Full disclosure - I grew up in a small town near Port Townsend, Washington, where Frank Herbert had moved in the early 1970s, and even in the pre-Internet age we always heard his name mentioned by his readers with a kind of awe. It was perhaps this legendary status that kept me from diving into "Dune," or it may have been the fact that the world of "Dune" is a pretty deep pool and I never felt ready to cannonball into it. Sadly, it’s rare for adult books to be so lavishly illustrated in today’s market. The Folio Society has kept the tradition alive and has garnered a dedicated following of readers and collectors for their efforts. I asked Sam if this project presented any particular challenges, and he responded: In 1959, if you were walking the sand dunes near Florence, Oregon, you might have encountered a burly, bearded extrovert, striding about in Ray-Ban Aviators and practical army surplus clothing. Frank Herbert, a freelance writer with a feeling for ecology, was researching a magazine story about a US Department of Agriculture programme to stabilise the shifting sands by introducing European beach grass. Pushed by strong winds off the Pacific, the dunes moved eastwards, burying everything in their path. Herbert hired a Cessna light aircraft to survey the scene from the air. “These waves [of sand] can be every bit as devastating as a tidal wave … they’ve even caused deaths,” he wrote in a pitch to his agent. Above all he was intrigued by the idea that it might be possible to engineer an ecosystem, to green a hostile desert landscape.

Dune is set in a far future, where warring noble houses are kept in line by a ruthless galactic emperor. As part of a Byzantine political intrigue, the noble duke Leto, head of the Homerically named House Atreides, is forced to move his household from their paradisiacal home planet of Caladan to the desert planet Arrakis, colloquially known as Dune. The climate on Dune is frighteningly hostile. Water is so scarce that whenever its inhabitants go outside, they must wear stillsuits, close-fitting garments that capture body moisture and recycle it for drinking.Regarding my inspiration for the cover: as it’s been a while since the original inception I’ll attempt to recall my thinking. Sam is amazing at painting a plausible alternative reality. We’d been so impressed with his previous commissions for us, but even more so by Sam’s wider portfolio which showed a clear love of all things strange. I thought it would make for a really interesting commission. In all, he was the perfect choice for Dune, and we were blown away when he not only said he’d love to work on it for us, but that it is also his favorite book.

After 10,000 years have come and gone, if mankind is still alive, we have won....we'll be comfortably re-planeted.... you'll mostly feel euphoric and contented..." In the course of natural events, the mother of the impressionable, young lad fondly reminisces about living in their former home far, far away by incredibly great distances of measurement, somewhere over the curved spectrum of colorfully diffracted light-beams known as a rainbow, beyond eons and eons of cosmic clouds in the time-space continuum, having a normal climate, an abundance of rainfall, mild weather, with clear lakes and cool-running streams, something quite radically different from the dire circumstances in which they presently find themselves. She smiles graciously and is pleasantly reminded of swimming in the ocean like an Olympic athlete; the outdoor public showers on the beach; washing the salty water out of her tousled and tangled hair, rinsing her skin clean and vibrant again; noticing sand in her bikini panties. Melange, or ‘spice’, is the most valuable – and rarest – element in the universe; a drug that does everything from increasing a person’s life-span to making intersteller travel possible. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world Arrakis. We are absolutely delighted to feature Sean’s brilliant work (we found him online!) and could not be prouder to present our 50th-anniversary edition of the greatest science fiction novel of all time, newly reset and featuring this glorious new artwork, to a new generation of readers. Dune will publish on 16 July!I've located the two grandsons from New Jersey," said Korn. "We're meeting them in a nice, quiet setting on the beach this very afternoon, at "Hooligans." A sprawling and complex mélange of a novel, Dune combined grand themes about human nature and human relationships to the planet(s) we live (or might live) on. Herbert wrote about his inspirations: “I find fresh nuances in religions, psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, theories of history, geology, anthropology, plant research, soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones.”