Sandworm (Dune)

Sandworms are animals similar in appearance to colossal terrestrial annelids and in other ways to the lamprey. They are cylindrical worm-like creatures with a fearsome array of crystalline teeth which are used primarily for rasping rocks and sand. During his first close encounter with a sandworm in Dune, Paul notes, "Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter ... crystal teeth with the curved shape of crysknives glinting around the rim ... the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes ... acids ..."[4]

A giant sandworm with its ring of teeth seeks to devour an ornithopter, in the Dune miniseries (2000)

Sandworms grow to hundreds of meters in length, with specimens observed over 400 metres (1,300 ft) long[13][14] and 40 metres (130 ft) in diameter, although Paul becomes a sandrider by summoning a worm that "appeared to be" around half a league (1.5 miles (2.4 km)) or more in length.[15] These gigantic worms burrow deep in the ground and travel swiftly; "most of the sand on Arrakis is credited to sandworm action".[13]

Sandworms are described as "incredibly tough" by Liet-Kynes, who further notes that "high-voltage electrical shock applied separately to each ring segment" is the only known way to kill and preserve them; atomics are the only explosive powerful enough to kill an entire worm, with conventional explosives being unfeasible as "each ring segment has a life of its own".[16] Water is poisonous to the worms,[13] but it is in too short supply on Arrakis to be of use against any but the smallest of them.

Herbert notes in Dune that microscopic creatures called sand plankton feed upon traces of melange scattered by sandworms on the Arrakeen sands.[17] The sand plankton are food for the giant sandworms, but also grow and burrow to become what the Fremen call Little Makers, "the half-plant-half-animal deep-sand vector of the Arrakis sandworm".[18]

Their leathery remains previously having "been ascribed to a fictional 'sandtrout' in Fremen folk stories", Imperial Planetologist Pardot Kynes had discovered the Little Makers during his ecological investigations of the planet, deducing their existence before he actually found one.[17] Kynes determines that these "sandtrout" block off water "into fertile pockets within the porous lower strata below the 280° (absolute) line",[17] and Alia Atreides notes in Children of Dune that the "sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet's bedrock, formed living cisterns".[19] The Fremen themselves protect their water supplies with "predator fish" that attack invading sandtrout.[19] Sandtrout can be lured by small traces of water, and Fremen children catch and play with them; smoothing one over the hand forms a "living glove" until the creature is repelled by something in the "blood's water" and falls off.[19]

The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase.

— Leto II Atreides, Children of Dune[19]

The sandtrout are described as "flat and leathery" in Children of Dune, with Leto II noting that they are "roughly diamond-shaped" with "no head, no extremities, no eyes" and "coarse interlacings of extruded cilia".[19] They can find water unerringly, and squeezing the sandtrout yields a "sweet green syrup".[19] When water is flooded into the sandtrout's excretions, a pre-spice mass is formed; at this "stage of fungusoid wild growth", gases are produced which result in "a characteristic 'blow', exchanging the material from deep underground for the matter on the surface above it".[12][20] After exposure to sun and air, this mass becomes melange.[20][12]

Kynes' "water stealers" die "by the millions in each spice blow" and may be killed by even a "five-degree change in temperature".[17] He notes that "the few survivors entered a semidormant cyst-hibernation to emerge in six years as small (about three meters long) sandworms".[17] A small number of these then emerge into maturity as giant sandworms, to whom water is poisonous.[12][13][17] A "stunted worm" is a "primitive form ... that reaches a length of only about nine meters". Their drowning by the Fremen makes them expel the awareness-spectrum narcotic known as the Water of Life.[17]

While sandworms are capable of eating humans, the latter do contain a level of water beyond the preferred tolerances of the worms. They routinely devour melange-harvesting equipment—mistaking the mechanical rhythm for prey—but they seem to derive actual nutrition only from sand plankton and smaller sandworms, and have no actual interest in the spice. Sandworms will also not attack sandtrout.

By the time of the events of Dune (1965), humans have been harvesting melange from Arrakis for several thousand years. The indigenous Fremen regard the sandworms as divine, but to everyone else they are just deadly pests. Few people know of the sandworms' connection to the spice.[4] This is no longer the case in Children of Dune (1976), and numerous groups attempt to smuggle sandworms off Arrakis and transplant them to other planets so as to break the Atreides' monopoly on melange. In Children of Dune, Leto II consumes massive amounts of spice and allows many sandtrout to cover his body, the concentration of spice in his blood fooling them. This layer gives Leto tremendous strength, speed, and protection from mature sandworms, which mistake his sandtrout-covered body for a lethal mass of water.[19] He calls it a "living, self-repairing stillsuit of a sandtrout membrane", and soon notes that he is "no longer human".[19]

Gradually over the next 3,500 years, Leto not only survives, but also is transformed into a hybrid of human and giant sandworm. By the time of God Emperor of Dune (1981), he has exterminated all other sandworms, and his own transformation has modified his component sandtrout. When Leto allows himself to be assassinated, the sandtrout release themselves to begin the sandworm lifecycle anew; subsequent offspring are tougher and more adaptable than their predecessors, allowing them to ultimately be more easily settled on other worlds, thus ensuring the survival of the sandworm species. Each one, according to Leto, carries in it a tiny pearl of his consciousness, trapped forever in an unending prescient dream.[23]

Over the next 1500 years, Arrakis (now called Rakis) is returned to a desert by the thriving sandworm cycle. Bene Gesserit Mother Superior Taraza becomes aware in Heretics of Dune (1984) that humanity is being limited by the prescient dream of Leto, and controlled by him through his worm remnants. She engineers the destruction of Rakis by the Honored Matres to free humanity, leaving one remaining worm to start the cycle anew. Taraza is killed; her successor Darwi Odrade takes the worm to Chapterhouse. She submerges it in a spice bath to generate sandtrout, with the goal of terraforming their own planet Chapterhouse into another Dune, and later doing the same on other planets, with new worms and infinite potential for gathering spice.

In the Prelude to Dune prequel trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (1999–2004), the Tleilaxu initiate Project Amal, an early attempt to create synthetic melange to eliminate dependence upon Arrakis. They are fundamentally unaware, however, that melange production is part of the sandworm lifecycle, and the project is an abysmal failure.

In Sandworms of Dune, Brian Herbert and Anderson's 2007 conclusion to the original series, the Spacing Guild is manipulated into replacing its Navigators with Ixian navigation devices and cutting off the Navigators' supply of melange. Sure to die should they be without the spice, a group of Navigators commissions Waff, an imperfectly awakened Tleilaxu ghola, to create "advanced" sandworms able to produce the melange they so desperately require. He accomplishes this by altering the DNA of the sandtrout stage and creating an aquatic form of the worms, which are then released into the oceans of Buzzell. Adapting to their new environment, these seaworms quickly flourish, eventually producing a highly concentrated form of spice, dubbed "ultraspice". Meanwhile, sandworms are revealed to have survived the devastation of Rakis after all, by burrowing deep under the surface.

In the 1984 David Lynch film Dune, the sandworms were designed by special effects modeler Carlo Rambaldi for a budgeted $2 million.[24][25] Rambaldi had previously created the titular alien for the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.[24][25] The blue screen constructed for Dune's special effects was thirty-five feet (11 m) high and 108 feet (33 m) wide, the largest at that time.[24] The sandworms were achieved using practical effect models, miniature sets and blue screens.[26] Several scales of sandworm models were created, operated by "worm wranglers" and pulled with cables to simulate motion.[26] The largest models, which were approximately 20 feet (7 m) long, allowed for wranglers to open the worms' mouths and crane their bodies up and down and from side to side.[26] The smaller versions were used for other movements, and for background action.[26]

Critics were generally not impressed with the film's effects.[27][28] Roger Ebert called Lynch's sandworms "striking", but noted, "the movie's special effects don't stand up to scrutiny. The heads of the sand worms begin to look more and more as if they came out of the same factory that produced Kermit the Frog (they have the same mouths)."[29] Entertainment Weekly's Sandra P. Angulo called the sandworms "embarrassingly phallic looking".[30] Daniel D. Snyder of The Atlantic was impressed by the "gargantuan" appearance of the sandworms thanks to the "staggering sense of scale" achieved by the miniature sets created by Emilio Ruiz del Río.[27] Though panning the film overall, Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted the "nice worm-fight at the end of the story."[31] Hoai-Tran Bui of /Film noted that "the popular image of the sandworm comes from David Lynch's 1984 film, which depicted the massive creatures as fleshy, phallic-looking monsters."[32]

The 2000 Sci Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune, and the 2003 sequel miniseries Frank Herbert's Children of Dune, employed computer-generated visual effects to create sandworms onscreen,[33] under the guidance of special effects supervisor Ernest Farino.[34][35]

Critics praised the visual effects in both miniseries,[33][35][36] each of which won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special.[37][38] Deborah D. McAdams of Broadcasting & Cable suggested that the images of "gigantic computer-generated sandworms munching down huge machines and people like popcorn" contributed to the 2000 miniseries' record-breaking ratings.[39]

Regarding his 2021 film Dune, director Denis Villeneuve said, “We talked about every little detail that would make such a beast possible, from the texture of the skin, to the way the mouth opens, to the system to eat its food in the sand. It was a year of work to design and to find the perfect shape that looked prehistoric enough."[32]

Besides film and television adaptations, the Dune franchise has been adapted into a series of computer and video games in which sandworms play a part. Sandworms are a featured element in the 1992 real-time strategy video game Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty,[40] primarily as destroyers of the player's spice Harvesters, assault tanks, and other equipment.[41][42] In the game, sandworms are computer-controlled forces that lie dormant under the sand until either player- or computer-controlled units come within range, and they will attack indiscriminately.[43][44] The sandworms can be damaged or destroyed by sonic blasts, a Death Hand explosion, a detonated Spice Bloom, or a self-destructing Devastator, and will disappear when they have been destroyed, reduced to half damage, or have eaten three units.[43] Sandworms do not appear until the third missions, and there may be two or three in play at once.[43] Sandworms also appear in Dune 2000 (1998). They behave somewhat differently than in the previous game, and are present from the first mission. Sandworms will disappear temporarily after devouring five vehicles, but eventually return.[45][46][47][48][49] Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001) features gameplay on four planets, and sandworms are a hazard on Arrakis. Players must also destroy a genetically engineered "Emperor Worm" to complete the game.[50][51][52][53]