Book Review: 'The Spice Must Flow' chronicles the legacy of the breakthrough novel 'Dune'

abcnews.go.com:

The saga of how cult sci-fi novel “Dune” slowly permeated the mainstream over decades is a tale with almost as many twists and turns as “Dune” itself, and author Ryan Britt recounts it in the lively and entertaining “The Spice Must Flow," writes AP's M...

NEW YORK — The saga of how cult sci-fi novel “Dune” slowly permeated the mainstream over decades is a tale with almost as many twists and turns as “Dune” itself, and author Ryan Britt recounts it in the lively and entertaining “The Spice Must Flow.”

As Britt details, author Frank Herbert began to plot the novel — about a young boy named Paul Atreides who may be the future leader of the galaxy — after doing research for a nonfiction article about a manmade technique to stabilize sand dunes.

Much of the action takes place on Arrakis, a desert planet that has reserves of a precious natural resource, spice, and is infested with sandworms, Herbert’s iconic dune creature.

Herbert had authored sci-fi short stories and novels before, but the only place he could find willing to publish “Dune” in 1964 was an auto-repair book publisher.

But slowly “Dune,” and its sequels caught on. Different aspects of the novel — a swashbuckling adventure tale, an environmental treatise and a polemic against combining religion and politics, all in one — appealed to different people at different times throughout the decades.

But bad timing plagued the book’s mainstream success. The first two Dune books sold slowly, but the third sequel “Children of Dune,” was a massive bestseller when it was published in 1976 and proved a sci-fi story could breakthrough to the mainstream. But everyone forgot about that a few months later when “Star Wars” — itself influenced by “Dune” — hit theaters and became a