ngl it's worrying. big part of dune's feel is the way all the current cultures eventually evolve into something that's both unrecognizable and familiar. replacing cultural signifiers may avoid controversy, but it also recreates the problem common to a lot of scifi where most of humanity's culture disappears and you're in space america.
In fairness, Dune was already effectively a retelling of Lawrence of Arabia in Space.
The Atreides and Harkonan are neat stand-ins for the English and Ottoman Empires at the start of the Crimean War. And the story echoes the birth of the Kingdom of Saud, alluding to its potential future status as global superpower. Written in a time when genetics was a young science and eugenics wasn't beyond the realm of dinner table conversation, when we were just seriously getting addicted to petroleum as a global commodity, and when the Cold War played out as an endless series of proxy wars between states, it absolutely does reflect the Western political moment.
That's not even really a bad thing. But I think it's worth stating how deliberately allegorical the Sci-Fi story was intended to be. It's a story about Oil and all the politics surrounding the fight for that scarce resource.
ngl it's worrying. big part of dune's feel is the way all the current cultures eventually evolve into something that's both unrecognizable and familiar. replacing cultural signifiers may avoid controversy, but it also recreates the problem common to a lot of scifi where most of humanity's culture disappears and you're in space america.
In fairness, Dune was already effectively a retelling of Lawrence of Arabia in Space.
The Atreides and Harkonan are neat stand-ins for the English and Ottoman Empires at the start of the Crimean War. And the story echoes the birth of the Kingdom of Saud, alluding to its potential future status as global superpower. Written in a time when genetics was a young science and eugenics wasn't beyond the realm of dinner table conversation, when we were just seriously getting addicted to petroleum as a global commodity, and when the Cold War played out as an endless series of proxy wars between states, it absolutely does reflect the Western political moment.
That's not even really a bad thing. But I think it's worth stating how deliberately allegorical the Sci-Fi story was intended to be. It's a story about Oil and all the politics surrounding the fight for that scarce resource.
That's how I felt about expanse: it started off very promising and then it devolved into Space America with Space Zombies