Book Review: “The Winds of Dune”

In recent months, Dune fans everywhere (myself included) have been excited about the announcement that Denis Villeneuve–the Canadian producer of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049–will be producing a new adaptation of Dune, which will be available to fans in 2020. There have been attempts to adapt Dune with low levels of success. It has been difficult to adapt to film because of the cultural, introspective, and psychological complexities of the novel. There was a series in the 80’s which featured a young Sting. The Children of Dune sequel series was much more enjoyable, and there was an aborted attempt by Chilean visionary producer Alejandro Jodorowsky to remake it in the 70s. The inability to make Jodorowsky’s Dune happen has invited the resentment of loyal fans, but now we have a new and promising adaptation by a talented producer with a solid track record to look forward to.

An easy way to explain Dune to non-initiates is take planet Tatooine from Star Wars, add giant worms, a substance (“spice”) that both alters consciousness and fuels spaceships, a messianic desert religion from another planet 8,000 years into our future, and a little Game of Thrones (competing dynasties vying for power), and you can begin to imagine what it’s like to be immersed in the intricate plot of Dune.

Trivia: The Oregon coastal dunes are what inspired Frank Herbert to write the first 1965 Dune novel, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and went on to have a huge influence in other sci-fi universes, like Star Wars. I suspect the original site will become a place of pilgrimage for Dune fans after the movie comes out next year.

I say all this to say that Dune is much more enjoyable to read than to watch because, like many other sci-fi masterpieces, it is a story about ideas and not just about characters and plot. Since I could hardly wait, and since I wished to refresh my mind, I decided to read a Dune sequel novel. After the death of Frank Herbert, his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have continued to write novels set in the Duniverse and to expand on the plot using notes left behind by Frank Herbert. One of their novels, The Winds of Dune is exactly what I was after: an adventure into the Duniverse. In the past, I’ve tried to read other novels in the Duniverse (other than the original one) and had difficulty following the novel, in part because the novel I was reading was a war novel and not written in the style of the original … more Rogue One than Star Wars 7. The Winds of Dune, instead, takes us back to the magic of the original novel.

Reading Winds of Dune today as an Epicurean made me realize that some aspects of Dune mirror the hellish society imagined by Plato in his Republic, where mothers who are subjected to the Bene Gesserit breeding program, have their children taken from them to be reared by royal houses whose genetic pools the Bene Gesserit have taken an interest in, and people are unable to have normal human emotions. Many of the so-called “mystical” characters in the Duniverse exhibit the worst of Stoic features. For instance, the Bene Gesserit are a galactic sisterhood of witches who manipulate human societies and their histories by seeding folk myths in the cultures that they can later exploit, and are obsessed with bloodlines and with the creation of superhuman messiah-like beings. In Winds of Dune one of the main characters, Lady Jessica, was unable to properly mourn the death of her son due to “her Bene Gesserit training“, which required a purge of all the normal emotions. Elsewhere, when she was depicted as suddenly knowing the right thing to do, it was thanks to rare, small outbursts of emotion that weren’t supposed to happen. The Bene Gesserit toolkit of psychological control includes the power of guilt-casting, a power that any survivor of Catholic indoctrination knows well. I don’t remember previous Dune novels treating the Bene Gesserit as the insidious, tyrannical, dangerous, and evil sorority that they are, but maybe my memory doesn’t serve me well. I read the first Dune over 15 years ago.

If you love science fiction, you can’t miss an excursion into the Duniverse. In the absence of spice-fueled spacecraft and a time machine, Winds of Dune is a great way to travel into the Duniverse and be part of the Dune adventure today, and it’s also a great way to anticipate the pleasures of the upcoming Dune 2020 movie.

Buy The Winds of Dune

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