, featured on the 2001 reprint cover of Frank Herbert's short story collection Eye (1985)]]The Fremen are a group of free people in the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. The Fremen inhabit Arrakis, also known as Dune, the desert planet that is the sole source of the spice melange in the known universe. The Fremen came to Dune thousands of years earlier as the Zensunni Wanderers, a religious sect in retreat. Over time, surviving the incredibly harsh conditions of Dune bred them into the ultimate example of humans in extremis: a people bred purely to survive. They took to calling themselves the Free Men of Dune, which was later shortened to Fremen; in an early, alternate Dune outline Frank Herbert called Spice Planet, the Fremen were literally the "Free Men" — convicts who had been transported to "Duneworld" to work for the spice operation of the "Hoskanners" in exchange for a reduction in th