Dune (franchise)
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Dune is an American science fiction media franchise that originated with the 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert and has continued to add new publications. Dune is frequently described as the best-selling science fiction novel in history. It won the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Hugo Award in 1966 and was later adapted into a 1984 film, a 2000 television miniseries, and a three-part film series, with the first film in 2021, a sequel in 2024 and a confirmed third movie coming out in 2026. Herbert wrote five sequels, the first two of which were adapted as a 2003 miniseries. Dune has also inspired tabletop games and a series of video games. Since 2009, the names of planets from the Dune novels have been adopted for the real-world nomenclature of plains and other features on Saturn's moon Titan. Frank Herbert died in 1986. Beginning in 1999, his son Brian Herbert and science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson published several collections of prequel novels, as well as two sequels that complete the original Dune series (Hunters of Dune in 2006 and Sandworms of Dune in 2007), partially based on Frank Herbert's notes discovered a decade after his death. As of 2024, 23 Dune books by Herbert and Anderson have been published. The political, scientific, and social fictional setting of Herbert's novels and derivative works is known as the Dune universe or Duniverse. Set tens of thousands of years in the future, the saga chronicles an intergalactic human and transhuman civilization that has banned all "thinking machines", including computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. In their place, this civilization—which, for most of the narrative, is organized as a complex technofeudal polity called the Imperium—has developed advanced mental and physical disciplines and technologies that adhere to the ban on computers. The harsh desert planet Arrakis, the only known source of the spice melange, is vital to the Imperium. Humans ingest melange to be able to perform the computations needed for space travel and other advanced tasks. Due to the similarities between some of Herbert's terms and ideas and actual words and concepts in the Arabic language, as well as the series' inspiration from Islamic culture and themes, a Middle Eastern influence in Herbert's works has been widely noted.