The Spice Must Flow

Published in 1965, Dune imagines Arrakis, a desert planet that is the sole source of melange - a spice enabling interstellar travel, extending life, and granting limited prescience. Frank Herbert was a journalist and ecologist, and Dune became one of science fiction's first major planetary-ecology novels, with environment driving politics, religion, economics, and plot rather than serving as backdrop.

The manuscript was rejected by more than twenty publishers before Chilton Books — a company best known for auto repair manuals — published it. It went on to become one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time, proving that audiences would embrace complex, demanding fiction if the vision was ambitious enough.