The Realm of Dune like the realm of Middle Earth references itself mostly through the shared damocleations of friends and kin who have felt a similarity between its story and the expression of our mutual travelling, through realms of linger and loiter.

It always bums me out to think about Dune. My favorite director, Alejandro Jodorowski (Holy Mountain, El Topo) was the original director slated to bring the book to the big screen. Even for such a master of the art of visual symbolism as he, Dune proved to be too big a task. So, uh, good luck to the director of Hancock...

The Dosadi Experiment would be a better choice if you want parallels with what is going on on our Prison Planet today. Plot summary below.

The novel is set at an unspecified time in the future when humans are part of an interstellar civilization called the ConSentiency with countless other races as members. One race, the Taprisiots, provide instant mind-to-mind communication between two sentient minds anywhere in the universe, and the Caleban provide jump-doors which allow instantaneous travel between any two points in the universe. This is the glue that holds the far-flung ConSentiency together. Unfortunately, one consequence of jump-door technology is the possibility that large numbers of unsuspecting sentients can be diverted to destinations unknown for nefarious purposes. A government saboteur attempts to expose one such plot.Jorj X. McKie is a Saboteur Extraordinary, one of the principals of the Bureau of Sabotage, and the only human admitted to practice law before the Gowachin bar as a legum (lawyer). While meditating in a park in BuSab headquarters McKie is mentally contacted by the Caleban Fannie Mae, a female member of a species of unparalleled power from another dimension whose visible manifestation in this universe is the star Thyone in the Pleiades clusterGenerations ago, a secret, unauthorized experiment by the Gowachins was carried out with the help of a contract with the Calebans. They isolated the planet Dosadi behind an impenetrable barrier called "The God Wall". On the planet were placed humans and Gowachin with an unstable form of government, the Demo-Pol. The planet itself is massively poisonous except for a narrow valley, into which nearly 90 million humans and Gowachin are crowded under terrible conditions. Senior Liator Keila Jedrik starts a war that will change Dosadi forever.In the story Jorj travels to Dosadi and escapes with Keila after engaging in ego sharing. This gives them the ability to swap bodies and thus by using a hole in the contract sealing Dosadi they can escape via jump gate. Once free, by legal manoeuvring the Dosadi population is unleashed upon the ConSentiency for good or ill.

 

“All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof. All things are known because we want to believe in them.”

Excerpt from ‘Children of Dune’, by Frank Herbert.

Probably the biggest thing i'm afraid of is that the film-makers are going to make too big of a connection between Dune and current events in the Middle East.

 

Though the Dune books are obviously influenced by Islam and the Arab world (as well as many other cultures) I believe the happenings on the desert planet are much more meant to be about the deep connection between ecology, environment, and the human psyche. (They are inseperable)

 

Though there is indeed a deep archetypal connection between Dune and current events (and human history) you cannot make direct political connections between the competing groups in Dune with competing groups in today's Middle East.

 I'm REALLY afraid we're going to get a film that says Fremen = Iraq insurgency and Harkonnen = Corporate Power And you simply cannot make that connection without basically tossing out the book and re-writing from scratch.

Remember that dear Frank Herbert wrote the book in the late 50's and early 60's, and in my opinion, he intended it to be

 

1. A hugely entertaining story and

2. an instructional for the awakening mind

rather than a treatise on Big Oil.

 

P.S. Those who enjoyed Dune should definately read Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. They will blow your head off, especially if you're into the philosophical and spiritual perspective of the first Dune novel.

We already had one bad retelling of Dune (thanks SciFi channel). Do we really need another? I know Lynch's version(s) were flawed, but at least he had vision. Peter Berg got this gig because of his absence of any vision whatsover. This makes him more amenable to the demands of the studio and their marketing department. When Berg took on the long in development "Friday Night Lights" (adapted from an engaging book) he managed to trash a perfectly decent script and then ruin hours of perfectly fine footage in the cutting room.

I'd skip this one and re-read the book.

when i was living in North Beach by myself in a small studio apt. i would walk around North Beach during the day, hang out in City Lights Books, and in the evening i would eat my can of soup, and sit down to Dune, i would enter into its vast imagination and just linger and visualize spice. Also Jodorowaski, who is into Tarot, wanted Dali to make the sets,of Dune, one can only imagine if there had been the funds and the time, what those two would have come up with.

I've read the first Dune novel, and was enthralled, reading it in only a few days (will now check out the others on your recomendation, True).

 

 I wonder why Hollywood is so obsessed with remakes? (eg: we have the rebirth of Robocop to look forward to apparently).I'd rather see the rumoured four hours of lost footage that Lynch filmed for his version of the books. Apparently he didn't have much control over the final cut and subsequently distanced himself from the film - it is certainly a poor relation to the book.

 

Regarding spice, and the psychedelic subtext, the visionary mycologist Paul Stamets was a friend of Frank Herbert, and writes in his recent book "Mycelium Running" that Herbert had mentioned that, "much of the premise of Dune - the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Fremen (the cerulean blue of the psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserit (influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the mushroom cults of Mexico) - came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms."

 

This perhaps throws new light on Herbert's dedication of the book: "To the people whose labours go beyond ideas into the realm of 'real materials' - ot the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration."

I totally agree with you, True. Spice is not oil, and it irks me to no end to constantly hear people today compare Arrakis to Iraq and spice to oil. Irks me so much I want to grab them by their shirtfronts and shake them vigorously whilst yelling, "spice is not oil!" I think of the old adage, "the spice of life". That's the impression I get of spice, that it's the mystery of life, death, and everything in between.

There's so much packed into the concept of spice: spirituality (Qabalah, Sufism); Jungian psychology; metaphysics (if only Frank had lived long enough to experience the Quantum Mechanics of Michio Kaku!)... I'm afraid all of this will be lost in a Hollywood film adaptation. It makes my eyes turn bloodshot red instead of a glowing blue. 

And to think, I thought spice was playa dust...

the spice must flow...I watched the Lynch and then the Sci-fi versions of both Dune and children there of marathon style not so long ago end they all show merit but just like with the books its a huge let down when you get to the end not so much because the end is a let down, its just impossible to get enough Dune even if its been Dune to death...

Hollywood loves remakes because they're a known quantity: they have some precedence for it being a success. Never mind that most remakes suck, of course. That's the kind of backwards logic you get down there. One can only hope the casting directors remember that the Atreides claim to trace their ancestry back to ancient Greece, and cast accordingly. (The Scifi channel version made Paul Atreides look way too blond, for instance.)

Although the comparsions between oil and melange have been made for a Very Long Time now, a closer reading will find many more facets to the Spice, including yes, its enthogenic properties. So the simple comparsion just isn't enough. With any luck this will be treated well in the screenplay, but another possible source of suckiness: MPAA ratings idiots. Feh.

And although there's some dispute to this: I feel you can't ignore the prequel books written by Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin Anderson. There's some very important points raised in those books too, such as the Fremen's efforts to terraform Arrakis going on for a generation before the arrival of Paul Atreides.