Dune: Recommended Reading

Sequels are the mind killer.

Jude: It's been a while, but we’re finally back to think about recommendations for people who liked Dune. As with our Lord of the Rings recommendations, we can’t point you to a book that’s “just like” Dune, and we’re going to resist the temptation to just recommend our favorite science fiction books. Instead, we’re going to try to break things out by different aspects of Dune you might have liked.

Thomas: First, though, we should address the most straightforward path to getting “more Dune”. Frank Herbert wrote five sequels. So…just read those.

Jude: Ah, well, it’s not so simple. The sequels have a well-earned reputation for being increasingly weird. Of course there’s weird stuff in Dune as well. The thing is, whereas our central thesis about Dune is that succeeds because it's packed full of many different ideas, the sequels get narrower and narrower. Right away, Dune Messiah really undermines Paul as not just a savior but even as an active protagonist. And unmoored from coming-of-age framework that anchors Dune to hundreds of other stories you've encountered, Herbert has free reign to really focus on what he's most interested in.

Thomas: I guess you’re not really getting “more Dune” so much as “more Frank Herbert”. Not such an attractive proposition, it turns out.

Jude: Some people love the Dune sequels, to be clear. It just depends how much you like picking up what Frank is putting down. The typical advice is to keep reading the Dune series as long as you like what you’re reading, and then the moment you don’t like it anymore…stop. Because it’s only going to get worse from wherever you are when you hit that point.

Thomas: For most normal people, that point is probably the end of Dune.

Jude: Then I guess we aren’t normal people. I am very glad to have read Dune Messiah!

Thomas: Of course we’re not normal! We’re not even real!

Jude: Don’t remind me. Anyway, I guess I should also say that—according to Goodreads—some people even like the posthumous novels published by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I’ve never met anyone in person who admitted this, but apparently they exist! So you never know. You, reader, could be one of these people.

Thomas: But…you probably aren’t.

Jude: Yeah, if you finish all of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and still want more, I think you’re better served trying his four book Pandora Sequence. Destination: Void predates the later Dune novels but has some similarities to them in its elevation of character and philosophy over action.

Thomas: If you’d like to read a book-length treatise on artificial intelligence and the philosophy of consciousness that’s written fifty years ago by someone without any actual expertise in either subject, Destination: Void is a great choice.

Jude: I’m not sure how well it all holds up, but the overall framing of wanting to benefit from powerful AI but being deeply afraid of the consequences feels like it is still relevant to modern circumstances.

Thomas: Yet we haven't read past the first one in that series. Let's move on to the options not written by someone with the last name “Herbert”.

Jude: Right. Well, one of the distinctive elements of Dune is its focus on the hostile desert environment. If Lord of the Rings is, at some level, about a fun camping trip, Dune has that camping element as well, but the camping is unpleasant. So here’s another book in a similar vein: Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is the first of a trilogy that was very popular back in the 1990s but which I don’t hear about so much anymore.

Thomas: These days he’s associated with near-future eco-dystopia with books like The Years of Rice and Salt and New York 2140.

Jude: I’m partial to a different book of his, Aurora, which is a farther-future science fiction novel with a revisionist take on the venerable SF novel trope of generation starships. Although there’s still a pretty strong strain of eco-dystopia in there.

Thomas: Still, the Goodreads ratings suggest the Mars trilogy is still his most read work.

Jude: Yeah, Red Mars is from 1992 and describes the beginning of an ambitious colonization and terraforming project on Mars. Obviously you get a hostile, desert-like environment, and its one that Robinson really puts a lot of effort into describing in incredible detail.

Thomas: Stupendous detail. Stupefying detail, maybe.

Jude: It can be a lot, but I think it’s a book that’s clearly in dialogue with Dune and its notions of Fremen terraforming, something that the actual Dune sequels don’t really choose to focus on. Robinson’s trilogy also has plenty of political intrigue as the colonists argue and eventually fight over what to do and how to govern themselves.

Thomas: It’s been a while, but as I recall, there’s also a lot of crude national stereotyping. And by the time you get to Blue Mars, a lot of board meetings and executives touring facilities.

Jude: Well, they weren’t perfect at the time and I’m sure they haven’t aged perfectly either, but I don't think anything since has done a better job painting a picture of starting a colony on another planet. They’re also worth reading because at this point there’s been an influential generation of people who grew up reading these books and are still inspired by them.

Thomas: That’s funny because Kim Stanley Robinson is, politically, so far from Elon Musk, and yet…

Jude: Musk surely read these, but I think it’s more helpful to think of his employees as having read them, particularly at SpaceX. In the early 2000s, for people who read books like Red Mars, NASA seemed hugely disappointing, so someone coming along with a vision for doing better in the private sector was really compelling.

Thomas: Poor KSR, he inspired thousands of people who are, slowly, making his visions a reality, except the monkey’s paw curls and the guy leading it has the politics of a character in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash instead of Robinson’s thoughtful eco-socialism.

Jude: Let’s move on to the next book. Another key thing people like about Dune is the scheming characters and political intrigue. Dune has several different semi-independent factions jostling for power and influence throughout the book. You’d think this would be a simple formula to copy, but it must be harder than it sounds because there aren’t a lot of similarly successful books.

Thomas: Our culture has a reasonably strong preference for essentially good and honest protagonists and a very strong preference for the hero to be an underdog. It’s not impossible to reconcile this with scheming, but it’s not a good fit. Villains obviously make sense as schemers and so comic book villains often do a lot of this, but people realized a few decades ago that a scheming outcast weirdo, like a typical Batman villain, isn’t nearly as intimidating as someone who sits on top of society and wields its power against the protagonist. But if they are running the society, there’s no need for villains to scheme. The Emperor has a really fun scheme in The Phantom Menace when he’s not actually Emperor yet and a bit of an underdog going up against the Jedi, but by the original series he’s just sitting around and the best scheme he can manage in Return of the Jedi is “you naturally assume our defense contractors are way behind schedule and over budget, but thanks to my evil scheme, they are slightly less behind schedule than you expected”.

Frank Herbert skillfully arranges matters in Dune so that a lot of the scheming happens in the phase of the book where the main character, Paul, is mostly a bystander. The book’s chief villain, Baron Harkonnen, is quite intimidating yet isn’t in charge of his society, so he needs to scheme.

Jude: Anyway, a book I’d recommend along these lines is one that won the Hugo award in 1981 but unfortunately has been mostly forgotten since, The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. This novel uses the Hans Christian Andersen fable as the plot outline but transposes it to an obviously Dune-inspired science fictional setting. An interstellar human society is exploiting a single planet for its unique resource.

Thomas: But it’s different because it’s a water world instead of a desert world!

Jude: It’s a lot more different, actually. There are two different “native” societies on the planet in Snow Queen, relatively sophisticated city people and people more primitive and superstitious, but whereas Herbert can’t help making the rustic Fremen powerful manly men who are obviously superior to Arrakis’ city people in every way, Vinge’s city people can hold their own. In particular, their leader, the eponymous Snow Queen, is a schemer who collaborates with the interstellar humans but who has big ambitions of her own. The Snow Queen is the villain from the Andersen fable and we as readers don't like her methods, but Vinge makes sure we understand her motivations and aims aren't entirely unjust.

It's also different from Dune because instead of Dune's coming of age revenge story, the underlying fable sets up the story to follow two lovers who have been cruelly separated by the Snow Queen's machinations. Needless to say this gives it a much different vibe.

Thomas: If you finished Dune and said, I wish this had a lot more sexual tension, then yes, this is the book for you. Unfortunately, the male half of the pair of lovers leaves a lot to be desired.

Jude: There's an follow-on story we haven't read and then a full sequel, Summer Queen, which we read as teenagers and thus were unprepared with how the fable scaffold fully drops away and the reader is confronted with realistic relationships suffering from sadly realistic problems.

Thomas: See, this is what happens when you give love interests more depth than Chani. All you get are problems.

Jude: The female love interest, Moon, is really the main character in Snow Queen, actually!

Thomas: I wasn't talking about her, I was talking about the male half of the love interest, Sparks, who is clearly the Chani of that particular relationship.

Jude: Ouch.

Thomas: I know, not really fair to Chani, who at least isn’t annoying.

Jude: Chani, direct your complaints to Thomas, not me. But let’s keep going to our next book. This time, I was thinking about the intersection of religion and mysticism. Clearly an important part of the Dune recipe!

Thomas: Important enough that people feel like it needs to be included, but unlike Frank Herbert, they usually boil it down until there's nothing interesting left, as in Star Wars with the Force.

Jude: Well, I want to recommend something that approaches this freighted topic with a similar courage: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Published in 1967 only a year after Dune, this novel combines two seemingly very different stories: intrigue and in-fighting among the leaders of a space colony and the emergence of Buddhism as a reaction to and an answer for some concerns present in the Hinduism of Buddha's day.

Thomas: The moral of this story is that if you find yourself joining Elon Musk on a ship going to colonize Mars, make sure you're a senior member of his crew and not just a lowly passenger.

Jude: In Zelazny's story, the crew of the colony ship has access to high technology that, among other things, allows them to fly, shoot lightning bolts, change one's gender at will, and to scan people's brains and recreate them as babies after their death, optionally with their memories intact. Naturally, they decide to deprive the passengers of any ability to understand or wield this technology and to set themselves up as gods. Specifically, the Hindu gods, enforcing a reincarnation cycle where your karma determines the status of your next life.

Thomas: Very natural behavior.

Jude: It's not a coincidence or a situation where a distinct civilization has independently landed on Hindu-ish concepts. The ship is from Earth and the crew is literally copying ideas from Hinduism. And so when one of the crew members decides he wants to lead a revolution against the "gods", he uses the weapon that history has provided to fight their religion.

Thomas: Islam?

Jude: Buddhism.

Thomas: Seems like you would pick the competing religion with billions of adherents over the one with millions.

Jude: Well, he picks Buddhism. Anyway, Zelazny is a gifted writer but above all very clever, and he is in top form coming up with ways to align science fictional tropes with Hindu and Buddhist concepts. And very relevant to the sham prophecies of Dune, although I'm not sure if there was a direct influence, the main character, Sam, is definitely not a Buddhist and doesn't at all believe what he's preaching.

Thomas: A quality he shares with the author.

Jude: And with us, so if you are skeptical that a white American author in the 60s did a good job capturing the essence of Hinduism and Buddhism…you're probably right to be, but it seemed convincing to me!

Thomas: Zelazny makes a lot more jokes than Frank Herbert does, which adherents of these religions might not always appreciate but which I as a reader definitely approve of.

Jude: I'd argue that while Lord of Light does have a cynical streak running through it—how could it not with that premise—it also foregrounds the experiences of actual religious believers and respects them in a way that Dune frankly never does.

Thomas: Unless the believer is Christian…

Jude: Yeah, like you said, there are a lot of jokes in here, and I'd argue the Christian character is Zelazny playing a bit of a joke on what must have been a predominantly Christian readership. Anyway, although it won a Hugo, this book is increasingly obscure and Hollywood surely will never have the guts to adapt it, so definitely check it out. I actually think it’s a better book than Dune, to be honest.

Thomas: The reader’s mileage may vary, though.

Jude: Of course, just throwing that out there. Finally, I think we should address maybe the most important aspect of Dune: its grand, sweeping vision. It incorporates ideas from the past, like barbarian tribes bringing down empires in general and the Arab conquest of Persia and parts of the Byzantine Empire in particular. It references issues from the present, like climate change and the presence of oil in the Middle East. And—although this is more of a feature of the sequels than Dune itself—it's interested in the future of humanity and how to free it from stasis.

Thomas: That's a lot to cover with just one recommendation.

Jude: But there is a good book to recommend here: Glen Cook's 1988 novel The Dragon Never Sleeps. It's probably not a coincidence that it fits so well. Glen Cook must have been strongly influenced by Dune, although sadly this book continues to languish in obscurity. Apparently the publisher went bankrupt right after publishing it, so it was extremely hard to find for two decades before finally coming back into print.

Thomas: The title is also bad. There are no dragons in this book.

Jude: The title's a metaphor that makes plenty of sense…if you've read the book. But yes, like Dune this is a far-future science fiction novel. Like Dune, there's a longstanding interstellar empire with squabbling noble houses that's clearly drawing on past archetypes, although in this case it's Rome much more than Constantinople. And like Dune, the setting is packed with wild ideas, albeit different ones: bio-engineered aliens, senile AIs, soldiers who are effectively thousands of years old because their minds backed up on computers, and plenty more.

Thomas: Maybe it’s a little too wild for it's own good. The usual problem that beset fantasy and science fiction in those days was massive books that moved way too slowly, but Dragon Never Sleeps reads like a trilogy that has been haphazardly edited down into a single book. In fact, Cook told someone in an interview pretty much that, minus the word "haphazardly". It's all a bit frayed and doesn't quite hang together.

Jude: Maybe so, but I also think the book succeeds magnificently at much of what it sets out to do. And perhaps because of all that editing, it takes on portentous topics like immortality, humanity's future, and decaying empires in a way that's not nearly so ponderous as you'd expect. Also, compared to Herbert's work where the author has a clear thesis they expect you to end up agreeing with them about, Cook allows his setting and many of the characters to remain ambiguous. Is his weird AI space empire a good thing? Characters provide some good arguments on its behalf compared to potential alternatives, yet the day to day lives of its unprivileged inhabitants really aren't acceptable. The book does a really rare thing where it encourages us, successfully I think, to root for (and against) characters on both sides of the conflict.

And that's all I have today, but I daresay it's a good set of books! They're all really unique, really strong in ways, and a mix of well-known and off the beaten path. So we can wrap up, unless you want to do the thing you did in our Lord of the Rings recommendations and do anti-recommendations?

Thomas: I do, but it's much harder here. Dune was quite influential, but it wasn't genre-defining in the same way that Lord of the Rings was, so it hasn't attracted nearly the same amount of work rejecting its premises. But there’s one book I’d like to put forward that offers very different perspectives on a few of the key themes.

Jude: Let's hear it.

Thomas: It’s Kameron Hurley's God's War.

Jude: Really? But…that book, and series, is absolutely nothing like Dune!

Thomas: Yes? These anti-recommendations are about opposites, aren't they?

Jude: I guess, but—

Thomas: And there actually are a few resonances. God's War takes place on an inadequately terraformed colony planet where there's a lot of desert and where future-Muslims are engaged in holy war. In fact, my initial reason for picking it was that I thought it takes religion in general and Islam in particular much more seriously than Frank Herbert did, or even Roger Zelazny in Lord of Light.

Jude: Yes, but we're now two for two on recommending books involving other religions written by authors who, to our knowledge, didn’t grow up with or spend any meaningful time practicing that religion.

Thomas: God's War isn't even all that interested in religion itself, but it's very interested in its characters and what motivates them, and that requires it to take religion seriously. The main character, Nyx, is a woman who works as a bounty hunter, tracking down and usually killing deserters who are fleeing service in the titular war. The most important secondary character is a man named Rhys, and he and Nyx present the reader with a series of contrasts. Nyx's society has become matriarchal due to most of the men dying in the war while Rhys is from a conservative and patriarchal society. Nyx is a rogue and an antihero, a swaggering, promiscuous, violent, and reckless person. Rhys is prim, religious, bookish, and completely useless in a fight. It's basically a gender swap of the archetype of a tough guy protecting a damsel in distress.

Jude: Also, trigger warning, besides all the swearing and violence, the technology on this planet is based on biotech and so a lot of unpleasant things happen involving bugs. The colony world was supposed to be terraformed by a variety of very sophisticated bugs, but due to infighting among the colonists, they lost control of the bugs and the technology to construct them. Or even understand them, really.

Thomas: Ah yes, the bugs, it's quite clever, taking the sort of high technology we associate with squeaky clean starship corridors and making it seem literally dirty by embodying it within insects.

But the point here is that while I don't think Hurley really had Dune in mind while writing this, God's War inverts a lot of things people take for granted about Dune. Nyx isn't a noble like Paul, she doesn't really have much control over her society or the grand sweep of events, she has hardly any self-control, and she solves problems with her fists and her guns rather than her brain. The focus of the narrative is always down at the level of individuals, where life is messy and unexpected and doesn't fit in with what the people running society might plan. The idea that any individual, however gifted, could seize the reins of this society and direct it toward an intended future is completely laughable.

And that is a much more honest view of the world, I’d argue, than is provided by the science fiction and fantasy genres in general and Dune in particular.

Jude: As our futile attempt at summarizing makes clear, though, the setting is jam-packed with interesting things, so that at least is another similarity with Dune. This was published in 2011 at the height of “grimdark” so it sure hits a lot harder than Dune was well.

Thomas: Sometimes grimdark fiction goes too far, but when telling this sort of story, I’d also argue that God’s War does a far better job making its point about the horrors of war than Dune’s offscreen jihads.

Jude: Well, there you have it. “God’s War is better than Dune.” — Thomas.

Thomas: I didn’t say it’s better, I said it’s more true and I’ll stand by that.

Jude: No doubt a completely mundane novel by a New England literature professor about a literature professor having an affair in New England would be even more true.

Thomas: Probably, but even I can only handle so much truth at once.

Jude: And our readers can only handle so much of us at once, so we’re going to wrap up here. Hopefully we’ll be back sooner than last time with looks at Dune and Lord of the Rings adaptations.