Eagle Time Reading List

Since I didn't actually say much about the actual story of Dune, I'll provide a brief summary. The first third is economic warfare between scheming interplanetary noble houses (a topic I find utterly fascinating), and through the rest of the book it transitions to an even mix of standard elements of science fiction and fantasy.

The book centers around the fictitious, ultra-valuable superdrug/"spice" called "melange" which prolongs life and increases mental, psychic and interpersonal abilities, but will kill you if you stop using it. It's also only produced on an awful desert planet that's hospitable enough to not justify spacesuit use or biodomes, but nasty enough that it really would be easier if they were used. The key difficulty is the extreme lack of water.

A lot of the story, especially the end, focused on the duality of water and spice. Those who lived on Dune ate and even breathed the constant spice that suffused the planet, but took great care to conserve any water. Spice users not on Dune generally had little difficulty obtaining water, but had to constantly order inordinately expensive shipments of spice to keep themselves alive. It's even revealed late in the book that

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Spoilerthe great sand worms that produce and protect the spice throughout different points of their life cycle are actually responsible for the arid conditions. Sandworms in the early part of their lifecycle will suck up all of the water from the air and ground, leaving it barren. However, water is poisonous even in small quantities to older worms, and the proteins and byproducts produced by most Earth life are poisonous to all of their life stages.

So if you want spice, you can introduce sandworm larvae on a terrestrial planet, but you'll transform a paradise into a wasteland. And if you want a livable planet, you can cultivate patches of Earth life which will naturally spread, but will destroy your source of the most valuable substance in the galaxy.

You can have water or spice. Never both.