Media Review: Dune
The book my engineer friends have abandoned the most
A few years ago, a lot of my friends and acquaintances in the space world started reading Dune, first published by Frank Herbert in 1965.
However, relatively few friends finished the book on their first attempt, which seems to be quite common — and even fewer moved on to the sequel. I know only one friend who’s an engineer and has completed the whole original series. This is really unusual, given its ongoing popularity. Herbert wrote five sequels, and there’ve been something like 17 other books, 3 movies, and several video games built around the IP.
It’s also apparently impacted other science fiction.
In the context of the conversations going on these days about effective accelerationism (e/acc), as well as the recently released film (which I have yet to see), I reread the book during spring break.
CAUTION: Spoilers ahead for the bookDune is not a book that feels designed to be easy to read. The book is so dense that a second, or perhaps even third, reading of the text is almost necessary to understand it. But this is to be expected in light of its framing as an almost religious text. The epigraphs at the start of each chapter come from fictional historical records dated after the events of the book.
This has the effect of presenting the plot to readers almost like a historical religious text from some future happening after the events of the tome. And religious texts, of course, are meant to be read and reread; Dr. Yueh’s gift shows this holds as true in the book’s universe as much as my own experience shows it in this one.
The story takes place in a future where humanity has become an interstellar species, yet completely and violently rejects any sort of thinking machine. The galaxy is organized as an empire, ruled by an emperor, whose power is significant though not absolute, along with an assembly of hereditary great houses. Their power is checked by two institutions:
Bene Gesserit is a sisterhood with political, religious, and genetic objectives.
The Spacing Guild is a commercial group that has a monopoly on interstellar spaceflight.
Both of these institutions are absolutely dependent on an addictive, vital drug known as melange, found only in the deserts of the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune.
Within this context, a new great house becomes the ruler of Arrakis; the heir, Paul Atreides, is the protagonist of the book.
I found the plot, which details Paul’s rise to power, less interesting than the world-building which surrounds it.
This is unexpected because Paul is painted not just as a messiah, but as a classical hero. I would think that with a heroic main character, a great story could easily focus on the unique individual, but Herbert disagrees — and his narrative clearly works, even as it takes a backseat to world-building.
My key takeaways from the plot were:
First and foremost, I can’t shake the idea that variety is the spice of life. This is perhaps the best literary pun I’ve ever encountered.
The protagonist is Paul, but the story isn’t actually about him as a person. His impending ascent to the throne at the end of the book shows that it’s really the start of his imperial narrative. The way this is accomplished has direct political and economic consequences; there are clear religious implications to Paul’s status among both the Fremen, the people who have been on Arrakis the longest, as well as the Bene Gesserit.
In short, the text is a snapshot of a galaxy where effective accelerationism won, for a time.
And then it lost.
Humanity conquered the stars with the help of advanced computers, but then it suddenly and violently rejected them. Herbert doesn’t talk about the Butlerian Jihad in much detail, but it’s clear that the event has left lasting scars among the leadership of the galaxy thousands of years later. In this respect, the society of the book clearly would be opposed to effective accelerationism.
The political environment seems to have changed from rebellion against silicon overlords to a quasi-feudal society with a limited monarchy. In this universe, politics are at least notionally patrilineal. The rejection of advanced technology also has had adverse effects; social mobility is nearly non-existent, and slavery is tolerated in society — at least among the villainous Harkonnens.
To accomplish interstellar travel, Spacing Guild personnel consume melange to perform the advanced mathematics necessary to navigate the stars. For individuals, computers have been replaced by Mentats, humans who undergo special training to analyze problems in a way that seems altogether similar to what GenAI could accomplish.
But the book seems broadly critical of this society, in that the protagonist’s role is to totally upend its way of doing thigs.
By positioning Paul as a leader of Fremen, the people who have adapted to Dune for thousands of years, Herbert certainly takes an anti-colonialist point of view. More generally, Paul’s heroic narrative is easily charted as a part of a political system, who grows to oppose the system, and then agrees to reform the system from the inside.
I think engineers do and probably should feel deeply uncomfortable with Dune for two reasons; one relates to the society which Paul initially inhabits, and the other to the particular premise of Paul’s monomyth.
On a societal level, Dune’s starting premise is that technology has lost. That’s a tough concept to sell to most science fiction readers, but Herbert does it well. It’s an impossible concept to sell to engineers though.
This premise is essentially incompatible with readers who define their career, perhaps their vocation, as making technologies more common and useful throughout society — or better yet, creating new technologies. It’s such a different approach, and the book itself is so difficult to read, that I think this alone justifies its relative unpopularity with my friends.
The other issue is really specific to Paul Atreides. The concept of a heroic narrative in the literary sense feels relatively difficult for engineers because of how it engages with the unknown. His came across as more difficult than most.
As an engineer, I was trained on the job not to know everything, but to act as if everything could be known by the right process — that anybody could perform.
Setting aside the ethical issues intrinsic to Bene Gesserit genetic manipulation, the whole concept of Paul becoming the kwisatz haderach as as his venture into the unknown feels deeply unsettling to me in this respect. This idea that knowledge isn’t equally accessible to anybody who puts in the effort might be true in Dune, might even be true in reality, but it’s not pleasant to force a practicing engineer to engage with it. In some sense, this is to be expected, as the framing of this particular event is quite religious in nature, relative to much of the rest of the book, for both the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen.
For entrepreneurs and those in their circles, Dune is truly a cautionary tale.
On the surface, it seems to argue both that humanity won’t ever change, and that effective accelerationism is doomed to failure. But these conclusions are too broad to accept, and the settings across interstellar space almost immediately disprove it.
A more narrowly construed takeaway is that technology alone cannot and will not save humanity, because it can be manipulated and even rejected. To avoid this, founders and their supporters must engage actively with other fields — the book highlights politics, religion, and economics — because by anchoring their work in other aspects of a society, the likelihood of that society rejecting essential technology can be reduced.