the wreckage of a project that was to be helmed by "Friday Night Lights" creator Peter Berg and with Charlize Theron as Jessica, Paul's mother. After considering Neill Blomkamp (political-SF sleeper "District 9") and Neil Marshall (low-budget hit "The Descent"), Paramount opted for Frenchman Pierre Morel. (Chase Palmer, a relatively unknown writer, will work with an existing screenplay by Josh Zetumer.)

Morel -- director of "Taken" and "From Paris With Love" -- has discussed his aim to make the film faithful to the novel, which he says he's read 10 times.

Optimists hope that the director can do for Herbert's book -- and maybe its sequels -- what Peter Jackson did with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," finding a balance among action, story and ideas.

It could also, of course, be cheap. "If they want to reawaken it as a film franchise," says io9's Newitz, "it's hard to imagine that it would not just be action-packed, with a video-game tie-in."

Lasting effect

For a book that's enjoyed such critical and popular success and continued interest from Hollywood, the legacy of "Dune" is not especially clear.

It's not quite New Wave -- which developed in the late 1960s -- not an antecedent to cyberpunk, nor a precursor to the recent space-opera renaissance. "It's some kind of singularity," says Latham.

"Dune" both channeled and stoked a greater environmental consciousness in SF: Important later novels by Ursula Le Guin, John Brunner and Octavia Butler looked at planetary ecology.

The original novel's most evident influence is on the science-fiction tradition of world-building, for which it raised the bar considerably. Writers and scientists had been envisioning other planets for a century, but not this deeply: The rituals by which the Fremen, the planet's desert people, deal with water are especially well imagined.

Many consider Robinson's trilogy about the terra-forming of Mars the best-realized exercise in the form since Herbert's. Robinson calls "Dune" a big influence: The book showed him, he says, that "you could talk about the future of the wilderness. It gave me courage. I knew that people were willing to read at great length and that the world could be a character."

But Herbert's future vision of a galaxy with numerous populated worlds seems out of step with the deflated present. "The future," says Robinson, "doesn't look to be off-planet in any near-future time frame."

A less encouraging descendant of the original "Dune" novel is the large number of other Dune novels. The first sequel, the much slimmer "Dune Messiah," came out in 1969; Herbert published the sixth of the original series, "Chapterhouse: Dune," in 1985. And though Herbert died the following year, while recovering from cancer surgery, Dune's universe has been extended by his son Brian and journeyman writer Kevin J. Anderson.

Some think these posthumous prequels and sequels have confused the legacy by dumping less serious books into the marketplace. "They've gone from something profound and thought-provoking," says Newitz, "to being something like candy, like the 'Star Wars' novelizations."

Whatever the book's influence and implications, the original continues to attract readers: It's sold an estimated 10 million copies. To Latham, it remains "a weird kind of in-between thing."

"It culminates a pulp tradition, with ridiculous villains and a pseudo-medieval empire set in outer space, and some bad writing," he says. "Then it has these '70s elements -- environmental concerns, drugs and mystical experiences. And somehow it managed to coalesce all of them."
(quoted again only because I underlined the part he deleted. :lol:)
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Paul of Dune was so bad it gave me a seizure that dislocated both of my shoulders and prolapsed my anus.
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Re: LA Times article on Dune's Timeless Appeal.

Post by SandChigger »

Ooh, LOW blow, Omph! :lol:

(Their CSS stylesheet over there SUCKS. Italic and underline emphasis makes the font size smaller? WTF?)
"Let the dead give water to the dead. As for me, it's NO MORE FUCKING TEARS!"
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