His Dune, in theaters next year, will tackle only half the novel. Denis Villeneuve now hopes to try again, albeit via a more modest ascent. Eventually, David Lynch made Dune, though the film - four hours in the rough cut - suffered from the studio’s insistence on mercilessly reducing it to 137 minutes. Ridley Scott then stepped up before becoming overwhelmed and abandoning the project for Blade Runner. The Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky tried, pulling together a formidable ensemble that included Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, Gloria Swanson, and Pink Floyd - he wanted the film to run more than 10 hours. Dune was their unscalable Himalayan peak. After 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes hit screens in 1968 (the same day, as it happens), young directors rushed to realize the countercultural possibilities of space. Science fiction had always been geeky, but Dune made it trippy. “He received telephone calls from people who seemed to be on drugs, telling him they had been reading Dune aloud to acid-rock music.” “After his performances, students mobbed around him,” his biographer has written. Herbert, who’d been supporting himself as a journalist, started earning money as a campus speaker.
“Word is spreading on the West Coast grapevine about an epic science fiction novel titled Dune,” the Boston Globe’s youth column reported in 1969. Reviewers were indifferent, but the book won sci-fi prizes - the Hugo and Nebula awards - and gradually secured an underground reputation. After 23 editors rejected the ungainly manuscript, Chilton Books, best known for its auto-repair manuals, gave it a small print run. One can only imagine publishers’ enthusiasm. And it ended with him leading a jihad, backed by guerrillas and guided by drug-induced visions, against that empire. The story started with a Kennedy-esque hero, Paul Atreides, a charismatic young leader from a venerable political family destined for a high position within the galactic Imperium. As the story tumbled out in Analog’s pages, it forecast many trends that would define the next decade: environmentalism, psychedelic drugs, mysticism, orgies, back-to-the-land survivalism, Indigenous ways, anticolonial rebellions, Arab nationalism, and political assassinations. The issue featured “Dune World,” the start of a serialization of a long novel by the obscure author Frank Herbert. What the future would bring, once those repressed elements surged forth, was an open question.Īn answer arrived in the next month’s issue of the science fiction magazine Analog. Kennedy’s life ended a seemingly innocent age, one that had restrained social and psychological conflicts. For the United States, the Technicolor-tinted era that began when the troops returned from World War II terminated in an instant: 12:30 p.m. SOME HISTORICAL PERIODS fade, others end abruptly.
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