The infinite lives of Duncan Idaho
The Dune series hits its stride after the first book, when things get much weirder.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, Happy Halloween, happy leaf-peeping, happy pumpkin-patching, happy flannel-wearing and fire-building, and welcome back to my reading stack.
I started this newsletter one year ago (Oct. 3, 2020) and while I (luckily) didn’t commit to it being a weekly or bi-weekly at the outset, I certainly hoped to write more often than monthly. My day job has been extremely time-consuming, but the pleasure of sitting down to write one of these entries remains—in fact it feels like more of a treat to myself than ever before. I did 12 issues in the first year, and it was fun to wax about everything from horse-racing to baseball to real American politics in 2020 to fictional French politics in 2022 to dogs and the civil war over oil.
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Dune was published in 1965 (first serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1963) and is one of the best-selling sci-fi series of all time, but I didn’t discover it until 2016, when I was nearly 30 and the book was 51. I had certainly heard of it and for years I noticed the thick 2005 Ace paperback on the front table at The Strand, but even as a big fan of sci-fi—especially Orson Scott Card, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman, and Philip K. Dick—no one had ever personally recommended Dune to me.
This is purely anecdotal, but I have the sense that Dune never quite hit with my generation (b. 1987) the way Ender’s Game or the Harry Potter series did. I know the 1984 David Lynch movie was terribly reviewed, and I wonder if that also threw cold water on the popularity of the book for a while. Dune was not an immediate commercial success when the book first came out; it took a feature in the culture bible Whole Earth Catalog to ignite mass attention.
I love what Frank Herbert wrote in his foreword to the fifth book about the success of the series: “Following the first publication, reports from the publishers were slow and, as it turned out, inaccurate. The critics had panned it. More than twelve publishers had turned it down before publication. There was no advertising. Something was happening out there, though… By the time the first three Dune books were completed, there was little doubt that this was a popular work—one of the most popular in history, I am told, with some ten million copies sold worldwide.”
After I finished the first book, I could see how every sci-fi novel I have ever read owes Dune a debt. Like the apocryphal comment that “we all came out of Gogol’s overcoat,” it seems to me that all sci-fi after Dune came out of Herbert’s desert.
Paul preparing to leave his home planet of Caladan for Arrakis made me think of Ender Wiggin being plucked from home and brought to battle school. And the pain test that opens Dune with the gom jabbar (very well depicted in the new Denis Villeneuve movie, I felt) reminded me of the tests Colonel Graff puts Ender through.
The rules and beliefs of the Fremen of Arrakis reminded me of the customs on Gethen in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. And Dune’s ecological concerns (a dry, parched planet that was once green with plant life; Liet Kynes the imperial ecologist as one of the book’s heroes) are echoed in The Three-Body Problem, especially its Silent Spring references. (And in so much other eco-fiction.)
Star Wars, which came a decade after Dune, clearly owes a debt. The Jedi look a lot like the Bene Gesserit; Luke Skywalker before he becomes a Jedi looks a lot like Paul Atreides before he’s worshiped as Muad’Dib; and highly coveted spice is mentioned throughout the movies.
Avatar in particular took a lot from Dune: an outsider arriving on a new planet and immediately “going native,” not merely joining the locals but becoming their savior. Three quarters of the way through the book, when Gurney Halleck and Paul watch a group of Fremen harness and ride a sandworm, Halleck can’t believe his eyes, and Paul says, “You heard my father speak of desert power. There it is. The surface of this planet is ours. No storm nor creature nor condition can stop us.” Halleck reflects: “Us… He means the Fremen. He speaks of himself as one of them.”
Of course, many of Dune’s themes and messages are universal. In the first few pages of the book, after the test of pain from the Reverend Mother, she tells Paul, “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Paul replies by quoting from the religious texts of his time (Dune is set in the year 10191), “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.”
Writers before Herbert, like Isaac Asimov, had grappled with fears of machines in revolt (I, Robot was published in 1950), and writers after would too. I recently read and enjoyed Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber, the first book in the “Safehold” series. The premise is that in the future, humans have been nearly wiped out by an alien species called the Gbaba (sounds like the Buggers in Ender’s Game) that discovered us because our technology became too visible. To survive, the humans in power create a pre-industrial society (Safehold) that has no awareness of technology whatsoever. But they go too far and make them believe all tech is religious blasphemy; a female soldier from the past, preserved for hundreds of years and then re-awoken, visits in disguise as a man and shows them the truth. I saw heavy Dune influence in it.
But for all of Dune’s influence and wonder, the series truly takes off after the first book. It also gets much, much funnier.
And it’s all about Duncan Idaho.
I suppose this constitutes a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read the book or seen the movie, but my essays here always deal with the entirety of a book, so this shouldn’t shock you unless you’re new here. Head for the exit now if this will upset you…
Duncan Idaho, who dies in the first book fighting the Sardaukar soldiers, returns in the second book, Dune Messiah. And in the third, and the fourth, and the fifth… because the Tleilaxu from the planet Tleilax, which is reviled but has advanced tech, create a ghola from Duncan Idaho’s dead body. (You’re meant to think of a golem, the creature in Jewish folklore created out of dust and brought to life by dark magic; but as the series goes on, I thought more often of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and the movie Moon with Sam Rockwell, and the movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise.)
In Dune Messiah, the ghola of Duncan Idaho goes by the name Hayt, and he has been pre-programmed to kill Paul when Paul utters a certain phrase, and Paul’s sister Alia falls in love with him.
It only gets crazier from there. By the third book, Children of Dune, Paul Atreides aka Muad’Dib aka the Kwisatz Haderach, now blind, has disappeared into the desert, but Duncan (the ghola) remains. Paul’s children with Chani, the twins Leto II and Ghanima, are now running Arrakis and have special powers. And Alia (their aunt) is possessed by the dead spirit of Baron Harkonnen. Duncan dies again—this time to protect Alia—and even he sees the irony of his situation, uttering as he falls, “Two deaths for the Atreides. The second for no better reason than the first.”
In the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, Duncan is back again. It’s my favorite of all the books.
By this point, Paul’s son Leto II has lived and ruled Arrakis for 3,000 years, become part sandworm (seriously), and has the Tleilaxu sending him a steady stream of Duncan gholas from their assembly line. Each new Duncan keeps trying to kill him, and Leto simply has a new one sent over each time. (I think this is hilarious.)
In the opening of God Emperor, the newest Duncan reveals “a small explosive from the folds of his uniform robe,” signaling his intent to kill Leto, and we get this bit of comedy: “Leto loved surprises, even nasty ones. It is something I did not predict! And he said as much to Duncan.” Duncan, taken aback, says, “This could kill you,” and Leto says, “I’m sorry, Duncan. It will do a small amount of injury, no more.”
I was laughing out loud. After Leto dispatches this Duncan, the replacement Duncan becomes the main character of this book, rather than a supporting character like in the previous installments. I’d even argue Duncan is the true protagonist of the entire series. (If it’s not Duncan, it’s the planet of Arrakis itself.)
I cannot stress enough that these zany plots are a pleasure. The series truly becomes a joy after the first book; it’s like Frank Herbert unclenched.
The first Dune book is deadly serious (as is the 2021 movie; there is zero levity). The next four books are aware of their outlandishness, and revel in it.
Duncan Idaho is the constant presence and witness of the whole series, even more so than Paul. That’s why I liked the casting of the new movie: Jason Momoa is a perfect Duncan Idaho. I don’t want to discuss the movie too much here, but I felt it got a lot right; it was never going to be perfect, trying to cram 800 pages into 2.5 hours, which is why Denis Villeneuve didn’t try to do that, and instead split it into two movies.
The characters are where the series shines, and throughout the books I noticed how Herbert gives equal attention to fleshing out the villains. Other than the grotesque Baron Harkonnen, played perfectly by Stellan Skarsgard, the new movie barely gives any time to the Harkonnen henchmen who are all so colorful in the book: Feyd-Rautha, the spoiled favorite nephew of the baron; Beast Rabban, the fumbling other nephew of the baron; or Piter de Vries, the baron’s ruthless right-hand man and a mentat, like Thufir Hawat on the Atreides side.
So in the end, what is the Dune series about?
In August, the official Twitter account of the new movie asked, “Explain Dune in one sentence.” The replies were outstanding, and mostly from people who have clearly read the books. Some of my favorites:
“A 15,000 year-long lesson in why mixing monopoly power, religious fanaticism, drug addiction, and eugenics is probably not a great idea.” (Matthew Feeney)
“The one fucking guy in the universe who understands exactly how badly it will turn out for everyone still decides revenge > everything else.” (Michael J. Anderson)
“He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” (Multiple people; it’s from Monty Python’s Life of Brian but definitely applies to Paul.)
But my very favorite reply and summation of the series is this:
Happy reading.
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Have you ever heard of the "Seinfeld Is Unfunny" trope? I've wondered if something analogous happened to Dune; where so much of what Dune originated was incorporated elsewhere, that now the original feels clumsy.