Two themes I saw as important which you only mentioned passingly:
(1) Dune plays in an age a long time after a great Jihad, one against technology, which the jihadists felt enslaves people. (Hence the use of Mentats, 'human computers'.) By the time of the story, some pragmatic 'compromises' have been made in terms of allowed technologies.
(2) Most SF about the future is a projection of America into the future in one or another way, and almost all are projections of Western culture. That Frank Herbert implanted strong Arabic, Muslim influences into this distant future (IIRC some 25,000 years away, with either the Jihad or the establishment of the Galactic Empire as halfway point and beginning of the then calendar) makes it stand out. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Dune is one of the best books, full stop, and Dune is one of the best writers, also full stop.
And you are right to flag his "implantation" of other cultures in his books - it's not just in Dune, it comes out in many other of his books, and it is indeed one of his better qualities - that ability to see long term treands, and qualities, in the rest of the world, not just the "West". In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
If I had tried to put them all in, the diary would have been nine miles long. And I am a little short on free time just now. My father is in the hospital and my life is not entirely my own. This diary, or something very like it, has been rattling around my skull screaming to be let out for a while now. I finally reworked an old essay in odd moments of free time to at least let the pressure off a bit.
I would have liked to at least mention the Butlerian jihad and the mentats. And I really wanted to go into the wonderful way Herbert wove all the Arabic, Muslim, and what I took to be Bedouin influences into the language and culture of Arrakis. I just couldn't think of a way to fit it into the diary without making it much much longer, and taking time that I don't have right now.
Another thread I would have liked to include was the whole tapestry of word play and language play. Herbert's wordcraft is in my mind positively Shakespearean in depth and breadth. The interior dialogues of the characters as the said one thing aloud and something else entirely in italics made the entire story richer. And again and again he invented words as English translations of Fremen words and used them to illustrate or suggest concepts. I've always fancied myself a kind of closet linguist and I found all those little linguistic tricks absolutely delicious.
The Bene Gesserit would make a diary all by themselves, as would the Spacing Guild. Sorry, just not enough time or space to do all I would have liked to. Twas ever thus. Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?
"There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet," Kynes said. "You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life - all life - is in the service of life...." .... From the charts emerged a figure. Kynes reported it. Three per cent. If they could get three per cent of the green plant element on Arrakis involved in forming carbon compounds, they'd have their self-sustaining cycle.
Another prescient theme: We now see increasing discussion of planetary-scale environmental engineering.
Cooling the Earth: CO2, SO2, and The Sunscreen Fix
(Yes, the ideas I warned of in October seem to be gaining traction. We'll see.) Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
we'd better beat it out of you with a Ouija board then. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I think that is why Herbert wrote the book. All of the rest of it, the awesome work of world-building, the political gamesmanship of the Great Houses, the psychological imaginings of the spice drug and precognition and the Kwisatz Haderach, the mysterious agendas of the Bene Gesserit, the spacefaring Guild, and all the rest, as magnificent as it is, all of that Herbert created to make an interesting story that would draw the reader. And all of that goes to create believable a universe in which Arrakis, the planet Dune, makes some kind of sense, and in which the very concept of planetary ecological engineering, as presented in the person of Pardot Kynes, makes sense. Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?
