"A Star Wars for Adults".
This is how Dune director Denis Villeneuve has described the story on which his new film is based.
Maths Claesson, CEO and founder of the Science Fiction bookstore, agrees.
He first read Dune as a lone train wrecker at a hostel in Copenhagen in the early 80's.
- I was expelled from the world as a young man.
At the same time, I read Dune about a different universe in a completely different world.
It felt appropriate.
He was devoured by Frank Herbert's grand and complex world.
- It's epic science fiction.
It takes place in a distant world with a time span of hundreds of thousands of years.
It's about families and a Machiavellian power struggle in a fantastic world: a sand planet with alien creatures.
It is entertainment with a high IQ content.
Eternal bestseller
The first Dune book
Arrakis - the desert planet
was published in 1965. Frank Herbert managed to write four more before his death in 1985.
In the same vein, 1984, the Science Fiction bookstore opened its first store in Stockholm.
The Dune books have topped the sales list since the start.
- There are a few books that always sell, year in and year out.
It's Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Douglas Adams The Lifter's Guide to the Galaxy and Frank Herbert's Dune.
But in our bookstore sales, Dune is the single title that sold the most of all books in the science fiction genre, says Maths Claesson.
- Many books appear and become large and then disappear.
Dune just lives on.
How is it that?
- Frank Herbert has managed to get an interesting discussion about climate destruction combined with an interesting family struggle.
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is not a distant comparison.
It also contains a question of imperialism that one can think about.
Another factor is that Herbert is rooted in the natural sciences.
It is appreciated by a critical readership.
- A science fiction writer plays god when they create new worlds. You must have full control of biology, physics, the human race, the animal world and the fauna. Frank Herbert really has it, and that's one explanation for the success.