Dune by Frank Herbert

And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action--the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand--moved a gigantic lever across the known universe.  He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.

The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.

The countless consequences--lines fanned out from this cave, and along most of these consequence-lines he saw his own dead body with blood flowing from a gaping knife-wound.

Last weekend I visited America's second-newest national park, Indiana Dunes.  (Remember travel?  Maybe we'll be able to do it again someday.)  I took along with me Frank Herbert's science fiction masterwork Dune, only partly as a pun and a joke: Herbert claimed that he was inspired to write the novel by the sand dunes he knew so well in Oregon.  The planet Arrakis in Dune is not so much a giant beach but a giant desert, and I had forgotten--I read this book, like I think a lot of young boys did, as a teen--how it's meant to be an amalgamation of the different desert landscapes of the earth.  The planets of Dune are all sort of biological manifestations of what the book calls mankind's "terran" origins, and so Arrakis is filled not just with sand and spice and giant worms but also saguaros, eagles, kangaroo mice.  It supports the plants and animals of the American southwest but the culture of the Fremen--the roving bands who live there and who prop up the spice trade--cribs a lot from the Islamic desert cultures of the Middle East and North Africa.

I was really interested in seeing how Dune stacked up against my memory.  At first blush, my reaction was that the novel seems like a high-quality version of many of the same narratives and archetypes that we see so often in fantasy.  It begins with a quarrel between "great houses": House Atreides, led by Duke Leto and his young son, Paul, and House Harkonnen.  The Emperor has recently replaced the Harknonnen monopoly on Arrakis, which produces the galactically valuable spice, giving it to the Atreides, but it's a trap: the Harkonnens and the Emperor are working together to destroy the Atreides.  Add to that a "chosen one" narrative: in the opening scenes of the book, Paul Atreides survives the trial of the gom jabbar, suggesting that he might be the Kwisatz Haderach, a prophet-like figure who is the end result of millennia of eugenic breeding by the secretive Bene Gesserit.  So far, so good.

The Harkonnen trap more or less works, but Paul and his mother Jessica survives, though they are pushed out into the desert where no one expects them to survive.  They're taken in, however, by the Fremen, who suspect that Paul might be their own chosen one: a messiah figure called the Mahdi.  (Paul has about a billion names in this thing: Mahdi, Muad'Dib, Usul, Kwisatz Haderach, Lisan al-Gaib, etc., etc.--like the many epithets of Jesus or something.)  One of the more interesting ideas in Dune is that local religions, like that of the Fremen, have actually been planted by the Bene Gesserit over thousands of years in order to enable them to do their secretive work among the many peoples of the universe.  Religion, for the Bene Gesserit, is a sociopolitical sham.

I think Dune ultimately rejects that view of religion.  Paul fits neatly into the chosen-one narratives of both the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen, but he manages to overshadow them both.  With the help of the spice, he gains incredible powers of seeing, into the future and the past, and the ability to see the consequences of billions of tiny choices.  Almost everyone in Dune has special powers--the hyperintelligence of the Mentats, who are like human computers, the mind-control training of the Bene Gesserit--but Paul outstrips them all.  In that way he suggests a power beyond reason, beyond history, something religious or prophetic in nature that cannot be controlled by the sociopolitical.  With these powers he seeks not only revenge on the Harkonnens but a way to guide the future of humanity, and part of his vision is that he will unerringly unleash a terrible jihad on the universe through his Fremen followers.

The best thing about Dune, in the end, is this: it has that quality of great science fiction that seems to collapse millennia into the space of a book.  It's big in a way that only Isaac Asimov's Foundation series really resembles, as far as I can recall.  In his desert stronghold, Paul considers the fate of humanity over a thousand years, and Herbert really makes you believe that he's doing it.