Frank Herbert’s novel was published in 1965 and became the best-selling science fiction novel in the world. Furthermore, it is regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written. In the far future, Frank Herbert invented an interplanetary feudal society where kings and emperors control and struggle for a substance known as the Spice Melange, which grants mankind superhuman strength and aids in space travel. The desired Spice Melange, on the other hand, can only be found on the planet Arrakis and is accidentally defended by massive monsters known as sandworms, which can grow to be a thousand meters long. Dune, Herbert’s first novel, received overwhelmingly good reviews from critics and was nominated for both the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Frank Herbert penned six Dune books, and David Lynch directed the first Dune picture in 1984, followed by two Dune television series in 2000 and 2003. Denis Villeneuve, the guy behind films like the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival, is directing the second Dune film, which will be released later this year.
What Are Sandworms? Why Are They Important?
The planet of Arrakis, also called Dune or Rakis, was a harsh and arid planet filled with deserts on its surface. It was located in the Canopus star system. The planet was important because it provided a substance called the Spice Melange, something that helped in space travel. The sandworms or Shai Hulud were native species of planet Arrakis and lived in the vast sand dunes and the vast deserts. It was these sandworms that were vital for the creation of the Spice Melange. Due to their gigantic form and impact, they were both feared and honored.
These are highly territorial creatures that would fight another to save their territory or die trying. These humongous creatures could grow up to four hundred and fifty meters in height. When compared to the largest animal found on Earth, i.e., the blue whales, the sandworms grow thirteen times longer than the whales. However, some believe that the creatures can even grow up to 700 to 1000 meters. That’s a freaking kilometer! But since most things about the planet of Arrakis are shrouded in mystery, these deductions about the sandworms could be flawed. Much like anacondas and great white sharks, it is believed that the creatures keep growing till the time they die and can live up to thousands of years.
A sandworm’s outer skin is orange in color and thick and rough in texture. Because the skin is created of thousands of tough and hardened scales, each a few square feet in area, it protects the gargantuan creature from internal sand invasion and other hostile events. The Fremen, or the people who considered that Arrakis was their home, discovered that while the outer skin was impenetrable because of overlapping and interlocking of the scales, it could still be exploited by compromising the integrity of the skin.
This could be achieved by prying open an edge and allowing sand to get to the softer insides of the sandworm, which causes intense levels of irritation to the sandworm. To stop more sand from getting inside, the sandworm doesn’t dive into the sand and rolls over so that the damaged portion is high up from the ground. When in this position, a Fremen can ride the worm. Worm riding is often considered a sacred act and is sometimes used to travel distances. In fact, just the way light is used to measure distances between planets in lightyears, the Fremen measured distances in sandworms. One unit would cover the distance until the sandworm got exhausted and dived into the sand.
Interestingly enough, the legendary H. R. Giger also envisioned the sandworms. But these creatures were inspired by the dragons from European mythology that guarded treasure and the dragon in Beowulf that also guarded gold. Much like these mythological and literary creatures that protected something valuable, the sandworms also attack all those who attempt to harvest it.
A sandworm’s approach towards a particular place would almost always get indicated by lightning due to the static discharge of electricity. Furthermore, sandworms get attracted to rhythmic vibrations or movements. For this reason, travelers had to move without a rhythm because the sandworms often perceived rhythm for prey in the form of smaller sandworms or enemies in the form of mature ones.
Therefore, sandworms are considered to be cannibalistic in nature. Although its diet majorly consists of sand and other inorganic compounds found in the crust of Arrakis, some believe that they eat the sand planktons for further nourishment. However, water served as a catalyst that accelerated its metabolism and made the organism unstable, causing organ failure. In other words, water was severely poisonous to sandworms, even in small amounts. Such deaths would be excruciatingly painful for them.
What Is Spice Melange?
The extremely arid lands of Arrakis are the only natural source of the spice mélange, which is often considered as the most valuable commodity in the entirety of the universe. It is also a drug that increases the life span, provides enhanced vitality, and heightens awareness in people. But the most important use is its capability to unlock prescience that aids in interstellar travel. As a result, it helped in cultural development as people started traveling more and to vast distances through warp space. Because it was a naturally occurring awareness spectrum narcotic, it became the building block and base of increased commerce and technological development in the universe for several millennia.
The spice mélange was found inside sand trouts or the larval form of a sandworm. Thousands of sand trouts would be present in a location deep beneath the surface, and they would suck large water bodies, transforming any region into vast deserts. However, when sand trouts are squeezed, spice mélange comes out of them. In other cases, the fungal excretion of a sand trout would get dissolved in water. When this substance would reach the surface, the intense heat and atmosphere of Arrakis would lead to a chemical reaction, producing the spice mélange.
Spice melange helped the Fremen to create several articles like chemical explosives, spice fiber, spice paper, etc. To give you a perspective about its value, it was believed that one case of spice melange was enough to purchase an entire planet. Such a valuable substance is bound to have several properties. It has mind-altering properties and can awaken the dormant parts of the human brain and mind, even enhancing sensory perceptions, and strong doses of the substance can aid in prescience. Apart from the psychological benefits, the spice melange increases life expectance and fortifies immunity, etc., so much so that it can triple the average life expectancy. But as mentioned earlier, it is essentially a narcotic component and creates addiction.
Anatomy And Life-Span Of Sandworms Explored
Sandworms are creatures that are similar in appearance to humongous segmented worms or ringworms, and they can also be compared to lampreys. These cylindrical and elephantine worms are fearsome creatures with an array of razor-sharp crystalline teeth that are used for rasping through sand and rocks alike. Its mouth itself is about eighty meters in diameter. Let Kynes describe the sandworms as incredibly tough and further notes that the only known way to kill them is through applying high-voltage electric shock, but even that has to be applied at different ring segments.
However, atomics also helps the cause because they are the only explosives that are potent enough to kill an entire mature worm. The conventional forms of explosives are rendered useless against these creatures because each ring segment of a sandworm is sentient and has a life of its own. As discussed earlier, water is a potent weapon against the sandworms but since it is a rare resource on the planet of Arrakis, water is a feasible weapon only against the smaller sandworms. According to Herbert himself, the microscopic creatures called the sand planktons to feed on the spice melange that the sandworms scatter on the sands of Arrakis.
These sand planktons, in turn, become the food for the sandworms, in addition to the inorganic substances found on the crust of Arrakis. As discussed earlier, the sand trouts thrive on water, but the sandworms don’t. The sand trouts get attracted to even little amounts of water, and the Fremen protect this valuable natural resource by using predator fish in their waters, which attack the incoming sand trouts.
Interestingly, Arrakis used to be a wet planet a long time ago, and that’s how there’s a vast amount of sand, just like the Saharan region was once an ocean. Naturally, sand trouts must have been introduced to the planet of Arrakis by some external being, after which point the land became arid and hostile. The essential reason why a sand trout seeks to terraform a wet planet into a dry one is that the sandworms, or their final form, grow and thrive only in dry regions.
According to Leto II Atreides in Children of Dune, the flat and leathery sand trouts look like diamond-shaped creatures with no heads, eyes, or extremities and look like coarse interlacings of extruded cilia. Squeezing them releases a green syrup. These are essentially water stealers and can die because of minute changes in temperature resulting in a spice blow. The few sand trouts that survive enter a semi-dormant cyst-hibernation and emerge six years later as small sandworms about three meters long. However, not all of these survive, and only a small number of these three-meter-long creatures develop and mature into fully grown sandworms. Now that they have grown and matured, water becomes highly toxic for them.
Dealing With Sandworms and their Relationship With Fremen
Despite the fact that sandworms resist eating humans because of the water content in humans, they could be hostile and extremely dangerous to humans or Fremen, who respect them, because of their territorial nature. The sandworms get attracted to or rather get maddened by the presence of electric forcefields used by the Fremen as a personal defense mechanism. In the novel Children of Dune, it was revealed that a weapon called a pseudo-shield was created with which a sandworm could be summoned to destroy anything in the vicinity.
The Fremen have developed a special bond of sorts with the sandworms, and they have learned the ways to avoid these hulking monsters. The Fremen avoid sandworm attacks by moving in a similar fashion as desert creatures and also use the natural sounds of the desert to avoid rhythmic vibrations. Furthermore, they have devised a device called the thumper, which attracts a sandworm to a specific point, the thumper’s express function is to create a diversion for the Fremen to move or to summon a worm ride. Riding the sandworms has developed as a coming of age ritual among Fremen, apart from serving as a mode of transport. The teeth of sandworms serve as sacred knives called the cryo knives, which are about twenty centimeters in length and are extensively used in hand-to-hand combat.
How Have Sandworms Been Represented In Various Dune Content?
In the novel Dune, humans harvested the spice melange with great trouble and respected the sandworms as divine creatures. However, anyone apart from the Fremen considered them as nothing but pests, and only a few knew how sandworms were connected to the spice melange. However, in the 1976 novel Children of Dune, this changed drastically, and people constantly attempted to transport sandworms to different planets so that more spice melange could be created. In Children of Dune, Leto II consumes huge amounts of the spice melange; this not only gives him superhuman speed, strength, and stamina but also allows him to live for more than 3500 years. Eventually, he transforms into a beast that is a hybrid between a sandworm and a human. During the events of God Emperor of Dune from 1981, he had exterminated all of the sandworms.
Dune (1984)
Carlo Rambaldi created the sandworms in the 1984 Dune film at a budget of around two million dollars. Rambaldi had already created the titular creature for the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. While the special effects screen stood at a massive 35 feet by 108 feet in height and breadth, the sandworms themselves were essentially created using practical effect models and miniature sets. The largest of the models used were about twenty feet in length, and cranes were used to move the body. For background action, smaller versions were used. The miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune and Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune, released in the years 2000 and 2003 respectively, primarily used visual effects to create the monster. Each of them won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Special.
The man behind films like Arrival and the 2019 Blade Runner, Denis Villeneuve, is set to take the reigns of the new Dune film, which would be the latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s much-celebrated and loved Dune series. The film, however, would be based on the first half of the novel, and the latter half would be brought to life in a sequel. Given the complexities of the Dune universe, it is only logical to picturise the film in two separate installments.