How the ‘Dune’ VFX and Sound Teams Made Sandworms From Scratch
They call it “sandscreen.” Out in the deserts of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, where director Denis Villeneuve shot much of Dune, everything is varying shades of beige. To…
With ‘Dune,’ Frank Herbert Designed the Maxi Pad of the Future
Don’t tell Frank Herbert (or the people at Thinx), but he actually came up with a pretty genius pair of menstrual underwear. Back in 1965. Only, well, his was outerwear—and…
Brian Herbert on ‘Dune’: ‘My Father Could See Into the Future’
Perhaps the most relevant layer, right now, is the environmentalism. Yeah. Frank Herbert read everything. He told me once that he couldn’t read one page of an encyclopedia without reading…
What the Military Can Learn From ‘Dune’
Carl von Clausewitz and Frank Herbert both understood the power of schwerpunkt. A 19th-century theorist revered among military geeks the way Paul Brown is revered among football coaches, Clausewitz wrote…
The Secret Sci-Fi Origins of Burning Man
It happened one night, sometime between 2000 and 2005. She swears it happened, but she can’t be more specific about the timing than that. What Summer Burkes does remember is…
How to Make a ‘Dune’ Stillsuit
Everyone talks about the sandworms and the spice, but the coolest thing Frank Herbert invented for Dune—even he seemed to think so—was the stillsuit. Worn by the inhabitants of the…
Spice World: WIRED Traces the ‘Dune’ Legacy
Dune, famously, is an unfilmable piece of work. It has four appendices and a glossary of its own gibberish, and its action takes place on two planets, one of which…
‘Dune’ Foresaw—and Influenced—Half a Century of Global Conflict
Just before his deployment to Iraq in 2003, Ryan Kort spotted a paperback copy of Dune in a bookstore near Fort Riley, Kansas. The 23-year-old second lieutenant was intrigued by…