I don’t like Frank Herbert’s Dune. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about the movies or my previous post about disliking Dune, you know this already. In fact, if you just want my general thoughts about the book, you should read my post about my dislike for Herbert’s first novel and leave it at that. This post is a much more specific discussion of what I disliked, why I disliked it, and why I think Dune should be left to collect dust in the period of history in which it was first published.

The last part of the previous sentence originally included the phrase “might be a bad book” and it took me a while to figure out why I wasn’t happy with the sentence. Which also coincidentally reflects my general experience with the book as a whole. I can’t say “might” because it is, unquestionably, a bad book that has some attitudes about people that were just as harmful back in the day as they are now, even though people might not have pointed them out as readily back in the 60s. Popular culture’s general understanding of language and how it is used to represent the voice of the author, the voice of the narrator, or the voice of a character has changed pretty significantly since then, and especially so in recent decades as we’ve come to grapple with the impact of language on culture (in ways that are still incredibly insufficient, unfortunately, but I’ll get into more of that later).

That said, it would feel incredibly naïve to brush off the ways that Herbert wrote about people, and the way that audiences loved his writing (and still do!), as just a product of his time. After all, we’ve got people still writing similar things today and people loving that writing, neither of which we write off as products of their time, so why should we extend Herbert a degree of grace that we won’t extend to modern writers saying the same things he did? Is it just because only modern writers have access to social media ecosystems that allow them to show their entire ass, so we get to see their horrible views outside of their texts and then unequivocally say that their horrible views are baked into their texts? Or is it because we want to look back at the time where two of the most popular genres–science fiction and fantasy–became popular and excuse some of the founding figures of those genres for their horrible views so we can continue to draw on the “traditions” of these genres without picking up their baggage? I’m almost positive it is the latter, more so now than ever before despite firmly believing this general idea for the last decade, and I can pin all of my newfound certainty on finally having read Dune, one of the most influential science fiction texts ever written.

Dune might not have the widespread cultural impact of The Lord of the Rings, but it is still a cultural heavyweight, especially when it comes to nerds and geeks and the stories that they tell. Modern or historic, it does not matter since almost all of them feel like anything that falls within the bounds of Sci-Fi is fair game for them to draw on. Historically, we have one of the biggest nerds of all time, George Lucas, creating the Star Wars series and not only including a massive space worm that lived in an asteroid belt in A New Hope, but also the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi. Which, as far as the movie is concerned, looks an awful lot like the toothy maw of a Dune sandworm, a reference that seems intentional given the parallels between Tatooine and the planet Dune (aka Arrakis) such as the fact that this particular Sarlacc can be found in the Dune Sea (which is the name given to this particular stretch of largely featureless desert on Tatooine). More recently, but also stretching back decades, we have the Purple Worm of Dungeons and Dragons, a pretty clear reference to sandworms, especially given how media built around the tabletop game (such as Critical Role’s second campaign), include references to using purple worms in a manner similar to how the sandworms of Dune are used (as natural threats but also as a means of conveyance to those savvy enough to ride one).

More modernly, and still tangentially related to Dungeons and Dragons, we have the webcomic The Order of the Stick which includes a direct reference to Dune beyond just sandworms: the spice one of the characters is given that turns his eyes blue, attracts the sandworms, and gets the character incredibly high (all of which high quantities of spice from Dune also does, except that the Spice trip in Dune allows the consumer to see the future). Star Wars also makes ample use of the public consciousness around the word “spice,” describing it as a not only a popular commodity to be smuggled but also an item that could be used instead of standard currency in shady deals, even if they won’t fully define what “spice” is so they can avoid answering whether its a drug or something else in the modern version of the Star Wars canon (though the varying descriptions of spice mean the canon has essentially settled on all of them). Outside of media references, the word “spice” so often brings Dune to mind that all you have to do is include the word in a post in various online spaces and people will start replying with things like “the spice must flow” or “the geriatric spice” or “melange” (which is just a word that means “mixture” when it’s used outside the Dune universe and is used often but not always interchangeably with the word “spice”) or whatever other asinine thing comes to their mind. The references are inescapable and the public consciousness of Dune is refreshed often enough that it never truly fades away. Even things that aren’t directly trying to reference Dune to be cute are impacted by it. The desert world of one of my favorite anime and manga, Trigun always has some kind of sandworms running around it, despite there being no proper reason for there to be massive burrowing worms that so closely match the sandworms of Dune. Sure, the latest version of the Anime, Trigun Stampede, has moved a little bit further from that reference, but the sand worms still there, burrowing around the planet.

While cultural longevity can be a good thing (as many problems as Tolkien has in his work, I’m still a huge fan of Elves and Dwarves and Ents and Hobbits) since it lets us keep things like Shakespeare and Beowulf in popular media, it isn’t always. Look at the way that Harry Potter media is escapable, despite the author, J.K. Rowling, being the literal textbook case for why you can’t always separate the art from the artist. It is arguable that nothing has had the cultural impact of Harry Potter and it is possible that it will take centuries before anything supplants it as the most popular media to ever exist. All this despite how clear it is that the continued cultural relevance of the franchise is leading to the harm of trans people all over the world. Despite how awful the wizarding school game of early 2023 was (there was a lot of well-document antisemitic writing in the game, something I encourage you to research on your own as the specifics are outside the scope of this too-long essay), we got news multiple times throughout the year of impending remakes of the movies or brand new media being made in the universe as the various movie studios weighed whether or not they’d make more money than they’d lose by attempting to reignite the once-blazing-but-now-cooling cultural power of Harry Potter. This resurgence of cultural cachet and the game’s amazing sales were partly fueled by the controversy and many people buying the game specifically to spite the people trying to argue that they shouldn’t buy it. It was the most purchased game of the year in 2023, a record that is directly responsible for the continued development of even more games in the franchise.

While Dune might not have an impact quite so powerful or pervasive, it is still present and strong enough that it will likely never die as media companies continue to regurgitate the same stories over and over again so they can produce additional money without actually making anything of value. A description which feels particularly apt given the recent announcement of a Dune based survival MMO–a game that feels like a blatant attempt by the holder of the IP rights to find a way to produce more money. There’s nothing in the trailer to explain why this game might be interesting other than heavy references to Dune and the suggestion that this game takes place on an alternate timeline, which is just sticking the multiverse into another franchise so they can keep churning out media.

It is tempting to ignore this stuff. To move on with your life and choose to not engage with the continued proliferation of this media. To not engage with the horrible things the creators of these franchises have said to the world at large or baked into their texts. Unfortunately, there is harm done in simply standing by and letting them pass unchallenged. It is small, at first, but it builds over time as these ideas spread, sometimes by creating a subconscious belief in someone who would not even know they agreed with it, because of the association between the ideas presented in the text. It can also validate the secretly held beliefs of those who already hold those views but recognize that voicing them would be socially damaging to them. As this builds, as more people feel validated in their beliefs and more people begin to subconsciously hold them as a result of these ideas going unchallenged, they begin to show up in more and more media, further validating and creating those beliefs. Eventually, they have become so normalized that even directly challenging someone on why those beliefs are wrong or discriminatory puts you in the minority or can even be damaging to you socially as you try to push back against a rising tide of public opinion.

The link I shared above (shared again here in case you scrolled past it and decide to take a look at it now) provides an example of how Rowling’s transphobic beliefs and the power of her influence have fueled a horrible shift in the political landscape of the world. While trans people have never been widely accepted in US culture, watching so many public figures easily get away with voicing their horrible, toxic, and completely unfounded beliefs has emboldened those who secretly held them. There’s even legislation making its way through state and federal government in the US that is built off the scaffold of hate and discrimination that Rowling has assembled. It is laid bare, in that article, the way this hate and its incorporation into popular media gradually shifts culture. It is undeniable unless you’ve spent a lot of time and energy emotionally investing yourself in refusing to accept that further support for the Harry Potter franchise continues to fund the hate and horrible gender politics of Rowling and her allies. I would not argue that Dune contributes to broad societal harm to the degree that Harry Potter and its creator, Rowling, do, but that there is still harm dealt by what Dune does touch on and how those ideas continue to seep into modern culture when they go unchallenged or unquestioned.

Despite that separation of intensity, Dune and Harry Potter have something in common: a shared belief about people and their nature that isn’t touched on the article I shared and that also follows this same pattern of cultural influence. Both of these franchises absolutely detest fat people. In the Harry Potter books, there is no segment that doesn’t glorify in the vile and evil behavior of its fat characters, one of which is in every book and others of which appear and reappear as the narrative demands a weak villain that we are supposed to feel nothing but contempt for. It even goes so far as to associate some of these characters’ fatness with their evilness, showing how lacking they are compared to the heroes because they have the personal and moral failing of being fat. This, though, is mild in comparison to the way that Dune discusses its fat characters. The authorial voice of the text, when it can be separated from the narratorial voice, cannot help but describe in vile, cutting terms the fatness of one of the villains, Baron Harkonnen. The camera cannot turn on him without reference after reference to how this villain moves or acts or thinks or even merely exists in a way that exults in how disgusting he is because he is fat and how he is fat because he is disgusting.

The narratorial voice, because Herbert lacks subtlety, directly draws a line between this villain being unable to control any of his hungers, how that is a sign of his evilness, and how his fatness represents his evil behavior. I would normally quote some lines from the text as evidence to support my point, but I found many of them genuinely sickening and so frequent that I had to take breaks while reading through the chapters focused on this character, to the degree that I don’t care to go find them again. Even the minor villains, though, cannot escape the fact that being evil in this way must also mean they are fat. Every villainous character who allows their hungers–a concept introduced in the book in order to distinguish “Humans” from “animals” since the eugenics espoused by the book requires establishing the idea that most people are little more than animals who can’t control themselves in the face of their instincts and base drives–to rule them is described as being fat and has that fatness held up as a sign of their corruption. Even the characters react to this narratorial sign of evilness, as if every person in this world would instantly recognize that a fat person was evil simply by their fatness alone.

If this direct association was the only vile thing that Dune had to share, it would still be a bad book, but there’s far more going on than just that. There’s the constant references to eugenics programs, in both the incredibly awful “breeding a messianic figure/perfect Human” of the Bene Gesserit and in the “Terrible Purpose” of Paul Atreides, as a “race memory” tries to use him to create a new, stronger mixture of human genetics by engulfing the entire galaxy in a religious war of conquest, pillaging, and referenced but never shown rape. Not a single reference to any of that passes without the narrator or some other character chiming in to reframe the idea in a manner designed to make it seem more palatable or acceptable but that doesn’t substantially change how it would work or what the intended result would be. Beyond even this horrible view of humanity’s path forward in time, there’s also the constant (repeated more often than literally anything else in the story other than proper nouns) invocation of the Noble Savage trope, which is almost always insidiously coupled to the White Savior narrative–that Herbert was supposedly inverting or commenting on, depending on who you asked–that has, as of Dune Messiah, been so completely turned around that it has become just another harmful White Savior narrative all over again despite some of the text from Dune (a comparatively small amount, given the length of the book) suggesting that White Saviors are actually bad.

Even if there’s textual warnings that the European-coded character will actually do harm to the native peoples he has arrived to lead, if the text approvingly shows that European-coded character being demonstrably superior to all of the native peoples in all the arenas that the native peoples value, all of which means he then winds up leading those people in a way that makes them stronger, more effective, and more capable, then it hasn’t really inverted the White Savior narrative. All it has done is take it one step further away, turning a physical and direct White Savior into a slightly metaphorical but still physical and direct White Savior. The most galling part of reading the sections that seemed to constantly stumble into this racist portrayal of Eurocentric superiority was how frequent it was that one of the European-coded characters would admire the Fremen’s strength or wisdom or technology in the beginning half–of a page, a paragraph, or even a single sentence–before spending the rest of their statement or thought expressing how backward, idiotic, superstitious, or foolish they were. I noted this exact sequence of admiration and derision so often in my notes that I developed a notation specifically for these exact expressions to save myself time on writing them all down.

There is little in this text that I could find that was redeeming. Even the approach it took to religion, a curious mixture of approval as a philosophy but a lever by which all fools (and so often this specifically meant the Fremen) might be moved, was one that left me frustrated. Adhering to religion does not make one foolish, but assuming that all those who follow a set of beliefs are easily manipulated is. While the European-coded savior characters are correct that they can use religion to get themselves resources and safety when they’re fleeing for their lives, they can’t help but constantly remark about the wisdom and strength of those they feel are putty in their hands every time one of their religion-building gambits pays out. While these false, manipulative “saviors” might not believe, instead feeling themselves removed from the perils of unquestioning religious fervor, they are as much a part of it as any of the people they manipulate. A fact that the text seems intent on ignoring, given that there is no evidence anywhere within the pages of Dune (or even Dune Messiah, which was apparently written in part because Herbert felt that people didn’t get what he was trying to do in Dune) that Herbert was capable of any amount of subtlety (my second most common notation), to the degree that the authorial and narrative voices being silent on pointing out the hypocrisy of the Atreides family and their use of religion as a weapon to control people seems like a tacit endorsement that anyone foolish enough to allow religion to control them deserves whatever happens to them as a result.

Normally, I don’t like doing negative reviews. Normally, if I don’t like something, I’m content to slowly forget it as time passes and never speak about it again. This time, though, I feel like I have a moral (or maybe personal) imperative as a writer to speak about Dune and the harm it has not only contributed to but continues to perpetuate due to its on-going cultural relevance as the various media giants of the US endlessly recycle anything they think they can get a universe/multiverse/endless IP source out of. I don’t think that liking Dune is a moral failing or a betrayal of the people impacted by the negative stereotypes (and hateful opinions in this example) coming from the author quite like continuing to engage with the Harry Potter franchise is, but it is contributing to the perpetuation of the cultural beliefs that fatness is a sign of moral failure, that indigenous peoples–no matter how advanced or powerful–could benefit from the guidance of a Eurocentric worldview or leader, that eugenics and “Survival of the Fittest” mentality are anything but harmful to all marginalized peoples, and that those with religious or spiritual beliefs are naïve and easily misled. All without mentioning all of the horrible sexism, the misogyny, and the fact that the only queer character was also a pedophile, all of which I left out because every time I started writing about them, I wound up going on a multi-paragraph rant that turn this post into a bloated mess. All of these things are bad in Dune and even worse in Dune Messiah, which is saying something. There is harm in continuing these horrible ideas that Dune espouses without spending the time to grapple with their messages, subtextual and textual, so I feel like I owe myself (if no one else) the time and space to explore what that harm is and why it seems to skate under the radar as often as it has.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about why I don’t care for Dune and found myself in a relatively small group of people who dislike it for the reasons I’ve outlined. Everyone else I’ve talked to either just didn’t enjoy it for its size and pacing or thought it was fine at worst and that all the things I’ve outlined as negative aren’t actually that bad. The latter of which is what inspired me to actually do all this work rather than let the book pass me by like everything else I’ve not enjoyed and chosen to ignore. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time honing my ability to do critical analysis and to understand not just text and subtext, but context as well. I have a degree of skill that many people never develop and it’s not a personal failing to lack this ability, these insights, or this experience. Not everyone spent four years and a hundred thousand dollars learning to be a skilled critical analyst of literature and the written word. It would, however, be a personal failing in my eyes to not use those things to talk about something I see as harmful. Nothing can change unless people start speaking up about problems and doing the work of making them visible to others. Which isn’t to say that I’m the only one doing the work when it comes to Dune. Plenty of other people have done great critical work on Dune, some even recently as its cultural relevance surges again, but I haven’t found anything that lays it all out as plainly as possible.

I don’t expect to reach a wide audience with this post. My blog never really does, aside from a rare stroke of luck that puts a post in front of the exactly perfect audience for it (and even then, a wide audience is maybe twenty people, so it’s still not an objectively wide audience by any measure), but I write this blog mostly for myself and I wrote this post mostly for myself. I needed to work through all this slowly, over time, to figure out my feelings about it, to grapple with all of what this book had to say and how it impacted me as I read it, and now I’ve done that. I felt compelled to use my abilities with critical analysis and the written word to speak about the harm I see in this book and now I’ve done that. I hope you got something out of reading this lengthy post. Something to think about, at least, if not full recognition of the terrible, insidious, and often subtle patterns of harmful beliefs that are created and perpetuated by our media culture. After all, I wouldn’t say that you shouldn’t expose yourself to challenging, difficult, or wrong ideas, just that you should go into that experience armed with the tools you need to understand what you’re being exposed to and how those ideas might be wrong or harmful. I, personally, would love it if things like Dune and Harry Potter (which isn’t to say that I think they’re equal in the harm they perpetuate, only that they both perpetuate harmful ideas and practices) entirely faded from the public consciousness, but that’s not going to happen until people start being able to grapple with these things on their own and, eventually, choose to leave them behind should they realize there’s nothing in them that’s worthy of the argument to keeping them. Sure, sometimes you need to rebreak a bone so it will heal properly, but wouldn’t it be better to just not break the bone in the first place?