>>9902Deconstructed hero's journey. Dune is a hero's journey story as written by someone who explicitly hates heroes. The surface reading of Dune and what is actually happening are frequently opposites of each other.
It's also a reply to Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Interestingly there's a Foundation series coming out:
https://youtu.be/FZd3xUDudy8Foundation takes place in a declining empire. A "psychohistorian" named Hari Seldon has discovered a way to use mathematics to predict the historical development of human societies on large scale – which is now possible given the galaxy-sized scale of the empire. Seldon predicts the empire will collapse and plunge the galaxy into thousands of years of darkness. The solution is to create a "foundation" that will accumulate human knowledge, preserve it, with the hope of shortening the dark ages and allowing the galaxy to recover from this very long "depression" in a kind of behind-the-scenes planning.
Herbert, being more of a libertarian, didn't like this idea. A big part of Dune is that plans laid thousands of years in the past run out of control. Paul Atreides, the protagonist in Dune, is the result of a breeding program by an order of space witches named the Bene Gesserit to create a superbeing which they can control and take over the galaxy. It doesn't quite work out that way.