Dune

Twenty publishers turned it down. Dune was eventually printed in 1965 by Chilton, a company whose main business was car repair manuals, and it went on to win the first Nebula Award and to supply modern science fiction with most of its furniture.

A magazine assignment about sand

Frank Herbert travelled to the Oregon coast in 1957 to write an article about a government project stabilising sand dunes with grasses. The article was never published.

He spent six years instead on ecology, water scarcity and the politics that follow when one substance controls an economy. Dune appeared as a magazine serial before Chilton took it as a book.

It won the Hugo Award and the first Nebula. Herbert wrote five sequels before his death in 1986, and his son has since added more than a dozen with Kevin J. Anderson. The novel has never gone out of print in sixty years.

Two failed adaptations before anyone succeeded

Alejandro Jodorowsky spent two years and two million dollars preparing a version in the 1970s with Salvador Dali and Pink Floyd attached. It was never shot, and the concept art circulated through the film industry for a decade.

David Lynch delivered a version in 1984 that he has disowned, having lost final cut. A television adaptation followed in 2000 with a fraction of the budget and more of the plot.

The book's reputation for being unfilmable came from these attempts rather than from the text, which is mostly people talking in rooms.

Villeneuve splits the book and the second half outsells the first

Dune: Part One arrived in 2021, in cinemas and on a streaming service simultaneously, during a period when neither route was reliable. It took 434 million dollars.

Dune: Part Two took 714 million in 2024 with better reviews, which is the opposite of the usual pattern for a second instalment. Dune: Part Three is scheduled for 2026 and adapts the sequel, a book that spends its length dismantling the hero the first one built.

Splitting a single novel across two films is normally a commercial device. Here it is what allows the political manoeuvring to survive the adaptation, which is where the book actually spends its time.

The furniture everyone borrowed

A desert planet, a valuable substance found nowhere else, a young man raised for a destiny, a religious order operating behind several governments: Star Wars uses all four, and George Lucas has acknowledged the debt.

Warhammer 40,000 took the god-emperor and the guild of navigators. Hayao Miyazaki has cited the sandworms as an influence on Nausicaa.

Herbert wrote the book partly as a warning against following charismatic leaders. Most of what it inspired kept the leader and dropped the warning.