Not sure if you heard or not, Dune’s release date has been pushed back to October 22, 2021. That’s disappointing, but it gives me a chance to finish reading Dune before the movie comes out so I can say ‘the book was better.’ To honor the movie and scifi in general calls for some fun scifi stuff, so the Dune memes must flow!
The Return of the Meme (vol. 147 Dune: A Spice Odyssey Edition)
What’s Dune about, you ask? Originally, Dune was ‘a 1965 science-fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert, originally published as two separate serials in Analog magazine. Dune is set in the distant future amidst a feudal interstellar society in which various noble houses control planetary fiefs. It tells the story of young Paul Atreides, whose family accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis. While the planet is an inhospitable and sparsely populated desert wasteland, it is the only source of melange, or “the spice,” a drug that extends life and enhances mental abilities. Melange is also necessary for space navigation, which requires a kind of multidimensional awareness and foresight that only the drug provides. As melange can only be produced on Arrakis, control of the planet is thus a coveted and dangerous undertaking. The story explores the multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the factions of the empire confront each other in a struggle for the control of Arrakis and its spice.
I’ll talk more about this later, but I’m struck by how modern the writing of Dune is. Great pacing, minimal exposition. Like Jules Verne before him, Frank Herbert had the foresight to avoid bogging his readers down with details. Give me action, give me stuff happening. I try to do the same thing in my writing, and it’s inspired by great authors like Herbert and Verne.
So the Dune memes must flow! I hope you enjoy this dump of fun scifi stuff and take some time over the long holiday weekend to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years.
Happy Friday and be safe!