The Spice Must Flow, page 11
In the broadest sense, Children of Dune is the closest thing Herbert ever did to just remaking Dune itself. Although various twists and turns are different, the big stuff is essentially the same. In the first book, House Atreides struggles to control Arrakis, with interference from both House Corrino and House Harkonnen. Ditto Children of Dune, only now House Corrino isn’t the ruling house anymore, and Baron Harkonnen’s spirit possesses Alia to try to ruin House Atreides. Duncan Idaho dies in the first Dune protecting Paul and Jessica, and then in Children of Dune, the second Duncan dies as well, once again serving “the Atreides’ interests even when the family itself was internally riven.” Finally, both Dune and Children of Dune end with a bittersweet victory that is really a curse. Leto II becomes the new Paul of the story, struggling to control his prescience, and, like his father, is aware that his rule as emperor will not be a walk in the park for many, many people. Paul didn’t literally fuse with a sandworm, of course, which makes Children of Dune the ultimate sequel that tries to top the original. Imagine if one of the Jurassic Park sequels ended with Jeff Goldblum transforming into a velociraptor and then ruling Isla Nublar and the world at large. That’s how on the nose Children of Dune is. When it was published in 1976, fans loved it. And the reviews weren’t bad, either.
In his review for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Robert LaRouche pointed out the book was much more than a sequel in which a bunch of stuff happens. “Herbert does more than carry events forward: he deals with consequences. . . . As a work of ideas Children of Dune completes the trilogy’s pattern but does not end it.”
Bullitt Lowry of the Denton Record-Chronicle, who didn’t think the book was perfect, nonetheless deemed it a comeback for Herbert, writing, “Children of Dune is far better than Dune Messiah.”
John Campbell passed away in 1971, so in late 1975, when it came time to try to serialize Children of Dune in Analog, this homecoming was smooth sailing for Herbert. Following Campbell’s death, Analog was edited by science fiction author Ben Bova, who enthusiastically published Children of Dune in four parts, starting with the January 1976 issue and continuing through the April 1976 issue. Because the cover date is always a month ahead for magazines, this means that from December 1975 through March 1976, newsstands couldn’t keep the four-part serial in stock. Analog sold out of all newsstand editions that contained Children of Dune in serialization. The circulation of Analog in the early seventies was 100,000 copies, so when we consider that four issues would mean roughly 400,000 copies, that’s a solid sign that Dune was in huge mainstream demand. Although this was the very last Frank Herbert–penned Dune novel to be serialized in a science fiction magazine prior to book publication, this also all happened at the very end of the era in which Analog was still a Condé Nast publication. By 1977, Bova had quit, and by 1980, Condé Nast sold Analog to Davis Publications. But in 1976, having Condé Nast’s random sci-fi magazine selling out on newsstands because of Dune was a massive deal. None of this was niche. All of it was mainstream.
Although Putnam had low-balled Herbert on the advance for Children, the successful run of serialization in Analog proved that there might be interest in the third sequel in a big way. As Brian Herbert put it, the Analog magazine sales gave Herbert’s then-editor at Putnam, David Hartwell, “ammunition” to convince Putnam to change the publication plan for Children of Dune. The push to make Children of Dune into a massive event was similar to Peter Jackson’s winning the Oscar for all three Lord of the Rings movies when he won for Return of the King in 2004: For Hartwell, this wasn’t just about pushing the new Dune book, it was about reminding everyone of how great the first novel was, too. Although the first Dune was an underground hit by the 1970s, the book itself had never hit a formal bestseller list of the time, because of the slow-burn nature of its cult following.
A cherub-faced man known for wearing loud ties uniron- ically and possessing one of the sweetest personalities in science fiction publishing, the late great David Hartwell understood that Dune appealed to “more than just science fiction fans.” From 2010 to 2013, I personally worked with David Hartwell at the science fiction publishers Tor and Tor.com. While there as a renegade twenty-nine-year-old blogger, I penned a column called “Genre in the Mainstream,” in which I ignorantly tilted at windmills and hoped that various literary titles could be embraced by science fiction fans while various SF titles could be picked up by the mainstream. While some of it makes me cringe now, my heart was in the right place. But Hartwell, a legend in the SF publishing field, always encouraged this project. Before his death in 2016, around the early part of 2012, Hartwell leaned in the doorway of my cramped shared office on the top floor of the Flatiron Building,[*] rocking an analog film camera dangling around his neck. A group of us were heading to a book reading somewhere in the city, and Hartwell and I were chatting casually about how science fiction exists both in the public eye and in a private small fandom simultaneously. I was then, and still am, preoccupied with the reasons why niche science fiction narratives become mainstream obsessions, and why some very good sci-fi, for whatever reason, doesn’t. And I’ll never forget what he told me. “Dune proved science fiction could be mainstream.”
David Hartwell was the person who made this happen. He pushed Putnam to print 75,000 copies, instead of the meager 7,500 copies that were planned. When Children of Dune hit bookstores in April 1976, it sold over 100,000 copies in the first two months. To support this huge success, Frank Herbert was sent on his first-ever book tour, hitting twenty-one cities in just a month. By the time it was in paperback with Berkley Books in 1977, the first print run was 750,000. A science fiction hardcover had never been declared a New York Times bestseller before Children of Dune. Bill Erdman wrote for The World on May 28, 1976, “[The] third Dune book rings true,” and that Children of Dune “redeems Herbert’s reputation.” On April 25, 1976, Ben Reuven in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Children of Dune “is a major event” and “serves to confirm the genre-shattering appeal of the Dune trilogy’s ecological message.”
The ecological message was there, of course. But notice that other phrase: genre-shattering. With 1976, the various versions of Dune weren’t just science fiction stories. From the failed screenplays to the daring third novel, as 1977 unfolded, Dune was one of the most mainstream science fiction phenomena of all time. What could be more powerful than the spice and the Voice? In 1976, Dune ruled science fiction literary circles and mainstream literary circles. Now it just needed to conquer the movies. And no Force in the galaxy could stop it . . . yet.
8
Spice Wars
Star Wars borrows the voice and soul of Dune.
No, my father didn’t fight in the wars, he was a navigator on a spice freighter.
—Luke Skywalker, Star Wars (1977)
The greatest twentieth-century film version of Dune was released in 1977, and it was called Star Wars. This relationship isn’t just a casual one. There is no way the 1977 Star Wars could have ever existed without Dune coming first. If there is a populist evolutionary chain of mainstream science fiction, and we consider Star Wars to be the most “evolved” of the species because of its massive profits, then Dune would be like the prehistoric Homo heidelbergensis, and Star Wars, Homo sapiens.[*] This analogy isn’t all that clean because Dune is more intelligent than Star Wars, even if it is less popular, or perhaps simply older. But still. Dune is the Elvis to the Beatles of Star Wars. And I’m not just saying that because a guy who played Elvis (Austin Butler) is also in a Dune movie.[*]
Back in 1977, fans of Dune noticed the striking visual similarities in Star Wars right away. “I must have been seventeen or eighteen, I remember seeing a couple of the scenes in the desert with R2-D2 and C-3PO and you see that crazy skeleton creature in the sand, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s sort of like Dune.’ ” The teenage Dune superfan who spotted the visual similarity was none other than Kyle MacLachlan. Ever since he was in junior high, when his friend Jim gave him the first Ace paperback edition of the novel, MacLachlan had been a big fan of the book. In 2022, after telling me about when he spotted Dune references in Star Wars, he added, “Everyone still pays homage to Dune,” and pointed out that Star Wars has never stopped. “I still see it. I watch all those new shows—The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor—and they’re always referencing Dune. Spice is some kind of revered substance in Star Wars, and don’t forget that thing in the desert that looks exactly like the mouth of the sandworm!”
Unsurprisingly, Kyle MacLachlan is right. The skeleton of a Krayt dragon, glimpsed in the first Star Wars film, later appeared as a flesh-and-blood sand monster in 2020, in the Mandalorian season 2 episode “The Marshal,” and it really looked like a sandworm of Arrakis. The “thing in the desert” with the mouth of the sandworm is the Sarlacc on Tatooine, which first appeared in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, one year before Dune, starring Kyle MacLachlan, hit theaters. Yes, the spice has been flowing through Star Wars for quite a while. Within the first five minutes of the original Star Wars, C-3PO worries about getting sent to “the spice mines of Kessel” if he and R2-D2 get caught. Han Solo moved spice illegally for Jabba the Hutt, and in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker we learned that Poe Dameron—played by Duke Leto Atreides himself, Oscar Isaac—was also a spice smuggler. Back in the 1990s, when Star Wars novels were all the rage, future Dune continuation novelist Kevin J. Anderson corresponded with George Lucas about the nature of the Star Wars version of spice, to make sure this was, indeed, some variety of space narcotic with mind-expanding properties. Although the editors of the Star Wars novels of the time wanted to tone down the druglike aspects of spice in Star Wars, Anderson claims that George Lucas told him, “Of course it’s a drug.” In that since-abandoned Star Wars continuity, some highly addictive forms of spice, called “glitterstim,” are the byproduct of giant space spiders instead of sandworms.
Even as recently as 2022, the animated Star Wars series Tales of the Jedi revisited a planet called Raxus Secundus, which borrows its name from both the prison planet Salusa Secundus in Dune as well as “Rakis,” the name by which Arrakis is known in the distant future, starting with Herbert’s fourth Dune novel, 1981’s God Emperor of Dune. In the second episode of the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi, the titular Jedi hero (played by Ewan McGregor) is offered street drugs right away by a young woman who says: “You want some spice, old man?” From the monsters they face, to the ground they walk on, to the spice they smuggle, the heroes and villains of George Lucas’s famous faraway galaxy seemingly wouldn’t have a galaxy to live in at all if Star Wars hadn’t cribbed more than a little from Dune.
“Star Wars borrowed from Dune a lot,” Frank Herbert told Rolling Stone in 1984, just months before David Lynch’s Dune hit theaters. “I think they owe me at least a dinner.” But did he always feel like this? And, more crucially, did Star Wars rip off Dune or merely pay homage?
Shortly after Star Wars hit theaters on May 25, 1977, it was Herbert’s son Brian who alerted him via telephone, saying, “You better see it. The similarities are unbelievable.” But by late August 1977, Herbert claimed he had still not seen Star Wars. When interviewed by the Associated Press[*] that month, he said he’d heard from friends and colleagues, and an editor at The Village Voice, that he might want to consider suing George Lucas. “I will try not to sue. I have no idea what book of mine it fits,” Herbert said in August 1977. “I suspect it may be Dune since in that I had a Princess Alia and the movie has a Princess Leia. And I hear there is a sandworm caucus[*] [sic] and hooded dwellers in the desert, just like in Dune.”
This is amazing. By August 1977, Star Wars had been out for three months, and Frank Herbert just could not be bothered to see it. His supposed ignorance about which book of his other people thought Star Wars ripped off also scans as a bit much. Did Frank Herbert really think Star Wars could have ripped off The Dragon in the Sea or The Santaroga Barrier? Was he legitimately unaware or was he just being a snob? Based on what he said publicly, it’s surprisingly tough to pin down what Herbert truly thought of the whole affair. Particularly throughout the back end of 1977, because he often seemed to take both sides. Either Star Wars totally ripped off Dune and Herbert wanted to sue, or Herbert didn’t care and thought that Star Wars ripped off everybody. For what it’s worth, George Lucas was also contacted by the Associated Press and basically said “no comment,” without saying it. As the article states, “Lucas, who says he drew on many sources in preparing the Star Wars script, declines to say whether the Dune trilogy was among them.”[*]
On September 11, 1977, Herbert told The Spokesman-Review that he thought the idea that Star Wars was derived from Dune was “a lot of bull” and added, “There’s probably a good number of similarities to the work of Isaac Asimov.” Spokesman-Review staff writer Tom Sowa then paraphrased Herbert, claiming, “He is certainly not, however, interested in considering legal action about unlawful use of his property.” Had Herbert still not seen Star Wars at this point, about a month after the previous interview? His quip about Asimov really makes you think he hadn’t, simply because trying to find the work of Asimov in Star Wars is a stretch. Asimov in Star Trek, yes. But claiming Asimov influences in Star Wars feels superficial at best. Yes, Asimov wrote about a galactic empire, and sure, he had a few cutesy robots, but if Herbert had seen Star Wars when he said this, the Asimov thing makes it sound like he’s sucking up to Asimov, which is just weird. Still, regardless of whether Herbert had or had not seen Star Wars yet in September of ’77, at that point, he also claimed he didn’t want to sue and seemed to try to distance himself from the conversation in general, mostly with the “a lot of bull” comment. It’s almost like in downplaying this, Herbert was saying Dune couldn’t have been ripped off, because Star Wars wasn’t important enough to have ripped off Dune.
But then, by December 1977, Frank Herbert has seen Star Wars. And his tone changes. He mocks it outright, saying, “It is very shallow in the story and character development sense. [The movie] should have had balloons in there with ‘Pow!’ and ‘Bang!’ ” And it’s at this point that it seems like he’s serious about suing.
On December 1, 1977, The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) runs a story written by Fred Crafts with the headline: “Should Sci-Fi Author Sue? Writer of ‘Dune’ Says ‘Star Wars’ Used Elements of His Novel Without Permission.” This article begins by calling Frank Herbert an “easy-going writer” with a “hearty laugh.”[*] And at first it doubles down on the notion that Herbert doesn’t want to talk about it. “I just hate getting into this damned thing. . . . I’m going to try very hard not to sue.” But then Herbert goes on the attack and admits he’s seen Star Wars, he thought it was “boring,” and his wife, Beverly, fell asleep in the theater.[*] When asked directly if Herbert believes that George Lucas “plagiarized” Dune, Herbert replies, “I think there’s reason to believe that he did.” A far cry from “a lot of bull”!
Fascinatingly, within this same article, Herbert explains that while he’s holding off on sending his loyal Fremen to destroy Lucas, he is suing Creed Taylor and CTI Records because of the release of the 1977 jazz album titled Dune. The article states that Herbert filed suit against the record company because the album was in “competition with Herbert’s own reading of his own work on Caedmon records.” This suit failed. Today, you can easily get this album, which was recorded and performed by a prominent pianist, David Matthews, who is not related at all to Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band, because the world isn’t ready for that musical take on Dune. This funky, fun jazz record is, as of this writing, readily available on Spotify and iTunes, and a copy on vinyl is easily the least expensive Dune collectible in the universe. Why Herbert believed this album was a threat to him is understandable at first, but upon closer inspection, it seems like he may not have done his homework before filing the lawsuit.
The first four tracks of David Matthews’s Dune are very Dune-y. You’ve got “Arrakis,” “Sandworms,” “Song of the Bene Gesserit,” and “Muad’dib.” Then track five switches gears into . . . a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” After that song (which includes the album’s only vocal), you’ve got a jazzy version of the theme to Silent Running, followed by a funk version of “Princess Leia’s Theme,” capped off by, yes, a bizarrely underwhelming jazz version of “Main Theme from Star Wars.” In terms of musical authorship, the only songs that David Matthews wrote for this album were the Dune tracks. The other half of the album is an easy-listening jazz sci-fi cover album that you can totally imagine playing in the background of deleted scenes in Boogie Nights. To top it all off, the cover of the album has the word Dune styled in what is clearly the yellow Star Wars font, set against a sea of stars, not a desert landscape.
Why was Herbert so mad about a jazz record? Here’s one theory: Herbert loved jazz. In fact, he sometimes referred to conversations with fellow authors or readers as “jam sessions.” The art of improvisation was deeply important to Herbert’s thinking and writing, and he even considered certain conversations verbal “jazz performances.” In the final Frank Herbert–penned Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), Darwi Odrade, Herbert’s last great Bene Gesserit protagonist, is into jazz, and incorporates it into her philosophy, and thinks that conflicts can be resolved through the reactive qualities of jazz music, which is why Darwi Odrade says, “Feed us with jazz.” Not the most famous Dune line! And yet, suddenly, when you realize how much Herbert liked jazz, you can see why a mostly corny jazz record with the word Dune on it might piss him off.
