EPILOGUE
Spice Up Your Life
Just one more dune to go.
Nope. You said that three dunes ago.
—Lone Starr and Barf in Spaceballs
In the summer of 2022, I’m reading a book to my five-year-old daughter, and buried in the pages is a sandworm of Arrakis. To be clear, this isn’t the 1984 kids’ book The Dune Storybook, adapted by the legendary sci-fi author Joan D. Vinge. Nor is it one of the Dune coloring books from the same era, nor is it a comic book adaptation, or 1978’s beautiful The Illustrated Dune, festooned with John Schoenherr’s striking artwork. I am also not reading aloud from the original Dune novel, either. My daughter can handle me reading The Hobbit out loud, but Dune for a little kid would be pretty extreme and utterly inappropriate. And yet, there it is, a sandworm in her book, and she knows it’s a sandworm, and she knows what a sandworm does. After identifying the sandworm and mentioning that if you “hang around sandworms you get blue eyes,” my daughter says confidently, “Sandworms are cute, aren’t they, Dad?”
The book we’re reading is The Octonauts and the Growing Goldfish. Although the cartoon TV version of The Octonauts is more famous, the equally wonderful book series came first, written and illustrated by Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy. In this specific 2014 storybook (which does not have a TV adaptation), the stalwart crew of anthropomorphized animals is tasked with assisting a rapidly growing prehistoric fish who has accidentally drifted into a too-small pond. We learn that where he really belongs is in a massive undersea cavern with other monstrously huge sea creatures. And on one page, as the journey down takes us through the earth, where other massive critters dwell, there is, very plainly, a hooded figure, with iridescent blue eyes, navigating a smiling sandworm. All versions of The Octonauts contain sly Easter eggs and references to all sorts of science fiction media, including, but not limited to, Star Trek, Doctor Who, The Lord of the Rings, and Thunderbirds. But this sandworm Easter egg can be caught only by parents, or kids with parents who talk about Dune all the time. My daughter is right in saying the sandworm is cute, because it is very adorable in this illustration. It’s so cute, in fact, that it would be innocuous if you didn’t know what it was. And therein lies the secret of Dune. Even when you don’t know it’s there, it’s right in front of you.
It’s tempting to say that the staying power of Dune is all because of every single thing that’s been discussed in these pages. Its social commentary, on subjects from religion to ecology, is clear, and not only that but highly original, too. It changed the course of the way books were published and the way science fiction was read, and it proved that “unfilmable” books can eventually be filmed. It’s a nexus for conversations about feminism, classism, racism, and the constant fight against fascism. The first novel is also, occasionally, a wonderful treatise on parenting. Paul doesn’t need to be an orphan to have a huge adventure, and his parents don’t need to be secretly evil to be interesting and compelling characters. Despite its coming-of-age elements at the start, Dune reminds us that adventures continue well into adulthood and that people who become caregivers—from Lady Jessica to Irulan and beyond—don’t stop being interesting just because they are in charge of young people.
And yet, for all the deep diving into the sand to sort out the relevance of Dune, the trick to its staying power might be simpler than these profundities. The cute sandworm buried in the pages of a children’s book gestures at something more than just a subject for literary and academic study. It’s more basic than that. Dune is really, really fun.
In 1984, National Lampoon published a 221-page parody novel by the humorist Ellis Weiner titled Doon. The book is slightly longer than Dune Messiah and about the length of some of Frank Herbert’s other non-Dune SF novels, like Whipping Star or The Heaven Makers. It’s about as profound as Spaceballs but occasionally carries some wit that approaches the brilliance of Douglas Adams. It’s difficult to maintain a spoof for an entire novel, but what makes Doon so funny is the way that Weiner really pays homage to Herbert’s style in a way that only a true fan could. Toward the end of the book (which is mostly about controlling a galaxy-wide supply of beer and riding some pretzels), the character of “Pall” repeats the Litany Against Fun, saying, “I must not have fun. Fun is the time-killer . . . when fun is gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. I, and my will to win. Damn, I’m good.”
What Weiner proves of course is that Dune is very fun and that it’s sometimes easy to make it not fun because it seems so serious. Again, we’re reminded of Herbert’s jarring assertion that Dune was written in a style of “high camp,” a style of narrative that pushes back against easy answers and binary societal viewpoints. The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear is obviously an amazing and immortal philosophy, but the parody version of it in Doon helps to reinforce its brilliance by mocking some of the earnestness. This seems appropriate, simply because every single account of Frank Herbert—from his son Brian’s wonderful memoir to what I learned firsthand from Theresa Shackleford—tends to paint a similar picture. Frank Herbert laughed a lot, loved corny jokes, and despite being put on the spot constantly to explain the deeper meaning of Dune, also didn’t take himself too seriously. He rejected the idea that his fans saw him as a guru, which was a subject that was very important to him. But within all of that, the serious artist was also having a lot of fun, too. In April 1984, in the foreword to Heretics of Dune, Frank Herbert wrote: “There’s an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard-earned money (and energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.”
If adults are interested only in telling other adults about why climate change is important or why fascism is bad, there is plenty of nonfiction out there to help them. Frank Herbert edited New World or No World, but that’s out of print and Dune isn’t. Good humans want to learn things, do better, and discover various things they didn’t know about the nature of life. But if we’re being honest, Herbert didn’t need to invent sandworms to make that point. Dune’s omnipresence in various aspects of culture can’t be attributed only to its serious tone and urgent, socially relevant messages. At a certain point, the goofiness of riding a massive sandworm is just flat-out awesome. Or, if you’re a five-year-old, cute.
In 2021, right around the time I started working on this book, Matt Caron released an absolutely perfect and hilarious video for Nerdist that crammed in pretty much every single pop culture reference to Dune found in other TV shows and films. Some are shockingly obscure. Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated pays homage to the opening of the David Lynch film, while in the 2019 final episode of the HBO comedy Silicon Valley, Monica (Amanda Crew) tells Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), “I know who fucking Frank Herbert is.” But my favorite reference that Caron put into this video is the moment from a 1993 Simpsons episode in which Lisa Simpson eats extra-spicy food and suddenly declares, “I can see through time!” Fast-forward to December 2022, and I’m having a coffee with Matt Caron in Portland, Maine, and he’s telling me how much he loves all the various games that have been created from Dune. This strikes me as funny, mostly because if we viewed Dune as a conventional game, there would be no way to win without losing. Having a Dune coloring book makes about as much sense as having a Dune board game or, for that matter, Dune action figures. Of course, all of these things exist, and the various versions of both tabletop games for Dune and video games based on the franchise are varying degrees of fun, depending on your investment into the world of Arrakis to begin with.
What’s fascinating about thinking about games based on Dune is the implicit nature of why we play games: fun. While writing this book, I tracked down a version of the 1992 Dune computer game, which was created by Cryo Interactive Entertainment and released by Virgin Interactive Entertainment. I periodically played this game while I was writing The Spice Must Flow, often to touch base with a part of Dune that would have appealed to me as a much younger person: pixelated sci-fi graphics juxtaposed with challenging gameplay and stakes that are utterly unclear. This game is hard to understand, hard to win, time-consuming, and totally addictive. If we’re only thinking about the emotional truth of Dune, there may not be a better adaptation than this on the planet. Interestingly, this game came out at a time when there were basically no new Dune things in the world and there was no real demand for the franchise at all. But if you grew up in the era of these kinds of early ’90s computer games, it’s perfect. You control a version of Paul who looks just enough like Kyle MacLachlan to make this feel like it’s set in the Lynch Dune universe, because even in 1992, nostalgia for the ’80s was strong. The game allows you to take your ornithopter out to various sietches to recruit Fremen to your cause, although most of them aren’t really sure about you yet. If you stay out in the desert too long, you will starve to death, and the computer shows your skin rotting away, pixel by pixel, until you’re just a skeleton. Then you can start over.
Here’s the funniest part. In order to save your game in the 1992 PC version of Dune, you have to go into a room and “look in a mirror.” This is when you see yourself, looking like a 1992 knockoff Kyle MacLachlan. In order to save your progress in the game of Dune, the game requires you to look in the mirror deeply. When I first realized this was how you had to save your progress, by participating in a kind of false digital reflection, I laughed out loud. Nothing could be more Dune-ish than this. A novel of self-reflection and adventure adapted into a video game that requires you to literally look in the mirror in order to walk away from the game. I tried to imagine a bookmark that’s also a mirror, and how hilariously jarring that would be if you had to stare into your own eyes before saving your place in a book you were reading. Particularly if that book was the 1965 novel Dune.
I suppose you could play this Dune video game without looking in the mirror and without saving your spot. But that doesn’t mean it would stop existing, or that you couldn’t hypothetically beat the game on the first try. As I write these words, I’ve just read an article in my local paper that tells me that discarded Christmas trees will be used on a local beach in Portland, Maine, in order to keep the sand dunes in place. This 2023 newspaper article doesn’t mention that this process is similar to what inspired Frank Herbert’s Dune. It’s possible the journalist who wrote the piece didn’t even know that detail. And yet, the connection is there. Dune fills in so many spaces in our lives and creates wonder while it does so. The journey of the spice from the 1950s until now doesn’t require you to understand or even remember what has happened. The Bene Gesserit know that even they won’t live to see the results of their plans. Dune will be around for much longer than any of us. Because as long as children can recognize a sandworm and see one thing, while adults see something else, the Golden Path will continue to unfold, hopefully, forever.