In the first half of this review, I looked at the physical content of Frank Herbert's created universe in Dune, but that is really only half the story. The politics and religion of both Arrakis and the rest of the Imperium are the ultimate driving force of the narrative, serving as both setting and plot.
The first Dune book spends more time exploring the Fremen than it does the Landsraad and the Imperium. The Fremen are more unique to Dune and therefore both more interesting and in need of more introduction. Herbert starts with them knowing the reader will take longer to understand them and doesn't drop too many details on the Imperium in the first book, saving that discovery for later installments in the series.
Dune is one of those books it’s effectively useless to review in a traditional sense. It doesn’t really matter to anyone if I like the book or not. It’s a classic, and it’s canon, and close to required reading for anyone who wants to write science fiction. I did my most recent re-read of Dune in this spirit—enjoying the story, sure, but trying to look beyond the story and see the underpinnings of Frank Herbert’s world and the way that he created it.
Because there's a lot to look at with this world, I've split the post into two parts. This first post will look at the physical aspects of the invented world of Dune, while the next will explore the culture.
I’ve traveled a lot in the past, but mostly under the usual vacation format: taking time off work and dedicating all my time to exploring a new place. Early in my freelancing career I took a working road trip, a multi-stop ramble from Pittsburgh to LA and back in a mix of Greyhound busses and a friend’s converted van, and I quickly learned what lots of folks reading this probably already know: traveling is hard work. On that first trip I’d only had a part-time workload, with fewer clients and longer deadlines than I have currently, and it had still been tricky to squeeze it all in between getting from place to place—and actually enjoying myself once we got there. The trip was fun but exhausting, and I came back completely spent and with a pile of work to catch up on.
For my most recent attempt at a the much-touted digital nomad life, I decided to take a different approach: slow traveling. I booked my entire one-month stay in Mérida, Mexico, kept my full client load, and set out to test whether it was really possible to enjoy traveling while I worked, or if this was all just some big scheme orchestrated by travel agents and Instagram influencers.
Jadzia Dax’s death in episode 6.26 of Deep Space 9 (“Tears of the Prophets”) is one of the few scenes from the series I have clear memories of watching as a kid. It was shocking, and crushing, on the first view—this is Star Trek, after all, not a show generally inclined toward killing off its main characters, and Jadzia was far from a red-shirt. I could never warm up to Ezri Dax my first time with the series. Like Worf on the show, I looked at her and could only see how much she wasn’t Jadzia.