from “If Research Were Romance and Other Implausible Conjectures” by Manny Rayner
There’s a characteristically witty essay by Borges about a man who rewrites Don Quixote, many centuries after Cervantes. He publishes a novel with the same title, containing the same words in the same order. But, as Borges shows you, the different cultural context means it’s a completely new book! What was once trite and commonplace is now daring and new, and vice versa. It just happens to look like Cervantes’s masterpiece.
Similarly, imagine the man who was brave or stupid enough to rewrite Dune in the early 21st century. Like many people who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I read the book in my early teens. What an amazing story! Those kick-ass Fremen! All those cool, weird-sounding names and expressions they use! (They even have a useful glossary in the back). The disgusting, corrupt, slimy Harkonnens – don’t you just love to hate them! When former-aristo-turned-desert-guerilla-fighter Paul Muad’Dib rides in on a sandworm at the end to fight the evil Baron and his vicious, cruel nephew, of course you’re cheering for him. Who the hell wouldn’t be?
So that was the Dune we know and love, but the man who rewrote it now would get a rather different reception. Oh my God! These Fremen, who obviously speak Arabic, live on a desert planet which supplies the Universe with melange, a commodity essential to the Galactic economy, and in particular to transport. Not a very subtle way to say “oil”! They are tough, uncompromising fighters, who are quite happy to use suicide bombing as a tactic. They’re led by a charismatic former rich kid (OK, we get who you mean), who inspires them to rise up against the corrupt, degenerate… um, does he mean Westerners? Or only the US? And who is Baron Harkonnen intended to be? I’m racking my brains… Dubya doesn’t quite seem to fit, but surely he means someone? Unless, of course, he’s just a generic stereotype who stands for the immoral, sexually obsessed West. This is frightening. What did we do to make Frank al-Herbert hate us so much? You’d have people, not even necessarily right-wingers, appearing on TV to say that the book was dangerous, and should be banned: at the very least, it incites racial hatred, and openly encourages terrorism. But translations would sell brilliantly in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and a bad movie version would soon be made in Turkey.
I honestly don’t think Herbert meant any of that; but today, it’s almost impossible not to wonder. If anyone reading this review is planning to rewrite The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, you’d better make sure you get your timing right. Who knows how it will be interpreted five years from now?
Isn’t it funny, indeed. We’ve all noted how obvious the parallels of Dune are to the current world situation. But when Herbert wrote the book, in 1966, the turmoil in the Middle East hadn’t really started, and the themes of environmentalism and ecology, resource scarcity, climate change, mysticism, messianic religion, technology and its discontents, Realpolitik, breakdown of the Old Order, and all the rest, were not fully on the radar yet. We were just starting to get bogged down in Viet Nam and fighting the Cold War.
The book is eerily prescient, and it is also about prescience, the ability to see the future. But it is also about the pitfalls of being able to see the future…and how doing so only breeds the seeds of disaster (at least, in the sequels). Now, exactly what kind of self-referential, recursive processing is going on here?
No, I don’t think Herbert was a psychic genius who could see the shape of things to come. I don’t even think he was a literary figure of any great stature. But he got a lot of things right, even if he did wrap them in some pompous and turgid prose. Is it just luck, or did he just happen to have an interest and insight into themes and currents that were just subliminally perceptible in the mid-sixties? Things that were resonating and just visible to a mind tuned to just the right frequency? It’s like walking into a bar, ordering a drink and minding your own business, and a little voice in the back of your skull tells you (with no direct or obvious evidence) that there’s going to be big trouble there that night. And just as you’re about to finish your drink and pay your bill you hear loud voices and the sound of broken glass.
I don’t believe in paranormal phenomena, but I am utterly convinced that a lot of our mental processing goes on at the subconscious level, down where we are just barely, or hardly, aware of it.
Fear is the mind-killer…
Some scholarly analysis…
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Frank+Herbert’s+prescience%3A+Dune+and+the+modern+world.-a0218817916