ACROSS THE UNIVERSE; Dune Babies
By Dave Itzkoff
Published: September 24, 2006
Though there is ample evidence that a sizable audience still exists for ''Dune,'' Frank Herbert's multivolume saga of the desert planet Arrakis, there seems to be no surefire method for distinguishing these people from the public at large. There are no semiannual gatherings I know of where devoted readers -- Dune-iacs? Duneheads? Herbertologists? -- dress up like the noble Paul Atreides or the wicked Baron Harkonnen. And the once proud cries that the disowned three-hour cut of David Lynch's film adaptation be granted its proper place in the cinematic canon have diminished to a whisper. These days the only reliable mark of a true fan is his e-mail signature, where he can safely inscribe a line or two of the axiomatic wisdom that Herbert dotted across his ''Dune'' novels -- proverbs like ''A process cannot be understood by stopping it,'' or ''The real universe is always one step beyond logic'' -- as a coded electronic wink to his fellow pilgrims driving their caravans across the sands of cyberspace.
My personal favorite Herbertism, from the original ''Dune,'' is this one: ''Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife -- chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.' '' This is not just a clever-sounding koan for achieving enlightenment and impressing your friends; it is a rigorous, demanding principle that neither Herbert himself nor his successors could fully adhere to.
''Dune,'' published in 1965, remains a perfect, self-contained work of science fiction: an enormous 500-page novel of feudalistic families clashing in a futuristic world for control of its precious few natural resources, and an exiled boy-king learning the traditions of a foreign land in order to fight his way back onto his throne. So what if its characters also happen to eat a narcotic, mind-expanding spice and ride on the backs of giant sandworms while speaking in oddly elevated Shakespearean tones? (''Someday I'll catch that man without a quotation and he'll look undressed,'' goes one instantly memorable line of dialogue.) Perhaps its closest modern descendant is the HBO television series ''Deadwood,'' another serial epic in which the fanciful settings disguise the work's larger philosophical intentions: in the case of ''Dune,'' a powerful ecological message and a reminder to its readers that their actions will have profound consequences for generations yet unborn.
Of course, the success of ''Dune'' ensured that it would not remain self-contained. As in the biblical narratives it aspires to, ''Dune'' begat ''Dune Messiah,'' which begat ''Children of Dune,'' which begat ''God Emperor of Dune,'' ''Heretics of Dune'' and ''Chapterhouse: Dune.'' ''Chapterhouse,'' published in 1985, ended with a cliffhanger, as an assortment of heroes fled into space on an interstellar craft called a no-ship, but when Herbert died the following year, his tale, while frustratingly incomplete, appeared to be at an end. One edition of the book even declares itself to be ''The Final Chapter of the Best-Selling Science Fiction Adventure of All Time.'' Best-selling, yes. Final, not by a long shot.
In recent years, Herbert's son, Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson have collaborated on their own series of ''Dune'' novels, in which the authors fill in the back stories of the franchise's central characters without hitching their sandworms to Frank Herbert's unfinished opus. (The dust jacket to one such prequel, ''Dune: House Corrino,'' announces it is ''The Triumphant Conclusion to the Blockbuster Trilogy That Made Science Fiction History!'') But the legend of ''Dune'' still wasn't finished: while researching their books, Anderson and Herbert the younger say, they discovered a set of safe-deposit boxes containing printed notes and ''two old-style computer disks,'' on which their predecessor had left detailed plans for a seventh ''Dune'' novel that would begin where ''Chapterhouse'' left off. After determining that this newly unearthed material would, in fact, require two books to relate in its entirety (and perhaps filing the anecdote away for use in a future novel, ''The Frank Herbert Code'' ), the authors set to work on ''Hunters of Dune'' and the forthcoming ''Sandworms of Dune.'' Oh, and also a companion volume, ''The Road to Dune.''
Before I turn my attention to ''Hunters of Dune,'' let me take this opportunity to say some further nice things about Frank Herbert's original novel: ''Dune'' was more than a clever rip-off of ''Lawrence of Arabia'' -- it was a metaphor for the environmentally conscious age it was written in, reverent enough to pay homage to its Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots, and prescient enough to suggest that kingdoms must become more attuned to the worlds beyond their castle walls in order to survive. (A glossary at the end of the book helpfully defines the word ''jihad'' for readers.)
If ''Hunters of Dune'' works at all, it is only as a metaphor for itself. Set three years after the conclusion of ''Chapterhouse,'' ''Hunters'' finds its protagonists still adrift on that no-ship, armed with technology capable of resurrecting many of the long-dead heroes of the earliest ''Dune'' novels, including Paul Atreides, a powerful psychic and a prophetic figure known as the Kwisatz Haderach; and his son, Leto II, a fearsome tyrant who ruled Arrakis for 3,500 years. Meanwhile, on a distant planet, a team of evildoers discover they also have the means to bring Paul Atreides back from the dead. Both sides briefly contemplate the inherent sacrilege of reviving those who have already been honorably laid to rest, and the dangers of attempting to rewrite the past, but by Page 202, they are busily tending to a galactic nursery's worth of Frank Herbert's Dune Babies. ''But I don't want to be who I was,'' wails a child who will someday grow up to be Dr. Wellington Yueh, a villain from the original ''Dune.'' ''I'm sorry,'' he is told, ''but none of us has that luxury.''
As hard as they try, the authors of ''Hunters of Dune'' cannot overcome the burdens of history, either. Frank Herbert's novels may have been full of neologisms that sounded like Mad magazine sound effects, but at least the author took some chances -- he wasn't afraid to strike his hero blind or turn him into a half-human, half-sandworm creature, or annihilate the entire planet of Arrakis when it suited his purposes, and he never gave his reader cause to believe that what he was writing was potentially ridiculous. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson go through the motions, but they don't often seem to be having much fun with their material: there are factional battles between rival squads of Bene Gesserits and Honored Matres, the Lost Tleilaxu and the Face Dancers, and an ominous, unnamed ''Outside Enemy'' hovering above it all, yet by the end of ''Hunters,'' they have done little more than set the table for ''Sandworms of Dune'' (target publication date: fall 2007).
I'll still read that book when it arrives, if only out of a sense of obligation, and you probably will, too. And at that point I hope its authors will heed the advice of another popular tome that has generated its share of memorable proverbs, and recognize that, even on a desert planet, there is a time to plant, and a time to pluck upthat which has been planted. For ''Dune,'' it's probably time to let the fields lay fallow for a while.
Photo (Photograph by Phil H. Weber)