Dune by Frank Herbert - Free Book Summary
Introduction to Dune Dune is – in my opinion – one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. Frank Herbert published Dune in 1965 and it has ever since stood there on the top of best selling science fiction books. David Lynch has adapted Dune to film in 1984 and by doing so introduced it to a whole new generation of followers, who also enjoy the five sequels: Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. "Dear Ruth, A big Thank-you for the Dune Summary!" The story surrounds the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, in the far future (in the year 10,190 A.D.). The main characters include: Leto Atreides, Duke of Caladan and Arrakis; Jessica Atreides, Leto’s concubine; Paul Atreides, Duke Leto and Jessica’s only son; Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, enemy of the Atreides family; and The Padishah Emperor, a wicked ally of the Harkonnens. For twenty generations, the noble Atreides family – Duke Leto Atreides, his concubine Jessica, and their son Paul – had ruled the watery, tropical world of Caladan. Now they had to leave their home world to govern the sparsely settled desert planet of Arrakis. Desolate Arrakis was still considered one of the richest bases in the universe – the prized spice Melange was found only in its deserts. Melange was valued for two remarkable properties: it extended its users’ lives and gave them a limited ability to look into the future. Without the spice, the Space Guild navigators would be working blind; they would have no way to foresee the paths of safest passage for their ships, and travel between the stars would become impossible. Members of the Bene Gesserit, a highly respected and powerful religious sect, also used the spice as a way to detect whether or not others were telling the truth. The Duke’s son, Paul, was a remarkable young man haunted by dreams of the future – dreams that usually came true. While he slept, he often found himself in a mystical cavern on a desert planet, where he witnessed two approaching events: he would meet a woman who would captivate him, and he would meet the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit. One part of this vision soon became reality. As Paul awoke one morning, his mother, Jessica – a lapsed member of the Bene Gesserit – introduced him to the Reverend Mother. And, just as he had dreamed she would, the Reverend Mother detected Paul’s potential to become the Kwisatz Haderach, “one who can be many places at once,” a Bene Gesserit who would be able to see the future completely. Sadly, the Reverend Mother wondered how much chance Paul had of surviving to achieve that ability. “We may be able to salvage you,” she told him. “Doubtful, but possible. But for your father, nothing.” This free book summary of Dune is complimentary from the www.free-book-summary.com website. Want to say Thanks? Tell about the book summary to your friends, link to it from your blog, or include a link to it in a book report forum. Cheers! The popular House of Atreides had been enmeshed for generations in a feud with the great and powerful House of Harkonnen. Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides, had recently acquired an even greater enemy: the Padishah Emperor, who had allied with Harkonnen to defeat the Duke. The Harkonnens were known throughout the universe for their merciless enslavement of those occupying their planets. Atreides, on the other hand, was famous for his fairness, loyalty, and justice. But now that the Duke’s army had grown as large as the Padishah Emperor’s fanatical Sardaukar forces, the Emperor believed Atreides to be a threat to his power; so he had united with the Harkonnens to destroy the House of Atreides. On their planet Caladan, however, the Duke and his family were safe; they needed bait to lure them out into a trap – the planet Arrakis. Arrakis was a Harkonnen world. As part of the plot, the Emperor turned over the valuable planet to the Atreides in a fake gesture of honor and good will. “There it is…the biggest mantrap in all history,” the Harkonnen leader chuckled in his deep voice. “And the Duke’s headed into its jaws. Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?” As the Duke, Paul, and Jessica traveled to their new home, however, they were not stupid. They knew the planet was filled with Harkonnen spies determined to destroy them. Arriving on Arrakis, to Paul’s astonishment, he was greeted by worshipful shouts of “Mahdi!” Local legend had long predicted that a savior would come, “the child of a Bene Gesserit, to lead them to true freedom.” Paul was the chosen one. Soon after their arrival, Duke Atreides began building up the defenses of his new planet. “Our supremacy on Caladan,” he declared, “depended on sea and air power. Here, we must develop something I choose to call desert power.” Within days, Duke Leto uncovered a Harkonnen ploy to expose Jessica, his faithful mistress, as a traitor. The Duke realized that something must be done. He advised Paul of a plan: he would pretend to suspect Jessica as a spy. “The Harkonnens think to trick me by making me distrust your mother,” he told Paul. “They don’t know that I’d sooner distrust myself…This way, if anything should happen to me, you can tell her the truth—that I never doubted her, not for the smallest instant. I should want her to know this.” Leto Atreides noticed one important thing Baron Vladimir Harkonnen had missed: Harkonnen had not bothered to take a census of the Fremen desert dwellers. He dismissed the whole tribe as unimportant scavengers. But Duke Leto could see the power of numbers and knowhow in the Fremen; and far from being simple outcasts, the Fremen were a complex warrior society. Most important of all, the Fremen hated Harkonnen as much as Duke Leto did. The Duke sensed that if he could recruit enough Fremen to add to his own army, he could defend Arrakis against the power-hungry Baron. Meanwhile, Paul had been greatly changed by his stay on Arrakis. Melange was mixed into everything that he ate and drank, and slowly he became able to tell whether someone was telling the truth or not, just as a Bene Gesserit “truthsayer” could. Paul’s mind began to catch glimpses of future events, even when he was awake. He intuitively knew the customs of the Fremen and was able to use the right words when speaking with them. The Fremen often had to put on complicated clothes known as stillsuits to reclaim the moisture their bodies lost in the desert heat; and Paul, though he had never seen one before, felt totally at home when he first put on one of the water-conserving suits. All of this convinced the Fremen that he was indeed the “voice from the outer world” come to lead them to vengeance and freedom. In the meantime, for Paul’s father, time was running out. Though Duke Leto had expected – and received – an initial rash of small raids, sabotage, and assassination attempts from the Harkonnens and the Emperor, he had underestimated how much his enemies wanted him destroyed. Before Leto’s defense preparations were complete, Baron Harkonnen launched a full-scale invasion. Not only did the Harkonnens attack with a mercenary army, the Emperor also sent legions of his elite Sardaukar, dressed in Harkonnen uniforms. And even as this overwhelming horde struck at the Atreides forces, an undercover agent, the Atreides family doctor, was betraying the Duke. He delivered the unsuspecting leader to Baron Harkonnen. The triumphant Baron struck his rival down immediately. This free book summary of Dune is complimentary from the www.free-book-summary.com website. Want to say Thanks? Tell about the book summary to your friends, link to it from your blog, or include a link to it in a book report forum. Cheers! But the traitorous doctor had only acted in an attempt to save his own wife, a Harkonnen hostage. Despite his treachery, he arranged for Jessica and Paul to hide among the Fremen. Soon, however, Imperial Sardaukar troops discovered where Paul and Jessica were hidden, and attacked their protectors. In the confusion of battle, Paul and Jessica made an air escape out over the desert – only to find themselves caught in one of Arrakis’ massive, 800-kilometer-per-hour sandstorms. The Harkonnen troops, watching their own pursuing spaceships demolished, assumed Paul and Jessica had also died in the storm. But the Bene Gesserit had a saying: “Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.” Paul safely crash-landed the craft. When a nearby band of Fremen tried to capture the two Caladanians for the precious water in their bodies, Jessica used her Bene Gesserit training to defeat the chieftain, and then convince him to let them live in peace with the Fremen tribe. Because of her ties to Bene Gesserit, Jessica was soon accepted as a Reverend Mother and Paul, anointed by the Fremen as “Paul Muad’Dib,” officially became the “Voice from the Outer World.” A girl named Chani was a member of this Fremen warrior band. Seeing her elfin face for the first time, Paul knew at once that this was the girl he had always loved! “The familiarity of that face, the features out of numberless visions in his earliest prescience, shocked Paul to stillness…” Like Paul’s father and mother, Paul and Chani began their life together without taking marriage vows; it would not do for Duke Paul Atreides to marry the lowly girl. Instead, Jessica ordered, Paul must eventually marry a noblewoman whose offspring could help him regain Arrakis from the Harkonnen. Paul was their only hope. Living with Chani and the Fremen in the desert meant that Paul’s food had an more Melange in it – a concentration that greatly heightened Paul’s prescience. He could see a troubled future, filled with a terrible purpose. “He sensed it…Somewhere ahead of him on this path, the fanatic hordes cut their gory path across the universe in his name. The green and black Atreides banner would become a symbol of terror. Wild legions would charge into battle screaming their war cry: ‘Muad’Dib!’” As this horrible apocalyptic vision engulfed him, suddenly, “he felt a new sense of wonder at the limits of his gift. It was as though he rode within the wave of time…and all around him the…waves lifted and fell, revealing and then hiding what they bore on their surface. Through it all, the wild jihad still loomed ahead of him, the violence and the slaughter.” “It must not be,” he thought. “I cannot let it happen.” But almost immediately, the prophecy began to fulfill itself. Harkonnen soldiers had begun killing the Fremen for sport, and the Fremen rallied behind Paul Muad’Dib and his army. Paul, placed at the center of destiny, “walking a thin wire of peace with a measure of happiness, Chani at his side,” found the showdown with the Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor growing ever closer, the start of the bloody jihad he so wished to avoid. The guerrilla war began. Streams of Fremen came to follow Muad’Dib against their Harkonnen oppressors. The desert-bred warriors proved to be more skilled fighters than the Emperor’s fanatical Sardaukar, and, finally, the Fremen victories forced the Emperor and Baron Harkonnen to visit Arrakis personally—joined by their entire armies—to crush the rebellion. Instead, Paul’s legions of Fremen struck down the entire Sardaukar and Harkonnen armies. With Paul’s military victory and his complete control of Arrakis, still the only source of Melange, Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, forced the Emperor to accept peace on his own terms: Paul would marry the Emperor’s daughter and rule the empire as Regent. This was the only way he could be certain the holy war would not spread from Arrakis to other planets. But Paul would keep Chani as his beloved one, though married to another in name. At this declaration, “a bitter laugh escaped Jessica.” Turning to Chani, she said, “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, who carry the name concubine—history will call us wives.” In Dune, Frank Herbert invents an entirely new and complex society, and introduces a three parties struggling for power: a Space Guild with a monopoly on interplanetary travel, the Bene Gesserit religious school, and the Padishah Emperor. The story of Dune can be read on many levels. There are the adventures of a young boy called to vanquish his enemies; the struggles of a man to control his own destiny; and the dilemma of a prophet fighting his role as the “messiah” of an oppressed people while trying to prevent a universal “holy war” – a jihad. The Complete Book Herbert, Frank. Dune (New York, NY 1965).
|
