Terraformed Giant Sand Dunes of Oregon was the Inspiration for Frank Herbert's Dune
The sand must flow ...
In the late 1950s, Frank Herbert was intrigued by a geoengineering project that the US Department of Agriculture was doing on the Oregon coast.
The giant sand dunes in the town of Florence, Oregon, were drifting inland and threatening to swallow houses, railway tracks and the US 101 Highway. So the Soil Conservation Services planted European beachgrass (Ammophila arenaria) to stabilize the dunes and stop the winds from pushing them towards the town.
Herbert chartered a small plane to fly over the shifting sand dunes and what he saw inspired him to write that the project was "the first enduring answer to shifting sands in all history" and was "an unsung victory in the fight of men against dunes."
The moving dunes could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways," Herbert wrote in a letter to his literary agent1.
Years later, Herbert wrote his epic science fiction novel aptly titled Dune (which, by the way, was rejected by 23 editors before an editor at Chilton Books named Sterling Lanier persuaded the company to take the risk on it. At the time, Chilton was primarily known for publishing auto repair manuals. Dune was published in 1965 ... and flopped. Lanier was fired, but was later vindicated as Dune's popularity grew by word-of-mouth and became one of the most - if not the most - best-selling science fiction novels of all time).
So now you know how the giant dunes of Oregon inspired the desert planet Arrakis!
Source: Dune: The “terraformed” Oregon dunes that inspired Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic by Nathan Scharping (BBC).
Image: Rebecca Kennison/Wikimedia