The Dune Series by Frank Herbert

FIRST PUBLISHED: 1965–85; includes Dune, 1965; Dune Messiah, 1969; Children of Dune, 1976; God Emperor of Dune, 1981; Heretics of Dune, 1984; Chapterhouse: Dune, 1985

TYPE OF WORK: Novels

TYPE OF PLOT:Science fiction

TIME OF PLOT: Eleventh millennium after the founding of the Spacing Guild

LOCALES: Arrakis, third planet of the star Canopus; many other fictional planets

Principal Characters

• Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib)the prophet of the Fremen
• Duke Leto AtreidesPaul’s father
• Lady JessicaPaul’s mother
• Alia Atreides (Saint Alia of the Knife)Paul’s sister
• Gaius Helen Mohiama Bene Gesserit truthsayer
• Duncan Idahothe Atreides’ armsmaster
• Gurney Halleckthe Atreides’ retainer
• Wellington YuehSuk School doctor in the Atreides’ service
• Baron Vladimir Harkonnenhereditary enemy of the Atreides
• Feyd-Rautha Harkonnenthe baron’s nephew and heir
• Liet KynesImperial planetologist on Arrakis
• ChaniFremen warrior
• StilgarFremen leader
• Emperor Shaddam IVruler of the Imperium
• Princess IrulanShaddam’s daughter
• Scytalea Tlielaxu Face Dancer (shapeshifter)
• Leto IIson of Paul and Chani, God Emperor
• Ghanimadaughter of Paul and Chani
• Moneo Atreideschamberlain to Leto II
• Siona Atreidesdaughter of Moneo, who can fade from prescient vision
• Miles Tegcommanding general to the Bene Gesserit armies
• Sheeanagirl with the ability to control sandworms

The Story

In Dune, the Atreides household is preparing to relocate from the wet planet Caladan to Arrakis, a desert planet, where Duke Leto is going to take command as the planet’s new feudal lord, replacing the Harkonnen household. A mysterious woman arrives to test young Paul, the ducal heir. She is Gaius Helen Mohiam, a member of the Bene Gesserit order, who trained Paul’s mother in the order’s almost superhuman powers. While Paul proves his ability to surmount agony, the old woman talks to him about philosophy and history.

Paul then meets with Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck, and Dr. Wellington Yueh, important members of his father’s staff. Hints are planted of the forces that will drive Yueh to betray his employer.

During the actual move, Paul exhibits curiosity about the nature of the Spacing Guild, the guild of navigators who are the only ones capable of overseeing travel between planets. He is firmly warned that he must do nothing to risk the shipping privileges of House Atreides. The Spacing Guild guards its secrets as zealously as any medieval guild, and all other powers in the galaxy are dependent on their navigational skills.

On Arrakis, Paul immediately becomes the subject of awed murmurs on the part of the residents, who have turned to religion for hope during the lengthy reign of the brutal Harkonnens over their world. Their awe is reinforced when Imperial planetologist Liet Kynes takes Paul and Duke Leto into the deep desert to witness spice mining operations, and Paul shows extraordinary perceptivity of the customs and usages of the desert.

Just as the Atreides seem to have settled into their new fief, treachery dispossesses them of it. Dr. Yueh betrays the Atreides, allowing Baron Harkonnen to attack and slaughter the Atreides forces. The baron has taken Dr. Yueh’s wife hostage to force his cooperation, but the remorseful doctor secretly gives Duke Leto a dose of poison that, when used, will kill both Leto and Baron Harkonnen. Yueh’s plan fails and results in Leto's death and Baron Harkonnen's narrow escape.

However, Paul and Jessica are able to escape into the deep desert, where they encounter the Fremen, the fierce people of the sands. Using Bene Gesserit skills, they are able to integrate themselves into the Fremen, normally insular and hostile to outsiders. After Paul proves himself in a duel to the death with one of the Fremen tribesmen, he is renamed Muad’Dib after the kangaroo mouse of the desert.

As Paul and Jessica teach the Fremen their Bene Gesserit fighting techniques, the already formidable guerrilla fighters become nearly unbeatable, and they engage in more open combat against the Harkonnen occupiers. Moreover, Paul and Jessica learn the secrets of Arrakis’s most important export commodity, known simply as “spice.” A luxury food that has life-extending properties, spice is also necessary to allow the Spacing Guild navigators to predict the future, which is how they are able to navigate ships safely through the myriad dangers of space travel. Without spice, each planet would be isolated and there could be no galactic civilization. Paul and Jessica learn that spice is derived from the massive sandworms that inhabit Arrakis—and no other planet, since water is toxic to sandworms.

Paul soon becomes one of their foremost leaders, and in time he is pushed to fight Stilgar for leadership of the band of Fremen. Instead, he refuses and claims his birthright as the Atreides heir and thus the rightful duke of Arrakis. With the desert-hardened, well-trained Fremen under his command, Paul has enough power to rival the emperor himself, whose elite army, known as the Sardaukar, is the basis of his power.

After drinking the Water of Life and gaining his full prophetic powers, Paul forces a final confrontation with both the Harkonnens and the emperor. Dune ends on a triumphant note: Paul defeats the killers of his father and takes command of the entire Imperium.

Dune Messiah takes up several years later. The Fremen have engaged in a massive jihad that has ravaged much of the settled galaxy. Paul and his beloved Fremen concubine Chani have no heir, which creates a precarious situation, as various factions jockey for position in the power vacuum created when Paul deposed Emperor Shaddam IV, whose House Corrino had ruled the galaxy for ten millennia. Among these factions are the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Tlielaxu, a renegade school for mentats, or human computers. (Computers themselves have been outlawed, so mentats are an important part of galactic society. Paul himself has been trained as a mentat.)

The Tlielaxu are master manipulators of human beings. Their chief representative is Scytale, a shape-shifting “Face Dancer.” He brings with him Hayt, who is a ghola, a revenant corpse brought back to life in the mysterious Axolotl Tanks. Specifically, Hayt was once Duncan Idaho, the Atreides sword master who gave his life so that Jessica and Paul could escape.

Hayt is part of an elaborate scheme to entrap Paul and make him dependent upon the Tlielaxu. Through various manipulations in the Imperial Court on Arrakis, involving corrupt courtiers and disgruntled veterans of the Fremen Jihad, Paul is blinded by a stoneburner, a type of nuclear device. Fremen tradition holds that blinded Fremen must commit suicide by walking alone into the harsh desert. The Tlielaxu had intended to offer Paul metal eyes to restore his sight, thereby gaining control over him. Instead, he turns to his prophetic powers, seeing by prescience as he “remembers” everything that is happening in his present, having foreseen it in the past.

Chani dies after giving birth to a son and daughter, Leto II and Ghanima. Scytale, in another attempt to gain Tlielaxu control of the empire, offers to resurrect Chani as a ghola. Paul refuses. He walks into the desert to die in the manner of the Fremen.

Children of Dune begins a decade later. Young Leto II and his sister Ghanima are growing far beyond their chronological ages as a result of the effects of spice upon their metabolism. They are the objects of superstitious awe and fear among the Fremen, but their positions as the heirs of Emperor Paul make them the targets of the more worldly Great Houses, whose ambitions have not been extinguished by the fury of the Fremen Jihad. In particular, the Princess Wensicia, daughter of deposed Emperor Shaddam IV, hopes to place her son Farad’n upon the throne.

To accomplish her goal, Wensicia has developed an elaborate scheme to use specially trained Laza tigers to kill the Atreides twins. However, she thinks of them as the children they appear to be, and they use the abilities derived from their ancestral memories to escape. Ghanima is rescued by Stilgar and taken to a Fremen sietch stronghold, while Leto flees into the deep desert and begins a journey of discovery that will lead him to the taboo sietches of Jacurutu and Shuloch. He flees the latter with a sabotaged stillsuit, his life’s water leaking out into the desert. Out of options, he implements the plan he had seen in many prescient visions and dreaded: he forms a symbiotic relationship with the larval form of the great sandworms of the deep desert.

In this hybrid form, Leto returns to the Imperial Court to confront his aunt Alia, who has become possessed by the ancestral memory of the evil Baron Harkonnen. After defeating her, he begins his reign in his own right. His sister reveals that Leto will eventually “go into the sand.” He will survive for millennia.

God Emperor of Dune jumps forward thousands of years, to the end of the reign of Leto II. Over the millennia, he has been able to remake all of galactic society in accordance with his Golden Path, which he believes will enable humanity to survive Kralizec, the Typhoon Struggle that he foresees occurring at the end of time. Central to this plan is his absolute control over the last remaining stores of spice, since the sandworms that generate it have been rendered extinct save for those larval forms encapsulated in his monstrous hybrid form. By doling out or withholding spice according to his pleasure, he is able to reward and punish formerly independent agencies such as the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, the Tlielaxu biotech masters, and the technologists of Ix.

However tight Leto’s control, there is still discontent, and some of it is within his own inner circle. In particular, Siona Atreides, beloved daughter and only child of Leto’s chamberlain Moneo, has entangled herself with a group of young rebels who steal a set of journals from Leto’s citadel. Leto is aware of her actions, but he believes that he can redirect her energies in accordance to his Golden Path. Thus, instead of having the Fish Speakers, his all-female army and secret police, arrest her, he has her initiated as one of them and assigns an agent personally loyal to him as her companion.

At the same time, Leto introduces his latest ghola-clone of Duncan Idaho, one of a long series he has kept as a sort of hobby, a reminder of his youth and his fading humanity. Duncan finds the Fish Speakers disturbing, more so when he is informed he is to be their commander, the sole male among them. As a result, he is quite willing to listen to Siona when she begins calling Leto the Tyrant.

Leto takes Siona on a walk through his tame desert, the Sareer, as his way of sensitizing her to his Golden Path. However, instead of converting her into a loyal follower, as her father Moneo became, the walk serves only to reinforce her determination to see Leto’s reign ended and humanity set free to follow its own paths.

After Leto crushes an attempt by the Tlielaxu to assassinate him using Face Dancers, the Ixians take a different approach. They send him a new ambassador, the beautiful Hwi Noree, who soon beguiles Leto to the point he is besotted. He announces that he will take her as a bride, and as their wedding procession passes over a bridge, it is ambushed by Siona and Duncan, who topple Leto’s royal cart into the river below. Afterward, Siona and Duncan find the dying Leto on the shore, where he tells them that they have served admirably in his plan to return Arrakis to the sandworms, whose larval forms have been freed from his body to burrow into the soil and trap the water, making the planet again inhabitable by the great worms.

Heretics of Dune begins shortly after the framing story for God Emperor of Dune. Arrakis, now known as Rakis, has been returned to the desert, and the worms are far more dangerous than they were previously. A young woman named Sheeana has survived the attack of a worm on her family’s desert-edge home, and she shows evidence of being able to control the giant creatures.

Meanwhile, it appears that Leto’s Golden Path was not as perfect as he thought. The Scattered Peoples are coming back, fleeing an enemy so terrible it may yet be able to engulf all of humanity. Among them are the Honored Matres, an offshoot of the Bene Gesserit who use a mode of sexual imprinting to control men. In their desperate fear, the returning refugees begin attacking the very people who are their best hope for succor, lest those peoples refuse to help.

The Bene Gesserit recall from retirement Miles Teg, a legendary commander with Bene Gesserit training. At the same time, they obtain a new ghola-clone of Duncan Idaho from the Tlielaxu, hoping that his wild genes may provide a surprise way of defeating their enemies. Desperate battles wage across the galaxy, and in one of them Rakis is attacked by massed nuclear weapons, sterilizing it. However, the Bene Gesserit have preserved a number of sandworms and their larval vectors. In Chapterhouse: Dune they seek to seed their Chapterhouse world to create a new source for the precious spice. Duncan steals the starship Ithaca and vanishes into hyperspace, where he sees a mysterious elderly couple, Marty and Daniel, who make a final cryptic comment.

Herbert's six Dune novels were followed by several books written by his son Brian Herbert and writer Kevin J. Anderson. These included prequels set before the events of Dune as well as sequels set after Chapterhouse: Dune and based on notes left by Frank Herbert. However, critical reception to the later works was much more mixed than the general acclaim given to the original novels.

In Popular Culture

The Dune series proved both critically and commercially successful, with the original novel in particular becoming one of the most popular science fiction works of all time. Like other major science fiction franchises such as Star Wars (for which Dune is considered an important influence) and Star Trek, it spawned an array of spinoffs and related works over the years. In addition to the official continuation of the series by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, further books and short stories set in the same fictional universe were published by many different authors. Though many of these were considered to be of lesser literary quality compared to the originals, they helped establish the franchise as a pop culture staple for many people. Iconic elements of the series, such as the sandworms, are frequently referenced in other works, from serious tributes to spoofs and parodies. Names of features on Saturn's moon Titan have even been drawn from Herbert's books.

The Dune series inspired many direct spinoffs in other media as well, such as card games and video games. Best known are the film and television adaptations. Efforts to create a film version of the original novel began in the 1970s, with several proposed versions faltering in development. Noted director David Lynch finally released the big-budget adaptation Dune in 1984, starring Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides. However, it was a major box-office bomb and Lynch disowned the work, claiming his artistic vision had been compromised by the producers. The film would remain divisive among fans of the Dune franchise and of Lynch, though it eventually gained cult classic status.

A television miniseries adaptation called Frank Herbert's Dune was released in 2000 on the Sci Fi Channel. It was generally praised and won multiple Emmy Awards. A sequel miniseries, Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (2003), explored the story lines of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. It also earned mostly strong reviews and became one of the Sci Fi Channel's most successful shows.

In 2013 the documentary film Jodorowsky's Dune was released, focusing on the failed attempt by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct a Dune adaptation in the 1970s. Meanwhile, efforts to develop a new film version continued to be discussed in the late 2000s and early 2010s. An adaptation from the studio Legendary Pictures was announced in 2016, and development and production proceeded over the next several years, with Denis Villeneuve signing on as director. Prominent stars including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, and Javier Bardem joined the cast of the highly anticipated remake. Originally scheduled for release in 2020, the film was delayed multiple times by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dune, the first film in a planned series, premiered in the United States in October 2021. It became a box office success, earning more than $400 million worldwide, and was critically acclaimed. At the 2022 Academy Awards, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won six, including Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects.

Following the success of the 2021 film, Dune: Part Two was quickly greenlit and eventually released in 2024 to vast critical and commercial success. Comprising roughly the second half of the first book and picking up where the 2021 film left off, Dune: Part Two was praised for both Villeneuve's directing and the cast's performances.

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