The Spice Must Flow: A Dune Trivia Quiz

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House Atreides is ordered off the ocean world of Caladan and given Arrakis, a planet with no surface water, daylight heat that kills the unprotected, and the only known source of melange. The spice extends life, sharpens perception and makes interstellar navigation possible, which means the galaxy's economy runs through a desert that House Harkonnen has just been made to vacate after eighty years of extraction. Duke Leto knows the handover is a trap set by the Emperor and accepts it anyway. His concubine Lady Jessica has already disobeyed her order by bearing a son instead of a daughter, and that son, Paul, has been dreaming about a girl on Arrakis he has never met.

Denis Villeneuve read the novel as a teenager and spent two earlier films arguing that it could be shot at all. His version was built around sand that behaves like sand. The Arrakis exteriors were photographed in Wadi Rum in southern Jordan and in the dunes of the Liwa desert in Abu Dhabi, and Caladan was filmed on the Norwegian coast. Hans Zimmer, who had wanted to score the book since reading it as a teenager, turned down Christopher Nolan's Tenet to take the job and built the music out of invented instruments and a female choir. The 2021 film won six Academy Awards.

Frank Herbert began the research in 1957, after travelling to Florence, Oregon, to write a magazine article about using planted grasses to stop dunes from swallowing roads. The article was never finished. The writing ran on for years, the novel appeared as two serials in Analog, and it was turned down by more than twenty publishers before Chilton, a company whose main business was automobile repair manuals, agreed to print it. It won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo, and was followed by five more Herbert novels before his death in 1986.

The Fremen are the part of the book that most of its imitators leave out. They live in sietches cut into rock, wear stillsuits that reclaim sweat and breath at an efficiency measured in thimblefuls a day, ride the sandworms instead of avoiding them, and have been running a planetary terraforming programme for generations, funded with spice and hidden from the occupiers. Their ecologist, the Imperial planetologist Liet-Kynes, works for both sides at once. Stilgar leads the sietch that takes Paul and Jessica in, and Chani, who trains Paul in desert survival, is the woman from his dreams.

Paul's advantage is not prophecy. The Bene Gesserit, the order Jessica belongs to, have spent ninety generations breeding toward a particular result while seeding useful myths on undeveloped worlds so that any sister stranded there can be treated as holy. Paul lands on a planet already prepared to receive a messiah, and he has the training to recognise the machinery he is stepping into. The litany Jessica taught him names fear as the mind-killer, and it is the first thing he recites when a Reverend Mother holds a poisoned needle at his neck and a box of pain in front of him. Herbert spent the rest of the series insisting that readers had misread Paul as a hero.

Putting the book on screen had defeated better funded attempts. Alejandro Jodorowsky spent two years in the mid 1970s assembling a version with Salvador Dali and Orson Welles attached that was never shot, and David Lynch's 1984 film was cut to a length that needed a voiceover to hold the plot together. Villeneuve split the novel in two, and Dune: Part Two arrived in March 2024.