Review: 'The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies'

We are living through very Duney times. The last thing I reviewed here on Psychobabble was Max Evry's oral history A Masterpiece in Disarray. The latest is Ryan Britt's The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies. This is a very different worm from Evry's hulkingly exhaustive 500-page dive into David Lynch's bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi franchise. Britt delivers only half the page count but sets his blue-within-blue eyes across a more complete vista, reminding us that Lynch's film is only one stop along a hero's journey that began in the early sixties when Frank Herbert, a struggling writer with a debt to the IRS looming over his head, conceived a far off galaxy in which royal houses squabble over control of a sandy drug empire. Dune World was published as a magazine serial in 1963, fleshed out for the more pithily titled novel in 1965, and further expanded for a series of literary sequels. Then came Alejandro Jodorowsky's doomed aborted attempt to adapt it into a film, Lynch's doomed unaborted attempt to adapt it into a film, John Harrison's TV miniseries for the Sci-Fi channel, and Dennis Villeneuve's ongoing big-screen remake series.

Despite wielding a hefty influence on such whiz-bang entertainment as Star Wars, Dune in all its iterations has a reputation for being fairly dense, serious stuff, but Britt goes out of his way to give the property's history a light telling to re-emphasize the fact that once you boil Dune down, it's still a story of heroes and villains and giant worms in outer space. After setting the tone with an extended discussion of Herbert's facial hair, the author blazes along all of the major stops on Dune Avenue, including its influence on its much more eager-to-please kid brother, Star Wars. 

If all you want to learn about is Lynch's film, which despite its rep as a turkey has a pretty sizable cult following and gains extra curiosity simply because it was made by our greatest living filmmaker, A Masterpiece in Disarray is certainly the book to get. But even though Britt only devotes 28 pages to that which Evry devoted 500, we still learn a few new things via Britt's interviews with Kyle MacLachlan and Alicia Witt. And, of course, if you have a more sweeping interest in Dune, Britt earns his keep by discussing matters such as the miniseries and the remake franchise that aren't among Evry's main focal points. And if you're pressed for time, Britt's book is certainly quicker to digest than Evry's, even if it isn't likely to leaving you feeling as satisfied.