Summary
Chapter 1
In Castle Caladan, where House Atreides has lived for 26 generations, Jessica—Duke Leto’s concubine, Paul’s mother, and a Bene Gesserit Lady—shows a mysterious old woman her son’s room. Paul, 15 years old, pretends to be sleeping. He listens to their conversation, and he thinks repeatedly about Arrakis, the planet his father has been given. This is an apparent victory over their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, who have held Arrakis for the last 80 years. Paul falls asleep and dreams of a crowded Arrakeen cavern (this dream is a prediction, and he knows it; he always remembers dreams that tell the future). When he wakes up, he practices a mind-body lesson his mother taught him to control his physical state.
Jessica summons Paul to meet the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the woman from last night, who is Jessica’s old teacher and the Emperor’s Truthsayer. Jessica leaves Paul alone with her, and the Reverend Mother performs a test with the gom jabbar, a poisoned needle held at his neck while he puts his hand in a box that causes excruciating pain. The purpose of the test is to “determine if you’re human,” able to control instinct and master the self. Jessica passed this test as part of her training; Bene Gesserit almost never give this test to men. Paul passes as well, withstanding much more pain than any person before him, and the Reverend Mother sees that he can see truth—perhaps he is the Kwisatz Haderach, the only person who can see down both feminine and masculine avenues (Bene Gesserit Truthsayers can see only female pasts).
Paul and the Reverend Mother discuss mankind’s previous downfall (thousands of years ago, the Great Revolt was led against robots and computers, which are now considered sinful) and the role of Bene Gesserit (managing human affairs and politics—often determining who's “human” and who's “animal,” deciding who can procreate). The control that the Bene Gesserit exercise over genetic lines conflicts with Paul’s "instinct for rightness" in a way he doesn’t quite understand, but he knows it's tied to his "terrible purpose." He learns that many men have taken the Truthsayer drug to see if they are the Kwisatz Haderach, but they have all died.
Chapter 2
Baron Vladimir Harkonnen brags to his Mentat, Piter de Vries, and his young nephew Feyd-Rautha about his successful trap for Duke Leto on Arrakis. The Baron knows he’ll kill Piter soon, since he’s addicted to spice and has nearly outlived his usefulness. Piter, with advanced Mentat awareness, also knows this and jokes about it. The Baron makes Piter explain his predictions to Feyd-Rautha: Duke Leto will be shocked to learn that Dr. Yueh, one of Paul’s teachers, is secretly a Harkonnen agent. Dr. Yueh was subjected to Imperial Conditioning, an unbreakable vow against doing harm, but the Harkonnens found the right leverage to control him. The Atreides’ Mentat, Thufir Hawat, will be fooled into thinking Jessica is the traitor instead. An attempt will be made on Paul’s life, and on top of it all, Imperial soldiers—Sardaukar—in Harkonnen clothes will kill every member of House Atreides.
Chapter 3
The Reverend Mother questions Jessica about her choice to give birth to a son despite having been told only to give birth to daughters—now the breach between Atreides and Harkonnen might never be closed. Now it is guaranteed that House Atreides will fall and Jessica will be exiled. The Reverend Mother explains the three-point structure of their civilization: the Imperial Household (Emperor), the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad (like Atreides and Harkonnen), and the Spacing Guild. She also explains that all three of these points are “flotsam in the path of the flood” of the human race’s fear of genetic stagnation. The Reverend Mother calls Paul in and questions him about his prophetic dreams, then says he might be the Kwistaz Haderach, but it's just a possibility. She sees no possibility of Duke Leto’s life being saved.
Chapter 4
In a training room a week after meeting the Reverend Mother, Paul talks to Thufir Hawat, Mentat to the Atreides for three generations, about the storms and natives on Arrakis, as well as the Reverend Mother’s advice that Paul learn to properly rule, not just command. When Hawat leaves, Gurney Halleck joins Paul. After some teasing, they practice fighting. Their sparring turns serious after Paul says he’s not in the mood to fight, and Paul wonders if Halleck is betraying House Atreides. The sparring ends with a stalemate in which both would have died. Halleck wants Paul to understand how real the danger is, and Paul is sad that everything is so serious now. Halleck feels for Paul, but he personally knows how dangerous the Harkonnens are, and he hopes Paul is ready.
Chapter 5
Relaxed after his workout with Halleck, Paul talks to Dr. Yueh. Yueh gives him filmbooks for his journey, and Paul is primarily interested in the worms and the Fremen. Yueh also gives him a special version of the Orange Catholic Bible with actual pages. Paul accidentally reads Yueh’s wife Wanna’s favorite passage. Yueh is conflicted about betraying House Atreides—especially Paul—but he has to, to keep Wanna from being further hurt by the Harkonnens. (The opening quote for this chapter reveals that Wanna in fact died approximately five years ago.)
Chapter 6
Duke Leto Atreides enters the training room. He and Paul talk about the CHOAM Company, which controls the economy; the Guild, which transports everything between planets; and how controlling Arrakis means controlling melange, the spice that makes space travel possible. Paul deduces that the Harkonnens have been stockpiling spice for years and intend to create a shortage, thereby controlling everything—and they'll have an excuse to kill the Atreides in the process. The Duke explains that even the Padishah Emperor has been stockpiling spice, revealing even the Emperor is an enemy of House Atreides. He helps Paul realize his plan to use the Fremen to fight the Sardaukar. Duke Leto reveals that Paul has been trained since infancy to cultivate his Mentat capabilities, and Paul elects to continue his Mentat training; he secretly wonders if being a Mentat is his unknown "terrible purpose," but his new awareness denies it.
Chapter 7
Lady Jessica looks around the governor's mansion in Arrakeen, which Leto has made the capital. The first two things she’s unpacked are a painting of the Duke’s father and a mounted bull’s head, and she knows there’s something symbolic in the action but not what it means. She hasn’t felt this unsure since she was bought to be a concubine for the Duke. She and the Duke discuss practical matters, and they each think of the other with admiring fondness.
Jessica meets with the Shadout Mapes, a Fremen woman who has asked to serve her specifically. Jessica uses the Missionaria Protectiva—a Bene Gesserit order that planted “legends” on worlds centuries ago so that a trained Bene Gesserit could arrive and be “the One”—to impress Mapes. Mapes gives her a crysknife, a rare weapon made from the tooth of shai-hulud, which no one else can see without being “cleansed or slain.” Mapes allows Jessica to “take the water of her life”—draw her blood with the knife—and Jessica observes that Mapes’s blood coagulates incredibly quickly, a desert adaptation. Jessica tells Mapes to hang the portrait and the bull’s head, which is stained with the blood of the old Duke, as it’s the creature who killed him.
Chapter 8
Jessica and Yueh, who are good friends, speak outside Paul’s chamber while he's resting. They look at a row of 20 date palms, each of which requires five people’s water-worth a day. They also talk about the mystery of water on Arrakis—when a well is dug, there is water at first, but it seems to be stopped by what Jessica suspects is something plugging the source. Jessica realizes that Yueh hates the Harkonnens even more than the Duke does, and that his wife was Bene Gesserit and must be dead; she doesn’t realize that Yueh is going to betray them. Yueh wishes there was some way to avoid betrayal.
Chapter 9
Paul isn’t actually resting—he palmed Yueh’s sleeping tablet and intends to explore Arrakeen in secret. He hears a sound and freezes, which saves his life: from his elaborate headboard comes a hunter-seeker, a common assassination weapon controlled by a remote operator, but reliant on movement to kill. The Shadout Mapes opens the door, and Paul grabs the hunter-seeker out of the air and smashes it, saving her life. In exchange, she tells him there’s a traitor among the Atreides. Paul puts on his shield and leaves to find Jessica.
Chapter 10
Jessica climbs an odd staircase and finds a wet-planet conservatory full of exotic plants. She estimates this room uses enough water to support 1,000+ people on Arrakis. The room was left to her by the Bene Gesserit Lady Fenring, wife of Count Fenring, the Emperor’s former proxy on Arrakis. She also finds Lady Fenring’s secret note on the underside of a leaf, warning her of the assassination attempt on Paul. She runs to find Paul as he enters the conservatory. They learn the hunter-seeker was operated by someone walled away in the cellar over a month before their arrival. Paul and Jessica wonder who the traitor is—possibly Hawat. Once the house is safe, Paul is summoned to the Duke.
Chapter 11
Duke Leto struggles to suppress his rage at the assassination attempt, thinking repeatedly, They have tried to take the life of my son! He meets the Atreides men arriving in Arrakeen, including Gurney Halleck, whom he asks to recruit to the old spice hunters. He puts on a brave face for his men but is relieved when he’s finally alone.
Chapter 12
Paul defends Hawat to the Duke when they're alone in a conference room. When Hawat enters to resign because of the assassination attempt, the Duke rejects his resignation. The Duke leads a meeting of his trusted men, where they discuss the Fremen. Though the Harkonnens made a lot of money on Arrakis, the equipment they left behind is sabotaged and useless. Paul learns about the desert: sand harvesting, done by enormous machines that sandworms can nevertheless swallow whole; shields attract worms into a killing frenzy, and Fremen never use them. Hawat estimates there are hundreds of thousands of Fremen, spread across sietches, perhaps worshiping a god named Liet. The Duke intends to harness what he calls “desert power” primarily by recruiting Fremen, but he’s disappointed that only around 300 of the 800 old spice harvesters have chosen to stay.
Duncan Idaho, Paul’s weapons teacher who had been living among the Fremen, enters quickly to report finding a Harkonnen band disguised as Fremen. He’s followed closely by Stilgar, head of a sietch. Paul observes the power of a leader in Stilgar. There are many cultural differences: Stilgar commands Idaho to not show anyone his crysknife, even the Duke; Stilgar spits on the table in front of the Duke, a sign of respect for Fremen but an insult on Caladan. Despite these, the men agree to let Idaho be both Fremen and a soldier of the Atreides. After Stilgar leaves, the Duke asks Hawat to ask Dr. Kynes, the Imperial Ecologist and Justice of the Change, if the old ecological bases still exist and are operable. Paul perceives that his father is desperate.
Analysis
Dune is an intentionally complex book, and almost every character has at least a few paragraphs about their thoughts. The first three chapters are intentionally broad, spanning multiple planets and schemes. We learn about the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit scheme to control politics from the shadows, and Paul's "terrible purpose" that he doesn't yet understand. We also learn of Baron Harkonnen's plans to destroy House Atreides. In this single chapter, the entire plot of Book 1 is outlined. There's no suspense in what will happen—because of that, Herbert has more room to focus on how it happens, and how these many, many characters feel about it.
The later three chapters all take place in the same training room, and they have the same basic structure: A mentor enters, teaches Paul something, and leaves. This gives the reader a sense of "normal" life before the real adventure begins, and it shows how Paul is prepared for Arrakis. Various men provide physical, spiritual, political, and mental training—each man has his own expertise—and that training combines with the Bene Gessert training from his mother, which is some combination of all of the above. In all likelihood, Paul is the only boy in the universe who has Mentat training, Bene Gesserit training, and something else—his own drive, his "terrible purpose."
Herbert uses many rhetorical tricks to give the reader power, making the story feel epic. Telling the reader what's going to happen is one of them; the multiple perspectives are another. For example, without any character doubting Mentat abilities, the reader can figure out that Mentat computation isn't all it's cracked up to be. In Chapter 4, Thufir Hawat is proven to be wrong twice without knowing it. First, the reader knows (from reading it in Paul's POV) that Paul does recognize Hawat even with his back to the door. Second, because the reader saw the conversation, we know the Reverend Mother was not on Caladan to whip Lady Jessica in line. When Hawat's third uncertainty is "the importance of this planet as an enemy"—basically, that Paul needs to think of Arrakis as an enemy—we naturally think Hawat might be wrong, because this is his third guess and the other two were misses. This does two things: Mentats are shown to be fallible, and the reader gets a sense that Arrakis isn't an enemy.
Chapter 7 jumps straight to the governor's mansion on Arrakis, skipping House Atreides' arrival and any description of the planet. This might be a rhetorical tool Herbert uses to "hide" Arrakis from the reader for a while longer, so that the first glimpse of it is through Paul's eyes once he's exiled in the desert. It could also just be to move the story along more quickly—Herbert generally prefers to focus on small details rather than grand entrances. Either way, the result is that we see small flashes of Arrakis from within the walls of the governor's mansion. The date palms illustrate wastefulness, especially right after seeing how the Shadout Mapes' blood has adapted to coagulate quickly, saving as much water as possible. Stilgar impresses Paul, but the cultural differences are obvious, and it will be a while before Paul understands why.
By the end of Chapter 12, Paul observes that his father is like a “caged animal” with a “hunted wildness about his eyes.” This is one example of the recurring theme of animal versus human. The Duke perfectly illustrates what the Reverend Mother said of man: An animal will gnaw off its leg to escape a trap, but a human will wait inside the trap for the chance to kill the one hunting their kind. The Duke knows he's in a Harkonnen trap, but he does nothing to escape it. Instead, he prepares as best he can for when the hunter gets close enough to strike. Despite displaying what the Reverend Mother calls perfect human behavior, the Duke still looks like an animal to Paul, perhaps meaning that the distinction between human and animal isn't as black-and-white as the Bene Gesserit believe.
