Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
24
Fictional Dune Worlds
Since human civilization requires water, and dunes imply
dry conditions, there is a generally an anticorrelation of
human population with dune population, and thus dune-
fields are an exotic, but recognizable, realm for most of us.
It is therefore no surprise that dune-filled deserts figure in
science fiction; indeed Arthur C. Clarke's first novel was
entitled The Sands of Mars.
An interesting, if slightly forced, connection is that the
most-read and most-translated book in French (selling over
200 million copies to date) is Le Petit Prince (The Little
Prince) which is in part set on an asteroid, and thus might
qualify as science fiction. This novella was written by aris-
tocratic author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who worked as a
mail pilot in North Africa and thus was very familiar with
the Sahara. Aspects of the topic are inspired by his experi-
ences; notably, the topic's narrator—a pilot—talks of being
stranded in the desert next to his crashed plane. This clearly
draws on Saint-Exupéry's remarkable survival in 1935 of
crashing his plane in the Sahara in the middle of the night
after 19 h in the air during an attempt to break the Paris-to-
Saigon speed record. He and his co-pilot nearly died of
dehydration wandering among the dunes in Egypt (actually
only 50 km or so from the Quattaniya dunes shown in
being saved by a chance encounter with a Bedouin. The
writer/narrator's admiration of the desert is clear in the
following excerpt, which points to a recurring theme in
desert studies and fiction, of water beneath the sands:
first is of historical interest, and in prompting thought about
the global sand budget of a dry planet; the second is of geo-
graphical interest, in that dune migration has been observed at
the film set used to make this fictional world seem real.
24.1
Arrakis
It is remarkable to us scientists, although perhaps not noted
by most of its readers, that Frank Herbert dedicates his
award-winning 1966 book Dune (considered the world's
best-selling science fiction novel) as follows: ''To the
people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of 'real
materials'—to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may
be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is
dedicated in humility and admiration.'' Herbert was inspired
by US Department of Agriculture efforts to stabilize dunes
in Oregon with grass.
As noted by Lorenz (2007), the novel is set on a world,
Arrakis, whose coverage by sand exceeds that of any world
we know. As the topic describes:
Observe closely, Piter, and you, too, Feyd-Rautha, my darling:
from sixty degrees north to seventy degrees south—these
exquisite ripples. Their coloring: does it not remind you of
sweet caramels? And nowhere do you see blue of lakes or rivers
or seas. And these lovely polar caps—so small. Could anyone
mistake this place? Arrakis! Truly unique'' (Dune, p. 14).
The geology—with salt flats—hints that Arrakis was
once wetter, and a plot element is the prospect of terra-
forming it back to more benign conditions. Herbert
describes the desert people 'Fremen' having clearly
researched Bagnold's work and others: the Fremen wear
'stillsuits' to retain exhaled water vapor, presumably
inspired by the external condenser that Bagnold introduced
into the radiators of his desert trucks. The Fremen repri-
mand one character for their poor skills at traversing the
the sand last night. You keep your force on the slip-face of
the dunes. Bad'' (p. 211).
…without saying anything more, I looked across the ridges of
sand that were stretched out before us in the moonlight. ''The
desert is beautiful,'' the little prince added. And that was true. I
have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand
dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence
something throbs, and gleams… ''What makes the desert beau-
tiful,'' said the little prince, ''is that somewhere it hides a well…
In the following text we discuss two fictional planets of
note, Arrakis, the setting of the Dune series of novels, and
Tatooine, a prominent world in the 'Star Wars' movies. The
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