The power of space opera: energetic melodrama and the ecologies of Dune

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the history of space opera and melodrama through the lens of science fiction and especially Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, with recent film adaptations by Denis Villeneuve (2021, 2024). Drawing on scholarship that explores the imperial and energy imaginary of science fiction, it argues that space opera is a subgenre of science fiction which amplifies melodrama’s ideological and structural critique of domestic and colonial power and the energetic regimes that produce them. As an energodrama, Dune deploys contemporary ecosystem science, with its tracing of energetic flows and circuits of resource interdependence, to detail the impact of resource extraction on ecologies and colonial territories, reading this pattern across a range of contested histories, from the guano wars of Peru, to the first Arab Revolt of WWI, to the nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war. Recent film adaptations of Dune restore the visual and sonic texture of this critique, amplifying the melodramatic texture of the novel and providing new sonic and visual ecologies that bring the viewer and auditor into visceral contact with those histories and the territories they remade.