Did Dune Doom Science-Fiction?

An interesting discussion at LibraryThing on Dune ‘s effect on the science-fiction genre :

One of my favourite things about SF is that the sheer amount of stuff that those authors pack into these books is unbelievable.

Case in point: Double Star , by Robert A. Heinlein – in less than 200 pages Heinlein gives us space travel, political intrigue, thrills and chills, and the obvious inspiration for the Kevin Kline movie “Dave.”

Now Dune gives us a lot as well; space travel, economics, guilds, family drama, mysticism, desert people, sand worms, and martial arts. The problem, to do all of this Frank Herbert needed a lot of space, 517 pages of space, and to be fair, with the incredible amount of stuff Herbert put into the book, he needed all of it.

Now Dune went on to win all sorts of awards, and is credited by many SF fans as a personal favourite or even the book that turned them onto SF. My problem is the effect Dune had on SF as a genre. Basically, people looked at it and instead of saying, “Wow – you can have this kind of massive family drama/economic intrigue/war story/mystical journey all in the context of SF”, they said, “ Dune must be awesome because it’s really long.”

So after 1965 all SF started to get really, REALLY, BIG. I mean, when I’ve lined up my copy of Dune with three SF books that had been written in the previous decade ( Double Star and Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement), all of them award winners, all of them critically acclaimed, and all of them barely adding up to the page count that is DUNE .

The trend of writing bigger SF books never stopped. Have you looked at the page count of recent SF? These things are monsters, often coming in at just under a thousand pages and the worst thing is a lot of it feels like filler, and I am not the only one to notice this.

The discussion is worth following on its own merits and the commenters have some thoughtful explanations for the shift (e.g., novels were no longer being serialized in magazines before coming out in book form).

But what I find really intriguing is the idea of a single book transforming an entire genre. What other books have had such profound effects on their respective genres?

(Via: IO9 )