I get why they did it, but it feels like something is lost as a result.
In fairness, Dune was already effectively a retelling of Lawrence of Arabia in Space.
The Atreides and Harkonan are neat stand-ins for the English and Ottoman Empires at the start of the Crimean War. And the story echoes the birth of the Kingdom of Saud, alluding to its potential future status as global superpower. Written in a time when genetics was a young science and eugenics wasn’t beyond the realm of dinner table conversation, when we were just seriously getting addicted to petroleum as a global commodity, and when the Cold War played out as an endless series of proxy wars between states, it absolutely does reflect the Western political moment.
That’s not even really a bad thing. But I think it’s worth stating how deliberately allegorical the Sci-Fi story was intended to be. It’s a story about Oil and all the politics surrounding the fight for that scarce resource.
