Dune, Book 1: Dune

I don't know why I tend to be surprised when a classic novel turns out to be good. I guess I expect that the novelty that made it good has been lost over the years: having already been exposed to other works that were inspired by the classic. It won't feel special anymore.

But Dune by Frank Herbert was good even when reading it for the first time now. The book had a similar feeling to it as the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I guess they're kind of from the same time period even if Foundation predates Dune by over a decade: 1951 and 1965 respectively. Evidently some Tim O'Reilly also suggested in his monograph that Herbert wrote Dune as a counterpoint to Foundation: the decay of a galactic empire but with different assumptions and conclusions.

In Dune, some galactic Emperor has machinated House Atreides to take control of Arrakis, a desert planet, Dune. It is the only place where a precious drug melange is produced and thus ruling the planet is a precarious position. Duke Leto Atraides, his son Paul, and Lady Jessica face immediate danger from House Harkonnen who previously held the position.

I was going to write how the novel's only fault was its short length. The Finnish paperback I read is not even 300 pages; it felt like a mere prologue! The praise quote on the cover is appropriate; "a snack for a scifi fan" indeed. As it turns out though, it was in fact not the whole book; just the first part -- or "book" as it's titled. I don't know if this was a translation print thing -- novels tend to get thicker in Finnish and get chopped into pieces (see The Wheel of Time) -- or is it how Dune has been published in English as well. I clearly should have borrowed the following volumes at the same time.

Still, regardless of being just the first part, the novel kind of speeds through its events. It doesn't waste time savoring the moments. I reckon that were it written in this day and age, it would be a lot longer. Or maybe I have read too much epic fantasy.

Also, reading Dune in Finnish wasn't the perfect experience. The name Harkonnen looks way too much like a Finnish name but is treated as foreign one and thus the base word doesn't get inflected like a Finnish name would; suffixes are just added to the end. You get inflections like 'Harkonnenien' (plural genitive) which just looks wrong to a Finn: as if it said "Harkko's noses". And even trying to inflect it like a Finnish name (dropping the -nen off for Harkonsien) would sound wrong due to the weird double N in the name: it's just not a Finnish thing.

Herbert apparently wanted a harsh-sounding name for the antagonist and came across Härkönen in a California telephone book. He thought it sounded "Soviet". I'm guessing it transformed into Harkonnen because typing Äs and Ös probably would have been difficult for not having the keys and because Herbert didn't know Ä (/æ/) and Ö (/ø/) are their own letters (in Finnish); the umlauts are not just a pronunciation guide. 'Harkonnen' is also almost exactly what an American trying to pronounce Härkönen sounds like: "haarkounnen". And on top of everything, the head of House Harkonnen has a Slavic (Russian) first name: Vladimir. All kinds of wrong with this thing.

Had I been the translator, in this case Anja Toivonen (also revised by Ari Koskinen), I would have made the decision to change Harkonnen to Härkönen and treated it as a Finnish name. Even Harkkonen could have worked. I don't know if that's an existing Finnish surname -- if it is, it is too rare to have public statistics available -- but that would have made it even better, I think.

Now to acquire continuation to this Dune saga...