From Afghanistan to cyberattacks, Frank Herbert’s novel anticipated and shaped warfare as we know it.

“If you’d said in the wake of World War II that the United States would lose a war to guerrillas who didn’t have an air force or navy or even really heavy weapons, people would have just thought that you were insane,” says Major General Mick Ryan, commander of the Australian Defence College and author of the forthcoming book War Transformed. “But Dune did kind of presage that, didn’t it?”