I have a Google Calendar reminder for today being Frank Herbert's birthday because...I do. For those unfamiliar, Herbert is the author of Dune including the core six books that have comprised the series for as long as anyone can remember until his son started writing supplementary material.
While it'll always feel that other big book series like The Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time have larger (and at times louder) fan communities centered around them, Dune has always been my favorite big book series. But that celebration of the books has always been a relatively private affair for one reason or another. It can't be helped, I suppose. Dune is not an easy book to read and as much as I'm a big fan of the series, it's not exactly the sort of book that I can easily recommend to others either.
It's hard to explain precisely why this book has resonated with me so much over the years. Is it just because it was my first big book series and getting through the books starting the 4th grade of my elementary school years felt like such an achievement? Maybe it's because it felt like such a smart book to read and the concepts contained within really got me to reevaluate how I view the world and the big things that keep our society running. Maybe the way the book presents things was just so drastically different from anything else I had consumed as media, which includes the already philosophical stories contained with Star Trek. It may not be life-changing for everyone, but it was certainly life-changing for me.
There's a certain...seriousness that comes with this book. It bandies about concepts related to politics, religions, the curse of the messianic figure, and even some ecology thrown into the mix. It has people who say one thing and do another on a regular basis and everything feels like almost everything is some sort of lesson that you need to dissect and figure out. And that's not counting the really bonkers stuff like genetic memory, near-superhuman abilities achieved solely through training, and sex utilized as a means of control and leverage. There's just so much.
It's only because of the 2021 and 2024 movies by Denis Villeneuve that the franchise has become truly accessible to a larger audience even though the 1984 movie probably had a larger impact in terms of how we visualize the universe while the 2000-2003 TV series is probably the most faithful in terms of story and dialogue despite a visual treatment that was...original.
So happy birthday, Frank Herbert! Thank you for being bonkers enough to bring the Dune universe to life. I promise that I'll continue to re-read your books when I can because the series remains so important to me. And I'm still working my way through his non-Dune fiction, which at times feels even more bonkers at times.
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