#Movie collector dune series

Once settled on Arrakis, Duke Leto hopes to bring a more humane government to this forlorn planet. Characters include elite samurai-like warriors, sadistically decadent aristocrats, mystical revolutionaries, and, not least, those monster worms, which barrel along under the desert surface with the speed of a freight train, then suddenly emerge from the sand like Moby Dick rising from the depths. Before Star Wars, before A Game of Thrones, Frank Herbert brought to blazing life a feudalistic future of relentless political intrigue and insidious treachery, a grandly operatic vision – half-Wagner, half-spaghetti western – of a hero discovering his destiny. As Paul’s friends become worshippers and his family become idols, the thin line between god, liberator and oppressor is increasingly indistinct.Įven now, half a century since it first appeared in 1965, Dune is certainly still ‘the one’ – it continues to top readers’ polls as the greatest science-fiction novel of modern times. It is a compelling dissection of literature’s, and humanity’s, mania with the godlike ‘hero’. As the chosen ‘one’ emerges, we discover his role has little to do with goodness the quakes of fanatical jihad – like the desert’s giant sandworms – rumble under the surface, waiting to swallow the galaxy one planet at a time.

On the surface it is a classic adventure story – a boy coming of age to reclaim his birthright – but soon Herbert strikes a darker vein, exploring the terrors of prescribed destiny and the problematic notion of hero-making. For this edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has contributed a new introduction, examining both the origins of Herbert’s unlikely success and the hidden depths of his ‘grand operatic vision’. Lawrence’s Bedouin desert revolt to cutting-edge terraforming techniques and the burgeoning environmentalist movement. In the construction of Dune Herbert drew on a range of influences, both literary and scientific, from the origin stories of the Abrahamic desert religions and T. Is he the fabled Kwisatz Haderach, able to span time – ‘who can be many places at once’? Betrayed and exiled into the waterless deserts of Arrakis, his destiny will not only be fulfilled, but the future of humankind decided, and from the dunes will arise a saviour – Muad’Dib – both terrible and beautiful in his absolute power. However, despite the grand scale of Herbert’s fully formed universe, at its heart Dune is the story of a single boy, Paul Atreides, who finds himself caught in the web of a myth, centuries in the making. Humanity has resorted to a delicately balanced feudal system of governance, each aristocratic family struggling for survival, competing for control of a decadent empire. It is a universe of ‘traps within traps’, of human computers, secretive witch-cults and fanatic warriors, all with their own intricate histories and intentions.

#Movie collector dune series

After the novel’s publication in 1965, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, going on to sell over 12 million copies, and spawning five sequels, as well as multiple board games, computer games, television series and feature films. The far-future universe created by Herbert is nothing short of a phenomenon.