Literature of War and the FantasticDune: Unit Final Essay

Professor Willis E. McNelly recorded and typed an interview that he made with Frank Herbert and his wifeBeverly Herbert, in 1969, on the subject of his novels Dune and Dune Messiah. The following is an excerptfrom that interview.

FH: Well, ecology, as somebody said…somebody said that ecology is the science of understanding consequences… Lovely expression! And of course we’re … each of us, individually, is the product of everything that has happen to us, and this happened to me and hit me, and so I used it, because, as far as I was concerned, one of the purposes of this story was to delineate consequences of inflicting yourself upon a planet, upon your environment.

WM: So you have a number of forces, then, that are inflicting themselves upon the planet. You have the Fremen forces, you have the forces of the House of Atreides…And you have the off-planet forces of the Spacer’s Guild and the entire Imperium also as being forces inflicting themselves on this planet.

FH: The name of the game is power, you see. …Western man has assumed that if you have…that all you need for any problem is enough force, power, and that there is no problem which won’t submit to this approach, even the problem of our own ignorance. No, we need what I would call a science of wisdom. …the moral norm, as I saw in “Dune”, was something that is imposed upon people by their environment.

WM: I find this that in one of the … or some of the internal conflicts which are bothering Paul, that the ethical norm which he sees as being one of say absolute rightness as opposed with the law of moral necessity, and these are clashing in him … these are tensions that work within Paul which cause him, I think, to have a depth of characterisation that you don’t normally find within the normal science fiction novel.

FH: You hit on, of course, the way the character of Paul was constructed. It was the conflict between absolutes and the necessity of the moment.

In a well-written essay, establish a claim relevant to our discussions of the past few weeks. Support your claim with direct reference to the interview, the text of Dune, and our class discussions. You may use the remaining space on this page for your Toulmin prewriting. You have the remainder of the period to complete this assignment.