reread Frank Herbert's Dune last week to prepare myself for a live SCIFI.com chat concurrent with the airing of David Lynch's version of Dune. With some books, the experience of returning to a once-loved story yields only disappointment, but this exercise turned out to be a good one. The craftsmanship of the epic novel still held strong. But there was surprising side effect to my dipping into the novel once more--the prose caused a few flashbacks.
I'd decided to reread the novel so I'd be better able to pontificate on which cinematic version best captured Herbert's original vision, but little did I realize that in doing so I would step into a time machine and be taken back decades to when I first read Herbert's prose, as well as those of many other science fiction masters.
I had last devoted the time to rereading Dune when I was a teenager, during a period when the annual promise of a long, interrupted summer stretched before me year after year. The other nine months of the year were devoted to exploring new science fiction, fantasy and horror, but summer was a time I reserved for reliving three very special books, and during my teen-age years, I read them each at least a half a dozen times.
You will undoubtedly recognize the names of all three epic SF novels--Dune, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. The first two have so far each been adapted into various dramatic versions, while the third has been rumored as a film ever since it was first published. But what matters most are the words.
Stranger in a Strange Dune
My summers back then were not measured by the calendar, but by the turning pages of those three novels. My experience last week made me realize how much I missed visiting with my old friends.
I didn't think much about my motivations at the time, but from my current vantage point I realize that all three books contained characters who had to mature in order to make their ways through unfamiliar worlds. In Dune, Paul Atreides had to grow to survive Arrakis and become the man he was meant to be. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins was forced to discover that the world was so much bigger than he knew, and he had to give up a part of himself to become a part of it. The powerful but innocent Valentine Michael Smith, in Stranger in a Strange Land, had to learn to "grok" the world (a term that sounds as retro to me now as "heavy, man," but believe me, in the '60s, the term resonated).
I believe now that the reason I reread these three books so many times was because I needed them as fictional templates to lead me to maturity. The characters' destinations had varied names, but my unfamiliar world was adulthood. I had forgotten that until I returned to Herbert's text after so long an absence. I won't wait so long again to visit my old companions.
I had my guidebooks. You, I'm sure, have your own. Make sure to visit them often.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit.
