I had a run last year watching Denis Villeneuve films – I watched Sicario, which I’d not seen before, and then Arrival, Blade Runner, and the two Dune movies. It’s not his whole catalogue, but it’s enough that certain concerns or fixations start to step out. He’s fascinated by bright exteriors and shadowy interiors. He’s got an eye for fabrics. The really fascinating thing about the Dune movies in particular is not just their faithfulness to the book – the two films making up the first and second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune – but how they introduce and codify a visual aesthetic that’s absent from the book and yet perfectly suited. The novel doesn’t look or sound like the movies. It’s dialogue-heavy and light on description. The prose is functional, not ornate. “Jessica turned, looked out over the basin, trying to see it the way Stilgar was seeing it in his imagination. She saw only the greyed mustard stain of distant rocks and a sudden hazy movement in the sky above the cliffs.” The Dune films are in a rare category of films that make the book better. They give texture and mood to a book that’s otherwise largely focused on dialogue. They’re comfortably complimentary.

The Dune universe has long been a mishmash of different authors – there are the six original novels by Frank Herbert himself, fifteen other novels put together by his son Brian Herbert and the sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson (who wrote Tales of the Jedi, nice), and then films, TV shows, board games, comics, and everything else. Part of what marks out the original novels is their specific narrative structure. Frank Herbert has a pattern of moving slowly towards a dramatic tipping point and then exploring the implications in the next book. There are often large time jumps between books – if you’ve read Dune, or seen the recent movies, you’ll know that it ends with Paul Atreides unleashing the Fremen in a holy war. The second book, Dune Messiah, jumps ahead twelve years. It skips the war and shows you the outcome: Paul is Emperor, he’s consolidated his position, and his opponents are forced to work in the shadows. Herbert focuses his narrative lens on the relative stability after the conflict. The war itself is something of a blind spot – it’s almost glossed over, as if to say yes, it’s all very showy and dramatic, but it’s not the interesting part. That’s a repeating pattern across the Dune novels. Each book works up to something dramatic, something that changes the course of history, and then immediately ends. The next novel then jumps ahead to the long-term implications of that change without explaining all the intervening steps. The most obvious example is between books #3 and #4, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, with God Emperor taking place three thousand years after Children. There are significant social and political changes that have taken place in the intervening time – which is part of the fun of each Dune novel, unpicking exactly what’s changed. There are political shifts, with different groups rising and falling based on their access to power: God Emperor introduces the Fish Speakers, a faction of female warriors who serve as the God-Emperor’s army. They’re just there, and you have to figure out their whole deal. You have to figure out how they’ve grown out of the change at the end of the previous book. Each new book becomes an exercise in reading backwards, in tracing effects back to their causes.

This writing style speaks to the almost geological concept of time in the Dune novels. Each book is like a different stratum. It’s not just that one thing comes after another – that’s how all sequels work – but that time in the Dune novels is best measured in geological eras. Dune is marked by characters with wildly varying perceptions of time. Some people have short-term goals that don’t extend past their own lives. Gurney Halleck serves the Atreides. When he dies, his plan ends. Others work to build empires or dynasties that will outlive any individual person. The Harkonnens are trying to get rich and take control of the empire, in a series of plans that span decades, even centuries. Then there are the Bene Gesserit, the advisor witches, who are working through an ultra long-term breeding program to shape the fate of humanity. Describing the Reverend Mother in Dune, Paul says “She could wait with her sisters – ninety generations for the proper combination of genes and environment to produce the one person their schemes required.” These perspectives put different weight on the significance of any given event. People engage in a way that reflects the depth of their planning. When the Harkonnens and Atreides fight over Dune, Gurney fights because he hates the Harkonnens, the Harkonnens fight because they want to rule, and the Bene Gesserit are annoyed at the whole conflict because it threatens their cultivated bloodlines. The levels of significance shift – they’re all thinking on different timespans.

The books themselves tend towards the longest perspectives. The most important moments, in the view of the Dune novels, are those that have the greatest impact. Thus the climax of each book is a moment that creates some generational change. At the end of Dune, Paul unleashes jihad, sending Fremen warriors out to holy war. In that final confrontation, he faces down the Emperor, kills Feyd-Rautha, and wins the hand of the Princess Irulan. It’s one scene that changes the face of the galaxy, setting up a complete change of affairs for the second book, Dune Messiah. The third book, Children of Dune, ends with the creation of the God Emperor, who spends the next three thousand years shaping the future of humanity – again trying to improve the human condition through this insane long-term plan. Events are measured by their significance, and the length of time between each book indicates the scope of that significance.

That setup leads to a common criticism of the Dune novels: that they’re a bunch of sitting around talking and then some abrupt drama right before the end. That’s – you know, not inaccurate, but it’s also the point of the style. It’s probably the least prevalent in the first and last novels (Dune is the most typical adventure story, and Chapterhouse Dune is closer to a political war thriller): the middle four are clearly yap-fests with shocking resolutions in the final couple pages. You can hate it, but it’s a deliberate stylistic choice. It creates this rich air of boredom and alienation stemming from those shifting perspectives on time. The characters thinking about tomorrow obviously act differently to the characters thinking about what will happen six hundred years in the future. There’s a barrier between the two – in a sense, they can’t even really communicate. Their values are too different. At the start of God Emperor, a clone of Duncan Idaho talks with Leto II, the God Emperor (now a three-thousand year old worm creature), and while Duncan is concerned with rebels and cults, Leto broadly doesn’t care. Duncan is thinking about the present, about groups that might attack or wound Leto. Leto is looking to the long view, working to shape human nature. “What a bore this Duncan has become,” he reflects. When Duncan protests that “it’s not an ordinary rebellion,” Leto gets frustrated. “Fool! All rebellions are ordinary and an ultimate bore. They are copied out of the same pattern, one much like another.” Duncan focuses on the individual instance, while Leto focuses on the psychological urges and desires that create rebellion in human society. “All rebels are closet aristocrats.” Even Duncan’s existence as a clone marks him as part of a repeating pattern. Leto has been cloning copies of Duncan over thousands of years – and ultimately Duncan’s consciousness of himself as a clone, as one in a repeating lineage, leads him to attack Leto. Leto in turn is thinking more about the patterns, the big picture, and almost misses Duncan making an attempt on his life. “They now are little more than poignant reminders… as is this Duncan who stands in front of me with his lasgun… Great Gods below! He has caught me napping. He has the lasgun in his hand and it is pointed at my face.” As a relatively normal human being, Duncan’s just not fully equipped to think of himself as part of a pattern:

“Idaho spoke with derision: ‘Tell me, Leto: how many times must I pay the debt of loyalty?’
Leto recognised the inner question: ‘How many of me have there been?’ The Duncans always wanted to know this. Every Duncan asked it and no answer satisfied. They doubted.”

That tension between scales of time provides much of the substance of the Dune novels. Whether because of their grasp of human nature or because they can literally see the future, characters in Dune who look the furthest ahead are the most detached from the present moment. They’re waiting for the end of the book, for the tipping point that pushes the universe from one stage into the next. To some extent, they are just killing time – as in one exchange between Leto and his majordomo, Moneo:

“You indulge in idle thoughts,’ Moneo accused.
‘I have time for idle thoughts. That’s one of the most interesting things about my existence as a singular multitude.'”

The same principle is reflected down through other characters with long-term plans. The Bene Gesserit don’t care who’s on the throne because they’re focused on cultivating bloodlines. When the Harkonnens plan their attack on the Atreides, the Bene Gesserit want Paul protected, because he’s part of their breeding plans, but the fall of House Atreides, the deaths of their retainers, the murder of the duke – it’s all just noise, just chaff in the wind. In Dune Messiah, that logic unspools to an inhuman extreme, as Paul describes the billions killed in his jihad as “a brief spasm when measured against eternity.” Those who focus on the long term refuse certain immediate, pressing concerns in favour of the big picture, and in turn are freed up for certain trivialities. They can afford to wax lyrical, to philosophise, to reflect on human nature. They’re also isolated, cut off from the rollicking waves of normal human life. There’s something arid about them, something prophetic. They fit into the archetype of the desert monk who steps back from society and reaches into the eternal. The charm of the Dune books is in that stepped model of time. Those with the shortest view are the busiest, the most concerned with the grist and churn of daily life. Those with the longest view are often idle, the most prone to sit around and pontificate. The books themselves explore those perspectives, but prefer the long view. They can be slow texts where not much happens, until suddenly something important comes up, and then – quick – it’s over and the book ends, and you have to read the next one to appreciate the depth and significance of that brief final moment – to adopt the perspective of those who see into the future.