The Spice Must Flow - The Story of Dune, from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies

Informationen zum Autor Ryan Britt is the author of Phasers on Stun! and Luke Skywalker Can’t Read . His writing has appeared in Esquire, Vulture, StarTrek.com, SyFy Wire, Den of Geek!, Inverse, The New York Times , and Fatherly , where he is a senior editor. Klappentext "Geek-culture expert Ryan Britt takes us behind the pages and scenes of the science-fiction phenomenon Dune, charting the series' life from cult sci-fi novels to some of the most visionary movies of all time"-- Leseprobe 1 Frank Herbert's Beard The real-life origins of Dune. To begin your study of the life of Muad'Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time. -Princess Irulan Despite how many times Herbert has described his leap from nonfiction article pitch to epic science fiction novel, that pivot still seems bonkers. Imagine a struggling essayist-behind on IRS payments, in need of steady work-saying to themselves: "Oh, I couldn't sell this very specific newspaper article to anybody, and my agent hates it. Maybe I'll just turn it into the greatest sci-fi novel of all time instead." Herbert didn't use those exact words, but that's effectively what happened. And, based on his history of making grandiose statements early in his life, you can almost imagine him saying something close to this ridiculous. On his eighth birthday, he told everyone he was going to be a writer, and by nineteen years old, he had landed a job as a journalist in Southern California, working for The Glendale Star. The story of Frank Herbert's success is very much a study in "fake it till you make it," but it did take him a while to make it. It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment when Dune began. Was it when Herbert was born? Was it at his eighth-birthday party? Or was it, as many Herbert experts have claimed, when he met psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery in 1949? These are the two people who introduced him to the work of Carl Jung and got him into Zen concepts. Without those two things, you don't have Dune, so really, they must be the most important people in his life, right? What about the moment he was discharged from the navy, early in 1941, for medical reasons? That's got to be it! Had Herbert served longer in the navy, everything would have been different! Or maybe none of those things matter. If Dune does one thing remarkably well, it's that it makes the shape of our lives seem like the opposite of an accident. For all the prescient paradoxes that Paul finds himself in (am I remembering the future, living in the future, or just way too high?), the themes of Dune seem to prove that fate doesn't exist and that destiny is still a choice. At some point, Herbert decided he wanted to write about sand dunes. And that started in the summer of 1957, with Frank Herbert, in the air. Frank Herbert was flying high above the coastal town of Florence, Oregon, staring down at sand dunes, keenly interested in observing the crucial feature of these specific mounds of sand. Although their advance was glacially slow, these dunes were in fact moving. Like Paul Atreides riding in an ornithopter, surveying the desert of the planet Arrakis for the first time, Herbert wasn't the pilot of this aircraft, but rather, a passenger of a small Cessna. He'd chartered this plane for the specific purpose of observing these unique dunes because he planned on writing a sprawling nonfiction article about the phenomenon, titled "They Stopped the Moving Sands." This ambitious piece of journalism was destined to fail and be reborn as the greatest science fiction novel of all time. But as the thirty-six-year-old Herbert leaned out of the small plane, he couldn't know his future. All he could feel was the wind in his hair and bits of sand blowing through his beard. Or maybe not. We don't know how much sand Herbert got in his beard that day, because we don't really know how big ...

Product details

• Authors: Ryan Britt
• Publisher: Plume USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.09.2023
• EAN: 9780593472996
• ISBN: 978-0-593-47299-6
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Mixed anthologies