11

Walk Without Rhythm

The phantom menace of the new Dune novels and the Sci Fi Channel miniseries.

Damn sandworms, up thirteen percent . . . welp, I better find a job.

—Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice (1988)

For teenagers in the 1990s, the two most famous men to have ever tangoed with sandworms were Michael Keaton and Kevin Bacon. Although neither Keaton nor Bacon has ever been attached to a Dune film or TV project, they starred in iconic movies sporting sandworms, both of which couldn’t have existed without Dune. In 1988, Tim Burton’s gothic tour de force Beetlejuice—starring Keaton in the title role—gave the world skinny, black-and-white-striped Claymation sandworms, not unlike those that artist Don Punchatz drew for the 1974 Ace paperback edition of Dune, on which a Fremen outstretches his arms like a rock star. In 1990, Kevin Bacon created one degree of separation between himself and Dune by starring in Tremors, a horror-comedy in which people in a small desert town in Nevada are plagued by attacks from “Graboids,” miniature versions of shai-hulud, that come across as what Dune’s sandworms would look like if they were imagined by Oscar the Grouch.

If you add up the appearances of the Graboids in the various Tremors films,[*] the sandworms in Beetlejuice, and the wildly popular animated cartoon of the same name,[*] the total number of minutes in which ersatz, non-Dune sandworms are seen on-screen is easily quadruple the amount of screen time legit shai-hulud sandworms got in the 1984 Lynch film. So if you were a young person in the 1990s, and you’d never read Dune or watched the 1984 film on VHS, cable, or network TV, then your idea of what a monster sandworm was came exclusively from Dune parodies. When Fatboy Slim and Bootsy Collins recorded the dance hit “Weapon of Choice” in the year 2000 (it was released the following year), the lyric Walk without rhythm and you won’t attract the worm could only really be a reference to the book versions of Dune, since, at that time, sandworm imposters were much more well-known than the real thing. So listen up, goth kids of the nineties and early aughts: If you believed Fatboy Slim was making a Beetlejuice reference in the year 2001, you’re totally forgiven. It was a confusing time for sandworm lovers everywhere.

There’s no question that the biggest Dune renaissance occurred in the twenty-first century. But that process began in 1999, arguably one of the most pivotal years in science fiction history, period. That year saw the release of The Matrix and the first Star Wars prequel film, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And in October 1999, five months after George Lucas went back in time to tell the origin story of his galaxy far, far away, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson released the first Dune prequel, House Atreides.

Set thirty-eight years before the events of the first novel,[*] the story of House Atreides connects the Dune dots for various character histories. Calling it House Atreides is a bit of a misnomer because the book reveals the backstories of Jessica, Duncan, Emperor Shaddam IV, Duke Leto’s father, and Duke Leto himself. In their quest to fill out the entire history of the Dune universe, Herbert and Anderson have left no grain of sand unturned, resulting in books that have been as controversial as they have been bestselling. As Frank Herbert’s eldest son, Brian Herbert had been a novelist in his own right for decades before coauthoring House Atreides with Kevin J. Anderson. Meanwhile, Anderson was a successful science fiction writer, too, widely loved for his various Star Wars novels.

According to Brian Herbert, he’d initially resisted writing Dune continuation novels set in his father’s famous fictional universe. But an editor named Ed Kramer “kept after” him. Kramer’s initial concept was to coedit a one-off anthology of short Dune fiction, with each story written by a different science fiction author. One of the authors who was interested was Kevin J. Anderson. Around this time, Brian Herbert got a call from his estate lawyer, who informed him of the existence of two safe-deposit boxes that, according to Brian Herbert, contained “papers and old-style floppy computer disks that included comprehensive notes from an unpublished DUNE 7.” As far as most people know, nobody has seen these disks and notes other than the lawyer, Anderson, and Brian Herbert. To date, none of the raw material has ever been made available to the public. This isn’t to say what the younger Herbert has divulged is somehow not factual, simply that we have no other sources to confirm it. Even aspects of “Spice Planet” are contained in the Fullerton library archives. But any raw “Dune 7” notes remain within the purview of the Herbert estate, perhaps for understandable reasons.

The long and short of all of this is that these notes apparently contained a narrative smoking gun that allowed Anderson and Brian Herbert to retroactively create prequel novels, which would eventually justify a huge twist in the long-awaited concluding novels. “By the end of Chapterhouse, the characters had been driven into a corner, utterly beaten,” Brian Herbert said. “And then the reader learned that the Honored Matres themselves were running from an even greater mysterious threat . . . a peril that was drawing close to the protagonists of the story, most of whom were Bene Gesserit reverend mothers. . . . Now Kevin and I knew for certain where Frank Herbert had been headed, and we could weave the events of our prequel into a future grand finale for the series.”

So where was Frank Herbert supposedly headed with “Dune 7”? What was the “even greater mysterious threat”? According to everything that happens in these continuation books, the short answer is: evil robots.

Wait. What? If you’ve never once ventured into the Dune continuation novels by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert, it might be impossible to believe that these Dunes contain malevolent AI hell-bent on destroying humanity. And yet, the vague backstory for Dune does mention a historical event called “the Butlerian Jihad,” in which humankind defeated oppressive “thinking machines.” Although Dune famously contains no aliens and no robots, Frank Herbert did stick a kind of Terminator-style AI uprising into the ancient history of his universe. And the fact that he left that concept in the backstory of the first novel is telling. While a mysterious group called the “Ones of Many Faces” does exist in Chapterhouse: Dune, Frank Herbert stops short of outright confirming that an evil AI is out there plotting to destroy everyone. In the spinoff novels, the two leaders of this ancient thinking machine empire are called Omnius and Erasmus. Nearly everything in the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson books connects to these concepts, which is coupled with a very liberal use of gholas. When they got around to doing “Dune 7,” Anderson and Herbert split it into two books, Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007). In the final book, nearly every single famous Dune character is brought back to life as a ghola, making the copious Duncan Idaho duplicates from Frank Herbert’s original books seem quaint by comparison. In Hunters and Sandworms, it’s not a question of if a classic character will return from the dead, it’s when.

As of 2023, there are a total of sixteen Dune novels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, of which only two—Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune—are sequels to Frank Herbert’s original six novels. In the grand scheme of Dune’s mythology, these books have done the impossible: complicate the mythology of Dune even more than Herbert had, but also keep the franchise alive as a series of contemporary books, which results in occasional solar flares of genius, combined with a steady stream of fan service for the diehards, who of course don’t entirely agree about these books anyway.

Unlike Frank Herbert’s first three Dune novels, these books present a stiff barrier to entry. Some novels are more approachable than others, but for the most part, the existence of all the “expanded Dune” books can be thought of like this: Imagine if every footnote in the book you’re holding was expanded into its own essay collection. The expanded Dune novels favor information first and artistry and theme second. As Kristina K. Iodice put it in her 1999 review of House Atreides for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “The narratives are too lengthy. Only the wealth of information that clarifies points in the later novels sustains readers through some sections.” John R. Alden of The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that readers could start with this novel before having read Dune, writing in his review, “[It’s] successful enough to stand on its own as an epic space opera. But the real pleasure here comes from watching the authors lay out the plot threads that will converge in Dune.”

Both these 1999 reviews of House Atreides are a microcosm of how to think about all sixteen of the spinoff Dune novels. The boundaries of Dune were endlessly expanded, and yet, the reader’s interest in these books still leads back to the original novels every single time. The popularity of Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert’s Dune books is very similar to the popularity of the Star Wars prequels[*] insofar as everything that people like about these books reminds them of the originals, and everything that has caused fan controversies either feels in conflict with the originals or doubles down on aspects of them that felt murky to begin with. Much has been written and said about the nature of these books and whether they “really count” when it comes to Dune canon. But there’s only one thing in them that truly made a huge and lasting impact on the entity of the saga: These books brought one of science fiction’s oldest (and most tired) tropes—killer robots—into the Dune saga, forever. The in-development HBO Max prequel TV series Dune: The Sisterhood is based on the 2011 prequel novel Sisterhood of Dune, which opens just after the end of the Butlerian Jihad. So there’s a good bet that killer AI will be a part of the visual Dune canon for a while, even if the original novels generally sidestep this common science fiction trope.

Just one year after the publication of Dune: House Atreides, the writer and director of a massive new made-for-TV Dune miniseries seemed to present a slightly opposite viewpoint from some of the expanded Dune novels. John Harrison, who had worked as a first assistant director on Day of the Dead (1985) and was the director of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), would eventually transform the first three novels into two epic miniseries, 2000’s Frank Herbert’s Dune and 2003’s Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune. And in the year 2000, he made it clear that this story wasn’t about killer AI at all.

“[Dune] is not about technology overwhelming human beings,” Harrison said. “It is not about space wars . . . it’s a story about the human condition.” In the summer of the year 2000, just as Tremors 3 was green-lit as a direct-to-video production, Harrison was hoping his new version of Dune would help shake off the sandworm posers and bring Frank Herbert’s vision back to its proper place of zeitgeist dominance, with not one robot or black-and-white-striped sandworm in sight. “I wanted to approach it the same way Herbert laid it out,” Harrison said in 2000. “To tell the story the way Herbert told it . . . in three nights.”

Both the 2021 and 2023 Dune films list John Harrison as a producer. This is because he was the last person to successfully produce and direct Dune, which means Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures had to make a deal relative to the screenplay and film option rights to Dune. In 2022, Harrison tells me that he had nothing to do with the Villeneuve versions, but from a structural point of view, his Dunes represent a bridge between the various earlier attempts and the high-level prestige treatment Dune enjoys in the 2020s. Villeneuve’s approach to filming Dune was to make sure he was allowed to adapt the first novel with two films instead of one, an idea pioneered by the 2000 and 2003 Harrison-produced miniseries.

“After David’s movie, I think people thought, ‘This is not an adaptable story,’ ” Harrison tells me in 2022. “Nobody wanted to do it. The only way we got a chance to do it is because Richard [Rubinstein] and I pitched it as a television miniseries. And I was able to convince people that we could do this in three nights, as opposed to trying to cram this book into a two-hour, two-and-a-half-hour movie. It’s just too much material. There’s too much good stuff.”

Directed by Harrison and shot by legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro—who won an Oscar for Apocalypse Now—the Sci Fi Channel’s production of Frank Herbert’s Dune was an original miniseries that ran from Sunday, December 3, 2000, to Tuesday, December 5, 2000. The total average viewership for the initial broadcast was roughly 4.4 million viewers. According to an analysis from Broadcasting and Cable published on December 10, 2000, “despite a slow start and a notoriously complicated storyline, Sci-Fi Channel’s adaptation of Dune became the most watched program in the network’s history . . . this miniseries is a decided home run.”

The success of this miniseries spawned a 2003 sequel miniseries, Children of Dune, which adapted both Dune Messiah and the titular novel in one script. In a positive review in Variety, Laura Fries wrote, “Give exec producer Richard P. Rubinstein credit for recognizing the shortcoming of David Lynch’s 1984 movie and the confounding mythology of the books: He has made Children of Dune decidedly more accessible even if that means more soaplike.”

If we leave the knee-jerk twentieth-century mainstream drumbeat that Dune has “confounding mythology” to one side, Fries does accurately describe what is simultaneously wonderful and challenging about both Sci Fi Channel Dune miniseries. In the era just before mainstream prestige sci-fi drama, a TV movie version of Dune looks and feels like what you would expect from TV movies from the early aughts, a faithful-ish adaptation of the books but rendered as a very well-produced and brilliantly cast soap opera. If the Lynch film employed aspects of surreal camp to highlight the ostentatious flavor of the novel, the Sci Fi Channel versions do the same thing, but instead, the hyperbole here comes from the soapy not-quite-prestige TV style of the time. The early-aughts Dunes are what Babylon 5 is relative to the reboot Battlestar Galactica or The Expanse; they created the foundation for serious and in-depth science fiction TV but lack the mainstream flavor of their successors. Because the production values of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica have aged slightly better, it feels like the beginning of the Sci Fi Channel’s golden period, even though Frank Herbert’s Dune and Children of Dune happened first.

The microcosm for this collision of intended audiences and sensibilities can be found in the original TV trailers that ran on cable ahead of the launch of the miniseries. Embarrassingly, the 2000 Dune was described as “a Sciniseries Event,” a bizarre pun in which we’re supposed to get that “Mini” has been swapped for “Scini,” even though the “Sci” in “Sci Fi” is clearly pronounced “Sigh,” not “Sih.” While this marketing term was not cooked up by Harrison, there’s something perfect in still thinking of the 2000 Dune as a “Sciniseries.” Like rockumentary or any other silly nineties cable TV portmanteau, the word captures the naïve quirkiness of these Dunes, while it also reveals the very specific fact that these two miniseries could not have withstood the scrutiny of a mainstream theatrical release and basically weren’t even trying for that kind of audience.

The only crime the Sci Fi Dunes have committed in the history of the flowing spice is that they were filmed and released at the wrong time. While the CGI effects of the late nineties and early 2000s have a certain charm, it’s clear that Frank Herbert’s Dune didn’t have Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic on their side. Spacecraft move through space with an eerie and realistic silence in this Dune, but today, the ships of the 1984 Dune seem more believable. In fact, because the visual effects feel very much of their time, both Sci Fi Dunes are perhaps unfairly judged. Cinematically, the Lynch film probably holds up better, but had Harrison and Storaro had access to Phantom Menace–level VFX, it’s kind of a toss-up which version may have been better remembered.

What the Sci Fi Dunes lack in slick visual effects, they more than make up for in star power. Frank Herbert’s Dune starred William Hurt, right smack-dab in the middle of his official sci-fi movie dad phase, just two years after he played a space dad in the 1998 Lost in Space and before his turn as a robot dad in 2001’s AI: Artificial Intelligence. Meanwhile, Children of Dune starred Susan Sarandon and James McAvoy—as Wensicia Corrino and Leto II Atreides, respectively. The former, as discussed in the introduction, basically cast herself in the role, while James McAvoy was very much not the James McAvoy we think of today. These films also starred Alec Newman as Paul, Barbora Kodetová as Chani, Laura Burton as the child version of Alia, and renowned character actor Ian McNeice as the baron. In the 2000 miniseries, Saskia Reeves played Lady Jessica, but when she was unavailable for the 2003 follow-up, Alice Krige stepped in. Krige is probably most famous to sci-fi fans for her role as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact, in which she was the ultimate foe for Patrick Stewart, proving, once again, that Dune is a crossroads of all other sci-fi franchises. Joining Krige in Children of Dune were Jessica Brooks as Paul’s daughter, Ghanima Atreides, and Daniela Amavia as Alia, the only person (to date) to portray Alia in her adult years.[*]

“This stuff is hard, because it’s so bonkers,” McAvoy told journalist Hoai-Tran Bui in 2021. “I was in an adaptation of the second and third books. But I’ve read them all cover to cover, and I love those books. They’re crazy. . . . I mean, the level of bonkers is unparalleled. But I love them.”

If these Dunes had come out as Netflix shows in 2013 instead of on Sci Fi in 2000 and 2003, then it’s possible they would have become the defining versions, akin to a TV version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. If Villeneuve’s Dune films had never materialized, the most faithful filmed versions of Dune would still be these two Sci Fi Channel miniseries. As Emmet Asher-Perrin put it in 2014, Frank Herbert’s Dune is “the most okay version of Dune, ever.” This might sound like a case of damning with faint praise, but prior to the 2020s, for most hard-core fans, calling a filmed version of Dune “okay” is a huge compliment. While the production values of both Harrison-produced miniseries haven’t aged well, their ambition and scope are praiseworthy, enjoyable, and in the grand scheme of Dune, unique insofar as almost nothing about these adaptations scans as unfaithful. Even when character backstories and arcs are expanded drastically, these changes feel perfectly appropriate, specifically the fact that the unifying narrative voice of Princess Irulan (Julie Cox) has a hugely expanded role that drastically departs from the novel, even though it feels very faithful.

“The key to a great adaptation is creating what is called the illusion of fidelity,” Frank Herbert’s Dune co-producer Mitchell Galin said in 2000. “This is sort of how Herbert really saw this character [Irulan]. We’re not really straying far afield emotionally with what he’s doing with this character.” In the first three Dune novels, Irulan is the most overstated and understated character simultaneously. Overstated, because her copious epigraphs are scattered throughout the first novel. And understated, because she simply doesn’t appear in real time as much as it seems like she should, and her total romantic love of Paul is admitted offstage in Dune Messiah.

“My agent in London had already cast a couple of people in this and she mentioned it to me and didn’t realize that I was already a big fan of the book,” Julie Cox recalled in 2000. Although Irulan is not technically the narrator of Dune, her epigraphs do create a veneer of plausibility that what you are reading is an amalgamation of her various texts.

“In my book, the character is the narrator,” Cox said. “But in the miniseries, she plays a much more active role. I like the way John [Harrison] adapted it very much, he made it stronger.”

Cox’s film career began in 1994, when she played the “Childlike Empress” in The Neverending Story III. Strangely enough, in between Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000) and Children of Dune (2003), Cox starred with Dune veteran Patrick Stewart in a TV miniseries loosely based on King Lear called King of Texas. And although her career extends to such contemporary TV classics as Broadchurch, Cox’s performance as Irulan in both Sci Fi Dunes does accurately demonstrate her immense talent. Because 2003’s Children of Dune takes place well after Paul and Chani’s children are adults, Cox takes Irulan where Herbert and other Dune films never could: from ambitious princess to lonely stepparent of the heirs of the known universe. “She’s very intelligent . . . coquettish when she needs to be, but not for her own personal gain,” Cox said in 2000. “She’s Bene Gesserit trained, [so] she has a very childlike quality, but great maturity and wisdom. She’d probably be a better emperor than her father.”

What goes unsaid by Cox is that the version of Irulan she played would also probably be a better emperor than Paul. There are no Marvel-style what-ifs in the Dune canon, but if there were, an alternate universe in which Irulan somehow becomes emperor instead of Paul would probably be the most interesting. As played by Cox, Princess Irulan is the number one reason Dune fans should watch both the 2000 and 2003 versions. Yes, Virginia Madsen was memorable in the Lynch version, but after her stunning (and hilarious) opening monologue, she gets only one word of spoken dialogue in the entire film, when she utters the word father to Shaddam IV. Florence Pugh’s Irulan in Dune: Part Two (2023)[*] may become the definitive Irulan for generations of Dune fans for the foreseeable future, but Julie Cox made it happen first.

Like Cox’s nuanced and brilliant performance as Irulan, the 2000 version of Paul Atreides is similarly underrated. Nineteen years before Timothée Chalamet became the definitive Muad’Dib of the 2020s, there was another prophet of Arrakis. His name is Alec Newman, and his version of Paul has nearly about the screen time of Chalamet’s and MacLachlan’s combined.[*] In the year 2000, in a time when streaming science fiction and fantasy TV didn’t exist, and the so-called geek renaissance of the early aughts had yet to take hold, Alec Newman created a uniquely honest version of Paul, which, at the time, many fans considered to be the most faithful filmed version of the character. In contrast with MacLachlan’s Paul, Newman dared to do what Herbert did on the page: introduce us to Paul not as a hero in training but instead as a spoiled brat. With arms folded and a pout on his face for much of the first episode of Frank Herbert’s Dune, Newman’s Paul Atreides feels like the perfect science fiction reflection of a nineties teenage sitcom character who is totally over it.

“I had the kind of foolishness of youth,” Alec Newman tells me in 2022. “I had a kind of bullishness, but if I knew then what I know now, I would’ve been much more intimidated by it. I didn’t know much about Dune when I was cast. But maybe that lack of a preconceived idea about what it was and how important it was to so many people was actually helpful. I might have been spooked otherwise.”

Like Kyle MacLachlan, Alec Newman was in his twenties when he began shooting his Dune. Because Paul is a teenager in the novel, Newman’s performance leans into the adolescent flippancy, which makes him seem even younger, mostly through body language. In early scenes, Newman’s Paul is slouching or has his feet up on a table. Newman tells me that of all the scenes he filmed for both his Dunes, those early scenes are the hardest for him to revisit.

“It’s a difficult thing,” Newman tells me. “In a sense, you’d almost want more than one actor to play Paul throughout all these stages, from being a teenager and then older. But John [Harrison] made a decision early on that one person would play the role. I think if you’re gonna have one actor, invariably parts of the story will benefit and parts of the story will feel the weight of that decision. The benefit is you get to see one portrayal with the same idea. And particularly for us as we went onward into Dune Messiah and Children, I really felt the benefit of having played him further and further into the story that we get. And what I’ve heard from fans is the deeper into the story we get, the more comfortable they got being around [my] Paul Atreides.”

As it turns out, being around Alec Newman’s Paul is wonderful. For longtime fans, the brilliance of the Sci Fi Channel Dunes can be found in their endless novelty. Unlike other popular installments of huge sci-fi franchises, these two Dune miniseries haven’t been endlessly critiqued and analyzed in the mainstream, which gives them a kind of refreshing newness when you watch them today. In a sense, the underrated qualities of the Sci Fi Dunes have protected them a bit from undue scrutiny, which is good for open-minded Dune fans, because there is much to love about these versions. Yes, these Dunes do wrap the world of Arrakis in a kind of late-nineties melodramatic sensibility, but again, in 2000 and 2003, prestige sci-fi TV wasn’t yet a codified phenomenon. Outside of nineties Star Trek, Babylon 5, and the Sci Fi Channel’s other favorite child, the burgeoning Battlestar Galactica, there was little on TV that you could compare to Dune. Two decades later, that’s thankfully still the case. In the bigger story of Dune, these two miniseries seem like sweet love letters, passed to fans in a time when we were all a little more innocent.

The 2000 miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune also faithfully tackles many aspects of the first novel that other adaptations either mangle or leave on the cutting-room floor. The warmaster Gurney Halleck—played by Patrick Stewart in 1984 and Josh Brolin in 2021 and 2023[*]—is known in the novel as much for his fighting as for his tender ability to play the mandolin-esque instrument the baliset. As one of Duncan’s gholas later claimed, “he could be killing you while he was singing and never miss a note.” And yet, in both Lynch’s film and Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2021), scenes of Patrick Stewart or Josh Brolin playing the baliset were cut from the final version. In 2021, composer Hans Zimmer told me that he’d even composed specific songs for Gurney’s baliset that went unused. There is some hope that Gurney will play the baliset in Part Two, but still.

However, in the 2000 miniseries, P. H. Moriarty’s version of Gurney does get to play the baliset. A lot. And in the same scene, as Gurney tells Paul of his hatred for the Harkonnens, he pronounces the name the preferred Herbert way, “Hahr-ken-en,” rather than the more common Lynch way, “Hark-koh-nen.”[*] This small detail represents just how all-in these two miniseries went. If something wasn’t good enough for a theatrical cut of a film, that same Dune idea would probably be about twenty minutes long in the Sci Fi version.

The microcosm for this geeky, detail-oriented feature of these versions is how the 2000 miniseries handled Frank Herbert’s favorite scene from the first novel: the famed banquet scene.[*] This scene does not appear in either the Lynch version or Villeneuve versions. But Herbert loved it. Although he never did a full audio recording of Dune, he did record selections from several of the novels in the 1970s and 1980s, specifically his beloved banquet sequence, in which Leto, Jessica, and Paul learn about their newfound home of Arrakis, all through the concealed warfare of polite dinner conversation. Ironically, although this is the only time a Dune adaptation has included this iconic scene, it’s also the moment where the 2000 Dune radically departs from the novel, in a way that paradoxically also feels hyper-faithful to Herbert’s intentions. In the book, Princess Irulan narrates from afar and eventually marries Paul, initially out of political convenience. But in the 2000 miniseries, Irulan crashes the banquet scene, showing up on Arrakis in person and creating a love triangle that doesn’t really exist in the books but totally should.

Today, both Frank Herbert’s Dune and Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune exist as a kind of novelty in between the 1984 film and the new blockbusters. And yet, in 2003, when Children of Dune showed us the beginnings of James McAvoy merging with the sandtrout in order to become part sandworm, part Fremen, and all God Emperor, this was the final word on a filmed version of Frank Herbert’s saga. To date, nobody has gotten as far into adapting the original novels as John Harrison, and it remains to be seen whether anyone ever will. These miniseries were ambitious and very much a product of the early 2000s. But without their walking awkwardly, without rhythm, through the landscape of cable TV in the early aughts, there’s no way the contemporary film versions of Dune could exist.

“I say this with all humility,” John Harrison tells me. “But I think that our miniseries was so successful that it actually made the industry say, ‘Oh, maybe we can do this as a film again.’ ”