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Dune is one of my favourite books and I actually enjoyed David Lynch's film.

I would love to see a modern cinema adaptation, but with the current political climate it might be impossible to make a movie about a messiah leading religious fanatics on a jihad against an empire for control of the commodity on which all civilization is dependent.




Most classic sci-fi is deeply anti-liberal. Liberal utopian stuff like Star Trek is the exception. Dune is loaded with implicit acceptance of aristocracy and religion.


Herbert said his whole point in writing Dune was to criticize the tendency of people to rely on Messianic figures for salvation, to show how our reliance on charismatic heroes and saviors can destroy us. Ironically, there's so much propaganda in favor of these things in fiction that most people read his criticisms as support. He also wanted to explore the idea that reading about characters who operate with advanced levels of consciousness might inspire readers to expand their own thinking, especially into thinking about long-term consequences on our environment, to get people to think about living more sustainably as neo-peasants, which he attempted to do himself. So the characters are meant to be inspiring, but their flaws ar meant to be obvious enough that we can avoid the mistakes they make while thinking more broadly and surpassing them.




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