#frank herbert should also not have been allowed within 40m of a teenage girl but thats not directly relevant to the point here

[voyagerprobe]

i do actually want to get my thoughts down on dune but don’t want to subject anyone to dune against their will so they are under a cut

first of all i want to make clear that i have only read the first 3 books (dune/dune messiah/children of dune) and have no intention of reading more. furthermore as it is well established that frank herbert viewed these three books as a trilogy and had planned and partially written all three books whilst writing the first, i think it is appropriate to view them as a single work of literature and will be analysing them as such here.

i think dune carries a lot of contradictions within it because at some level it is an anti-imperialist story written by a racist white man, and this is something that manifests itself throughout the entire trilogy

its easy to read the first book and come away with the impression that it’s a white saviour narrative; this is because it’s exactly what it is. but it specifically plays with the white saviour narrative and tries to expose its fatal flaws in ways that don’t really become apparent until the second half of the trilogy. and throughout this the view the narrative seems to take on the characters also changes; in the first book kynes and stilgar are presented as pretty much unilaterally good people who want the best for everyone and paul is generally presented as a well meaning person. 

kynes, the coloniser who is himself a white saviour narrative of sorts, fancies himself as having “gone native” yet at the same time introduces the plan to transform arakkis into a wet planet, a plan that the narrative eventually condemns as a colonialist exertion of control, an ecological disaster, and borderline genocidal in its destruction of fremen culture. by the end of children of dune, though kynes is long dead, the narrative has changed from viewing him as a caring sympathetic visionary to at best a naiive fool and at worst an insidious force who kickstarted unspeakable evils.

stilgar is, i think, the most interesting character to me, as he’s arguably the most tragic character. at every point in his arc he makes what is ostensibly the right decision—trading the harkonnens for the atreides secures more rights and better conditions for the fremen, and the ecological transformation lessens the burdens of life on dune. for this he is initially portrayed as noble (and i very purposely invoke the “noble savage” trope that herbert was using). but by the end of the trilogy it becomes clear that stilgar has feet of clay, that he simply traded one coloniser for another and in the process royally fucked everyone over by siding with that coloniser.

and paul, who by the second book is a dictator responsible for tens of millions of deaths, is reduced to being a miserable lone wanderer in the desert regretful of everything he ever did or stood for; he only gains any moral victory in the end by reversing course to speak out against the colonisation, assimilation, and ecological transformation of dune.

dune is a deeply racist book series. it is deeply orientalist to its core and is rife with racial stereotypes even outside of the fremen. the fremen, as a portmanteau of indigenous peoples around the world, are at every turn exoticised, sexualised, treated as barbarians or noble savages, and aside from stilgar are largely non-characters. aside from stilgar the fremen have little agency; aside from stilgar the narrative shows us that only the white coloniser characters are worth caring about. despite all this, these same coloniser characters are shown to be rotten to the core and their actions one way or another are eventually revealed as morally reprehensible.

dune’s attempts to be anti-colonialist can only fall flat because of these contradictions. it asks us to believe in the personhood of the fremen and sympathise with their plight yet refuses to portray them as more than tokens in a world of political intrigue amongst white colonisers. to the very end as it attempts to unravel these white heroes and reveal them as complicit, it is always other white heroes who get the final say. it is consistently undercut by its own colonialism.