Dune Summary | Chapterly
Dune by Frank Herbert: A Complete Summary "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." Overview Dune (1965) is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, and it earned that distinction by doing something no science fiction novel had done before: it built a world as complex, layered, and internally coherent as the real one. Frank Herbert spent six years researching and writing Dune, drawing on ecology, desert cultures, Islamic history, Zen Buddhism, Jungian psychology, and political philosophy to create a story that operates simultaneously as adventure, political thriller, ecological treatise, and cautionary tale about the dangers of charismatic leadership. The novel is set approximately 20,000 years in the future on Arrakis, a desert planet that is the sole source of melange -- a psychoactive spice that extends life, expands consciousness, and enables interstellar travel. Whoever controls Arrakis controls the most valuable substance in the universe. Into this web of imperial politics, the fifteen-year-old Paul Atreides is thrust when his noble family is assigned stewardship of the planet and then betrayed by their enemies with the emperor's complicity. Dune was rejected by twenty publishers before being accepted by Chilton Books, an...