The previous chapter presented a troublesome conclusion for law and technology. It suggested that the ‘saving law’ transgressed the boundaries of the Frankenstein myth. Instead of securing a future for humanity against the monstrous of technology, it was revealed, in itself, as technological. This glimpse of technical legality suggests two lines of enquiry. First, is technical legality an adequate account of contemporary law? Second, if it is, what does this mean for the remaining element of the Frankenstein myth – the human? It was further suggested that science fiction is a privileged location for exploring technical legality.

This chapter takes up these strands. It argues that Frank Herbert's Dune cycle exposes the essential commitments of law as technology. Dune is a coriolis storm from the title planet that ‘cut[s] metal like butter, etch[es] flesh to bones and eat[s] away the bones’. The bones of law as technology that are exposed are sovereignty and positivism. However, the abrasiveness of Dune goes beyond exposing skeletal matter; it dissolves the very notion of sovereignty, leaving its essential commitments – death and time.

Structuring this argument is the law and humanities’ method of reading a popular text jurisprudentially. Dune is not read as an analogy of legal theoretical concepts – namely sovereignty and positive law – but as a con-tribution to thinking sovereignty and positivism. Dune's dusty vistas, superhuman galactic emperors, and sandworm hybrids reveal the commitments behind law as technology in ways that have been forgotten or missed by jurisprudence's formal texts. To do this, Dune is engaged with ‘thickly’. It is through a detailed shifting of the sands of Herbert's imagined universe and the decades of secondary literature that it has spawned that allows this jurisprudential reading.

The argument of this chapter is in three stages. The first stage reviews the cycle. The second stage re-examines the secondary literature on Dune. Critics have identified that Dune reflects on messiahs, politics, and ecology. The commonality identified between these is a meta-theme concerning the illusion of control. This meta-theme has led critics to summarise Herbert's opus as a rejection of the public and as encoding a message of self-care and disengagement with the world. However, the ‘public’ nature of Herbert's protagonists suggests another accounting of Dune.