Cit’s on the sly that Dune made his first appearance in The World, on October 23, 1970. The work of Frank Herbert, now broadcast as a big-budget television series (Dune. Prophecy, on Max), is then only the first volume of a science fiction saga known in France only to fans of the genre. It is moreover Jacques Goimard, a French academic teaching “marginal literatures” at the University of Paris-VII, who points out in a scholarly article this intergalactic epic, the publication of which in the United States began in a SF magazine in the early 1960s.
Its author Frank Herbert is a veteran of the Second World War, journalist and short story author, converted to ecology. In his article devoted to the boom in science fiction books in French bookstores, Jacques Goimard hails a “ big and beautiful book “, although ” a bit laborious in places ».
It was not until November 24, 1978 that the saga Dune be chronicled in “Le Monde des livres”, from the pen of Alexis Lecaye. This writer and screenwriter is enthusiastic about the latest volume, Children of Dune (Robert Laffont, 1978), who “ closes one of the most masterful epics of contemporary science fiction ».
The contributor to the literary pages of Monde ventures to summarize this “ mind-blowing fresco » and overflowing with 1,200 pages: “ Arrakis is the center of the story, a desolate world compared to which the Sahara is a humid and green paradise, the sole supplier of a drug, “the spice”, an elixir of prescience and longevity.he explains. Only this spice allows interstellar navigators to sail through the currents of space. For all men, possession of drugs and their sources is the basis of power. As a backdrop, a human civilization, infinitely diversified, extends to the stars, an immense feudal empire shared between a few great families. »
The Lynchian error
Over the years, the saga Dune established itself as a worldwide commercial success in bookstores, with soon more than 20 million copies sold. But a curse hangs over its adaptation to the cinema. As recalled The World in February 1985, several filmmakers broke their teeth there, including Alejandro Jodorowsky. It is ultimately the American David Lynch, crowned by the success of his first two films Eraserhead et Elephant Man, who tries to take up the challenge. But his Dune does not convince the criticism of Monde Colette Godard, who seems to find Lynch’s film very bland, in unison with all the critics.
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