Dune Rehabilitation in Progress

Abstract

SummaryFrank Herbert’s Dune (1965), a classic of twentieth century American science fiction (sf), describes a fantastic universe where noble families, corporate interests and shadowy, cultish organisations vie for power and monopoly over a fantastic resource, the spice-melange. It is inarguably the power source of the novel’s setting and its narrative. The immensely valuable and addictive substance increases longevity and radically expands the capabilities of the human mind – enabling movement, commerce, and communication on an epic scale. Positioning sf as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”, I regard the spice-melange as a discursive platform for oil and the ideological, social and political formations that are inextricable from reliance on black gold, while its deleterious aspects are disavowed or deferred. I argue that this collective response constitutes oil as offshore: the degree to which it is implicated in modern political and social formations is fundamentally understated. On the contrary, it is framed as an object of science and political economy, not as their material basis; a mentality only made possible by a utopian discourse of everlasting, ecstatic innovation; itself a discourse made all the more potent by oil’s power and mutability. I argue furthermore that sf is the approach best suited to combat the dominant discourse of oil as an offshore object of our society. Sf’s utopian projects and excessive spectacles may serve as a spark to imagine new, alternative energy futures; as the estranging mechanisms of sf allow us to explore our energy present through extrapolations and analogies of new ways of powering human life. My final argument is that, by highlighting the centrality of energy to modern life and culture, sf is framed as an immediate and terrestrial concern in texts such as Dune.