Deriving from Arabic, Muad’Dib means one who teaches-and rather significantly, one who teaches civility. Amongst the Fremen, he takes on the name Muad’Dib. We can see where this is headed, right? Right.ĭune’s protagonist is Paul, heir to the House of Atreides-and the story’s White Saviour. Addiction to the spice causes one’s eyes to turn blue- read blue-eyed addiction to oil. Furthermore, it is vital to interstellar travel that bends space and time. The geostrategic (or, interplanetary) significance of Arrakis is that it supplies the most precious of resources in the Universe: melange-a psychotropic spice that expands human consciousness. In this sense, Herbert acknowledges the unique qualities and natural-given bio-physical adaptations of the native within their inhabited geographical space. They can also be read, as my colleague noted, to know of their own human potential as bio-weapons-in the landscape of Dune, those capable of facing the Emperor’s elite and feared forces, the Sardaukar. The Fremen can be read to be depicted as savage-their bodies sinewy their tanned, leathery skin evokes harsh desert existence. They live in patriarchal collectives, called sietches-within cave-like rocky formations that appear throughout the desert sands. Dune’s Fremen are a sort of sub-culture of humans. Herbert’s Fremen likely take their name from the Amazigh people (Arab-Berbers) of the Maghreb of Northern Africa, and Amazigh can be translated as free man. Of course, the geographical expanse of Iraq-erm, I mean Arrakis-is hostile, yet home to a strange and almost mystical nomadic native people, the Fremen. The year is 10,191, and our insatiable humankind has colonised the vast expanse of planets throughout the known Universe.

The story of Dune unfolds against a desolate desert landscape, the planet Arrakis. I voiced this hesitation to a colleague (whom I suspect to be at least a bit of a sci-fi and fantasy escapist), who encouraged me to write it despite my misgivings, because as academics we are all too often so turned towards our own navel-gazing-why not write something that doesn’t take ourselves too seriously. Frank Herbert’s masterpiece of course, regarded as a foundational text of the Science Fiction genre, is inarguably rife with orientalist motifs and imagery. A Saidian orientalist critique of Dune is far too easy. It feels a bit beneath the urgency of the topics we ordinarily lend our time to in lensing the Middle East and Northern Africa-the whole heart-breaking aftermath of foreign imperial ambitions. I hesitated on writing this piece, a critique of Frank Herbert’s seminal contribution to the literatures of speculative fiction.

Frank herbert