Even now, the book seems a little hard to pin down. It was, for the most part, a Cold War thriller about the race to harvest offshore oil — except crammed inside the thriller was a near-future science-fiction tale of fantastic technology. And crammed inside the science fiction was a psychological study of naval officers crammed inside submarines.
The Dragon in the Sea received some nice reviews. Anthony Boucher praised it in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the New York Times compared it to sea-going works by C.S. Forester and Herman Wouk. But readers found the novel confusing, and it didn’t sell particularly well, leaving the 36-year-old Herbert uncertain where to turn next. So he accepted a commission to write something called “They Stopped the Moving Sands.”
However much that sounds like a 1950s sci-fi title, the commission was actually for a non-fiction magazine article about Oregon’s sand dunes and the Department of Agriculture’s attempt to halt their drift by planting them with poverty grasses. The dunes were amazing, Herbert explained in a 1957 letter to his agent: In their undulations, they could “swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways.” He was piling up notes for the article at a furious pace. So many notes, in fact, that he never finished “They Stopped the Moving Sands.”
That turned into Dune, of course:
With Dune, Frank Herbert (1920-1986) made the breakthrough in science fiction that J.R.R. Tolkien had achieved in fantasy — both of them showing all subsequent writers in their fields how to build what we might call Massively Coherent Universes: with clashes of culture, technology, history, language, politics, and religion all worked out in the story’s background.
At the same time, Dune is an occasionally sloppy book and oddly paced. It sprawls when it might be compact and shrinks when it might be discursive. How could an author extend his plot maneuvering through hundreds of pages — and then be satisfied with an ending so rushed that even the death of the hero’s infant child in the final apocalyptic battle is only a side note?
Meanwhile, the prose is sometimes weak, striving for the memorable epigrams it can’t always form. The psychology of the minor characters is ignored at some points and deeply observed at others, which makes those characters flicker in a peculiar way between the two-dimensional walk-ons of myth and the three-dimensional figures of novelistic realism. And the third-person narrator keeps his distance from them by printing what they’re thinking in italics, just so we understand that this is, like, you know, mental speech.
In fact, the book contains so much italics — with the many poems, song lyrics, and extended quotations from fictional sources printed the same way — that the reader wants to bang it against the nightstand once or twice a chapter. Add up all the problems, and you can see why those publishers rejected Herbert’s manuscript. It had a thousand chances to fail and only one chance of succeeding — which it grasped by being so relentlessly, impossibly, irresistibly interesting.
I had my own concerns.
The Dragon in the Sea, retitled Under Pressure, has some good submarine SF tech (Sub-Fi?) in it — about as good as Bill Keith’s Sharuq and Stingray. But like you say, it’s mostly a story about a nervous bunch of serious professional WASPs being serious and professional and nervous. One waspish Jew, a genius psychiatrist of course. Fifties editors seem to have liked these more than fifties readers, who preferred a little blood on the bikini. Elleston Trevor did a bunch, then got a clue and struck the Adam Hall gold.
How I remember the book. I read it during the Autumn of 1957 as I, a sophomore in high school, discovered Science Fiction and thus reading for pleasure. It was one of my first reads, and I read it through mainly because I bought it with my own money. I had not discovered the used book stores at that time. The Avon book was titled: 21st Century Sub and cost 35¢. The cover depicted a submarine that did not reflect the description in the book.
I disliked the book as many things did not make sense. If I remember correctly the torpedoes were carried externally, like missiles on a F-16, exposed to the ocean instead of internally as is done on today’s submarines. All I could think of was that the torpedoes would corrode and pick up barnacles if in the salt water. I don’t recall much of the book except that the base for the sub was somewhere inland from the Gulf of Mexico reached by a long underwater tunnel which I found farfetched.
Funny, I enjoyed Dune when I read it in college.