There had been so many things to learn. Arrakis would be a place so different from Caladan that Paul's mind whirled with a new knowledge. Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet.

Thufir Hawat, his father's Master of Assassins, had explained it: their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, had been on Arrakis for eighty years, holding the planet in quasi-fief under a CHOAM Company contract to mine the geriatric spice, mélange. Now the Harkonnens were leaving to be replaced by the House of Atreides in fief-complete—an apparent victory for the Duke Leto.

Basic Set up:

In the first chapter of this famous novel, the narrator introduces us to Arrakis, the planet that contains the lucrative drug mélange, which everyone is fighting over.

Frank Herbert's Dune is sci-fi par excellence. There are distant planets, lots of science, amazing journeys and voyages and dueling dynasties. In fact, it's one of the most popular sci-fi works ever published.

In this passage, we can see a lot of these classic sci-fi themes. There's the desert planet Arrakis. There's the drug mélange, which gives people longer lives (and here we can see the book's emphasis on scientific themes). And there is, as in any good Sci-fi story, big conflict: in this it's case between dueling dynasties.

Herbert's novel was first published in serialized form in Analog, the famous Sci-fi magazine that had been formerly known as Astounding Science Fiction.

Given that the Dune series became one of the best-selling sci-fi stories of all time, the fact that it was first published in a magazine shows us just how important these magazines were in the development of the genre.