Dune

Dune is a science fiction novel by the American writer Frank Herbert, published in 1965 and set thousands of years in the future on the desert planet Arrakis, the sole source of the spice melange, a substance essential to interstellar travel and highly valuable across the novel's feudal interstellar empire. The novel follows Paul Atreides, heir to the noble House Atreides after it is granted stewardship of Arrakis and then betrayed and destroyed by the rival House Harkonnen and the Emperor, as he flees into the desert with his mother Jessica, is taken in by the planet's native Fremen people, and gradually fulfills a messianic role among them shaped partly by his mother's Bene Gesserit order and partly by the spice's mind-altering, prescience-inducing effects. Herbert drew heavily on ecology, in particular research into desert reclamation and dune ecosystems, alongside religion, politics and the history of colonial resource extraction, building a densely detailed world whose central commodity, the spice, functions as an explicit analogue for oil. Widely regarded as one of the best-selling and most influential science fiction novels ever written, Dune won the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1966, and its ecological and political complexity set a new standard for world-building in the genre.