News Dune Messiah

Denis Villeneuve Is Doing Dune Messiah

Please ready your best “dune it again” jokes

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 5, 2024

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There could’ve been an infallible prophecy about this. That’s how inevitable it was. Last year, Denis Villeneuve said he only wanted to do one more Dune movie, making Dune Messiah to close out a trilogy. A wise man, he told Empire, “After that, the books become more… esoteric.”

A third Dune movie wasn’t official until now, in the wake of Dune 2 doing exceedingly well at the box office. And yet the announcement that he and Legendary are developing Dune Messiah was still so much of a foregone conclusion that it is tucked into a Deadline piece about an entirely different movie.

But it’s nice to have a level of certainty!

Dune Messiah takes place some years into Paul Atreides’ rule. As the book synopsis says:

There are political machinations, clones, children, deaths, and more politics. And philosophical musings, too.

It takes a while to make a sandworm saga, so Dune Messiah won’t be on screens any time soon. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Dune

Dune: Part Two Asks Questions That the Original Never Dared

Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune film alters the arcs of key characters, but not everyone gets such careful treatment

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on March 4, 2024

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

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Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

If you had the ability to reconsider one of the cornerstones of the science fiction genre, what would you do with that chance?

It is perhaps enough to say that I cannot stop thinking about Dune: Part Two since leaving the theater. That is more than a satisfactory reason to recommend it, to my mind. Films don’t need to be perfect in order to provoke us, and Dune: Part Two certainly isn’t perfect. What’s exciting to me as a viewer and a critic is knowing that no one is likely to agree on the ways in which it falters or triumphs. What is also exciting to me is knowing that a particular stripe of fan is going to be very displeased about what was altered, after an initial salvo that seemed to indicate a careful adherence to the basic narrative.

While Dune: Part One looked and felt like its source material perhaps more than any other screen adaptation, it drew a number of pointed criticisms, particularly where its depiction and casting of the Fremen were concerned. For my part, a lack of focus given to Lady Jessica’s narrative was also drew ire. Given the ways in which Part One was successful—namely in the look, feel, and scope of the film—what would director Denis Villeneuve create to complete this journey?

Building on the framework that Part One painstakingly put in place, Part Two is more stunning, more grotesque, and somehow far grander than the first. We are given the diaries of Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) as scaffolding in place of her written histories in the book, but the device offers the same anchoring, the same helpful exposition by way of a new figure who is learning precisely how dangerous her father’s machinations have become. The design choices of these films continue to be immaculate in every sense of the word, from the sand of Arrakis slipping into every crevice to the monochrome oil and iron stylings of the Harkonnen homeworld Geidi Prime.

There are moments designed to make you gasp. Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) first worm ride to become Fremen is perhaps the key point among these, a feat that Villeneuve is determined to make the audience feel with every muscle as the prophisized chosen one clings to the hide of a sandworm as big as a skyscraper with two metal hooks his only hope for survival. The introduction of Austin Butler’s Feyd Rautha is similarly arresting, Butler’s casting easily being one of the more impressive choices for Part Two—Butler plays the role simultaneously calculating, feral, and deeply horny, and the choice pays out dividends every time he steps on screen.

The primary changes that Dune: Part Two enacts come from choices made about the Fremen people and their willingness to believe the legends seeded on Arrakis by the Bene Gesserit generations ago, all about the outer world prophet sent to deliver them. Rather than making Paul’s ascent a simple question of when he is ready to follow the path, a much-needed dose of realism is injected into the story—not every Fremen believes in their religious dogma. There are divisions among their people when questioning who can save Arrakis and its people, and who should fight to free them. Importantly, Chani is one of the key dissenters against the path that Paul will eventually take.

It makes sense of the casting of Zendaya in the role because up until this reveal, it had been something of a mystery as to why this would be a part she would want to play. (As an actor, she has always been very exacting about the roles she has taken on as an adult, and the book’s Chani decidedly does not fit that mold.) In reconsideration of Chani’s story, Zendaya is perhaps the brightest piece of this puzzle, intent on convincing her people that they are the arbiters of their own destiny, that only Fremen can liberate themselves.

The awkwardness then comes from the fact that following this arc seems to be in service of taking the sting out of Paul Atreides’ role as a brutal colonizing force, to reposition his choices as an evil he is actively aware of and trying to overcome. Paul is willing to openly critique Fremen prophecies as the Bene Gesserit trick that they are, to insist that he’s not a savior and merely wants to become Fremen and fight alongside them. His desire to defy that path set down by his mother and the Bene Gesserit is a large part of why Chani falls in love with him. This creates a better story, certainly, and it further humanizes many characters that don’t feel fleshed out enough within the pages of the novel (Paul, Chani, Stilgar). The question then becomes how does this change the overall story?

Because there are many pieces left barely on the board in Dune: Part Two and it makes for confusing viewing. After having her own arc utterly decimated in Part One, Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica Atreides becomes more perplexing than ever. While it’s initially suggested that she’s following the path laid down by the Bene Gesserit in order to keep them alive, Jessica is also doing so against her directives from the order to ends that are never clarified. Furthermore, the purpose of creating the kwisatz haderach is completely lost in this story, making matters more puzzling. Paul winds up drinking the water of life to… get better visions? Which is important for him, sure, but makes the Bene Gesserit schemes suddenly nonsensical—why bother working to create the kwisatz haderach if he’s not really that important in helping you achieve your aims?

The result makes it seem that Paul’s true difficulty is being caught between his mother (and his unborn but fully conscious sister) and the woman he loves, respectively representations of a shadowy order of eugenics-wielding politicking women and the indigenous people he wishes to join and liberate. Without any attention paid to the Mentats or other various power players that Frank Herbert’s tome showcased, this genuinely damages the core of the story. It was the right choice to pay more attention to Chani and the Fremen people, but an equal amount of attention needed to be paid to other female characters in order for it to plumb make sense… which the film neglects to do.

And tellingly, it has no problem spending an outrageous amount of time on the stories of men instead. The centering of Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) in this film is a strange mistake that seems to be making a meal out of an overarching revenge theme for several of the film’s central characters. Paul, Jessica, and Gurney are all driven out of a desire for revenge on specific people—Paul against the Emperor (Christopher Walken) and Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), Jessica against her own Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling), and Gurney against Rabban (Dave Bautista). While revenge is certainly an underlying motivation throughout Dune, the choice to zero in on it does nothing for the story, and actually serves to take time away from figures who need and deserve more development. It also reassigns defining narrative moments for characters who will become incredibly important down the line, if Villeneuve gets the money to make more movies in this series. (Yes, for those wondering, I am talking about Alia.)

The timeline of the film is greatly compressed as well, a choice that is frequently made in film—rules around screenwriting often tout that immediacy is king, and it’s just not true—that I will never understand. Rather than taking place over years, Dune: Part Two takes place over months, robbing the characters of their chances to truly root and grow as groups, and turning up momentum on the story like a boulder gaining speed as it rolls down a mountainside. It takes time to become a legend, but here you just need one big speech, and you’re good to go, apparently.

And then there are a the bits that manage to be good and bad at once. The last hour of the film is overwhelming, undoubtedly an intentional choice meant to heighten tension and saddle the audience with the same increasing dread that the characters are feeling. While the sound design for Dune is incredible fullstop, it might prove too much for some viewers by the end, not just in terms of auditory stimulation but bodily punishment—the whole room heavily vibrates for a solid 45 minutes. (I am saying this as a person who loves the immersive sound quality of a movie theater more than anything on this earth. If I think you’ve maybe overdone it, that’s… probably not the best sign.)

Having said all of this, I still enjoyed the hell out of Dune: Part Two. As a film experience, a spectacle, a sideways look at a familiar story, it is top tier. As a movie you’ll leave the theater talking about, there are none better. I’m content to let it have its moment. But I’ll meet you at the bar later to tease out all the things we can’t stop prodding at, our very own misshapen bruise that somehow resembles a desert mouse.[end-mark]

The post <i>Dune: Part Two</i> Asks Questions That the Original Never Dared appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Fantasy

Crashing Dunes and Wandering Winds: 5 of the Best Fantasy Deserts

By Moses Ose Utomi

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Published on March 5, 2024

Photo by Martino Pietropoli [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Martino Pietropoli [via Unsplash]

I’m a child of the desert. That sounds dramatic, and dare I say alluring, but it really just means that I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is located in the Mojave Desert. As a city known more for gambling than its biome, Las Vegas may not be the sexiest of deserts, especially when it comes to the crashing dunes and silk-clad nomads that populate the deserts of our collective imagination. But growing up there imparts many of the same experiences of those who grew up in other deserts. I know well the sound of wandering winds across untamed sand, and the relentless gaze of the summer sun. I learned young that nights are dark concerts for the howls of coyotes, and that water is akin to a grad student’s bank balance—an ever-decreasing quantity.

So inspired I am by the dust bowl of my youth that I made my SFF debut with The Lies of the Ajungo, a fable about a boy who must wander an endless desert in search of water, lest he and his city continue to suffer at the merciless hands of the oppressive Ajungo Empire. It’s the first book of The Forever Desert trilogy (the second one—The Truth of the Aleke—comes out March 5^th), and the series represents my love letter to not just the desert of my own youth, but the deserts I’ve since traveled to and the deserts I grew up hearing and reading stories about.

In that vein, I’m listing below 5 of my favorite fantasy deserts, and I’ll be rating them based on how well they meet a metric I am call Desertudity. Desertudity is the collection of traits that I consider to be essential characteristics of a desert: vastness, mysteriousness, and hotness. Vastness refers to the size—deserts only get better the bigger they are, or the more successfully they can induce the illusion of largeness. Mysteriousness refers to the sense of mystery it evokes—deserts thrive on the unknown and the sense that if you wander its body long enough you can run into things you never imagined possible. Lastly, Hotness refers to heat—no tundras on this list.

Let’s get to it!

Dune by Frank Herbert

Making this list without mentioning the desert planet of Arrakis would immediately eviscerate my credibility in the eyes of many SFF fans, so let’s just get it out of the way early. Frank Herbert’s magnum opus contains perhaps the quintessential SFF desert. Inspired by his local Oregon Dunes and drawing on the imagery and cultures of various desert peoples around the world (though perhaps most notably Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula), Herbert’s desert fulfills all three of the measures of Desertudity. There’s really not much to say here that hasn’t been said, so go read (or watch, or play) Dune.

Desertudity
Vastness: 5
Mysteriousness: 4
Hotness: 4
Bonus: Sand worms

Holes by Louis Sachar

As a Millennial, Dune predates my formative years. Instead, it was Louis Sachar’s Holes that first showed me what a desert can look like in book form. Camp Green Lake keeps up the desert tradition of being a place of oppression, home to a band of juvenile inmates who are forced to dig—you guessed it—holes into the hard-packed sand. Though not as large as the other deserts on this list, its memorable history lends it an air of mystery. However, the heat of Camp Green Lake is perhaps the story’s cruelest villain, bearing down on the cast in nearly every scene and being the direct cause of some of the story’s most compelling moments.

Desertudity Scores
Vastness: 3
Mysteriousness: 4
Hotness: 5
Bonus: Onions

The Unbroken by C. L. Clark

When I refer to the “Hotness” of a desert, I’m typically referring to climate—the sun, the dry heat, that sort of stuff. When it comes to C. L.  Clark’s vaunted debut The Unbroken, though, most fans like it for a different kind of—ahem—Hotness. The romance between hotheaded soldier Touraine (whose arms alone bump up the hotness score by a point) and calculating Princess Luca forms the heart of Clark’s story of empire and love and the relationship between them, but equally important is the brutal, relentlessly cruel world, an ambiance enhanced by the North African-inspired desert setting. The desert is a raw and open place, one in which all things will eventually be laid bare beneath the sun—even secrets of the heart. Clark’s desert understands and demands that fact.

Desertudity Scores
Vastness: 5
Mysteriousness: 4
Hotness: 4
Bonus: Well-sculpted arms

The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor

In Binti, we don’t spend much time in Binti’s desert home among the Himba people, but luckily we get to see more of the desert in its sequels Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade. Here, we see a desert full of life and the complications that accompany it. The Himba are both the victims and perpetrators of discrimination, which is just part of the complex tapestry that is the desert’s history. Part of the magic of deserts lies in their mystery—in the sense that shoveling up any bit of it could unearth life-changing secrets, and Nnedi Okorafor’s is a masterclass in that.

Desertudity Scores
Vastness: 4
Mysteriousness: 5
Hotness: 4
Bonus: Rites of passages

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

Way back in the year 2012, when Throne of the Crescent Moon came out, diversity in fantasy fiction wasn’t where it is now. As such, a desert fantasy based on Arab culture and mythology that was written by a writer of Arab ancestry was beyond a breath of fresh air. Not only does Throne of the Crescent Moon present an intimate yet swashbuckling adventure story, it takes you on a journey across a vast desert world, told through the eyes of an aged ghul-hunter who feels every degree of the desert’s heat. Throw in a politically convoluted desert city and a tribeswoman who can take the form of a lioness and you’ve got one of the best fantastical deserts in recent memory.

Desertudity Scores
Vastness: 5
Mysteriousness: 4
Hotness: 4
Bonus: Shapeshifting

[end-mark]

Buy the Book

The Truth of the Aleke

Moses Ose Utomi

Book 2 of The Forever Desert

Buy Book

The Truth of the Aleke

Moses Ose Utomi

Book 2 of The Forever Desert

Book 2 of The Forever Desert

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The post Crashing Dunes and Wandering Winds: 5 of the Best Fantasy Deserts appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Dune

Arrakis, Tatooine, and the Science of Desert Planets

A geologist looks at the most iconic desert worlds of science fiction.

By Alex Acks

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Published on March 1, 2024

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

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Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy almost as long as I’ve been able to read, and I’m normally very good at suspending my disbelief. Unfortunately, seven years of university schooling and two degrees have now placed some suspension limits on certain areas—namely geology, landforms, and maps. I tend to notice little things like mountain ranges having ninety degree corners or rivers that flow uphill or maps that don’t have a scale bar.

So I want to talk about some things, which on-a-geological-scale are very small details that make me tilt my head like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. Not because I hate, but because there is no more honorable nerd past-time than dismantling something we love into its finest details, ruminating endlessly on the bark of a single tree while there’s an entire forest planet surrounding us.

Which is what I’d like to talk about today, incidentally. Single-environment planets. The other stuff, including scale bars, will come later.

I like desert planets, and it’s the combined fault of Dune and a semester of examining lithified sand dunes that are now absolutely gorgeous rock formations.

Arrakis wasn’t the first desert planet of science fiction—at the very least, Altair IV as seen in Forbidden Planet has it beat, and I’m sure there’s some pulpy goodness even earlier that involves desert planet adventures. But Arrakis and its direct descendant Tatooine are definitely the most iconic desert worlds of our genre.

As a geologist, I have a particular love of the desert and its landforms, ones that are normally more shaped by wind than water. (The descriptor for those is eolian, which is a particularly lovely word to say.) I did a lot of undergraduate field study out in Moab, and I grew up in Colorado, which has a lot of near-desert and desert environments. The dry hot-and-cold of the desert shapes you, in ways beyond an appreciation for chapstick and a healthy respect for static electricity.

There’s an inherent magic to the desert, whether you’ve ever been in one or not, a grown-in mysticism that comes with the unfamiliar. It’s a landscape that’s entirely alien to most of us, unimaginable for its lack of water, its alternating burning and freezing temperatures, its weird or absent plant life. The horizon in a desert extends on forever, because there’s no humidity to get in the way of your vision. The only real limit is the curvature of the planet, elevated land features, or particulates in the air. Even the sunsets look different, if you haven’t lived your entire life where it’s incredibly dry. (Let me tell you, the first sunset I saw in a place with humidity actually scared me because it looked so different, with the Sun hovering massive on the horizon like a blood-filled Eye of Sauron.)

There’s a quiet to the desert that sinks in through your skin, a hush that’s only the sound of the wind. Rodents or insects moving around sand grains or pebbles sounds shockingly loud. Birds startle you. And the sky at night? You’ve never seen so many stars in your life, if you’ve never been to the desert. Being out in the middle of nowhere cuts out all the urban light pollution, but beyond that, there’s few clouds, no humidity to blur and hide the sky.

Of course, there’s this common conception that deserts are like very specific portions of the Sahara, with undulating dune seas that go to the horizon. Arrakis and Tatooine both have a lot to answer for on that front, but I will admit that barchanoid (crescent) and transverse (linear, if wavy) dunes are particularly photogenic. And while those are what capture the imagination, both Dune and Star Wars admit there’s more to their desert worlds than just endless draas. Arrakis has extensive salt flats (sometimes called “saltpan” colloquially in America) that are the skeletons of extinct oceans and lakes. There are rocks and mesas that poke their heads above the sand. In Star Wars: Episode IV, we get a brief look at Sluuce Canyon—which might also mean there was once a fast-moving river there, or it could be a tectonic artifact. But either way, it’s a change from the dunes.

And let me tell you, there are a lot more landforms in the desert beyond those. There’s hardpan (basically rock-hard clay surfacing) and desert pavements of packed stone, with or without desert varnish. There are deflation hollows (where sand has been blown away from rock outcrops, leaving a hollow), dry steppes, and an assortment of strange rock forms shaped by wind and blown sand (yardangs). For all its many faults, Star Wars: Episode I got one thing right—we get to see a scene during the pod races with a hardpan plain riddled with mud cracks and darted with wind-shaped yardangs.

Deserts can be as hot as you imagine or impossibly cold. This is because the factor that determines if something is a desert is precipitation. That’s it—everything comes down to how much water falls from the sky. Latitude doesn’t matter, sand or lack thereof doesn’t matter, just that it’s really, really, really dry.

This is why as a geologist, I don’t have to suspend my disbelief very far to journey to a world that’s all desert. I’d like to see more than just sand dunes, but I can tell myself that for some reason, all the people want to just hang out in the sand and ignore the other areas. They’re believable—they even exist in our very own solar system. Just look at Mars! (Mars is a desert whether it has water hiding under its surface or not; what matters in this case is that it certainly hasn’t rained there in recent geological time.) If you look through many pictures of the red planet, you see all that variation in local land forms I mentioned, from classic sandy dune seas, to dry mountains, to empty canyons, to rocky landscapes of what might be equivalent to pavements. All you need to get an entire planet that’s a desert is reverse that ubiquitous direction for ready-made products—just remove the water. Voilà, instant desert!

Then, of course, you have to address how the hell anyone actually survives on that world, but that’s your problem. I just deal in rocks.

Mono-environment invented planets don’t work for much else, though, with the possible exception of the ice ball world. (Even then, depending on your land masses, there might be more than just glaciers out there. But I’ll give the benefit of the doubt on that one.) The real issue is that worlds are spherical-ish (“oblate spheroids,” if you’re nasty), and they tend to get their input of light and heat via orbiting a star. The unforgiving realities of geometry—sphere versus what is effectively a uni-directional point source—dictate that the distribution of heat is never going to be even, which means you’re going to get atmospheric currents, and those mean that the distribution of precipitation is never going to be even, and as soon as you add that plus your unevenly distributed landscape and unevenly distributed bodies of water, you have environmental trouble. If your entire world is so hot that there are tropical rain forests at the poles, what the heck is happening at the equators? How is your rainfall and temperature being so regulated that there’s jungle everywhere? Have you never heard of mountain rain shadow effects?

This is why, once we leave Tatooine, the world-building in the Star Wars universe generally loses me. Having an entire planet that’s made up of rainforest-covered archipelagos as far as the eye can see looks very pretty on the screen with a starship zooming in, but it awakens a lot of deep and worrying questions in me, including (but not limited to) just what is happening with the plate tectonics?

Please don’t think I want a deep, loving, exhaustive description of how the plate tectonics on your planet work. I don’t, and I say this as a geologist—I’m sure no one else does, either. But there needs to be a reason, a level of believability, and if it ain’t a desert, it ain’t going to work. And remember even then, you’re still not going to have an Arrakis that is one massive dune sea that’s all the same temperature. The landscape varies, and that variation provides a certain amount of character and realism—it’s a similar principle to when directors in movies want sets to look “lived in.” The variation in landscape makes the planet alive, even in a world that seems as sterile and dead as one giant desert—because trust me, deserts are neither sterile, nor dead.

They never stop moving, as long as the wind blows.[end-mark]

An earlier version of this article was originally published in May 2017.

The post Arrakis, Tatooine, and the Science of Desert Planets appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Dune

Adapting Dune to the Screen: Three Different Interpretations of Herbert’s Vision

Which of these adaptations is the most faithful to the book—and does that make it the best?

By Kara Kennedy

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Published on February 26, 2024

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Against all odds, Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune has been adapted to the screen three times, though with varying degrees of faithfulness. David Lynch’s penchant for the grotesque shines through in his 1984 film Dune. John Harrison takes a Shakespearean approach in his 2000 television miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune. Most recently, Denis Villeneuve showcases the visual beauty of the desert in his 2021 film Dune: Part One.

Although many things have changed in the political, social, and cultural landscape since the 1960s, Herbert’s book remains the same. So, directors, producers, and other cast and crew have had to make numerous decisions about how to adapt this story to their time period and audience. What they choose to keep, remove, or change impacts how true their adaptation is to the original novel. Even though all of these directors said publicly that they wanted to stay faithful to the source material, ultimately each had to make a choice about how strongly to hold to this conviction.

Here are a few of the features in each adaptation that either succeed in staying faithful or miss the mark.

Dune (1984)

The script for Dune (1984) includes many lines taken directly from the book, especially in the first half of the film. In an early scene where Paul Atreides’ trusted teachers Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck, and Dr. Yueh enter a room with Paul sitting at a desk, the conversation is almost identical:

There are many other examples of lines recognizable from the book in Lynch’s Dune. Herbert himself noted that he could hear his dialogue all the way through the movie and thought fans would enjoy tracking down the lines after watching it. Interestingly, one iconic line that isn’t in the book is “the spice must flow,” though this phrase from the film still accurately captures the strong desire for spice that drives the various factions in the Imperium.

Lynch’s Dune remains the only adaptation that attempts to stay faithful to the book’s inner monologues by including voice-overs. Throughout the film, the camera will hold steady on an actor’s face as they pause silently and a voice-over reveals what they are thinking in that moment. For example, after the conversation between Thufir and Paul mentioned above, the camera lingers on Thufir’s face as his voice-over says, “Yes, perhaps he would at that.” This line reflects Thufir’s inner thought from the book and clues the audience in to the idea that Paul has special perceptive abilities and little reason to worry about his personal safety. Later, after Jessica shows a hint of concern for Paul before he is left alone with the Reverend Mother Mohiam, Paul’s voice-over asks, “What does she fear?” Not only does this build suspense for the following scene with the gom jabbar test, it helps the audience understand Paul’s thought patterns. The voice-overs align with the book by letting viewers get inside the characters’ heads and experience events alongside them.

However, Lynch also took liberties with the source material that move his film further from the themes and concepts important to Herbert’s story. The weirding modules are one of the biggest changes. In the book, the Atreides’ advantage in combat lies with their strong training by fighters such as Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck. Paul has an additional advantage because he was trained in the supreme control of mind and body by his mother, a member of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. But in the film, weirding modules are introduced as the Atreides’ secret advantage. They take the name of the Bene Gesserit’s ‘weirding way’ and appear to work by harnessing the power of sound, but these point-and-shoot weapons require no skill to use. In his book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune. An Oral History (2023), Max Evry suggests that they reflect Lynch’s interest in Transcendental Meditation and the power that one word or mantra can access. This may be true, but ironically the modules undercut the mental and physical strength and skill of both the Fremen warriors and the Bene Gesserit from the book. They unnecessarily add technological gadgets to a story that originally uplifted humans’ abilities over technology.

Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000)

Harrison’s miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune takes special pains to explore the political and religious themes from the book and depict the Fremen as a multi-faceted desert people. The miniseries focuses on the political intrigue between the various factions of House Atreides, House Harkonnen, the Imperial household, and the Guild and Bene Gesserit. In a Shakespearean-influenced style, characters frequently reveal their political motives and schemes, including at the banquet on Arrakis. The Emperor and Princess Irulan also take on bigger roles, though largely in keeping with their descriptions from the book.

Religious influence plays a significant role in the story, as Paul and Jessica use myths and propaganda to their advantage in order to secure their place among the Fremen. Yet the Fremen are shown to be a strong and culturally vibrant desert people with their own traditions and rituals, even though they remain susceptible to Paul’s charisma. Harrison went so far as to hire a choreographer to design the hand gestures and body movements of the Fremen to bring their culture to life on screen. For example, Stilgar shows his respect for his crysknife by bringing it up to his forehead in a ritualistic motion before lowering it. Other Fremen bow their heads and make particular hand motions in the presence of Reverend Mother Ramallo and later Paul, which indicate their deference to religious figures. Such features provide depth to the Fremen culture, while staying firmly grounded in some of their characteristics from the book.

One notable deviation in the miniseries is when Paul appears to summon forth a waterfall in the Fremen sietch after proclaiming his right to reclaim his dukedom and cleanse the planet of their enemies. This scene, similar to the one at the end of Lynch’s film when Paul makes it rain, risks making Paul look like a god who can control the elements. Its purpose was likely to reinforce the religious nature of Paul’s leadership and the Fremen’s view of him as a messiah figure who can perform miracles. Water is certainly an important symbol, but it does not appear in this way in the original story.

Dune: Part One (2021)

Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One brings to life the hostile but stunning desert environment in the book through the use of on-location filming in the Middle East (specifically near Abu Dhabi and Wadi Rum in southern Jordan). This gives it the advantage of being able to show off the austere beauty of the desert and its rocks and sand dunes, as is appropriate for a story set on a desert planet. The wide vistas of rolling dunes and intense sunlight highlight the moisture-starved environment described in the book. Spice appears as a glittering substance in the air and on the ground, much prized and fought over by multiple groups.

The film also stays true to a smaller detail relating to the desert setting: how to walk in a non-rhythmic way to avoid attracting the attention of a giant sandworm. A choreographer created a special desert sandwalk that Jessica and Paul use when forced out on into the desert after the Harkonnen attack. In the film, as they venture out into the open sand in their stillsuits, Paul tells Jessica they must walk like the Fremen do—a practice he learned about in his filmbooks. He shows her how to do the sandwalk, taking a wide step with his right leg, a wide step with his left leg, and then a small step forward before making a sweeping circular motion with his left leg dragging through the sand. The depiction of this movement keeps the film true to the book’s descriptions of how people have learned to survive in the deserts of Arrakis.

On the other hand, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the excesses of the depiction of the Baron Harkonnen in Lynch’s film, Dune: Part One changes this character into a bald monster with few lines. Such a drastic shift neutralizes the Baron’s crafty, Machiavellian nature from the book and leans into a more stereotypical views of villains as barely human and animalistic. It makes it impossible to view the Harkonnen and Atreides as mirror images of one another, each manipulating those around them to obtain power and wealth. The loss of this interesting, articulate character from the book reduces the story’s political depth and the audience’s ability to enjoy watching his plots unfold and ultimately unravel.

Comparing Adaptations

In terms of how the adaptations compare with each other, all three have a few things in common in their approach to translating Herbert’s story to the screen.

First, all of them feature a female narrator providing a prologue to the story, whether Princess Irulan in Dune (1984) and Frank Herbert’s Dune, or Chani in Dune: Part One. For the first two adaptations, this aligns with Irulan introducing Paul through the excerpt from her writing that begins the book. Yet all of the adaptations then change the start of the main storyline where Reverend Mother Mohiam and Jessica look in on Paul the night before the test of the gom jabbar. After a second short prologue titled “A Secret Report Within The Guild,” Dune (1984) begins with the Emperor meeting the Guild and planning to kill Paul. The miniseries opens with a sequence of Paul’s visions and Paul waking up in his room with a hologram of Dr. Yueh lecturing about the political structures of the Imperium, though this scene is then immediately followed by the gom jabbar test. In Dune: Part One, after Chani’s prologue featuring scenes of spice in the air, spice harvesting operations, and the Fremen and Harkonnen conflict, Paul awakes on Caladan after having had visions of Chani and proceeds to have breakfast with his mother.  

The adaptations often take quite different approaches to characters, sets, and costumes, giving them a unique look and feel that may be only loosely tied to the book. However, they all decided to go with an adult actor for Paul. In the book, Paul is 15 years old at the start and described as small for his age. Of the three lead actors, Timothée Chalamet is really the only one youthful-looking enough to pull this off—Kyle MacLachlan and Alec Newman look older than a young teenager. All the adaptations also include some effort to capture the blue color in the eyes of the Fremen through different special effects through the years, from rotoscoping to UV contact lenses to CGI-enabled blue tinting.

In addition, the later adaptations pay homage to their predecessor, Lynch’s Dune, even though they largely try to avoid replicating its specific look and feel. In the miniseries, Paul speaks the line “the sleeper has awakened” while discussing his terrible purpose with his mother. This is identical to the line that Paul utters after taking the Water of Life in Lynch’s version. Both the miniseries and Dune: Part One include a large Guild ship with a long, tubular structure reminiscent of the ship in Dune (1984). Herbert’s book doesn’t include details about these ships, other than the fact that they are very big but that sandworms could be larger, so the consistency of the ships’ appearances on screen indicates that the later adaptations are riffing off of the Lynch version’s ship design.

Villeneuve’s film also contains several other similarities to Lynch’s film. There is a Soviet influence in the Harkonnen ships and architecture and marks on the Mentats’ lips. The Baron Harkonnen bathes in a dark, industrial-looking substance (also recalling a scene from the film Apocalypse Now). There is also a hint of Lynch’s strange preoccupation with animals, which popped up in Dune (1984) numerous times through the Harkonnens’ mutilated cow, cat/rat antidote set-up, and squood device. In Dune: Part One, a weird spider-like creature appears eating out of a bowl on the floor in the Harkonnen chambers and is dismissed in disgust by Reverend Mother Mohiam. With no explanation or backstory, it appears to be another way of demonstrating the Harkonnens’ animalistic nature and monstrosity, similar to how the creatures function in Lynch’s film.

Conclusion

Herbert’s long, multi-layered book has posed many challenges to those who have attempted to adapt it to the screen. Herbert himself couldn’t write a workable screenplay and concluded that he was probably too close to the material to see it as a film. But three directors and their teams have navigated some of the complexities of Herbert’s story successfully enough to bring a screen adaptation to life. Each expressed a desire to be faithful to the source material but also had to try to align their vision with the realities of their time period and the constraints of cinematic production. Some aspects of the resulting films are more faithful than others, leaving plenty of room for discussion and debate about how the adaptations stand up against the original, unchanging novel.

So, let’s discuss: Which adaptation do you think was most faithful to the spirit of the book? Are there features you found that aligned closely to Herbert’s vision, or perhaps other features that exist only in the cinematic versions that have remained in your mind? And do you think the new film, Dune: Part Two, will stay more or less faithful to the novel than Part One?[end-mark]

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The event, which will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 24 at select IMAX theaters, is, of course, part of the promotional lead-up to the release of Dune: Part Two, which is set to premiere in theaters on March 15, 2024. What will be part of the “exclusive sneak peek” at this screening is unclear, though it’s likely to be scenes from the upcoming film, which chronicles the second part of Frank Hebert’s iconic sci-fi novel, Dune.

Dune: Part One takes place through the first part of Hebert’s book, up to the moment when Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) have joined the Fremen after the Harkonnens have murdered Paul’s father (Oscar Isaac) and reclaimed rule of the desert planet, Arrakis (aka Dune).

The second film, according to Villenueve, will be more emotional than the first. “Part One was like the promise of something, but Part Two delivers on that,” the director said in an interview this summer with Empire, later adding that, “the first movie was more contemplative—a young man discovering a world. Here, it’s a war movie.”

Part Two will also bring some of the book’s major characters to the big screen, including Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler),  Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), and Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken).

Whatever we have in store for us in Part Two, the opportunity to see the first film on an IMAX screen (again) before the second movie comes out is a good thing. You can see if there are tickets available for a screening near you by clicking here.

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This trailer, though, is mostly war, with a sweeping score to intensify the feelings. On the one hand, there’s violent conflict; on the other, there’s the relationship between Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya), who come from very different backgrounds. Here’s the synopsis:

Dune: Part Two will explore the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a path of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee.

Dune: Part One was very beautiful, but one might also argue that it was more technically fascinating than emotionally or narratively compelling. (Personally I remember the thing about cereal being used in the sound design more than anything else). But it looked really, really cool. And so does Part Two. What else it has to offer remains to be seen.

Returning stars include Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, Dave Bautista, and Javier Bardem; new cast members include Butler, Pugh, Christopher Walken, and Léa Seydoux. Villeneuve co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Spaihts; cinematographer Greig Fraser, production designer Patrice Vermette, editor Joe Walker, visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, costume designer Jacqueline West, and composer Hans Zimmer all return for this second adventure in the desert.

Dune: Part Two is in theaters March 1, 2024.

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In addition to Tenet, Warner Bros. has moved some of its other high-profile releases: Wonder Woman 1984 (again), Godzilla vs. Kong, and Matrix 4.

The shifts in release dates come as uncertainly around the reopening of the world economy in light of the continuing Coronavirus pandemic. While numerous states across the US have begun to slowly reopen their economies, resurgences of the disease highlight the fact that the disease remains a key threat, and that businesses that see people in close proximity with one another — such as movie theaters — might still be unsafe.

Nolan’s Tenet, a time-bending spy thriller, was seen as the film to signal the reopening of the film industry, and it was set to debut in theaters on July 17th. It’s now been bumped back two weeks to July 31st. However, Warner Bros. is sticking another Nolan film back in theaters: Inception will be rereleased to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Deadline notes that the delay will give the studio more time to finalize Tenet‘s IMAX print, and that those theatergoers who venture out will get a special look at the upcoming film.

Other Warner Bros. films are getting shuffled around as well. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman sequel was supposed to hit theaters on August 14th (already delayed from its original November 2019, December 2019, and June 2020 release dates), but has now been rescheduled for October 2nd.

Godzilla vs. Kong, which was supposed to debut on November 19th, has been shifted to May 21st, 2021, and the upcoming Matrix 4 will now debut on April 1st, 2022 (originally May 21st, 2021.) Notably, Warner Bros. hasn’t moved its release date for its upcoming adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. It’s been scheduled to hit theaters on December 18th, 2020.

It remains to be seen if some other high-profile films, like Mulan (July 24th, 2020), or The New Mutants (August 28th, 2020) will retain their release dates.

The moves are par for the course at this point in 2020. At the height of the pandemic, a number of movies saw their theatrical releases delayed (Fast & Furious 9, and A Quiet Place Part 2, Mulan, and Black Widow), or sent straight to video on demand or streaming (like Bloodshot, Onward, Birds of Prey, The Invisible Man, and others.)

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And he could have been science fiction’s best known non-binary protagonist.

According to the plot of Dune, the Kwisatz Haderach had to be created via millennia of special breeding directives from the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. The all-female organization was working toward what all great shadowy organizations work toward—absolute power, namely their own puppet on the throne as emperor. Wrapped up in this desire was also a long-standing problem; spice offered the sisterhood some prescience and race memory, with the Reverend Mothers capable of looking back in time through the line of other sisters… but they could not access the male knowledge and experience in their past. It was believed that the Kwisatz Haderach would be able to look into their full history, both sides of their race memory, and also to see far into the future.

This figure was meant to arrive a generation after Paul—his mother was supposed to have a daughter who would wed the Harkonnen male heir, producing the Kwisatz Haderach. But Jessica went against the sisterhood, giving her partner Duke Leto the son he wanted, and somehow, this resulted in the fated figure appearing ahead of schedule. Paul took the water of life, a poison from the sandworms that the Reverend Mother is capable of changing, and learned of his destiny, saying:

“There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.”

According to Paul, he is the fulcrum between those two points, able to give without taking and take without giving. That is what makes him the Kwisatz Haderach.

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Here’s the thing: The world of Dune is bound by an essentialist gender binary that doesn’t do the story many favors, despite its careful and often inspired worldbuilding. Aside from the fact that gender isn’t a binary, the insistence upon it isn’t a clever story juxtaposition that makes for great themes and plot. It’s an antiquated perspective that reads as out of place, especially in such a far-flung future. This is especially true when you couch maleness as a “taking” force and femaleness as a “giving” force. Men and women are not naturally those things because people overall are not that easily categorized—they are expected to be those things by society. Stating it as some form of spiritual truth, as Dune does, is an awkward declaration that only gets more awkward as time passes.

In addition, Dune is a story that spends much of its narrative currency on battles between binaries. They crop up everywhere in the book: the tension between the Bene Gesserit and the Mentats; the age-old feud between Houses Harkonnen and Atreides; the conditioning of Arrakis’ fremen forces against the conditioning of the Emperor’s sardaukar; the struggle between the ruling houses and the spacing guild. While there are countless groups vying for power, and the political complexities of that do not go unnoticed, Dune still dwells on that ‘A vs B’ dynamic in all the places where it really counts. Without these binary antagonisms, the tale wouldn’t function.

For a story so taken with binaries, there is something arresting about Paul balancing male and female aspects as an implicit factor to being the Kwisatz Haderach. The real confusion lies in the idea that the Kwisatz Haderach always had to be male, as though counterbalancing generations of Bene Gesserit sisters; if the figure is meant to be a fulcrum between those two specific genders, then their own gender should be insignificant. More importantly, if that is the nature of being the Kwisatz Haderach, then coming into that power should ultimately change one’s perception and person entirely. If you’re going to be the balancing point between dual genders, then why would you be solely either of those genders? Paul literally says that being able to do what he does changes him into “something other than man.” It doesn’t make him a woman, clearly, so what’s the alternative here?

It would have been a sharper assertion for Paul to have awoken into a different gender entirely, perhaps genderfluidity or even a lack of gender altogether. This wouldn’t have altered his key actions within the narrative, but it would have added another dimension to his journey. A non-binary protagonist for a story that obsesses over binary thinking would have been a stunning wrench to throw into the works. In many ways, it would have made more thematic sense than what Dune currently offers its readers.

While the upcoming film is unlikely to go that route, it’s tantalizing to think of the story that might have been, of all the possibilities contained therein. A story set in the future that accounted for the complexities of gender identity and how it might pertain to an awakening of consciousness and purpose. Even if Paul was the first person in their time period to consider non-binary gender, that would be a powerful statement that would shape their reality for centuries to come. Perhaps others would embrace non-binary identities to honor Muad’Dib, or it would become a sacred way of being, looked upon with religious fervor due to Paul’s importance. And there are further questions as to how that would have affected the sequels as well—would Leto II also have gone that route? He turns into a sandworm, you can’t tell me they’ve got clear and separated binary genders. They’re worms. In the sand. Try again.

In a story that turns on binaries, particularly as they pertain to gender, it would have changed the whole scheme to consider Paul as a non-binary protagonist. Moreover, it would have been fascinating to see how his perspective changed as a result of being that fulcrum, not just as it related to time, but as it related to people. While the story is quick to zero in on what Paul sees in the flow of time, his “terrible purpose” in putting humanity on the Golden Path, there is no consideration for how this shift in state might effect how he sees other humans. It’s a missed opportunity to really explore what absolute power would look like in a being who can project himself into the experiences of men and women equally. Would he understand his mother better than before? His sister?

It’s not the story that we have, but there will always be a part of my mind preoccupied with these possibilities. Because it’s fun, and because it’s intriguing, and because I will always wonder about what the world would look like if more people didn’t take the concept of binaries for granted.

Emmet Asher-Perrin will be stuck on this point for forever. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.

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This week, Vanity Fair released a pair of articles that give us our first look at what to expect from the film.

The movie appears to still be slated for a December release

This summer has been a trial for studios and theaters alike, as many have closed for to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As a result, numerous films have had their theatrical releases delayed to later this year, or skipped the theatrical window altogether. Dune appears to be on track, according to Vanity Fair, although it’ll face competition from some other big films, like Black Widow, Godzilla vs. Kong, No Time to Die,  and Top Gun: Maverick.

There are indeed two films planned

Since the inception of the project, Villeneuve has talked about producing two films. Writer Anthony Breznican points out that Dune is an enormously complicated book, and Villeneuve notes “I would not agree to make this adaptation of the book with one single movie. The world is too complex. It’s a world that takes its power in details.”

He notes that that complexity is probably why the prior adaptations haven’t lived up to the books. “It’s a book that tackles politics, religion, ecology, spirituality—and with a lot of characters. I think that’s why it’s so difficult.”

The result will be something like It and It: Chapter Two: two big blockbusters that will allow Villeneuve to explore the complexity of the novel without making shortcuts.

The film retains its environmental message

One of the reasons for why Frank Herbert’s novel caught on with audiences in the 1970s was the environmentalist message embedded in the text, a holdover from the origins of the projects: a feature article about dune migration in the Pacific Northwest.

Villeneuve notes that “No matter what you believe, Earth is changing, and we will have to adapt.”

“That’s why I think that Dune, this book, was written in the 20th century. It was a distant portrait of the reality of the oil and the capitalism and the exploitation—the overexploitation—of Earth. Today, things are just worse. It’s a coming-of-age story, but also a call for action for the youth.”

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— ⊃∪∩⪽ (@DuneNews) April 14, 2020

The Stillsuits look pretty cool

One of the biggest challenges for a novel’s adaptation is the look and feel of the world—particularly the costume design. Filmmakers have to balance what looks good and natural for the film, against what’s practical to wear for the actors. With Dune, there’s been three (ish) prior adaptations, and in all three instances, I’ve never felt that any of them quite nailed the look and feel of the Stillsuits that the Fremen wear to protect themselves from the desert environment.

Villeneuve’s adaptation looks like they’ve nailed the look: Vanity Fair’s piece shows off several pictures of the costume, which look rugged and like they could exist in the real-world.

Moreover, the costumes helped with the actors’ performance: Timothée Chalamet noted that they were performing in extremely hot conditions, and that the costumes were pretty oppressive to wear. “In a really grounded way, it was helpful to be in the stillsuits and to be at that level of exhaustion.”

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It looks as though Villeneuve is updating the story a bit

Dune might be a classic novel, but it’s attracted some criticism over the years for some of his portrayals: women don’t play as big a role, and some of the characters, like House Harkonnen’s Baron Vladimir (played by Stellan Skarsgård) are portrayed as grotesque.

Villeneuve notes that the character is still a “mammoth,” but “As much as I deeply love the book, I felt that the baron was flirting very often with caricature. And I tried to bring him a bit more dimension.” The director notes that Skarsgård portrays the character most like a predator, and less a power-crazed ruler.

Vanity Fair reports that some of the roles will change a bit: Lady Jessica’s (played by Rebecca Ferguson) role has been expanded, and is described more as a “warrior princess,” than a “space nun.” Ferguson notes that the character is “respectful” of the novel, but “the quality of the arcs for much of the women have been brought up to a new level. There were some shifts he did, and they are beautifully portrayed now.”

Another character, Liet Kynes, an ecologist on Arrakis, is a male character in the book, but for the film, will be played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Rogue One), a woman of color.

Atreides Anti-hero

Actor Timothée Chalamet will portray Paul Atreides, “a child of privilege raised by a powerful family, but not one strong enough to protect him from the dangers ahead.” Chalamet provided some insight into his take on the character yesterday, noting that he’s “on an anti-hero’s-journey of sorts.”

“He thinks he’s going to be sort of a young general studying his father and his leadership of a fighting force before he comes of age, hopefully a decade later, or something like that.”

Readers of the novel will know that that’s not what’s in store for the young Atreides: his family will be overthrown by rival House Harkonnen, which seeks to take control of the planet Arrakis. It looks as though Villeneuve and Chalamet’s take on the character is nuanced and complicated, and that it’ll take into consideration some of the character’s privilege in becoming the leader of the indigenous Fremen tribesmen.

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Before the 1990s, the idea of planets around other stars was science fiction, but today, astronomers are discovering thousands of ‘exoplanets’, and inevitable comparisons with the worlds of science fiction have been drawn. For instance, the phrase ‘Tatooine planet’, to describe a world with two suns, is practically part of the scientific lexicon now.

So here are four fictional, yet scientifically plausible, planets – and four real planets that show that, sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.

Blueheart

Water-worlds may be among the most common types of planet out there, so it’s no surprise that they’ve featured in science fiction. One of the most well thought-out is Blueheart, from Alison Sinclair’s 1996 novel of the same name. Ninety-seven percent of Blueheart’s surface is covered by a deep ocean, and is inhabited by genetically-engineered humans called adaptives. However, there’s conflict with a group of un-modified humans who want to terraform Blueheart to better suit themselves.

What’s really intriguing about Blueheart’s ocean is its false bottom, formed from floating forests that have dense, entangled roots that can catch nutrient-rich organic material sinking from the surface waters, maintaining the stock of nutrients necessary for ocean life. On Earth, the wind blowing off continents moves surface water away, allowing deeper water to well up to the surface, and this mixing keeps nutrients in circulation. Blueheart doesn’t have any continents, so the floating forests are the only way to prevent the nutrients from sinking to the sea floor, but here’s the rub: the floating forests can only form thanks to tides and breakers produced by the terraformers who threaten the adaptives’ way of life, hence the conflict at the heart of the story.

Real-life planet: Although Earth is the only planet we know that definitely has oceans of water, several strong candidates for ‘water worlds’ have been discovered, not least a planet 48 light years away called Gliese 1214b. The density of this planet suggests that three-quarters of it is composed of water, wrapped around a small rocky core. The water wouldn’t remain liquid all the way down to the core. Instead, the increasing pressure with depth would gradually transform the water into various exotic states. These might include ‘superfluid’ water with zero viscosity (friction between fluids) allowing whirlpool vortices to spiral forever, as well as exotic ‘ice VII’ that forms under incredible, crushing pressures of over 21,000 atmospheres.

Gethen

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous, award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness comes this planet of Winter (‘Gethen’ means winter in its inhabitants’ language). Gethen is in the grip of an ice age, with polar caps extending as far as 45 degrees north and south, and the entirety of the planet is cold. Scientists refer to this as a Snowball Earth state, triggered in part by Gethen’s highly eccentric orbit around its star (meaning that its orbit is not circular, but elongated), which can lead to long periods of runaway cooling.

Real-life planet: All planets, including Earth, have eccentric orbits, but most are only slightly eccentric. Gethen’s orbital eccentricity is a more extreme, but it’s got nothing on the gas giant planet HD 80606b, which is 190 light years away from Earth, and which has a 111-day orbit so extremely elliptical that it makes a closest approach of its star at a distance of just 4.5 million kilometers, whipping past it in a matter of hours. (For comparison, Earth is 149 million kilometers from our Sun). During this fast summer, its temperature rises from about 500 degrees C to 1,200 degrees C, triggering huge summer storms with winds blowing at 15 times the speed of sound. Then the planet moves quickly away from its star and back out into deep space to begin another orbit.

Trisolaris

This deadly world from Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem is gravitationally thrown around a system of three stars like a hot potato, leading to catastrophic Chaotic Eras where the planet bakes or freezes, interspersed by short-lived Stable Eras where civilization can arise once more. It’s purported to be the Alpha Centauri system, which is the closest star system to Earth, just 4.3 light years away. However, the Trisolaran system doesn’t quite match reality: Alpha Centauri is a double-star system with Proxima Centauri a possible third member (astronomers aren’t sure if Proxima is gravitationally connected, or just passing by) and the orbital dynamics are much more stable. Astronomers have even found a planet orbiting Proxima, but this rocky world has probably been irradiated by its star.

Real-life planet: While the interchanging gravitational fields of Trisolaris’ three stars causes its chaotic motions, in real life no known ‘Tatooine planets’ are as unstable. However, a star’s gravity can affect a planet in other ways.

WASP-12b, which is 800 light years away, is a gas giant planet orbiting just 3.4 million kilometers from its star. This is close enough for gravitational tides from the star to stretch WASP-12b into an egg-shape, far broader around the equator than around the poles. The planet swelters at 2,200 degrees C and is evaporating under the intense stellar heat and radiation, losing 189 quadrillion tonnes of gas from its atmosphere every year, the gas bleeding away like the tail of a comet.

Arrakis

Better known as ‘Dune’ from Frank Herbert’s novel, Arrakis is a desert world and the only source of the spice melange, which the Spacing Guild uses to fold space and travel interstellar distances. The only water on Arrakis is found in tiny ice caps at the poles and in underground reservoirs.

Planetary scientists have actually theorized the existence of such worlds, describing Arrakis as “a bigger, warmer Mars … [with] signs that water flowed in the prehistoric past”. The scientists suggest that these Dune-like worlds could remain marginally habitable over a wider range of distances from their star than wet Earth-like planets can.

Real-life planet: On Arrakis, spice is more common than water. On the planet 55 Cancri e, which is the fifth planet in orbit around the star 55 Cancri, located 41 light years away, carbon is more common than water (and, hence, oxygen), a characteristic that could lead to a seriously weird world. Its landscape could be made of chiseled graphite, while the high-pressure carbon in its core could be transformed into an enormous chunk of diamond the size of a small planet.

For more information on how astronomers discover new planets, visit NASA.

Keith Cooper is a science journalist, Editor of Astronomy Now magazine, and author of The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Bloomsbury Sigma). Follow Keith on Twitter.

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You can find out a lot about the story you’re in by how they tackle this conversation. Here are some of the most memorable ones of my life.

The Animorphs and the Glowing Box

I devoured these books growing up, and they were one of the first exposures to science fiction I had. Even if you didn’t read them, you might remember their original covers—each one depicting a kid turning into an animal, and all the horrific steps in between.

The Animorphs “chosen one” conversation involves an alien telling our five heroes that Earth has been invaded by a race of slug creatures that crawl into your brain via your ear canal and take over your mind. The alien then offers them a choice: he can give them the ability to fight these slug creatures (Yeerks) by transforming into animals. Yes, the characters find that as weird as you might expect. But it’s a middle grade book, and the alien is in the middle of dying, so there’s not a lot of time to dwell on it. The alien tells each of them to touch one side of this glowing cube, which will transfer the abilities to them, and they do. The fate of the human race depends on it, after all.

What I like about this conversation is that it was entirely coincidental. The alien happened to land in this place where these five people just so happened to be. They don’t have any special skills—their unique abilities are a gift in a desperate moment. There was possibility here that doesn’t exist in every chosen one story—the potential for heroism in any random kid who happens upon a flying saucer with four of his friends, and has the heart for it.

The Matrix and the Oracle Fakeout

I saw The Matrix in sixth grade. I remember, in the conversation between Morpheus and Neo where Morpheus explains “The One”, getting that spark of excitement in my stomach: we were about to see Neo’s specialness on full display, his “set apart” status. And then, when Neo finally goes to see the Oracle, to confirm that he is indeed the hero of our tale…I can’t explain to you how deflated I felt.

ORACLE: But you already know what I’m going to tell you.

NEO: I’m not the One.

ORACLE: Sorry, kid.

At that point, I realized, I had no idea what was going to happen next. I had no road map in my mind for how this story could go. (Remember: I was eleven, I hadn’t been around long.) If you’ve seen the movie, you know the oracle tells Neo what he needs to hear in order to embrace his destiny, and he is actually the One, a fact he realizes largely because Trinity, certified hottie, confesses that she’s in love with him while their ship is coming apart around them and he’s still stuck in the Matrix, and it’s all very intense and dramatic and I still desperately want a trench coat.

But it all goes back to that conversation with the Oracle, that moment when fate and choice tangle together. That conversation introduces us to a simple idea: sometimes, in order to fulfill a destiny, you have to feel free to make your own choices. You have to believe that you are not special, that your life is not singularly important, in order to become someone who is.

Harry Potter and the Broken Prophecy

It took five books for us to find out Harry’s “chosen one” status via a prophecy contained in a glass orb, but that’s not even the “chosen one” conversation I want to talk about. That honor belongs to Book 6, The Half-Blood Prince.

Dumbledore has been, up to that point, taking Harry on a journey through other people’s memories, introducing the method by which Voldemort will, at last, be defeated—but this conversation is also about how Voldemort himself determined the prophecy would be fulfilled, creating the instrument of his own downfall (Harry) by trying to destroy it. The focus here is not on destiny, but on choice.

“He understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high.”

Harry already knows he’s the chosen one—he’s known that for a year at this point. The revelation here, then, is that choice exists. Harry’s destiny tells him only what he already knew, an inevitability from the moment Voldemort murdered his parents. It’s the feeling that matters here, more than the fact—the feeling of agency, restored, which is what our hero needs to complete his journey. Harry Potter presents the idea that choice informs destiny, and destiny informs choice. The two are locked together, often indistinguishable from each other.

Dune and the Gom Jabbar

Chosen One stuff is all over Dune by Frank Herbert, a book I read when I was probably too young to understand half of it, twelve or thirteen. But the most memorable of the assorted chosen one conversations in this book is the one at the very beginning: Paul is summoned to a test wherein a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother puts his hand in a box that causes horrible pain, and then puts a needle called the Gom Jabbar to his throat. If he removes his hand from the box, he’ll die by the Gom Jabbar. If he can outthink his animal instincts and keep his hand where it is, he’ll live. Paul passes, obviously—but he also learns of his new potential. You see, there’s a prophecy. (Duh.) One man will be the Kwisatz Haderach, with special abilities beyond those of the women who have come before him. Paul’s mother, Jessica, chose to give birth to a son rather than a daughter in the hope that he might be that man of prophecy. He exists because she believed he could have an important destiny.

I have…a lot to say about the gender politics part of the Kwisatz Haderach, but this isn’t really the place for that. For now, let me just say that Dune is unique for the way that Paul both buys into prophecy and uses it to manipulate the people who believe in it. He sees an array of paths and steers himself and others accordingly. And this moment is just the first example of that—Paul himself is a result of his mother’s pride, her taking the reins of destiny and trying to yank them in a particular direction. This bold maneuvering of destiny is part of what makes Dune a special chosen one story—fate, here, is a powerful weapon you can halfway wield, rather than something to surrender to.

Community and the True Repairman

Community, uneven though it was, was singularly capable of taking an extremely low stakes situation (a study group at a community college) and creating high stakes, weird drama out of it. Never was this more apparent than with Troy in season 3, embracing his destiny as the Truest Repairman. Basically, Troy wants to go to regular college, but he has a special gift of…air conditioner repair. The Dean of the air conditioner repair school finally maneuvers Troy into his grasp, and then reveals to him his destiny: he is the Truest Repairman, who will fix “not only air conditioners, but the men who fix them.” Troy then faces off with the evil air conditioner repair guy in a thunderdome style air conditioner repairing arena known as The Sun Chamber, defeats him, saves his life, and tells them all to stop being an absurd cult and become a regular school instead. He can do that, he says, because he’s their Messiah.

I don’t think this subplot was received positively by all fans of the show, but it was received positively by me, Chosen One Enthusiast. Few times in my life have I laughed harder than when Troy hears this prophecy about the Truest Repairman and replies, “It’s a trade school! It’s a two-year degree in boxes that make rooms cold!” Community loves tropes, and it loves playing with them while simultaneously indulging in them, something I very much enjoyed about it—and later decided to try my own hand at.

My book, Chosen Ones, takes place over ten years after my main character Sloane hears about her destiny. But I couldn’t resist including the chosen one conversation, in the form of a declassified government document. In it, she asks what will happen if she says no, and she is the only one of five chosen ones to do so. Sloane is not eager to save the world, but she does it anyway, and ten years later, haunted by the trauma of that experience, she wonders if what set the five of them apart, really, is that their parents were willing to surrender them to destiny, and other chosen one candidates’ parents were not. Sloane is primarily concerned with the cruelty of shaping a child to save the world. She is living in its aftermath.

As with any trope, though, you can’t mess with it unless you have a good foundation in it—and these five stories, among others, paved the way.

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Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent series and Carve the Mark. She was born in a Chicago suburb, and studied creative writing at Northwestern University. She and her husband and dog currently live in Chicago. You can find Veronica on Instagram (@vrothbooks), Facebook, or at her website (veronicarothbooks.com). Chosen Ones is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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“Truth be told,” he wrote, “I am spending more time in Westeros than in the real world, writing every day. Things are pretty grim in the Seven Kingdoms… but maybe not as grim as they may become here.”

To fans who immediately took this as a sign that Winter (that is, The Winds of) is coming: not so fast. It’s important to note that Martin has neglected to mention the specific name of the Westeros-set book he’s working on, so this could easily be another Fire & Blood situation. But it could also mean he’s making daily progress on the long-awaited sixth A Song of Ice and Fire book, so fingers crossed.

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The Unspoken Name

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Elsewhere in the post, Martin revealed that he’s indefinitely shut down the Jean Cocteau Cinema and his non-profit, the Stagecoach Foundation, for safety reasons, but that all employees will continue to be paid. He also said he’s keeping his bookstore Beastly Books open (under careful monitoring, with precautions like disinfectants and sanitizers) until it seems like a better idea to shut it down, while the mail order service will also remain open.

Ending on a serious note, the author gave fans an update on his health and the safety precautions he’s taking during the pandemic: “For those of you who may be concerned for me personally… yes, I am aware that I am very much in the most vulnerable population, given my age and physical condition,” he wrote. “But I feel fine at the moment, and we are taking all sensible precautions. I am off by myself in a remote isolated location, attended by one of my staff, and I’m not going in to town or seeing anyone.”

He signed off by wishing everyone to “come through this safe and sound,” attaching a 20-second hand-washing meme captioned with the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from Dune. Read the full blog post here.

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If you want to tell the truth, best to do so in a story, and when these truths are dark, best to do so through a work of horror.

Horror is most powerful when it reveals a larger truth about the world we live in. Tackling the devastation of our current opioid crisis is no different. Citing statistics about the number of people who have died from overdoses hardly has the same impact as the tale of one who has suffered. To hear about the nature of addiction in a story, putting the reader into the addict’s body, brain, and spirit as it morphs into something unrecognizable, something horrific, makes the larger crisis much more personal. In this way, horror facilitates understanding, empathy, and even compassion.

Memoir is the primary delivery method of addiction stories, but even in memoir, it is the moments of personal terror we feel most deeply. When horror tackles the subject of addiction, it becomes ultra-realism or a sort of black magic realism, I’ll call it.

Consider Stephen King’s story “Grey Matter,” the powerful tale of a boy catering to his father’s ever-growing alcoholism through buying beer at the local party store and delivering it home for his dad to drink. The child is a hostage in many ways, forced to fuel his father’s habit even as the addiction devours him. We feel such empathy for the child, but if his father never turns into a subhuman, insidious blob multiplying in size as it consumes others, we would not feel the same dread on such a cosmic scale.

This same blob is currently attacking our country. We are living within Stephen King’s “Grey Matter,” but with opioids feeding the beast. On average over 130 people will overdose and die today from opioids. During weekends when overdoses spikes, morgues are overrun in some cities and refrigerated trailers have to be brought in to handle the demand.

The horror genre and speculative fiction is quite often the mirror for this slaughter.

Addiction as horror in film is nothing new, and often presents as body horror or possession. The heroin addict in Saw must rip open the stomach of a human lying next to her in order to save herself from a reverse bear trap. She is one of the few to survive Jigsaw’s torturous puzzles and becomes an advocate of his methods, citing their extreme measure as the only thing that saved her.

Is this what it takes to stop a heroin addiction?

The body horror of addiction can be found in the Evil Dead (2013 version) where the cabin in the woods becomes the refuge of Mia, a heroin addict looking for a place to detox. As the withdrawals hit, the possession begins. Her body becomes ravaged by trees in the forest, is sizzled by a blistering hot shower, and her very arm where she used to inject gets slowly torn from her body at the end.

This is what addiction and then detox feels like—being spiritually occupied and living through a painful mutation of your physical self. To depict this suffering without the element of the horrific or supernatural would be to create a lesser beast, certainly with less verity.

Heroin addiction in the Netflix version of The Haunting of Hill House is perhaps the biggest demonic presence for the Crain family. Director Mike Flanagan took the concept that it’s not houses that are haunted, it’s people that are haunted, and wrapped it up into Luke’s heroin addiction. It becomes a supernatural battle, and, similar to Hereditary, the genre of horror uniquely puts its audience inside the fractured Crain family—the tension, the anger, the cold isolation—just ordinary people dealing with extraordinary demons such as heroin.

The entire Hill House series ends (spoiler alert) with a shot of Luke blowing out a candle celebrating 2 years of being clean, but the possible interpretation that this haunting is not over. The cake, the central object of the scene, is the same color red as the most insidious room of the house—the red room— with a propensity for deluding those inside. We’re left wondering if they are still trapped, deluded with fantasies that such curses can ever be conquered. Luke’s heroin addiction becomes the perfect trope for a person who is haunted by the memories of their misdeeds and by the insatiable urge to use, and this does not end until the final candle goes out.

Compared to these interpersonal conflicts, science fiction often portrays addiction in more cosmic and political tones. In Brave New World, Soma is provided by the government and is the literal opiate of the masses, providing a constant source of bliss, solace, and comfort and stops the population from directing their dissatisfaction toward the state. It’s the drug use of Soma itself that gives the word “brave” in the title its irony.

In the sci-fi land of Dune, water is precious, but it is secondary to the drug, mélange. As Duke Leto Atreides notes, of every valuable commodity known to mankind, “all fades before mélange.” In order to mine and harvest the drug, battles are fought with giant sand worms who move like whales below the surface, all for the wealth of mélange which acts as a hallucinogen, expanding one’s senses and allowing transcendent knowledge and cosmic travel. The horror of addiction remains for withdrawal from mélange is deadly.

While less cosmic, the psychological personal terror of substance D in Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly also finds its roots in dystopian Los Angeles. The war on drugs has been lost, 20% of the population is addicted, and undercover narcotic agent Bob Arctor is addicted to the very drug he is investigating, but not fully aware, for substance D splits the psyche. He ends up in terrible withdrawals, and at the end finds comfort detoxing in a farming commune called New-Path, but in the closing scene, one last absurd truth is revealed. New-Path is growing the very plants used to make substance D. The treatment is also creating fuel for the disease.

One cannot help but think of big pharma, which has been creating opiate addiction en masse, but also profiting from the cure. Narcan is a life-saving pharmaceutical for opioid overdose and appearing on the utility belt of every first responder in the country (and rightly so) but we’ve found ourselves where the pharmaceutical industry profits from the insatiable need for opiates they helped create, but also profiting from the cure.

We’re living inside A Scanner Darkly, living in a Brave New World, and the blob of “Grey Matter” is being fed daily and growing larger.

Horror speaks to this trauma in a more personal fashion, and this seems essential. What better way to capture the epidemic of addiction, and the barren emotional and spiritual states that come with it, than through a work of horror? Until you’ve had your mind and soul hijacked by addiction, it’s difficult to comprehend, for in the throes of a craving, the desire to obtain and use substances equals the life force for survival itself. Imagine yourself drowning and being told not to swim to the surface for air. Obsessions should be so mild.

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The craving for a substance is not much different than that of a vampire who craves blood. The vampire trope is of the most fluid in horror, so ripe with interpretive innuendoes it often reflects the time the art was made, but one thing that remains consistent is the physical nature of vampires matches that of an addict. They must stay hidden in the shadows to exist, a perpetually cold craving in their gut that is never satisfied. Best they can hope for is a momentary relief from suffering, until the emptiness returns and demands to be filled yet again. The concept of heroin addicts saving milk-blood to keep from running out—saving some heroin-infused blood to inject at a later date—is a term made famous by Neil Young in his song, “The Damage Done”, but seems as if it could be pulled directly from HBO’s horror series True Blood.

By creating such monsters in fiction, the reader is granted understanding of what it is like to live with this affliction, and the compassion for addicts grows. Horror can do that. It does do that. “Horror is not about extreme sadism, it’s about extreme empathy,” Joe Hill so aptly noted in Heart-Shaped Box. Portraying addiction as metaphorical monster, such as vampirism, the physical, or possession, the spiritual, demonstrates the type of biological and spiritual forces addicts are fighting against. Being understood means feeling less alone, and there is infinite power in ending that isolation. There is a reason the 12 steps of AA start with the word We. The compassion and power of being understood by a group has tremendous healing, and ending the isolation is often the beginning of one’s recovery.

I’ve been in recovery for 25 years, but I still feel the addiction inside me, speaking to me. My mouth waters when I think of vodka. I feel an electric jolt down my spine when I see someone snorting cocaine in a movie. In this way, like Luke Crain of Hill House, like Mia from the Evil Dead, recovering addicts such as myself remain possessed, and what is more horrific than that?

Yet at the same time, what testament to the human spirit that the desire for health and wholeness can battle such demons and win, learn how to diffuse the cravings, and squeeze unprecedented joy out of life. Right now someone just picked up their 60-day token, someone is blowing out the candle on a cake celebrating 3 years of sobriety. Loved ones witness this transformation of this miracle as if watching someone lost rise from the grave.

I’ve been writing about my addiction for years, for when I open up a vein, this is what spills upon the page. My last two efforts were an invitation for other writers to explore “addiction horror.” The results are the anthologies Garden of Fiends and the new Lullabies for Suffering, pieces of fiction that demand work from very intimate places from each writer’s heart. As Josh Malerman said of these tales of addiction horror; “What fertile ground for horror. Every topic comes from a dark, personal place.”

Horror can shine a blinding light into the eyes of these demons, these dark truths of addiction, in a way no other genre can. It allows the fiction to scream events that are true, even if they never happened. In this way, the darkness of horror, even in its most grotesque forms, leads to a deeper understanding, and during its best moments, compassion and empathy for the sick and suffering addict.

Mark Matthews is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a licensed professional counselor who has worked in behavioral health for over 20 years. He is the author of On the Lips of Children, All Smoke Rises, and Milk-Blood, as well as the editor of Lullabies for Suffering and Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror. He lives near Detroit with his wife and two daughters. Reach him at WickedRunPress@gmail.com

The post The Compassion of Addiction Horror appeared first on Reactor.

And so, when my father came home from the video store a year later with a new cassette, pointed to the foregrounded man in black, and said, “This boy is a prince, and he’s sort of like a Jedi,” well, you can imagine just how sold I was.

That was all it took for me to fall head-over-heels in love with David Lynch’s 1984 Dune adaptation. Screw being a Jedi, I wanted to be one of the Bene Gesserit. The litany against fear became my mantra, and—as soon as I laid hands on a copy of Frank Herbert’s source novel—I began trying to hone my powers of persuasion and physical mastery in order to be just like one of them.

It would be more than a decade before I realized that my deep and abiding love of David Lynch’s sci-fi epic had landed me in one of the most unpopular film fandoms, ever.

You see, people hate Dune almost as much as they love Dune. That is, sci-fi fans revile Lynch’s film almost as deeply as they revere Frank Herbert’s novel. Over the years, I’ve heard many theories on why Lynch’s Dune is so terrible, but I’ve never been convinced they’re right.

Look, I’m not saying the film is perfect, by any means, nor am I arguing that Alejandro Jodorowsky or Ridley Scott couldn’t have done a better job. Even Lynch himself hates Dune, after all. Valid criticisms about it exist, but, on the whole, I’ve just never understood what was so unspeakably godawful about the 1984 film that hardly anyone seems to be able to enjoy it, when I love it so fervently.

Writing for Tor.com in 2017, Emmett Asher-Perrin argues that “David Lynch’s Dune is what you get when you build a science fictional world with no interest in science fiction,” and they’re absolutely right. All his body of work’s weirdness aside, Lynch has shown very little interest in sci-fi over the course of his career.

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That doesn’t stop Dune from being a sci-fi film, however. The opening voiceover—one of the picture’s many, many voiceovers—explains that we’re dealing with a story set in the 11th millennium, and all of the strange technologies, from space travel and personal levitation to body-moisture recycling and voice-activated weapons, reinforce that we are not in 1984 anymore. None of these elements are executed in a spectacularly poor way, with the exception, perhaps, of the force shields Paul and Gurney Halleck wear while training, which are so stunningly Eighties that you practically need sunglasses—at night—to look at them.

So if Dune is, in fact, a sci-fi film, what’s the problem?

Most of the film’s critics seem to agree that Lynch’s cult classic simply isn’t a very good sci-fi flick, for a variety of reasons. Ask critics who aren’t familiar with the source material, and they’ll tell you Dune is nigh incomprehensible.

Take Janet Maslin, for example. In her 1984 review of the film in The New York Times, Maslin asserts that the “psychic” powers the heroes possess “[put] them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the film.”

That’s one hell of a burn, but here’s the thing: I’ve never shown Dune to anyone—and trust me, it’s one of the first ten movies I’ll ask if you’ve seen—who seemed confused by the story.

At its heart, Dune is a simple tale, much as many fans will hate to hear it. There’s Leto Atreides, a weak duke who’s about to be overthrown; Jessica, his strong, gorgeous, and secretly pregnant witch of a concubine, whom he regrets never officially marrying; and Paul, their son, who was never supposed to be born. The guy who sells this royal family out happens to be secretly in love with Jessica, so he helps her escape with Paul. Mother and son wind up living as refugees on a remote desert planet, Arrakis, where there be monsters and a valuable resource: the spice, which just so happens to be the very thing that Leto’s enemies wanted to unseat him in order to obtain. By embedding themselves among the locals and winning them over, Jessica, Paul, and Alia—Paul’s younger sister, in-utero at the time of the coup—exact their revenge on the bloody Baron Harkonnen, who killed Leto.

And how can this be? Because Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach—the super-powerful boychild that the Bene Gesserit have been waiting for. Really, folks, it’s all right there, in the movie.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that some parts of Lynch’s Dune really don’t make much sense. Like that grotesque pet cat/rat the Baron Harkonnen gives to House Atreides’ longsuffering servant, Thufir Hawat, to milk. Why does it have to be a cat with a rat taped to its side? Why does Thufir have to milk it in order to rid himself of Harkonnen poison? Why does he have to do this every day or risk death? Why does Sting have to be the one to carry the cat/rat? The easy answer to all of these questions is that Thufir’s pet is one of a generous handful of elements that aren’t fleshed out enough for us to understand them, at least not in any capacity that goes beyond the mental image of Lynch shrugging and saying, “Make it weird.”

But there’s another, less easy answer, and one that I think gets to the heart of why I love Lynch’s Dune so much. All of the elements of the film that grate on critics, from the near-constant voiceovers to the unexplained powers of the Mentats and Bene Gesserit, are near and dear to me, because they made sense to my 8-year-old, Star Wars-loving self. More than that, Dune gave me a world in which everything was not guaranteed to turn out all right—something to temper the almost relentless optimism of Star Wars.

Let’s get one thing clear: the problem isn’t that Lynch’s Dune doesn’t explain things. It does, sometimes to an excruciating degree. The bigger issue, however, is that the film, for all its info-dumping, never gives viewers a solid picture of what the world looks like outside of House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and Arrakis. Unlike Herbert’s novel, Lynch’s film doesn’t have the time to introduce you to the Padishah Emperor and his Sardaukar, or to the ongoing struggle between the Atreides and Harkonnen. Those elements are reduced, largely, to the spare summary I gave above—the barest minimum required to set in on the action.

Altering or erasing elements from the source text is a common in any page-to-screen adaptation, even more so with a doorstopper like Dune, but Lynch’s choices continue to rankle Herbert’s fans. In particular, his decision to prioritize interior scenes over exterior ones gives his version of Dune a deep and unabiding strangeness. Revisiting Dune for The Atlantic in 2014, Daniel D. Snyder writes, “If the movie’s goal was to create… a world that felt utterly alien, then Lynch and his surreal style were the right choice…. [Dune] seeks to put the viewer somewhere unfamiliar while hinting at a greater, hidden story.”

Where The Return of the Jedi wrapped up its space opera in a bow of happily ever after, Dune leaves viewers wondering what’s to become of Paul and his loved ones. Will his decision to enter into a loveless marriage with the Princess Irulan protect his people from another attack from the Sardaukar? Can Chani handle the burden of being his concubine, as Jessica did for Leto, given that her husband will have an official wife? Will the warchild Alia be forever scarred by her actions on the battlefield? What will the rain Paul has brought to Arrakis do to its native fauna, the giant sandworms known as Shai-Hulud, who are sacred to the Fremen?

Some of these questions have answers in Herbert’s books, and some don’t. Even as it opens these lines of inquiry, Dune doesn’t feel like a movie that’s gunning for a sequel. When the credits roll, you know it’s over, even though you want answers to all your burning questions about rain on Arrakis and Harkonnen heart plugs. If you’re an adult when you see Lynch’s Dune for the first time, you’re angry that the film doesn’t give you what you want.

But if you’re eight years old and watching the film for the first time, it’s a different matter. At that age, it’s OK if you don’t know how something works in a movie, because you don’t know how plenty of things work in real life. And no one will tell you how anything works in real life, just like movies and books gloss over things you don’t need to know.

That persistent ignorance lingers once you reach adulthood. The difference is that no adult wants to admit that we don’t know how the Internet, or newspaper printing, or fine dining works. Instead, we demand answers, even though most things become a lot more fun as soon as you stop banging out questions long enough to enjoy them.

That’s the problem detractors have with Dune. The movie possesses a cinematic claustrophobia, that, as Snyder points out, is “actually closer to Kubrick… than Lucas.” Dune takes place in a gigantic, unfamiliar galaxy, but only introduces you to a small corner of it. What you see is what you get. Everything outside is darkness.

Could Lynch have done a better job of giving us context for Dune’s weirdest elements? Of course. But Dune is much more enjoyable without the nitty gritty. The only thing required to enjoy the movie is to embrace the childlike sense of wonder that makes peace with not knowing everything—a trait all SF/F fans should try to cultivate.

That, I think, is why I still love Lynch’s Dune, in spite of its faults, more than 20 years since we were first introduced. As soon as I see Princess Irulan’s face floating in space, I become the eight-year-old kid I once was, in love with Star Wars and all other things SFF. I’m not critical. I wait for answers instead of searching for them. I permit the film to pass over me and through me, and I remain. More than two decades after I first saw it, and approaching 40 years since its theatrical release, David Lynch’s Dune remains—unchanged by time, still waiting to welcome me back into the halls of the Houses Major and the sandy peaks of Arrakis.

Dune will have a new, theatrical successor soon. Denis Villeneuve is at the helm, with an all-star cast lined up on the other side of the camera. That film may not have the same flaws as Lynch’s adaptation, but it still won’t be the 1:1 analogue to the novel that some fans want. It will be its own monster, perhaps one full of bite and vigor, but faulty all the same.

I’m sure I’m going to love Villeneuve’s Dune, too. Because when the lights go down on opening night, I’ll be that eight-year-old kid learning about Paul Atreides’ world for the first time, all over again.

And right beside me in that theater, there will be other kids experiencing Dune for the first time. I hope they hold onto their wonder and joy whenever they re-watch Villeneuve’s film. I wish them the same sort of renewed beginnings I have in Lynch’s Dune. After all, a beginning is a delicate time.

Kristian Wilson Colyard writes fiction and poetry, reads, and does nerdy stuff at her home in the rural American South, where she lives with her husband and their clowder of cats. She’s on Twitter @kristianwriting, and you can find more of her work online at kristianwriting.com.

The post I Love David Lynch’s Dune in Spite of Its Faults appeared first on Reactor.

Which isn’t bad for a work of epic fantasy, all things considered.

While it might use a lot of the aesthetic and ideas found in science fiction—interstellar travel, automaton assassins, distant planets, ancestral armories of atomic bombs, and, of course, gigantic alien worms—Dune‘s greatest strength, as well as its worst kept secret, is that it’s actually a fantasy novel. From its opening pages, describing a strange religious trial taking place in an ancestral feudal castle, to its triumphant scenes of riding a giant sandworm, to the final moments featuring the deposing of a corrupt emperor and the crowning of a messianic hero, Dune spends its time using science fiction’s tropes and conventions as a sandbox in which to tell a traditional fantasy story outside of its traditional context. In doing so, it created a new way of looking at a genre that—while far from stagnant—tends to focus on relatively similar core themes and concepts, especially in its classic form (though of course there is plenty of creative variation in terms of the science, technology, and settings that characterize classic SF).

Before we dive into the specifics of Dune, we need to define what we mean by “epic fantasy.” Genre, after all, is kind of a nebulous and plastic thing (that’s kind of the point of this article) and definitions can vary from person to person, so it’s important to get everything down in concrete terms. So when I refer to epic fantasy, I’m talking the variety of high (or, if you prefer, “imaginary world”) fantasy where the scale is massive, the heroes are mythic, and the world is so well-realized there are sometimes multiple appendices on language and culture. The kind of story where a hero or heroine, usually some kind of “chosen one,” embarks on a massive globe-spanning adventure full of gods, monsters, dangerous creatures, and strange magics, eventually growing powerful enough to take on the grotesque villains and end the story much better off than where they started. There have been numerous variations on the theme, of course, from deconstructive epics like A Song of Ice and Fire to more “soft power” takes where the main character relies largely on their wits, knowledge of politics, and much more diplomatic means to dispatch their foes (The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch do this sort of thing incredibly well), but for the purposes of this investigation, I’m going to do what Dune did and stick to the basic archetype.

Dune follows Paul Atreides, the only son of House Atreides, one of several feudal houses in a vast interstellar Empire. Due to some manipulation on his mother’s part, Paul is also possibly in line to become a messianic figure known as the Kwisatz Haderach, a powerful psionic that will hopefully unify and bring peace to the galaxy. Paul’s father Duke Leto is appointed governor of Arrakis, a vast desert planet inhabited by the insular Fremen and gigantic destructive sandworms, and home to deposits of the mysterious Spice Melange, a substance that heightens the psychic powers and perception of whoever uses it—a must for the Empire’s interstellar navigators. But what seems like a prestigious appointment is soon revealed to be a trap engineered by a multi-tiered conspiracy between the villainous House Harkonnen and several other factions within the Empire. Only Paul and his mother Lady Jessica escape alive, stranded in the vast desert outside their former home. From there, Paul must ally himself with the desert-dwelling indigenous population, harness his psychic powers, and eventually lead a rebellion to take back the planet from the Harkonnens (and possibly the Empire as a whole).

It isn’t hard to draw immediate parallels with the fantasy genre: Paul’s parents and the Fremen serve as mentor figures in various political and philosophical disciplines, the sandworms are an excellent stand-in for dragons, everyone lives in gigantic castles, and back in the 1960s, “psionics” was really just an accepted science-fictional stand-in for “magic,” with everything from telepathy to setting fires through telekinesis handwaved away through the quasi-scientific harnessing of “the powers of the mind.” The Empire’s political structure also draws fairly heavily from fantasy, favoring the feudal kingdom-centric approach of fantasy novels over the more common “federation” or “world government” approaches most science fiction tends to favor. Obvious fantasy conventions abound in the plot: the evil baron, a good nobleman who dies tragically, and Paul, the young chosen one, forced to go to ground and learn techniques from a mysterious, mystical tribe in order to survive and exact vengeance on behalf of his family—a vengeance augmented heavily by destiny, esoteric ceremonies, and “psionic” wizardry.

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This isn’t a simple palette swap, though. Rather than simply transposing fantasy elements into a universe with spaceships, force shields, and ancestrally held nuclear bombs, Herbert works hard to put them into a specific context in the world, with characters going into explanation of exactly how the more fantastical elements work, something more in line with the science fictional approach. It isn’t perfect, of course, but in doing things like explaining the effects and mutagenic side effects of spice, or by getting into the technical methods by which the Fremen manage to survive in the desert for long periods of time using specially-made stillsuits and other gear, or giving a brief explanation of how a mysterious torture device works, it preserves both the intricate world and also takes the book that extra mile past “space fantasy” and turns it into an odd, but entirely welcome, hybrid of an epic, operatic fantasy and a grand, planetary science fiction novel. The explanations ground the more fantastical moments of sandworm gods, spice rituals, and mysterious prophecies in a much more technical universe, and the more fantastical flourishes (the focus on humans and mechanical devices instead of computers and robots, the widespread psionics, the prominence of sword and knife fights over gunfights) add an unusual flavor to the space-opera universe, with the strengths of both genres shoring each other up in a uniquely satisfying way.

Using those elements to balance and reinforce each other allows Herbert to keep the border between the genres fluid and and makes the world of Dune so distinctive, though the technique has clearly been influential on genre fiction and movies in the decades since the novel was published. Dune is characterized above all else by its odd textures, that critical balance between science fiction and fantasy that never tips over into weird SF or outright space fantasy, the way the narrative’s Tolkienesque attention to history and culture shores up the technical descriptions of how everything works, and the way it allows for a more intricate and complex political structure than most other works in either genre. It’s not quite fully one thing, but not quite fully another, and the synergy makes it a much more interesting, endlessly fascinating work as a whole.

It’s something more authors should learn from, too. While a lot of genres and subgenres have their own tropes and rules (Neil Gaiman did a lovely job of outlining this in fairy tales with his poem “Instructions,” for example), putting those rules in a new context and remembering that the barriers between genres are a lot more permeable than they first seem can revitalize a work. It also allows authors to play with and break those rules, the way Paul’s precognitive powers show him every possible outcome but leave him “trapped by destiny,” as knowing everything that’s going to happen wrecks the concept of free will, or how deposing the Emperor leaves Paul, his friends, and his family bound by the duties of running the Empire with House Atreides forced to make decisions (like arranged marriages) based more on the political moves they have to take than anything they actually desire. In twisting and tweaking the familiar story of the Chosen One and the triumphant happy ending, Herbert drives home the ultimately tragic outcome, with Paul and his allies fighting to be free only to find themselves further ensnared by their success.

All these things—the way Dune merges the psychedelic and mystical with more technical elements, the way it seamlessly settles its more traditional epic fantasy story into a grand space opera concept, and the way it uses the sweeping world design normally found in works of fantasy to create a vaster, richer science fictional universe—are what make it such an enduring novel. By playing with the conceits of genres and inextricably blending them together, Frank Herbert created a book that people are still reading, talking about, and trying to adapt half a century after its release. It’s a strategy more authors should try, and a reminder that great things can happen when writers break with convention and ignore accepted genre distinctions. Dune is not only one of the more unusual and enduring epic fantasies ever to grace the genre of science fiction; it’s a challenge and a way forward for all the speculative fiction that follows it.

Sam Reader is a literary critic and book reviewer currently haunting the northeast United States. Their writing can be found at The Barnes and Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Blog and their personal site, strangelibrary.com. In their spare time, they drink way too much coffee, hoard secondhand books, and try not to upset people too much.

The post Frank Herbert’s Dune: Science Fiction’s Greatest Epic Fantasy Novel appeared first on Reactor.

Entertainment Weekly has revealed a first look at the upcoming graphic novel, which will be written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and illustrated by Raúl Allén and Patricia Martín, with covers by Bill Sienkiewicz.

The comic has been in the works for a while: Brian Herbert announced that he and Anderson were working on a “faithful adaptation” of the novel back in 2017, and last fall, Abrams Books said that it would publish the graphic novel in October 2020. EW revealed the character designs for Paul, Leto, and Lady Jessica Atreides, as well as the logo for the series.

Herbert says that the adaptation will be published in three parts, while Anderson noted that “this is a definitive, scene-for-scene adaptation of Dune, faithful to the story as Frank Herbert wrote it, but brought to a visual form.”

The comic doesn’t appear to be connected to the upcoming feature film, but its release certainly coincides with the PR run-up to the big-screen adaptation — and should make for a good refresher before you watch the film.

That upcoming film will hit theaters on November 20th, 2020, and is directed by Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049), and stars Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Stellan Sarsgard, Javier Bardem, Zendaya, Dave Bautista, and Josh Brolin.

The post Frank Herbert’s Dune Novel Is Getting a Three-Volume Graphic Novel Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

Grudge (January 3rd)

John Cho + ghosts? Why am I not already in the theater? —Leah

Dolittle (January 17th)

This will be a trainwreck. But a trainwreck with Robert Downey, Jr is still a trainwreck I want to witness? —Em

The Turning (January 24, 2020)

Yet another crack at The Turn of the Screw, this time set in the 1990s with Mackenzie Davis and BB Horror Icon Finn Wolfhard! Yes, I am here for all of this. —Leah

Color Out of Space (January 24th)

Richard Stanley, Maligned Genius, finally returns! I can only imagine that by his powers combined with the force of nature that is NICOLAS CAGE, this movie will finally achieve H.P. Lovecraft’s true purpose of driving all who see it irrevocably mad. And I can’t wait. —Leah

Birds of Prey (February 7th)

I’ve never been a huge fan of Harley Quinn, and her “daddy’s little monster” getup in Suicide Squad did not give me much hope. But I’m a fan of what Margot Robbie has been pushing for the character. Plus, this all-female lineup seems like it’ll carry the energy of 2018’s Ocean’s 8 and 2019’s Hustlers into 2020. —Natalie

Ugh PLEASE BE GOOD. —Leah

If the awfulness of Suicide Squad leads to this being the beacon of Women Take No Shit that I’ve been waiting for from a Harley Quinn movie, it will all have been worth it. Don’t let me down, y’all. —Em

Sonic the Hedgehog (February 14th)

At least he ostensibly doesn’t have human teeth anymore? Honestly, I enjoyed that cartoon as a kid, so I’m hopeful. —Em

The Invisible Man (February 28th)

My knee-jerk reaction was why not make The Invisible Woman instead?, but after watching the trailer I’m onboard. Retelling this story from the POV of the woman being stalked and gaslit by the Invisible Man? Blumhouse, you’ve got my attention again. —Natalie

Onward (March 6th)

Color me intrigued by a story about a modern world where magic has disappeared… and let’s be honest, I would follow Tom Holland searching for his father (figure) in any story. —Natalie

Godzilla vs. Kong (March 13th)

I really enjoyed Kong: Skull Island and I really didn’t enjoy Godzilla: King of the Monsters. So I’m hoping this is just a movie where Kong thrashes Godzilla back and forth the way Hulk did to Loki in The Avengers. #TeamKong —Em

The New Mutants (April 3rd)

We’ve been waiting on this movie so long that it feels like a treat just knowing it’ll actually happen. Maybe that was their plan all along? —Em

No Time to Die (April 8th)

I’m excited for a woman to play 007, I’m excited that Daniel Craig agreed to another film, but more than anything, I’m excited to see Q and Felix Leiter and Moneypenny again, so this movie needs to hurry it on up. —Em

Between this and Y, I am ready for 2020 to be the year of Lashana Lynch. —Natalie

Black Widow (May 1st)

I’m not jazzed about a Black Widow standalone prequel because my favorite version of Natasha Romanov is the one who has accepted that the Avengers are her family (even if they seem to have conveniently forgotten this fact in Avengers: Endgame). She’s had so much character development in the past ten years that going back in time feels almost like an alternate universe. But if anyone can tackle the notion of alternate selves and paths not taken, it’s TiMER writer/director Jac Schaeffer. —Natalie

Just… don’t mess this one up, Marvel. Natasha has always deserved better from you, and she should get a chance to shine on her own terms. —Em

Artemis Fowl (May 29th)

It’s looking dubious for this film’s success considering the many delays, but the trailer was pretty and all. —Em

Wonder Woman 1984 (June 5th)

Fanny packs. Technicolor. Malls. Is this how I was supposed to feel about Stranger Things season 3? —Natalie

Put Chris Pine in my eyeballs and I’ll follow you anywhere. —Leah

We need Diana to stare at the television in disgust while Ronald Reagan says something awful, just once. —Em

Candyman (June 12th)

An update on the classic exploration of race, class, and horror? From Jordan Peele? Obviously. —Leah

I’m bad at watching horror in the theater, but Jordan Peele can make me do anything at this point. —Em

I’ve never seen the original Candyman, but now I’m going to have to in order to get prepared for Peele’s take. —Natalie

Ghostbusters Afterlife (July 10th)

JUSTICE FOR HOLZMANN —Leah

Bob’s Burgers: The Movie (July 17th)

LIIIIIN. There had better be a musical number to rival “Sailors in Your Mouth.” —Natalie

The Stubby crew should cosplay when we go to this movie. Someone get me a pink bunny hat. —Em

Bill & Ted Face the Music (August 21st)

The best possible culmination of the Keanussance! (Who am I kidding—there will be no “culmination.” The Keanussance is eternal.) Plus the movie’s going to focus on B&T’s daughters‘ journey through time, rather than going the typical route of focusing on their sons. This movie fills me with hope. —Leah

The fact that this movie is going to exist at all is proof that we can’t be completely doomed as a species. Be excellent to each other, folx. —Em

Venom 2 (October 2nd)

I wasn’t sold on Venom until one of my smartest coworkers explained to me that it was a romcom between a garbage man and his alien symbiote. This was true, and now I am in desperate need of the sequel, please, don’t keep me waiting. —Em

The Witches (October 9th)

Roald Dahl adaptations are always extremely hit-or-miss, but with Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro involved, color me intrigued… —Em

Death on the Nile (October 9th)

I wasn’t exactly blown away by Kenneth Branagh’s take on Murder on the Orient Express, but the cast for this film is frankly astounding, and I think I might be in just for that? —Leah

Halloween Kills (October 16th)

I would have been very happy if 2018’s Halloween had ended with the legacy of Michael Myers—really, the legacy of Laurie Strode—going up in flames. But alas, they planned this quasi-reboot with an automatic sequel. The good news is, while we don’t know the actual plot, it will feature the return of three generations of Strode women: Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). Putting aside Curtis’ incredible performance of a woman coming to terms with her trauma, Greer was the next best thing about Halloween, especially with her “I’m sorry mommy, I can’t!” act that caught Michael. I cannot wait to see her in the sequel, when her survivalist skills are no longer obscured behind a helpless facade. —Natalie

The Eternals (November 6th)

Like Guardians of the Galaxy, this is one of those stories that I’m desperately curious about Marvel’s ability to pull off in movie form. But it’s got a pretty genius cast list, so… maybe? —Em

Dune (December 18th)

The Sleeper… has… AWAKENED!!! *grabby hands* —Em

The post Movies We’re Looking Forward to in 2020 appeared first on Reactor.

Luckily, you’re not alone. Over the weekend, Reddit user u/vannybros alerted fans to the existence of The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook and asked what other fantasy cookbooks they’d like to see.—and the response was overwhelming! It seems like there’s a great hankering among us for lembas bread, oat farls, scone of stone, Otik’s Spiced Fried Potatoes, and, yes, even Luke’s blue milk.

Here are our favorite suggestions from the thread, including cookbooks that actually exist, recipes from fans, and fantasy cookbooks that are (thus far) just wishful thinking.

SFF Cookbooks That Exist in the Real World

The Lord of the Rings

• An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery, by Chris-Rachael Oseland (suggested by u/honestyblackfield)
• Cooking for Halflings and Monsters, by Astrid Tuttle Winegar (suggested by u/shennanigins)

Redwall

• The Redwall Cookbook by Brian Jacques (suggested by u/-Miss_Information-)

Discworld

• Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs, and Tina Hannan (suggested by u/AliceMadder, u/Madikor, and u/ImJustaNJrefugee)

A Song of Ice and Fire

• A Feast of Ice and Fire, by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer (suggested by u/Chyld and u/Artistic License)
• Game of Scones: All Men Must Dine by Jammy Lannister (suggested by u/just_keeptrying)

Dragonlance

• Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis (suggested by u/TheRealMarklar)

Star Trek

• Star Trek Cookbook by Ethan Phillips and William J. Birnes (suggested by u/Poison_the_Phil)

Aubrey/Maturin series

• Lobscouse and Spotted Dog by Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas (suggested by u/Rosmucman)

Star Wars

• Wookiee Cookies: A Star Wars Cookbook by Robin Davis (suggested by u/Techelife)

The Hunger Games

• The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook by Emily Ansara Baines (suggested by u/Kaseiopeia)

SFF-inspired Recipes and Other Links From Fans 

From u/Jadis4742:

My sister and I planned a May The Fourth themed party once, but real life (and food allergies) have this awful habit of getting in the way. But here’s a picture of my ryschcate (spice cake with walnuts) with a mynock strip (candied bacon). I’m really close to finalizing the ryschcate (the cake I made after this one was darker and more moist) but I have to adjust the flour mix. Again.

Other recipes I’m finalizing are:

• Colo Claw

• Fizzy Protein Cubes

• Bantha Platter

The blue milk was just gonna be almond milk dyed blue, although now I’m thinking I might experiment with butterfly pea flower and maybe do a cocktail.

From u/kbennett73:

The Inn at the Crossroads is a web site that originally featured recipes for dishes described in George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. The authors wrote The Official Game of Thrones Cookbook. They later went on to write World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook, Firefly: The Big Damn Cookbook, Elder Scrolls Cookbook, and several others.

Their blog is filled with free recipes inspired by a wide range of fantasy and science fiction series like Harry Potter, The Witcher, Interstellar, Hearthstone, and Star Wars.

From u/TheDreadPirateNacho, the Fellowship of Middle-Earth’s online compendium of Middle-earth Recipes, compiled by MithrandirCQ and Primula.

SFF Cookbooks We Wish Were Real

• Studio Ghibli (“That food looks delicious. EVEN the buffet in Spirited Away. I’d put those pigs to shame.” –u/velifer)

• Tamora Pierce’s various fantasy series (“…especially the foods from the Summersea/Circle of Magic quartets. Some of the stuff she describes sounds straight out of a Miyazaki movie.” –u/SwingGirlAtHeart)

• Dune (“especially for the Fremen fare” –u/HipsterGalt)

• The Dresden Files (But really all u/BearlyHereatAll wants is “a steak sandwich and a beer from McAnally’s”)

• Shrek (Says u/theknightlynews: “duh”)

• Winne-the-Pooh (There actually is one, but as u/surle says, it really only needs “One page. One word.”)

• The Stormlight Archive (“A lot of spicy recipes in there.” –u/wojic)
  Hey wait, we can actually help here! Check out our series on Cosmere Cuisine for some fan created recipes from the worlds of Brandon Sanderson.

• The Gentleman Bastards series (“Every single meal in those books sound delicious!” –u/Nonninz)

What SFF recipes have you tried, and which do you wish had a real-world guide?

The post Sci-Fi and Fantasy Cookbooks Fans Would Like to See appeared first on Reactor.

Villeneuve is helming the two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, the first installment of which is set to hit theaters in December 2020. In addition to that project, WarnerMedia ordered a companion series, Dune: The Sisterhood, for HBO Max’s streaming service.

THR says that Spaihts turned in a script and an outline for the series, but the studio “was not happy with the early work,” and is searching for a new showrunner to helm the series. What this means for the production of the series is unclear, but it doesn’t seem as though Spaihts is being cut out completely—he’ll remain an executive producer on the series and will work on the upcoming film sequel, which has not yet been officially announced by Legendary.

The series appears to be an adaptation of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s novel Sisterhood of Dune, a prequel to Herbert’s original novel, and helps set up the Bene Gesserit who play a pivotal role in the story. Alongside the film, the series is set to be part of a much larger effort on the part of WarnerMedia to forge a new major science fiction franchise for the studio, one that will appear in both cinemas and on streaming services (along with video games, comics, and other offerings), much like Disney has done with its Star Wars franchise. But first, the company has to get the project up off the ground.

The post Dune: The Sisterhood Showrunner Steps Down to Write Dune Sequel appeared first on Reactor.

Which is fine and wonderful and grand… except:

As Tor.com’s ace media reporter Emmet Asher-Perrin observed,

This is a series about the most powerful women within the Dune universe… and the only woman involved in production so far appears to be author Frank Herbert’s granddaughter, Kim Herbert, who is representing Herbert’s estate alongside her father and cousin. Villeneuve is developing the show, and the sole writer attached is a man.

Asher-Perrin goes on to say,

Announcing projects like these with no female creatives attached never inspires a great deal of confidence. It’s 2019; we shouldn’t have to have the conversation anymore.

Indeed we should not. And yet here we are.

When I posted on Twitter about Asher-Perrin’s article and added my own observations, lots of people agreed. Inevitably, however, multiple men doggedly had to Explain To The Female On The Internet that Dune (the book) was written by a man.

So it was. And yet word on the fandom street is that Herbert’s second wife Beverly, who had given up her own writing career in order to support her husband (not by any means an uncommon situation), was not only his editor/proofreader and sounding board but also an uncredited collaborator. Furthermore, that the Bene Gesserit may have been her creation, and she in fact co-wrote Chapterhouse: Dune. There’s no way to be sure how much she contributed to the works published under her husband’s name, but that Beverly Herbert did contribute is highly likely.

It’s also totally irrelevant to the point that’s so objectionable, here: that in 2019, a television series titled “The Sisterhood” should have zero input from women writers. Why is that a problem? Why is it not a good thing for a show about women to be exclusively written and conceived by men?

Because, as I said on Twitter, a team that doesn’t think to include women writers is extremely likely not to realize what they don’t know about the lives, minds, and emotions of women. They don’t know what they don’t know. They won’t understand about the world women live in, how it’s defined by patriarchy, the compromises, the accommodations, the sacrifices. It’s not in their world view.

Look at how Hollywood portrays women in show after show, film after film. Doctors and lawyers in tight, revealing clothes while the men around them wear more loosely fitted outfits. Action heroines in low-cut necklines and tank tops when the men are in long-sleeved shirts and heavy coats. Police detectives presenting themselves for daily duty with long, loose hair, skimpy skirts, and spike heels, working beside men in plain and practical suits or jeans and running shoes.

The men are there to work. The women are there to titillate the male audience. It’s called the male gaze, and it pervades our culture.

In show after show, film after film, women exist in isolation. No female friends. One woman, gang of guys. If there is more than one woman, they’re often rivals for one of the guys. (See: Bechdel Test.) If they’re leads, they’re of prime breeding age, and course they’re highly attractive. Women over the age of forty are relegated to minor roles. Mom. Grandma. Murder victim.

Even when the show purports to offer Strong Female Role Models, they’re all too often defined by the men around them. That show that just ended, for example. It started off with multiple rapes and brutalizations of women. The ones who survived ended up in charge, for a time. But by the series finale, one had gone insane and turned into a mass murderer who had to be stabbed to death by her male lover, one had “transcended” gender and sailed off into the sunset, and the most interestingly evil character had turned into a blubbering, clinging wreck and had a rock dropped on her.

Of course one of these women did get to be Queen in the North, and one got to be Commander of the Kingsguard. But the Queen had no female friends, colleagues or advisors: they were all dead or departed. The woman knight became the sole female member of the Small Council, and in the only personal moment we see, she’s all about making sure her male lover gets his due in the annals of the Kingsguard. It’s a man’s world, and each of these characters is an isolated exception to the general lot of women in that world.

That’s what all-male writing teams tend to do when they write women. They make sure those women keep their place. Women are maidens to be either protected or brutalized, mothers to be either set on a pedestal or fridged or both, or whores to be used and abused. As characters, they are all, ultimately, defined by their relations to men.

The idea that women can exist apart from men, that they can have lives and thoughts and preoccupations that do not center on men, is not only difficult to conceive of from within a patriarchal culture—it’s threatening. It strikes right to the heart of male hegemony.

And that’s exactly why an all-male writing team is the last thing I want to see on a show about an order of powerful women whose primary mission is to control and ultimately overturn the patriarchy. A writing team that hasn’t even thought to include women behind the scenes in a show about women is all too likely to make the Bene Gesserit about men—focused on them, defined by them—when in fact, for the Bene Gesserit, men have little importance or relevance except insofar as the sisterhood manipulates them for the purposes of the order.

The Kwisatz Haderach is not about male supremacy. He’s about smashing it to smithereens.

And no, I don’t think an all-woman writing team would give us the Bene Gesserit in their full, terrible, patriarchy-shattering glory. That show would upset too many heavily entrenched applecarts and make far too many viewers uncomfortable. Hollywood at its beady little heart is all about ratings, and ratings mean catering to patriarchal assumptions.

Still. With women writers taking an active role on the team, we’re likely to get at least some sense of how women are when they’re with each other, apart from men, in an environment in which men are just not relevant. Maybe some comprehension of female friendship, women who genuinely like each other (who knew?), who get along, who work together for common goals. Who don’t drop everything to glom on to a man. Who can be strong in a way that has nothing to do with toxic masculinity, who can age without turning evil or invisible, who live lives of their own, have thoughts of their own, and aren’t constantly judging themselves by the standards of the default-male.

I don’t hold out hope for a less forced-binary future, or one that doesn’t privilege heterosexual romance—that’s not in the source material. But respect for who women are as women, rather than as male fantasies of Woman, would be a nice thing.

I might be totally wrong about this show. It could be hiring women writers even as I speak, and developing stories that respect and accurately portray the lives and experiences of women. It could happen. It’s happening with, of all things, the James Bond franchise—which has hired a woman writer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to clean up the script for its latest film, and has reportedly cast Lashana Lynch, a Black woman, as the new 007.

Could it happen to “The Sisterhood,” too? I suppose we can dream.

Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her most recent novel, Dragons in the Earth, a contemporary fantasy set in Arizona, was published by Book View Café. In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies and space operas, some of which have been published as ebooks from Book View Café. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

The post The Story of Dune’s Bene Gesserit Needs the Perspective of Women Writers appeared first on Reactor.

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Dune

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Dune

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

Artist Matt Griffin says:

“Having been a huge Dune fan since I was about 14, this was a dream project for me. And, being a dream project from a young age, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make the best images I could. 

My favourite part of a job like this is the preliminary work. I read the book (again). I look at images of deserts, and worms (or centipedes, or anything long and scary-looking). I fill my brain up with anything that feels right and appropriate to the story. I let that all swirl around my head and then I doodle. I play with ink and water, or charcoal, or whatever I can get my hands on. It is a happy time.

One of the things I looked at a lot were rock formations particular to deserts. The wind erosion makes very distinctive wave patterns in the stone and carves it all into very visually appealing shapes. I thought this would be a perfect basis for an image of a Sietch. So I went about making the first image – ‘Home to the Sietch’. 

I tried all kinds of ways of making the patterns, but in the end found a way of using a broad, dry brush and sparse ink to get the effect I wanted. I roughed the composition, making sure it all swirled towards the cave entrance (I knew I could have a nice contrast of light by showing the entrance, enhanced by a couple of glow globes in the foreground). Then I took the scans of my brush work and put them in piece by piece, warping as I went and adding light and shade to make them undulate. 

For the second image I had a lot of ideas. Too many. But the chance to draw a sand worm was too appealing, so I knew it would feature one of them, somewhere. I decided to do Paul, summoning a big one for his first go at harnessing Shai Hulud. 

Often I’ll think an image is finished before it is. It takes some external eyeballs and encouragement to push it further, to where it really needs to be. That was the case with this – I was happy enough, but the art director Adam Auerbach and Brian Herbert (son of Frank) both urged me to do more. They wanted to see more worm. And I’m so glad I listened. This final image is far better then the versions before it. 

I was also glad I looked at long scary creatures aside from worms. I had remembered one of the scariest of all – the Sea Lamprey – from another cover job, and realised its mouth was the perfect model for a Sand Worm’s. And all of that came together for this, called: ‘Shai Hulud.’ 

An Arrakeen dream come true. I can’t wait to hold a copy in my hands.”

The deluxe hardcover edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune publishes October 1st with Ace. From the catalog copy:

Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the “spice” melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for…

When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

This deluxe hardcover edition of Dune includes:

• An iconic new cover
• Stained edges and fully illustrated endpapers
• A beautifully designed poster on the interior of the jacket
• A redesigned world map of Dune
• An updated Introduction by Brian Herbert

The post Check Out the Artwork for a New Edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune appeared first on Reactor.

The Jedi are the obvious root example. Robed and reclusive, prone to politics when by all rights they should steer clear, any given Jedi Knight is a tonsure and a penguin outfit away from the Order of St Benedict. Dune’s Bene Gesserit have a distinctly monastic (or convent-ional) quality, in their withdraw from the world and their focus on the Long Now via their messiah breeding scheme. Hyperion has its Templars, robed dudes who hang out in spaceship trees—along with its xenoarchaeological Jesuits (priests, sure, but relevant to this conversation) and Jewish academics. A Canticle for Leibowitz follows monks through the postapocalypse, and Stephenson’s Anathem culminates in a double handful of monks being launched into space for a hundred-fifty page EVA. (Surely the spoiler limit on this one has passed by now?) Sevarian’s Torturers’ Guild is a monastic order of St Catharine, and the berobed, contemplative Utopians in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series have more than a whiff of the monastic about them.

Monks fill the galaxy, singing compline on Mars, illuminating manuscripts on Andromeda. Babylon 5 features at least three monastic orders and that’s only counting the human variety. LeGuin’s Ekumen also has a tinge of the monastic.

When I sit down to write books set in space, I find monks popping up like mushrooms. “The Scholast in the Low Waters Kingdom” was written in part to pacify the Space Mohists who kept appearing in my other projects, asking me to do something with them. When I dove into Empress of Forever, I didn’t last beyond chapter three before the monks arrived.

So: why monks? And why space?

Dedication

Astronauts don’t have many days off.

It makes sense if you think about it. Lifting a human from Earth’s gravity well is insanely dangerous and expensive, without even mentioning the added cost of supporting life up there in space for any length of time. So Mission Control tries to make the most of it. Astronauts’ days are heavily scheduled: conduct this experiment, that experiment. Fifteen minutes for lunch. Experiment, experiment, EVA, conference call, experiment, check in, we’re already ten minutes behind, straight through from morning to night to morning to night to morning to… Well, to be fair, it’s morning every thirty minutes on the space station, but eventually you do go back to sleep. Whether or not the Skylab slowdown in 1976 really was a strike as it’s sometimes characterized, it speaks to the overwhelming work conditions in orbit that 93 minutes of radio silence could constitute a remarkable disruption.

Many astronauts come from military and scientific backgrounds—in some cases both. Military and academic careers do involve a certain level of routine—but they also value independent thought and agency. A year of endless repetition of basic tasks in an unchanging environment—even an environment of weightlessness and awe-inspiring glory—can chafe. There’s a whole field of Mars mission prep focused not on radiation shielding or delta-V but on the human factor. What kind of person can live in the tight, constrained conditions of a Mars voyage (let alone a Mars colony) without going mad?

But that’s life in the monastery. Different orders (and, of course, different religions!) have different rules, and customs shift from monastery to monastery, but let’s take Christian Benedictine monks for an example: their day begins with Matins at around two in the morning, and proceeds through eight services until Compline around sunset. Between church services and daily communal meals, monks work to maintain the monastery—gardening, farming, brewing beer, giving out alms, cooking and feeding the monks themselves, copying books. Many orders require that monasteries be self-supporting, which in the modern day means the monks’ activities often have a commercial component, whether that’s making jams and furniture or (in the case of at least one Franciscan monastery in the ‘90s) web design. The schedule is rigid, communal, and mutual—you attend services, do your work, and live with your fellow monks, not out of a desire for fame or adventure, but out of a desire to serve the always-unfinished cause of salvation, and to help your community survive.

The monastic existence doesn’t have a lot of draw for people who want to be heroes, or win a Nobel Prize, or cure cancer, or turn people into dinosaurs. Becoming a monk means acknowledging that you’re one small piece of an effort that began long before your birth and will continue long after your death. Which brings us too…

The Long Now

Monasteries last. The Order of Saint Benedict was conceived during the long fall of the Roman Empire as (massive oversimplification warning) a kind of ark and alternative to a failing society. Rather than continue to work and live in the shadow of decaying Rome, Saint Benedict thought, instead retreat with your like-minded fellows. Tend gardens, live by simple rules, and take care of one another. Those structures, close to the ground, dedicated, and united (more or less) in their mission, survive today. Sure, the role of Benedictine monasteries in European life has changed over the centuries, but they’ve lasted through all those centuries to change. Few other institutions—corporations, dynasties, governments, even governmental systems—can say the same. (Universities come close, but then, universities drew heavily on the monastic and clerical model.)

Space, meanwhile, is big. Even when we’re talking about fictional universes that feature such dramatic conveniences as faster-than-light travel, few authors represent that travel as instantaneous. Most include some hat-tip to the idea that space takes time to cross—weeks in hyperspace if not generations of sub-light acceleration. Even in settings that allow for real instant travel between settled systems (like Hamilton’s Commonwealth, Cherryh’s Gates, Simmons’ Hegemony of farcasters, or the Stargates of SG-1), going someplace totally new—and carting around those instantaneous FTL gates—takes days, weeks, months, years. More common is the imperial travel time suggested by Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire: months to pass from the periphery to the core.

Space Rome isn’t built in a space day. Any prospective interstellar civilization will have to bridge vast gulfs of time with raw intent. Few groups have that kind of staying power. Representative democracies are notoriously bad at maintaining consistent motivation (on things like infrastructure maintenance, say) over a scale of years, let alone millennia. Dynasties can can cobble together a century or two of executive intent, enough to build a cathedral, but that’s small potatoes next to the time you’d need to settle even a tiny fraction of space. Monks, though: you get them started and they just keep going.

Insignificant Compared to the Power of the Force

We’re all insignificant in space. No matter how planet-smashing the setting, no matter how vast and all-consuming the star wars, they’re dwarfed by the stars themselves. All the stellar empires and spaceports and Big Dumb Objects you care to name amount to so much pocket change in the reaches of eternity. We can cleverly suggest that our deep-space action fills the cosmos by shooting our spaceships from underneath and positioning the camera so the Imperial Star Crushers fill the screen, but we all know that’s movie magic. Space is just too big for us to matter in it.

The other social structures we humans might bring to bear on the challenge of surviving and thriving in Space—universities, militaries, governments, corporations—aren’t known for their ability to confront their own utter irrelevance. They’re limited spheres of endeavor that confuse their own limited concerns with the Ultimate.

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Monks, on the other hand, live in conversation with the ultimate. Different faiths and traditions construct that conversation differently—not every faith has a Book of Job to rub humanity’s face in its own tininess—but to be a monk is to acknowledge that there are things bigger than you, bigger than your family, bigger than any terrestrial desire or ambition. The concerns of the monastic life—death, time, liberation—are beyond any individual monk’s ability to see through to their end. Even if one individual monk becomes a saint or bodhisattva or even (heaven forfend) famous, achieving some deeper understanding or personal revelation or miraculous power, the work of monks in general remains. The road is straight, and goes on forever.

That’s not to say individual monks (or whole orders) don’t find themselves concerned with short term goals, fighting for their lives, making the best beer, getting more funding or protecting their land, whatever. Just that when a monk returns to the heart of their calling, when they ask themselves “why am I here,” the answer isn’t going anywhere.

And neither is space.

And in the end…

There are so many sorts of monks in space, and so many facets to the monastic life that seem well suited to life in space, that I could go on listing correspondences for another few pages without doing more than scratching the surface, and spin the examples out into a master’s thesis. Which raises another question: is there a reason monks and space (or, to be more specific, the imaginary of space, the picture we have in our heads of what life in space might be, and the kind of stories we tell about it) go together like chocolate and cappuccinos? Is this fitness just a coincidence, or… what?

In physical life we might easily say, it’s a coincidence, monks just happen to be the best space-tool for the space-job. But this is a conversation about stories, too, and coincidence does not sit easily in a story’s stomach.

Space is the “final frontier.” It’s the unmapped territory, the uncomprehended edge, the giant question mark. Space contains mystery on mystery. Ask yourself where we came from, where we’re going, what happened in the immense gulf of before-time to bring us to this moment, and how our atoms will, over millions of years, decay—whether our culture will survive the next century or the next millennium—what life is and whether it has any destiny to speak of—the answer is out there in space. Or maybe what’s out there are only more questions—an endless sequence of questions curled up and hiding inside other questions, like the coiled-up higher spatial dimensions.

Rudolph Bultmann, in The New Testament and Mythology, points out that the picture of the world encoded in Christian teaching—the world view in which there’s a heaven up there with gods, a hell down there with demons, a living earth realm caught between them, and spirits that move from realm to realm according to some set of rules—is not by any means exclusive to Christianity. It’s a common way that a resident of Judea in 0 CE would have described the universe. It wasn’t until modern times, Bultmann says, that we started to peer down into the bowels of the earth and see, yes, fire, but no demons—and peer up into the stars and see no Heaven, but… Space.

For Bultmann, that creates a crisis in Christian teaching. Modern Christians find themselves forced into doublethink: Hell does exist, it is “down there”, but not down there down there, just sort of ‘down’ in a different ontological direction. Heaven, similarly, is up, but not up-up. To live in the modern world and use modern technology is to accept on some level the picture of the world that underlies that technology, even if you claim to disagree with it. You have two visions of reality in your mind at once. For Bultmann, this is a maddening proposition—and that leads him to investigate the inner content of the Christian teaching, what human truths early Christians were trying to communicate using the language of the world as it was commonly understood in their time.

But that sword cuts in the other direction, too. Spiritual truths, great unanswerable questions, are posed in the common language of every century and every people. And when a person who accepts the general scientific picture of the material universe—whether or not that person thinks of themselves as particularly secular—wants to ask questions about (or tell silly stories about, which amounts to the same thing in the end) deep time, human destiny, death and fate, where we’re going and where we come from and what we do on the way—that person looks up into the Ultimate, where we see the beginning and end of all things, our insignificance and our wonder, and uses the language of that world to express their convictions.

Space, in short, is a spiritual realm. So of course it’s full of monks. They go where the work is.

Max Gladstone is a fencer, a fiddler, and a two-time finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. He is fluent in Mandarin and has taught English in China. He is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated Craft Sequence of novels, a game developer, and the showrunner for the fiction serial, Bookburners. A graduate of Yale, Max lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts. His novel Empress of Forever is available from Tor Books.

The post From the Jedi Order to the Torturers’ Guild: Science Fiction’s Preoccupation with Monks in Space appeared first on Reactor.

Denis Villeneuve (who is writing, directing and producing the Dune film) will direct the pilot of the series. The Hollywood Reporter continues:

Jon Spaihts will pen the script for the TV series, which hails from Legendary Television. Villeneuve and Spaihts will executive produce alongside Brian Herbert, Byron Merritt and Kim Herbert for the Frank Herbert estate. Kevin J. Anderson will co-produce. Spaihts co-wrote the screenplay alongside Villeneuve.

Villeneuve had this to say on the project and his choice to single out the Bene Gesserit for television:

“The Bene Gesserit have always been fascinating to me. Focusing a series around that powerful order of women seemed not only relevant and inspiring but a dynamic setting for the television series.”

The series will be among the first original shows for the new WarnerMedia streaming service, which will include all Warner-owned content, including HBO, TBS, TNT, and CNN properties. This follows a move by WarnerMedia to expand Dune into an entertainment empire that will eventually extend to comics and video games. The first film—possibly one of two to encompass the original Dune novel—is set for release on November 20th, 2020.

There are a few aspects of this project that give me pause. First off, the suggestion is that this series is meant to cover Bene Gesserit machinations set during and around the events of Dune itself, which would indicate that the film(s) is not planning on focusing on them to the same extent. Not only does this seem like a mistake from a narrative perspective, given the importance of their actions within the central story, but it also smacks of believing that the stories of women and female characters are not interesting or wide-reaching enough to give them a place on the big screen. They are being pushed to television instead.

More importantly, this is a series about the most powerful women within the Dune universe… and the only woman involved in production so far appears to be author Frank Herbert’s granddaughter, Kim Herbert, who is representing Herbert’s estate alongside her father and cousin. Villeneuve is developing the show, and the sole writer attached in a man. A man responsible for the Passengers screenplay, I might add, which didn’t exactly do well by its central female character. Announcing projects like these with no female creatives attached never inspires a great deal of confidence. It’s 2019; we shouldn’t have to have the conversation anymore.

More information to come, but an awkward foot forward from Dune‘s ever-expanding franchise.

The post Dune: The Sisterhood Series in the Works For WarnerMedia’s New Streaming Service appeared first on Reactor.

It’s important to note that this is not a new question. Dune has been around for over half a century, and with every adaptation or popular revival, fans and critics take the time to interrogate how it plays into (or rebels against) certain story tropes and popular concepts, the white savior complex being central among them. While there are no blunt answers to that question—in part because Dune rests on a foundation of intense and layered worldbuilding—it is still an important one to engage and reengage with for one simple reason: All works of art, especially ones that we hold in high esteem, should be so carefully considered. Not because we need to tear them down or, conversely, enshrine them, but because we should all want to be more knowledgeable and thoughtful about how the stories we love contribute to our world, and the ways in which they choose to reflect it.

So what happens when we put Dune under this methodical scrutiny? If we peel back the layers, like the Mentats of Herbert’s story, what do we find?

Hollywood has a penchant for the white savior trope, and it forms the basis for plenty of big-earning, award-winning films. Looking back on blockbusters like The Last of the Mohicans, Avatar, and The Last Samurai, the list piles up for movies in which a white person can alleviate the suffering of people of color—sometimes disguised as blue aliens for the purpose of sci-fi trappings—by being specially “chosen” somehow to aid in their struggles. Sometimes this story is more personal, between only two or three characters, often rather dubiously labeled as “based on a true story” (The Blind Side, The Help, Dangerous Minds, The Soloist, and recent Academy Award Best Picture-winner Green Book are all a far cry from the true events that inspired them). It’s the same song, regardless—a white person is capable of doing what others cannot, from overcoming racial taboos and inherited prejudices up to and including “saving” an entire race of people from certain doom.

At face value, it’s easy to slot Dune into this category: a pale-skinned protagonist comes to a planet of desert people known as Fremen. These Fremen are known to the rest the rest of the galaxy as a mysterious, barbaric, and highly superstitious people, whose ability to survive on the brutal world of Arrakis provides a source of endless puzzlement for outsiders. The Fremen themselves are a futuristic amalgam of various POC cultures according to Herbert, primarily the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, the San people, and Bedouins. (Pointedly, all of these cultures have been and continue to be affected by imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, and the Fremen are no different—having suffered horrifically at the hands of the Harkonnens even well before our “heroes” arrive.) Once the protagonist begins to live among the Fremen, he quickly establishes himself as their de facto leader and savior, teaching them how to fight more efficiently and building them into an unstoppable army. This army then throws off the tyranny of the galaxy’s Emperor, cementing the protagonist’s role as their literal messiah.

That sounds pretty cut and dried, no?

But at the heart of this question—Is Dune a white savior narrative?—are many more questions, because Dune is a complicated story that encompasses and connects various concepts, touching on environmentalism, imperialism, history, war, and the superhero complex. The fictional universe of Dune is carefully constructed to examine these issues of power, who benefits from having it, and how they use it. Of course, that doesn’t mean the story is unassailable in its construction or execution, which brings us to the first clarifying question: What qualifies as a white savior narrative? How do we measure that story, or identify it? Many people would define this trope differently, which is reasonable, but you cannot examine how Dune might contribute to a specific narrative without parsing out the ways in which it does and does not fit.

This is the strongest argument against the assertion that Dune is a white savior story: Paul Atreides is not a savior. What he achieves isn’t great or even good—which is vital to the story that Frank Herbert meant to tell.

There are many factors contributing to Paul Atreides’s transformation into Muad’Dib and the Kwisatz Haderach, but from the beginning, Paul thinks of the role he is meant to play as his “terrible purpose.” He thinks that because he knows if he avenges his father, if he becomes the Kwisatz Haderach and sees the flow of time, if he becomes the Mahdi of the Fremen and leads them, the upcoming war will not stop on Arrakis. It will extend and completely reshape the known universe. His actions precipitate a war that that lasts for twelve years, killing millions of people, and that’s only just the beginning.

Can it be argued that Paul Atreides helps the people of Arrakis? Taking the long view of history, the answer would be a resounding no—and the long view of history is precisely what the Dune series works so hard to convey. (The first three books all take place over a relatively condensed period, but the last three books of the initial Dune series jump forward thousands of years at a time.) While Paul does help the Fremen achieve the dream of making Arrakis a green and vibrant world, they become entirely subservient to his cause and their way of life is fundamentally altered. Eventually, the Fremen practically disappear, and a new Imperial army takes their place for Paul’s son, Leto II, the God Emperor. Leto’s journey puts the universe on what he calls the “Golden Path,” the only possible future where humanity does not go extinct. It takes this plan millennia to come to fruition, and though Leto succeeds, it doesn’t stop humans from scheming and murdering and hurting one another; it merely ensures the future of the species.

One could make an argument that the Atreides family is responsible for the saving of all human life due to the Golden Path and its execution. But in terms of Paul’s position on Arrakis, his effect on the Fremen population there, and the amount of death, war, and terror required to bring about humanity’s “salvation,” the Atreides are monstrous people. There is no way around that conclusion—and that’s because the story is designed to critique humanity’s propensity toward saviors. Here’s a quote from Frank Herbert himself on that point:

I am showing you the superhero syndrome and your own participation in it.

And another:

Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.

At the center of Dune is a warning to be mistrustful of messiahs, supermen, and leaders who have the ability to sway masses. This is part of the reason why David Lynch’s Dune film missed the mark; the instant that Paul Atreides becomes a veritable god, the whole message of the story is lost. The ending of Frank Herbert’s Dune is not a heroic triumph—it is a giant question mark pointed at the reader or viewer. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that only invites more questions, which is a key part of its lasting appeal.

And yet…

There is a sizable hole in the construction of this book that can outweigh all other interpretations and firmly situate Dune among white savior tropes: Paul Atreides is depicted as a white man, and his followers are largely depicted as brown people.

There are ways to nitpick this idea, and people do—Paul’s father, Leto Atreides might not be white, and is described in the book as having “olive” toned skin. We get a sense of traditions from the past, as Leto’s father was killed in a bull fight, dressed in a matador cape, but it’s unclear if this is tied to their heritage in any sense. The upcoming film has cast Cuban-Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac in the role of Duke Leto, but previous portrayals featured white men with European ancestry: U.S. actor William Hurt and German actor Jürgen Prochnow. (The Fremen characters are also often played by white actors, but that’s a more simple case of Hollywood whitewashing.) While the name Atreides is Greek, Dune takes place tens of thousands of years in the future, so there’s really no telling what ancestry the Atreides line might have, or even what “whiteness” means to humanity anymore. There’s a lot of similar melding elsewhere in the story; the ruler of this universe is known as the “Padishah Emperor” (Padishah is a Persian word that essentially translates to “great king”), but the family name of the Emperor’s house is Corrino, taken from the fictional Battle of Corrin. Emperor Shaddam has red hair, and his daughter Irulan is described as blond-haired, green-eyed, and possessing “patrician beauty,” a mishmash of words and descriptions that deliberately avoid categorization.

None of these factors detract from the fact that we are reading/watching this story in present day, when whiteness is a key component of identity and privilege. It also doesn’t negate the fact that Paul is always depicted as a white young man, and has only been played by white actors: first by Kyle MacLachlan, then by Alec Newman, and soon by Timothy Chalamet. There are many reasons for casting Paul this way, chief among them being that he is partly based on a real-life figure—T.E. Lawrence, better known to the public as “Lawrence of Arabia.” But regardless of that influence, Frank Herbert’s worldbuilding demands a closer look in order to contextualize a narrative in which a white person becomes the messiah of an entire population of people of color—after all, T.E. Lawrence was never heralded as any sort of holy figure by the people he worked alongside during the Arab Revolt.

The decision to have Paul become the Mahdi of the Fremen people is not a breezy or inconsequential plot point, and Herbert makes it clear that his arrival has been seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the shadowy matriarchal organization to which his mother, Jessica, belongs. In order to keep their operatives safe throughout the universe, the Bene Gesserit planted legends and mythologies that applied to their cohort, making it easy for them to manipulate local legends to their advantage in order to remain secure and powerful. While this handily serves to support Dune’s thematic indictment of the damage created by prophecy and religious zealotry, it still positions the Fremen as a people who easily fall prey to superstition and false idols. The entire Fremen culture (though meticulously constructed and full of excellent characters) falls into various “noble savage” stereotypes due to the narrative’s juxtaposition of their militant austerity with their susceptibility to being used by powerful people who understand their mythology well enough to exploit it. What’s more, Herbert reserves many of the non-Western philosophies that he finds particularly attractive—he was a convert to Zen Buddhism, and the Bene Gesserit are attuned to the Eastern concepts of “prana” and “bindu” as part of their physical training—for mastery by white characters like Lady Jessica.

While Fremen culture has Arab influences in its language and elsewhere, the book focuses primarily on the ferocity of their people and the discipline they require in order to be able to survive the brutal desert of Arrakis, as well as their relationship to the all-important sandworms. This speaks to Herbert’s ecological interests in writing Dune far more than his desire to imagine what an Arab-descended society or culture might look like in the far future. Even the impetus toward terraforming Arrakis into a green world is one brought about through imperialist input; Dr. Liet Kynes (father to Paul’s companion Chani) promoted the idea in his time as leader of the Fremen, after his own father, an Imperial ecologist, figured out how to change the planet. The Fremen don’t have either the ability or inclination to transform their world with their own knowledge—both are brought to them from a colonizing source.

Dune’s worldbuilding is complex, but that doesn’t make it beyond reproach. Personal bias is a difficult thing to avoid, and how you construct a universe from scratch says a lot about how you personally view the world. Author and editor Mimi Mondal breaks this concept down beautifully in her recent article about the inherently political nature of worldbuilding:

In a world where all fundamental laws can be rewritten, it is also illuminating which of them aren’t. The author’s priorities are more openly on display when a culture of non-humans is still patriarchal, there are no queer people in a far-future society, or in an alternate universe the heroes and saviours are still white. Is the villain in the story a repulsively depicted fat person? Is a disabled or disfigured character the monster? Are darker-skinned, non-Western characters either absent or irrelevant, or worse, portrayed with condescension? It’s not sufficient to say that these stereotypes still exist in the real world. In a speculative world, where it is possible to rewrite them, leaving them unchanged is also political.

The world of Dune was built that way through a myriad of choices, and choices are not neutral exercises. They require biases, thoughtfulness, and intent. They are often built from a single perspective, and perspectives are never absolute. And so, in analyzing Dune, it is impossible not to wonder about the perspective of its creator and why he built his fictional universe the way he did.

Many fans cite the fact that Frank Herbert wrote Dune over fifty years ago as an explanation for some of its more dated attitudes toward race, gender, queerness, and other aspects of identity. But the universe that Herbert created was arguably already quite dated when he wrote Dune. There’s an old-world throwback sheen to the story, as it’s built on feudal systems and warring family houses and political marriages and ruling men with concubines. The Bene Gesserit essentially sell their (all-female) trainees to powerful figures to further their own goals, and their sexuality is a huge component of their power. The odious Baron Harkonnen is obese and the only visibly queer character in the book (a fact that I’ve already addressed at length as it pertains to the upcoming film). Paul Atreides is the product of a Bene Gesserit breeding program that was created to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach—he’s literally a eugenics experiment that works.

And in this eugenics experiment, the “perfect” human turns out to be a white man—and he was always going to be a man, according to their program—who proceeds to wield his awesome power by creating a personal army made up of people of color. People, that is, who believe that he is their messiah due to legends planted on their world ages ago by the very same group who sought to create this superbeing. And Paul succeeds in his goals and is crowned Emperor of the known universe. Is that a white savior narrative? Maybe not in the traditional sense, but it has many of the same discomfiting hallmarks that we see replicated again and again in so many familiar stories. Hopefully, we’re getting better at recognizing and questioning these patterns, and the assumptions and agendas propagated through them. It gives us a greater understanding of fiction’s power, and makes for an enlightening journey.

Dune is a great work of science fiction with many pointed lessons that we can still apply to the world we live in—that’s the mark of a excellent book. But we can enjoy the world that Frank Herbert created and still understand the places where it falls down. It makes us better fans and better readers, and allows us to more fully appreciate the stories we love.

Emmet Asher-Perrin maintains that it would have been awesome if Paul had been a non-binary character, since the story is so adamant that he possesses important male and female attributes. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

The post Why It’s Important to Consider Whether Dune Is a White Savior Narrative appeared first on Reactor.

Pretty sure her mom is kwisatz haderach.

SummerRay started with three works that reportedly took eight months a piece, each based on the work of cover artist Bruce Pennington.

With the announcement of the Dune reboot, here are three incredible scenes from the original book my mum spent 24 months freehand stitching pic.twitter.com/MSejbb0kaq

— Summer Ray (@SummerRay) February 4, 2019

Those are two covers for Dune Messiah and God Emperor of Dune, along with the cover to A.E. Van Vogt’s Children of Tomorrow, shown in all their bookbound glory via this helpful tweet from Ranaroth:

Left to right: New English Library, 1973 / New English Library, 1981 (reprint) / New English Library, 1982 (reprint). pic.twitter.com/EZDhOEKboj

— Ranaroth (@Ranaroth2) February 5, 2019

But there’s more!

Left to right: New English Library, 1981 (reprint) / Star, 1985 (reprint) – Sunset Warrior Cycle No.3 pic.twitter.com/ihixJMmTkp

— Ranaroth (@Ranaroth2) February 6, 2019

Those next two are the Bruce Pennington cover for Children of Dune and Erik Van Lustbader’s Dai-San. According to SummerRay, her mother has refused to make more of these, and they’re not for sale (aside for two that her mother has already sold). But they are certainly incredible to ogle, and somehow incredibly soothing…

The post Woman Creates Incredible Freehand Stitched Dune Covers appeared first on Reactor.

Is this going to work?

Stellan Skarsgård is an excellent choice to play the Baron in terms of talent, but that’s not really what I’m getting at here. Frank Herbert’s Dune was written in the 1960s when certain types of coding were common for villainous characters. In the case of the Baron, there are two primary issues at hand, two characteristics that further argue his odiousness on the story’s behalf that are rightly seen as contentious today: the Baron is obese, and he is also queer.

In the history of Dune on screen, two different actors have portrayed Baron Vladimir Harkonnen: Ian McNeice in the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, and Kenneth McMillan in David Lynch’s 1984 cult film. Lynch’s attempt is infamous for really leaning on those codified aspects of the Baron, to the point where the his sore-ridden appearance has been called out as a likely connection to the AIDs epidemic, which was a prevalent health crisis while the film was in production. Lynch also makes a point of connecting the Baron’s desire for men to deviancy and violence, deliberately juxtaposing his assault of a young man with a tender love scene between Duke Leto and Lady Jessica Atreides (who are the parents of the story’s “hero” Paul Atreides). Ian McNeice’s turn played down these aspects—his appearance was not altered to make him seem ill, he never physically attacks anyone, and the miniseries paid more attention to the fact that the baron was a rapist, his preference for men being incidental.

There have been attempts to explain this away within the narrative and recodify these choices—while Dune itself suggests that the Baron’s obesity might be the result of a genetic disease, Prelude to Dune, a prequel written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson retcons this idea and instead posits that the Baron Harkonnen was once a very fit and vain young man. He is given a disease by Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim after he drugs and rapes her in response to a Bene Gesserit sexual blackmail plot. With that retelling, the Baron’s corpulence is meant to be comeuppance for doing something reprehensible, a physical punishment meant to hurt his vanity by taking away the attractiveness he so prized in himself. Unfortunately, it does nothing to alleviate the connection being drawn between weight and hedonistic sadism, and this explanation isn’t present within the first book at all.

And so, the Baron Harkonnen being the only fat and only visibly queer person in the novel continues to be a problem for Dune. When a villain is the sole character to occupy certain characteristics, the reader or viewer is made keenly aware that those characteristics are being tied to their moral vacancy. Many evil characters in fiction are portrayed as fat (Vernon and Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter series, The Trunchbull in Matilda, Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park, etc.), just as many are portrayed as gay or queer (Zed in Pulp Fiction, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, Pavi Largo in Repo! The Genetic Opera, and so on). But there’s no reason that a new Dune film has to uphold those choices and keep reiterating those damaging tropes.

The physical appearance of the Baron is particularly noticeable in part because nearly everyone else in Dune is commonly portrayed as lithe and athletic (with the exception of the Baron’s elder nephew, the “Beast” Rabban). But there’s no reason that this has to be the case, and also no reason that the Baron must maintain such a specific silhouette. So how might Villeneuve’s film handle  the physical appearance of Baron Harkonnen, as portrayed by Stellan Skarsgård? Outside of allowing the actor to play the role as he is, there are three likely options: (1) he gains weight to plays the role; (2) he wears a “fat suit” to play the role; or (3) his appearance is modified through CGI. All of these choices present potential problems, and it would be a major step forward if the film found a different way to highlight the Baron’s obsession with excess. There’s also his iconic suspensor belt to account for, a device that helps the Baron to walk due to his size, but the film could easily make this an affectation of laziness rather than a physical necessity. He is a powerful man, and is accustomed to having others do for him—the suspensor belt is an extension of that expectation. With that in mind, Baron Harkonnen needn’t be obese for the sole purpose of making misguided points.

As always, the issue with the Baron Harkonnen being the only openly queer character in Dune can be solved the way this problem can always be solved when creating an adaptation: by making it clear that there are other queer people in this universe. (And I don’t just mean the other Harkonnens, who are often queer-coded as well.) In effect, none of the characters in Dune have to be straight, so this is an easy problem to tackle. There are themes that turn on the issues of power in families where there are both spouses and concubines, and families that contain more than one wife—and so could easily contain more than one husband, too. This doesn’t throw off the gender politics of the story whatsoever because breeding remains a paramount issue in Dune regardless. The Bene Gesserit still must plot to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach.

It would be simple to show queer people among the Fremen of Arrakis, or the royal court’s intrigue, or the Bene Gesserit sisters. It would be unsurprising to learn that one of Duke Leto’s painfully loyal men harbored feelings toward him. (I’m not saying it’s Gurney Halleck, but I’m definitely saying that.) Queer people are everywhere, and should fit seamlessly into any narrative. Once that is done, then the fact that the Baron is queer is no longer a signal of a lack of morality. It becomes a fact about him, and nothing more, and narrative is no longer equating queerness with evil.

When you don’t shy away from these potential fixes, you avoid lazy pitfalls that undermine the messages that Dune is trying to convey. Then the story can focus on what makes the Baron truly monstrous—the fact that he spends all of his time plotting murder, sowing discord, and destroying populations of people to get his way—which in turn will make him a far more frightening opponent. By refusing to rely on outdated and hurtful tropes, Dune only comes out stronger.

Emmet Asher-Perrin is very intrigued about the casting for Dune overall, of course. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

The post How to Handle the Baron Harkonnen in a Modern Dune Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

The original:

i am not taking questions at this time pic.twitter.com/PM0E3RzUkS

— alex but stronger (@crunchleaf) December 5, 2018

Behold, our take on Alex’s chart, featuring some elementary, my dear Watson; laws from Asimov and Sturgeon; some fourth-wall-breaking from Deadpool; and, of course, Rule 34. (Click to enlarge.)

We hope this makes you giggle as much as we did creating it—and share what columns you would add!

The post “90% of Space is Crap” and Other Fun Things That Happen When You Mix SF/F Aphorisms appeared first on Reactor.

It presents an argument that I think is fundamentally misguided, but it’s worth reading.

It’s about the ruminations of a man who turns into a worm, but it’s worth reading.

I know it’s worth reading because I’m still thinking about it three decades after the first time I read it.

The worm in question is Leto Atreides. He’s the son of Paul Atreides, the protagonist of Dune. Like his father, Leto has the gift (or curse) of prescience, and of awareness of the memories of all his ancestors.

The Dune books begin in the far future of humanity, when Earth’s culture is barely remembered, and they span a long period after that.

God Emperor takes place 3,500 years after Paul Atreides won a family feud, became emperor of the known universe and reluctantly unleashed a violent “jihad” his prescience told him was necessary. After his father’s death, Leto makes a decision guided by that same vision of the future: he gradually becomes a sandworm, one of the giant creatures that make Dune a dangerous place to visit. This transformation makes him nearly invulnerable to attack and greatly extends his life.

Like Walton, I was about 12 the first time I read Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. My older sister’s boyfriend told me about them and lent me his battered paperbacks. (Be warned, teens of the world: The younger brats who borrow your books may be the science fiction writers of the future. Lend wisely.)

I read them all, back to back, and then I read them again.

Contrary to the stereotype, many teenagers think about the future a lot. It is, after all, the stage when you’re meant to decide the main course of the rest of your life. For an earnest, politically-minded kid, that translates into: How will I serve humanity? Can an individual even make a lasting difference?

God Emperor of Dune gave me one resounding, booming version of yes, in response to that question. It’s taken me a few decades to figure out precisely why it’s such a bad yes, but that in itself is useful. It’s an entire series of books about What Not to Do.

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that Frank Herbert intended the books to be a cautionary tale. In 1982, he told Bryant Gumbel on NBC that his message was “Don’t trust leaders to always be right.” Herbert’s prescient tyrants—Paul and Leto Atreides—use their own charisma and humanity’s history of messianic religion to create unspeakable horrors.

But the reading of the original six Dune books simply as a cautionary tale doesn’t sit easily with me. Whether or not that’s what Herbert intended, it doesn’t fit the experience of reading the books, which are not didactic, or at least not in that way. Paul and Leto are, for the first four books, the protagonists. And they are sympathetic ones. The first four books aren’t about how humanity reacts to tyrants; they’re about why tyrants believe it is necessary to become tyrants.

God Emperor is dominated by Leto’s perspective. It shows us his Golden Path, his vision of a future in which humanity survives because Leto is willing to manipulate it into a period of suffering first. Leto’s oppressive regime, and its aftermath, is the only way to ensure that humanity reacts in a way that makes it harder to oppress. And the design of Leto’s prescient eugenics program is to create humans who will be invisible to future prescients. The means and the avoided ends differ only in that the former are meant to be, ultimately, temporary.

There is no escaping Leto’s vision. The people in God Emperor who think they’re rebelling against him are actually serving his goals. When the emperor is both functionally omnipotent and prescient, if you’re alive and resisting, it’s because he wants you alive and resisting. Resistance is worse than futile; resistance is inherently co-opted.

Like many tyrants, Paul and Leto believe the horrors they unleash are all for humanity’s own good. This is familiar: Many a strongman has come to power by convincing people he’s the alternative to worse horrors. Herbert doesn’t portray their worldview uncritically, by any means, but he does portray it with a great deal of sympathy. After all, Paul and Leto do what they do because they know what few others do. They see the obligation to play the bad cop as a burden they must bear. Leto believes he is the war to end all wars.

Herbert was writing in the latter half of the 20th century, when humanity had just created a new set of international, liberal-democratic institutions in direct response to the two world wars. It really did seem, when I was a teenager reading these books, that human history was moving in a certain direction. That it had an arc.

And one certainly gets the impression that Herbert thought that humanity had to learn its lessons somehow. Later in that same NBC interview, he said half-jokingly that his favorite president was Richard Nixon, “because he taught us to distrust government.”

Or, as Leto says to a rebel, “You hate the predator’s necessary cruelty.”

It’s that word necessary that’s all kind of wrong. I don’t know whether Herbert believed it was wrong, but I sure do.

A sole, horrific path to survival is a staple of science fictional story-telling. In Marvel’s Infinity War movie, it’s a motivation for both the bad guy and at least one (prescient) good guy: the idea that there’s only one solution, so its cost must be paid. This set-up appeals to story-tellers: It puts humanity in a giant arena like the one in Frank R. Stockton’s story “The Lady, or the Tiger?”. In this arena, there are infinite tiger doors and only one lady door. One way to survive, and many ways to die.

I can’t argue with a hypothetical God Emperor who can see the outcomes of all things. But I do know that a Golden Path is not actually how we are going to save the real world. The future survival of humanity is not a puzzle to be solved. There can be no single solution, no lone tipping point, because the future is the ultimate wicked problem.

The term “wicked problem” arose in social science in the late 1960s, roughly simultaneous with the publication of the first two Dune books. In 1973, the journal Policy Sciences published a paper by Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber called “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” It defines the characteristics of wicked problems. Such problems are not wicked in the sense of malicious, but they are, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, not tame lions. (The paper actually compares wicked problems to lions, and, charmingly, to leprechauns.)

Rittel and Webber noted that the rise of professionalism in modern social science seemed to inspire both faith and fear. “Many Americans seem to believe both that we can perfect future history—that we can deliberately shape future outcomes to accord with our wishes—and that there will be no future history,” wrote Rittel and Webber. “To them, planning for large social systems has proved to be impossible without loss of liberty and equity. Hence, for them the ultimate goal of planning should be anarchy, because it should aim at the elimination of government over others.”

This could easily be a thematic summary of God Emperor of Dune, which would be published eight years later.

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The paper goes on to posit that we cannot “solve” social problems, in any definitive sense. Even the act of defining a problem, of setting a goal, can’t be separated from the act of addressing the problem. Solutions to wicked problems are not true/false; they are good/bad, and they are never good enough. A wicked problem is both fundamentally unique and connected to other problems. Every action has repercussions that cannot be foreseen, not even with vast amounts of data and computers to analyze that data. (Even Leto’s prescience has its limits, by his own design.) “The planner who works with open systems is caught up in the ambiguity of their causal webs.” Wicked problems are not just bigger or badder than tame problems; they cannot be addressed by the same methods.

Many smart people have devoted many words since 1973 to refining and refuting Rittel’s and Webber’s argument, and debating how we understand and solve complex social problems, especially when it comes to climate change, the wicked problem par excellence.

The theory of wicked problems doesn’t mean, of course, that policy-makers can’t examine evidence and act on it. It does mean that waiting for a Great Intelligence to show us the one door that doesn’t lead to a tiger is a false and dangerous hope.

It’s tempting to think, like Tom Stoppard’s version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that “there must have been a moment.” A single moment, when we could have made a choice, and a better future could have been secured. Circa 1998, perhaps? Or perhaps earlier, before the bloody 20th century began? Earlier still, before the ravaging atrocities of colonial empires? But the truth is both more terrifying and more hopeful: the truth is that both the future and the past are made entirely of those moments. This is one of those moments right now, as you’re reading this.

Saving the world is not a yes or no proposition. We’re all saving the world to some degree every day, and destroying it to some degree every day. Even an action as seemingly binary and discrete as diverting an asteroid from its path depends on many decisions long before that point in many different systems, and it creates repercussions, some of which are far in the future and can’t be foreseen. Saving humanity is a good thing, but it’s never a simple thing, and it can’t be crossed off a to-do list, by a giant worm or by anyone else.

I can’t say whether I would have majored in political science, had I not read God Emperor of Dune. I can’t say whether I would have written books about a war between rival sets of time travelers bent on shaping the future. I do know that Herbert’s novel, as frustrating and disturbing as it is, caused ripples of consequence in my own little life, and is causing them still.

Kate Heartfield’s time-travel novella, Alice Payne Arrives, is available now from Tor.com Publishing, to be followed by a sequel in March. She is also the author of the historical fantasy novel Armed in Her Fashion (CZP) and the novella The Course of True Love (Abaddon). Kate’s interactive novel, The Road to Canterbury, is available from Choice of Games. She is a former journalist and lives in Ottawa, Canada.

The post The One Book That Made Me Take the Long View of the Future: God Emperor of Dune appeared first on Reactor.

“A desolate, dry planet with vast deserts… The planet is Arrakis. Also known as Dune.” – Princess Irulan, Dune

I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy almost as long as I’ve been able to read, and I’m normally very good at suspending my disbelief. Unfortunately, seven years of university schooling and two degrees have now placed some suspension limits on certain areas—namely geology, landforms, and maps. I tend to notice little things like mountain ranges having ninety degree corners or rivers that flow uphill or maps that don’t have a scale bar.

So I want to talk about some things, which on-a-geological-scale are very small details that make me tilt my head like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. Not because I hate, but because there is no more honorable nerd past-time than dismantling something we love into its finest details, ruminating endlessly on the bark of a single tree while there’s an entire forest planet surrounding us.

Which is what I’d like to talk about today, incidentally. Single-environment planets. The other stuff, including scale bars, will come later.

I like desert planets, and it’s the combined fault of Dune and a semester of examining lithified sand dunes that are now absolutely gorgeous rock formations.

Arrakis wasn’t the first desert planet of science fiction—at the very least, Altair IV as seen on Forbidden Planet has it beat, and I’m sure there’s some pulpy goodness even earlier that involves desert planet adventures. But Arrakis and its direct descendant Tatooine are definitely the most iconic desert worlds of our genre.

As a geologist, I have a particular love of the desert and its landforms, ones that are normally more shaped by wind than water. (The descriptor for those is eolian, which is a particularly lovely word to say.) I did a lot of undergraduate field study out in Moab, and I grew up in Colorado, which has a lot of near-desert and desert environments. The dry hot-and-cold of the desert shapes you, in ways beyond an appreciation for chapstick and a healthy respect for static electricity.

There’s an inherent magic to the desert, whether you’ve ever been in one or not, a grown-in mysticism that comes with the unfamiliar. It’s a landscape that’s entirely alien to most of us, unimaginable for its lack of water, its alternating burning and freezing temperatures, its weird or absent plant life. The horizon in a desert extends on forever, because there’s no humidity to get in the way of your vision. The only real limit is the curvature of the planet, elevated land features, or particulates in the air. Even the sunsets look different, if you haven’t lived your entire life where it’s incredibly dry. (Let me tell you, the first sunset I saw in a place with humidity actually scared me because it looked so different, with the Sun hovering massive on the horizon like a blood-filled Eye of Sauron.)

There’s a quiet to the desert that sinks in through your skin, a hush that’s only the sound of the wind. Rodents or insects moving around sand grains or pebbles sounds shockingly loud. Birds startle you. And the sky at night? You’ve never seen so many stars in your life, if you’ve never been to the desert. Being out in the middle of nowhere cuts out all the urban light pollution, but beyond that, there’s few clouds, no humidity to blur and hide the sky.

Of course, there’s this common conception that deserts are like very specific portions of the Sahara, with undulating dune seas that go to the horizon. Arrakis and Tatooine both have a lot to answer for on that front, but I will admit that barchanoid (crescent) and transverse (linear, if wavy) dunes are particularly photogenic. And while those are what capture the imagination, both Dune and Star Wars admit there’s more to their desert worlds than just endless draas. Arrakis has extensive salt flats (sometimes called “saltpan” colloquially in America) that are the skeletons of extinct oceans and lakes. There are rocks and mesas that poke their heads above the sand. In Star Wars: Episode IV, we get a brief look at Sluuce Canyon—which might also mean there was once a fast-moving river there, or it could be a tectonic artifact. But either way, it’s a change from the dunes.

And let me tell you, there are a lot more landforms in the desert beyond those. There’s hardpan (basically rock-hard clay surfacing) and desert pavements of packed stone, with or without desert varnish. There are deflation hollows (where sand has been blown away from rock outcrops, leaving a hollow), dry steppes, and an assortment of strange rock forms shaped by wind and blown sand (yardangs). For all its many faults, Star Wars: Episode I got one thing right—we get to see a scene during the pod races with a hardpan plain riddled with mud cracks and darted with wind-shaped yardangs.

Deserts can be as hot as you imagine or impossibly cold. This is because the factor that determines if something is a desert is precipitation. That’s it—everything comes down to how much water falls from the sky. Latitude doesn’t matter, sand or lack thereof doesn’t matter, just that it’s really, really, really dry.

This is why as a geologist, I don’t have to suspend my disbelief very far to journey to a world that’s all desert. I’d like to see more than just sand dunes, but I can tell myself that for some reason, all the people want to just hang out in the sand and ignore the other areas. They’re believable—they even exist in our very own solar system. Just look at Mars! (Mars is a desert whether it has water hiding under its surface or not; what matters in this case is that it certainly hasn’t rained there in recent geological time.) If you look through many pictures of the red planet, you see all that variation in local land forms I mentioned, from classic sandy dune seas, to dry mountains, to empty canyons, to rocky landscapes of what might be equivalent to pavements. All you need to get an entire planet that’s a desert is reverse that ubiquitous direction for ready-made products—just remove the water. Voilà, instant desert!

Then, of course, you have to address how the hell anyone actually survives on that world, but that’s your problem. I just deal in rocks.

Mono-environment invented planets don’t work for much else, though, with the possible exception of the ice ball world. (Even then, depending on your land masses, there might be more than just glaciers out there. But I’ll give the benefit of the doubt on that one.) The real issue is that worlds are spherical-ish (“oblate spheroids,” if you’re nasty), and they tend to get their input of light and heat via orbiting a star. The unforgiving realities of geometry—sphere versus what is effectively a uni-directional point source—dictate that the distribution of heat is never going to be even, which means you’re going to get atmospheric currents, and those mean that the distribution of precipitation is never going to be even, and as soon as you add that plus your unevenly distributed landscape and unevenly distributed bodies of water, you have environmental trouble. If your entire world is so hot that there are tropical rain forests at the poles, what the heck is happening at the equators? How is your rainfall and temperature being so regulated that there’s jungle everywhere? Have you never heard of mountain rain shadow effects?

This is why, once we leave Tatooine, the world-building in the Star Wars universe generally loses me. Having an entire planet that’s made up of rainforest-covered archipelagos as far as the eye can see looks very pretty on the screen with a starship zooming in, but it awakens a lot of deep and worrying questions in me, including (but not limited to) just what is happening with the plate tectonics?

Please don’t think I want a deep, loving, exhaustive description of how the plate tectonics on your planet work. I don’t, and I say this as a geologist—I’m sure no one else does, either. But there needs to be a reason, a level of believability, and if it ain’t a desert, it ain’t going to work. And remember even then, you’re still not going to have an Arrakis that is one massive dune sea that’s all the same temperature. The landscape varies, and that variation provides a certain amount of character and realism—it’s a similar principle to when directors in movies want sets to look “lived in.” The variation in landscape makes the planet alive, even in a world that seems as sterile and dead as one giant desert—because trust me, deserts are neither sterile, nor dead.

They never stop moving, as long as the wind blows.

Originally published in May 2017.

Alex Acks is a writer, geologist, Twitter fiend, and dapper AF. Their sweary biker space witch debut novel, Hunger Makes the Wolf, is out now from Angry Robot Books.

The post The Science of Desert Planets appeared first on Reactor.