Fiction Addiction: "Dune" and the Narrative of Exceptionalism
Fiction Addiction: "Dune" and the Narrative of Exceptionalism January 2022 I heard a radio host the other day say that he had not seen the movie "Dune". At the time, I felt like telling him, "Do watch it so you can discuss it, but don't pay for what will be inevitably dreadful." Quoting myself from September 2020: " Frank Herbert was one of the most inventive and original writers of speculative fiction and Dune is a classic masterpiece that can still hold a reader's interest. I have never been without a copy on my bookshelf. But it is important to keep the work in perspective: it is largely a fantasy that sets aside what we know of space, time, consciousness, the human brain, biology, and the fundamentals of information processing. It does this to present a time-proven bankable romantic fiction of social privilege, adventure, and warfare. Nowhere does the book touch on how a future society would achieve the slightest measure of democractic