Dune 3: Planetary Regeneration?

Why Chani Kynes is my favorite character in Denis Villeneuve's latest epic.

By far the most interesting characters in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, for me at least, were the Kynes family: Pardot, Liet-Kynes and Chani. But that wouldn’t have been the case had I simply watched Denis Villeneuve’s astonishing brace of films, Dune and Dune 2. And I wonder whether, in the process of creating his action-heavy blockbusters, Villeneuve hasn’t (so far at least) short-changed Herbert, helping viewers miss much of the point of Herbert’s story.

In the book, the Kynes family line begins with Pardot Kynes, the first planetologist on Arrakis (aka Dune), then cascades to his son Liet-Kynes and next to his daughter Chani. As a result, even while deeply immersed in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune 2 last night at the Olympic Studios cinema—where bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Led Zeppelin once recorded—I sensed an agitated ghost. But it wasn’t that of John Lennon, Brian Jones or Jimi Hendrix. It was only when we got home that I realised that it was the ghost of Herbert’s original Chani Kynes.

On the face of it, as played by actress Zendaya, Chani enjoys top billing, as the main love interest of Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet. The film ends on her. But you would be hard-pressed to guess the back story. In the book, she was a more complex character, not simply a beguiling desert fighter—and the family business of planetary regeneration was what guaranteed that the story would live on so powerfully in my memory.

Pardot Kynes was focused on the challenge of terraforming the planet of Arrakis, which he alone—at the time—saw was possible. His son, Liet-Kynes, then assumed his father’s mantle, as Dune.fandom.wiki explains, continuing “the vision of gradually terraforming the planet from a harsh desert world into a temperate world with precipitation, greenery, and open water.”

Compared to his father, Pardot Kynes, “who almost entirely focused on the ecologic reformation of Dune and at times appeared to be tactless (though he was kind nonetheless), Liet-Kynes paid more attention to the Fremen and was overall significantly more Fremen and less single-minded than Pardot.”

The son, in short, grasped the power of the social and cultural bottom lines, not just the environmental ones. The economic dynamic was provided by the harvesting of spice, a powerful narcotic produced by the sandworms haunting the planet’s desert expanses. This was “the rarest and most valuable commodity in the known universe. It was said that it was so valuable that one briefcase full of spice would be enough to purchase an entire planet.”

Sometimes ranked as the best-ever science fiction novel, I read Dune back in the late Sixties and it pulled me deeper into the sci-fi world, sparking a multiyear quest to meet its author—an ultimately successful adventure I describe in my new book Tickling Sharks (due out from Fast Company Press in June). The conversation we had in 1983, as I arrived in London from Seattle and he and his wife Bev prepared to fly back to the same city, was one that has resonated powerfully for me throughout life.

On first reading back in 1968 or 1969, it took me forty pages to penetrate the Dune world, but then I was completely, irretrievably hooked. This was a radically different reality, but one shot through with ecological themes. And those themes were reinforced for me last night when I pulled down a paperback version of the book (New English Library, 1965).

On page 465, I came across Herbert’s three appendixes, the first on the ecology of Dune, the second on the planet’s main religion, and the third on the Bene Gesserit religious order that plays such a pivotal role through the story.

Then, in the first few paragraphs of the ecology section, which is a manual for regenerating a desert planet, I came across this quote from Pardot Kynes, describing the aim of all life: “Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce co-ordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system’s capacity to sustain life. Life—all life—is in the service of life.” Having thought that the line that “life creates the conditions for more life” was novel, this was a forceful reminder that Herbert and other paradigm shifters were there well before us.

As I recall in Tickling Sharks, I first came across Dune as a set book in a sociology of religion course—and the book’s second appendix helps explains why. It sketches the various threads woven together to evolve the Fremen religion that provides the context and much of the motive force for Paul Atreides’ rise to power—and his overthrow of Emperor Shaddam IV, played here by Christopher Walken.

Having just finished Heresy, Catherine Nixey’s brilliant survey of the multiple prototype versions of Christianity, and of the brutal suppression of so many of them, I was primed to understand the furiously complex politics of evolving religions, nor as Richard Dawkins would have it, mind viruses.

Computers, too, suffer from viruses, just as AI systems seem to suffer hallucinations. And a key component of the back story is the Butlerian Jihad. This, in Herbert’s telling, involved the bloody overthrow of machine logic and of thinking machines, or computers. The ways in which humankind develops workarounds—including human computers, or mentats, and space navigating pilots supplied with a gas evolved from spice, are key elements in Herbert’s narrative. At a time when the exponentially accelerating power of AI is ringing alarm bells in various quarters, it is clear that he was ahead of this curve, too.

In very much the same that he positioned Paul Atreides as a “voice from an outer world,” so Frank Herbert has played that role for us. In my own way, too, I have tried to do something similar for a business world only just beginning to wake up to the potential power of regenerative mindsets—if not yet to the increasingly urgent challenge of planetary regeneration.

Hopefully that’s a card Denis Villeneuve has up his sleeve for Dune 3?