5 ways Dune is better than Foundation

(No serious spoilers)

In anticipation of the movie and TV versions of these sci-fi classics this fall, I read both Herbert’s Dune and Asimov’s Foundation. I understand that Foundation was planned as the first of a series to begin with (Dune had sequels, but it was complete in itself), but the first book ought to make you want to keep going. It didn’t. But Dune is fantastic. Once the film comes out, I’ll write again about it (probably with spoilers). For now I’ll simply point to a few ways I think it’s a much better book.

1. Character development
   The most obvious difference between the two novels is the depth of character development in Dune compared to Foundation. The latter skips through generations with each new chapter. You never really get to know any of the characters before you move on to a new era when the previous characters are just names from the past. Dune takes place over just a few years, and so lets you dwell on the characters, get to know what makes them tick, and get to like them (or despise them). For Foundation’s approach to work, you have to do something like War and Peace in a much longer book.
   

2. Female characters
   I think there is only one female in Foundation that has any lines. And she only speaks twice. And both times it is a stereotypical 1950s housewife projected into the future. I’m curious to see how the TV version is going to play this. Lord of the Rings tilts in that direction too, and the Peter Jackson retelling took some liberties to get some more females involved. Perhaps the other books in the series have some characters and plot lines that can be mined for this. The first book is just one dude after another.
   
   Dune’s main character is male. But two of the other most important figures are females. It’s not like we see some egalitarian society in Dune, but at least there is the recognition that 50% of the population actually contributes to the world. And there is a really interesting community of characters — the Bene Gesserit — who are all female.
   

3. Feels less like Buck Rogers
   Predicting the future of technological change is hard. So any sci-fi stories are going to miss some elements of their imagined futures which become central to a way of life. Foundation written in the 1950s, and Asimov didn’t have computers in mind at all at that time. Instead, he had the people of his future using personal nuclear devices with all kinds of nifty effects: generate a personal shield, make a knife cut through steel, give yourself an aura that changes your appearance. But it all just felt corny like the old Buck Rogers space adventures.
   
   Dune was written in the 1960s, so it too has some element of that. I’m guessing the movie version will incorporate computer technology much more than the novel did. But the setting on a desert planet helps to give you the sense that this isn’t just your own world projected into the future, but something very different anyway. Reading it doesn’t feel like lame sci-fi that missed a really important part of future civilizations.
   

4. World Building
   There are a couple of ideas in Foundation that are really interesting, and I look forward to seeing how they are worked into the TV series (because I don’t plan on reading the other books). One is the prediction of the future, and how it affects what people do right now: if you know the prediction, it throws off the predictions, rather than things being fated like in Oedipus where no matter what you do, it brings about the same conclusion. And secondly, I like how science became a religion in Foundation and was used as a tool to control the population. But beyond these ideas, I didn’t get the sort of fully developed and coherent world building that I like to see in fantasy and sci-fi novels.
   
   Dune, on the other hand, delivers this well. Again, because it is a desert planet, Herbert has to give us enough detail to make life plausible on the planet at all. And you come to feel that the Fremen desert dwellers really could have survived. Of course water becomes the most precious commodity. So how does life get organized around this fact? We get a nice picture of this throughout the novel. As an example, consider the stillsuits. When I first read the word I thought of “still” as the adjective for lacking motion; but of course in a desert world where water is gold, “still” refers to the noun, the thing that collects vapor and condenses it back to liquid. You can see the nostril plugs people wear in the trailer for the upcoming movie. That’s part of the apparatus that collects the body’s moisture — yes, all of it — and reclaims it for drinking again.
   

5. Sand worms
   Finally, there is nothing like Dune’s sandworms in Foundation, and these are fantastic. The size of them seems a little outrageous (kind of like the ice wall in the northern country of Game of Thrones). But they are a brilliant device in the story. They are shrouded in some mystery, but we’re given enough to know that they are both a constant threat as well as a crucial resource. And of course they cohere with the world perfectly. I can’t wait to see them on the big screen. Let’s hope it’s better than the 1984 attempt.