Arrakis (/əˈrækᵻs/;Arabic: الراقص‎‎, ar-rāqiṣ, "the dancer")—informally known as Dune and later called Rakis—is a fictional desert planet featured in the Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert. Herbert's first novel in the series, 1965's Dune, is popularly considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and it is sometimes cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history.