ENTER THE DUNEIVERSE

Fusing high science fiction, real-world geopolitics, environmental science, zen mysticism and messianic dogma, the universe created by author Frank Herbert in his 1965 novel ‘Dune’ and its sequels can seem dauntingly complex. That’s because it is. Set millenia in the future at a time of entrenched Imperial power and feuding Great Houses, the books span multiple centuries and thousands of light years of settled space – though the main action takes place on the desert world of Arrakis, source of the fabled spice melange, and known to its inhabitants as Dune.

“Beginnings are such delicate times…”

Like a number of his SF contemporaries, Frank Herbert was a mystic visionary in the guise of a square-suited ’60s everyman (). A journalist, critic and lecturer with a penchant for ecology, Buddhism, pulp fiction and psychology, Herbert was also an early adopter of natural psychedelics, all of which would feed directly into his writing. Inspired magazine as two separate stories – ‘Dune World’ (1963) and ‘The Prophet of Dune’ (1965). Published in a single volume in 1965, ‘Dune’ would win the Hugo and Nebula sci-fi awards for that year and go on to become the best-selling science fiction novel of the century.