I get why they did it, but it feels like something is lost as a result.
ngl it’s worrying. big part of dune’s feel is the way all the current cultures eventually evolve into something that’s both unrecognizable and familiar. replacing cultural signifiers may avoid controversy, but it also recreates the problem common to a lot of scifi where most of humanity’s culture disappears and you’re in space america.
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.
There’s a chance it’s for the better.
spoiler
In the book, Paul does everything he can to avoid the jihad he sees coming, because jihad = religious fanaticism = bad. A crusade is also religious fanaticism and is also bad, but portraying the term “crusade” as an evil to be avoided could be a good thing for an American audience. Crusades are a part of Christian culture, and if you’re going to write religious criticism there’s less of a risk of it being misinterpreted if you use the audience’s dominant religion as an example. If you criticize religious fanaticism using the religion of the Other, it’s easy to interpret that as nothing more than “Other bad.”
Plus, we’re almost guaranteed to get some Christian chuds throwing a fit over it, especially with the rise of right-wing “crusade” imagery. That’s always good for a laugh.
Spoilers for a book that came out half a century ago, I guess.
Is it really Islamophobia if you’re portraying a religious war as bad, and using a Christian word for a bad religious war instead of an Islamic one?
I thought the point is that the jihad - at least, the one that Paul tries to prevent - won’t, strictly speaking, be bad.
Dune Spoilers
He ended up riding the jihad, steering it a bit, but it was never in his power to stop it. The Fremen were, from the beginning, going to cast the Harkonens from their world, and the jihad brought a new vitality to the Imperial apparatus.
Now that I’m writing this, the worm, the unstoppable creature that is the source of spice, I see that the worm is a pretty clear metaphor for the jihad.
Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.
