Empire of Dune: Indigeneity, U.S. Power and a Science Fiction Classic — A Talk by Daniel Immerwahr

for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here virtually and see so many familiar faces in the audience, I'll be sharing my screen so we'll have a visual part of this, so I hope you can see it now. Um, okay, so first of all, Danny, thank you very much for that lovely introduction and, Lorena, thank you also for introducing us to um for doing a land survey, um, and that's particularly appropriate today as it's the day that that I grew up with Columbus Day and it's been replaced up north in Evanston by Indigenous Peoples Day recently and I'm very excited about that, you see I think it's particularly appropriate that we're doing this

talk

on this day so I want to tell you a story of, basically, a book report that got out of hand, there's a movie about Dune, which is a very well-known novel by Frank Herbert, a

science

fiction

novel, and there's a movie.

It was supposed to come out in December and it got delayed, so it's coming out in 2021, but I was

talk

ing to an editor I work with at a magazine called n plus one and, you know, he suggested it might be good. write something about Doom, so basically, can you do a book report about Dune? And I thought yeah, this will be something nice and easy in the summer. I have read that there is a novel of types that I have read, it is the first. one you know, people who have read it have usually read it, there are a few others, maybe I'll read them, you know, I'll dip my head into the

dune

world and see what there is to see, part of the reason why I was excited to take on this assignment that I thought was going to be quite short because I am a historian and, as a historian, I am particularly interested in the foreign relations of the United States and the American

empire

.

These are the covers of the two books that I've written and I had a hunch about Dune and the hunch was this and it was derived from a cultural theorist called Edward Saeed who wrote a lot about British literature and what he noticed about British literature and we're already You know, talking about

classic

s of Victorian literature, uh, there was a way in which, often unacknowledged, the theme of

empire

lurked in books that didn't even seem like they were supposed to be about empire, so much like Jane Eyre. It turned out to be once you read it the right way, all about the empire and um, and I suspected that you could probably say something about a lot of the literature that was popular in the United States.

No, you don't know British literature in the 19th century, but we. literature in the 20th century um there's certainly a lot of fairly popular

fiction

that writes about empires um but it writes about them in a kind of vague, abstract sense where they're set like in the Star Wars universe in a galaxy far far away and I thought I know which you know people like George Lucas are interested in empires just in a kind of abstract storytelling form, but also the United States is itself a pretty

power

ful imperial country with a lot of imperial entanglements and I bet those show up in literature specifically , not just in a general way, so I had a hunch that you know in Frank Herbert's universe there was going to be a story that I could tell as a historian and I know evidence to think that this could be You know?

The imperial interaction that the United States government had with the indigenous peoples of the North American continent is fully displayed throughout the culture. cowboys and Indians, I mean, there are many ways that many aspects of American culture really have to do with that kind of imperial encounter, so the question that I had or the hypothesis that I had or the assumption that I had is that it probably could you also say something about um, the post-1945 United States imperial interactions with other parts of the world um, and I've already done some research on this. I've written something about um, a group of comics that were extremely popular in the 1940s and 1950s. these Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics and it turns out that not only were they enormously popular but they're about ducks traveling to countries in the global south in asia and africa, they get money and they come back, I mean, these are You know, topics that deserve to be explored and I got very interested in that.

I also wrote a little bit about Star Wars, which I discovered was actually about Vietnam and George Lucas, you know, he was thinking very carefully about Vietnam while he was thinking about the star. Wars Universe and once you see that you can map elements of the movies into that political situation, then the question for me was what about Dune? What's happening with Dune? And I felt like you knew it was a good time to answer it because um, on the one hand, there's this movie that's about to be released, here's a screenshot, on the other hand, partly because the movie is coming out, but also because other reasons and reasons that we can explore in q a doom, a novel that first came out in 1965. has resurfaced and recently this year has appeared at the top of several mass market bestseller lists, thus having sold more books than those published this year and last year is this book that, as you know, came out over 50 years ago, part of that is The pandemic just a lot of people felt it was the right time for Dune, so it's having a cultural moment Strange that I think it goes beyond the movie and it seemed like a good time to talk about it, so I won.

Don't assume everyone in this audience has read Dune. My experience is that the world is divided between the majority of people who haven't read Dune and then a vocal minority who have read it more than three times. So, whatever it is, I welcome you. I hope this is interesting. Briefly, what the novel is about is an alien named Paul Atreides who arrives on what appears to be an inhospitable desert planet called Arrakis or colloquially Duna and it looks like it's going to be extraordinary. It's a tough place to be, it's on the periphery of the galaxy, it's valuable because there's some kind of mineral-like substance called spice that can be extracted from there that's extraordinarily valuable, but other than that, it's a really cool place. difficult to live, as Paula's treatise in Dune says. he starts to feel connected to it, he feels connected to the environment, and particularly he becomes connected to the indigenous people of Doom, the Fremen, and he ends up leaving the political situation that he entered into, where it's kind of, well . -established young man with a political future, joining the foreign men, taking a friend and a name and then leading a foreign insurgency to overthrow the galactic empire and that's how the book ends, so it's kind of a wild book when it came out for the first time.

It's also a very long book, and when it first came out, Frank Herbert serialized it in a

science

fiction magazine called Analog and then wanted to publish it in its entirety as a single novel, and that was a difficult thing to do. Do it, the thing was, if you know, you have any sense of the word count, it was 215,000 words, which turned out to be, you know, about 600 pages, and the editors weren't interested in taking it, it was weird, it was long. it was ungainly uh the plot didn't really resemble many plots in other science fiction books uh at that time uh the place that uh frank herbert finally found that was willing to publish it uh is uh um a publisher named chilton primarily known for his textbooks auto repair and the joke was that they were used to publishing books that were quite thick, so they published it with a very low circulation and it didn't go out of print, so basically the book was kind of you know, a lot of books were published and they didn't a lot of people read it, except for this first one, it started winning sci-fi awards and then, more importantly, it started gaining a cult following, especially on college campuses, there was something subversive about it. something transgressive, there was something exciting about this book and, in fact, if you look at the topics that are covered in the book, they are a little wild, so it deals in a really active way with ecology, the book is about coming to terms with the ecology of this planet, uh, and the Fremen, you know, they have all kinds of things going on, they hold orgies as a kind of standard matter of statecraft, uh, there's a lot of mysticism coming from all directions in the book, uh, the characters meditate and that meditation becomes really important and there are psychedelic drugs the characters take psychedelic drugs uh this novel seemed to capture a lot of what was going to emerge from the counterculture in the next two years and it seemed to get there pretty early given which was first published uh serially in 1963.

Partly for that reason, many screenwriters became very interested in making a movie about Dune. Dune became the unscalable peak of the Himalayan counterculture in space movies. So, first, this Chilean, surrealist, Alejandro Hodarovsky, was supposed to direct it. This is a poster that corresponds to the film he was going to make. You can see in the back Salvador Dalí, who was going to be in the cast. Ridley Scott then tried to do it. Potarovsky failed. Ridley Scott then tried it. To do so, he found it too difficult and ended up directing Blade Runner instead after the directors felt this was the film they wanted to make.

David Lynch finally made it in 1984. It was a huge, highly anticipated film with a huge budget. It was also a flop, partly because David Lynch had a rough cut of about four or five hours and the studios forced him to cut it down to two hours and the movie became somewhat incomprehensible, so Dune was exciting to watch. many directors filmed it seemed to capture something of the era that they really wanted to interact with, but it was also very difficult to film and there is an irony here because the way

dune

appears on the screen is not through this, you know these famous attempts by Hodorovsky and Ridley Scott of this famous David Lynch flop, but it enters through the back door because many of the themes of Dune are taken up in another major Star Wars film and I won.

I won't go through all the examples, but you know, fans have actually spent a lot of time on dune versus star wars and noticed that george lucas was clearly reading dune, especially in the early drafts, the economy of star wars revolves around something. called spice, which is exactly the substance that is so important in Dune and, more importantly, Star Wars tells the story of a young man on an outlying desert planet who wields a sword and masters the mystical arts and then comes to overthrow a galaxy empire that's the plot of dune that's the plot of star wars uh and this is kind of a deep reference cartoon that deals with some of the very specific words and images that are in each one.

I'm happy to explain some of them in the q if you want, um, anyway, Dune is strange because it's hugely successful as a franchise, but its success is almost entirely due to the writing, it's the novels that are successful and , in particular the first novel when Frank Herbert died in 1986. The entire series based on that first novel is simply called dune, the rest have dune in the title. I sold about 35 million copies, which, if you know books, is absolutely extraordinary, and it's also extraordinary that Dune, as a literary franchise, is back. we also top the bestseller lists today, um, so the question is the Edward Saeed type hypothesis, right? empires um that was a question i had and it didn't take me long to realize that in fact there was a lot to say um when i started reading the life and biography of frank herbert one thing i discovered is that before that he was able to support himself by dune's success as a novelist, he worked as a political writer and he worked, he was on the west coast, he was from Washington state, and he had grown up in a socialist commune, but nevertheless, he had undertaken a political journey and became a fairly conservative Republican, so he worked as a speechwriter and political assistant in a broader sense for several West Coast Republican political candidates, the most important being the one he worked for and who brought him to Washington.

It was this person named Guy Corden, who is the senator from Oregon who was running for re-election, so Frank Herbert worked for him in Washington, worked on his re-election campaign, a campaign for which Richard Nixon was stumped by the senator who ultimately unsuccessful, but this. Do you know an extraordinarily conservative man who was primarily concerned with resting logging outside the purview of the federal government so that logging companies could go about their business more directly and more easily? Frank Herbert was quite influenced by it, the more catchy the thing was. that what makes Cordon's career interesting and particularly interesting from my perspective is that Corden had gotten into politics primarily to defend the logging companies, but because he's in the Senate and because he had been in the Senate for quite some time in By the time Frank Herbert began working for him in the 1950s, he had risen through the ranks and become chairman of the Interior and the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee.

So what does the Internal and Insular Affairs Committee do? abroad sincethe senate, the department of the interior, and also oversees insular affairs, which are insular affairs and the united states at that time. Still now he had an overseas empire not huge but quite substantial with overseas territories, the islands, those are the ones that's why they're called insular affairs, insular affairs, so Guy Cordon was the highest-ranking person in the Senate to oversee the United States colonial empire, which at the time included overseas territories like Hawaii and Alaska which were not yet states, as well as American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which at the time had a different political identity.

This was a big problem for Guy Gordon. He traveled extensively to the Pacific territories. Here he is adorned in a Hawaiian style and was also important to Frank Herbert. He became involved in the politics of the empire. You thought a lot about the politics of the empire. In fact, one of um by Cordon. uh secretaries a woman named dorothy jones because of all these connections had ended up and then ended up living for quite a while in american samoa and uh frank herbert became absolutely fascinated by this and decided that what he really wanted to do was be a colonial official in american samoa and He lobbied hard for this, so he lobbied his boss, he lobbied all his other connections, the secretary of the interior, who he knew, and he just asked to be sent to basically someone American and I just let you know that he would settle down there and have a life as a writer.

He really didn't have a vision of what he wanted to achieve with the colony. It was mainly a vision of the kind of life of leisure he expected. to enjoy there um he didn't get the job partly because I think a lot of people perceived that he wasn't going to stay long and he had other ambitions that were going to take him uh very far from uh the colonies but still there It was another way in which he got really involved with the American empire and really interested in it. It's not just that the United States had an overseas empire or overseas colonies.

Just after World War II, the United States had also declared sovereignty over seafloor territory, so the submerged lands that lie off the coast of the actual land that the United States had claimed, um, this is something that was kind of a pet problem for Guy Corden and became a pet problem for Frank Herbert, who got really excited about this kind of water imperialism and what could be done, what could be extracted from this new territory that The United States had complained, so he wrote an article urging people to be adventurous and, you know, get on their submarines and start exploring this. new land was going to be the new frontier to develop as he said our new empire is the continental shelf uh not only did he write about this and of course he worked for Guy Cordon on this topic um his first novel uh not very frequently The book that I read these days called The Dragon in the Sea was entirely about this, it's a story, it's a cold war story about submarines that go and do offshore oil drilling and those are the heroes, right?

The heroes are the people who are drilling oil on the high seas. drill and they're able to get resources, bring them back to the United States, exploit the underwater seafloor and that's what really excited Frank Herbert. If you've read Dune, this is a theme you'll recognize because a lot of Dune is about mining in hospitable conditions here in Dune, it's in a desert rather than at the bottom of the sea, but much of the same sense of adventure and Danger carries over from one novel to another, so that's one way that wow, okay, frank kerbert. it's not just about writing about empires in general, he really has a specific empire in mind and knows a lot about it, but there's more, but there's more when I read the biography of Frank Herbert written by his son Brian Herbert, so there's a lot of stories that Frank Herbert had told his son One story really caught my attention and I immediately wanted to know more about it.

It's a story that Frank Herbert told his son about when he was young and growing up in Washington State and the story goes like this, one day when Frank Herbert was fishing and hunting, which he often found himself in and this is how he told it. , an Indian man named Indian Henry, or at least named after Frank. herbert uh the two became very close friends uh henry adopted frank herbert uh and taught him the customs of his people and they were together for about two years uh or they were often together uh in the forest for about two years indian henry I thought, oh my God. , I would love to know that guy's story and it was very frustrating in a way because that's all he is in Indian Henry's biography and that's all I've seen in Frank Herbert's articles that I couldn't find. this guy's name i knew he was a member of the hoe tribe uh but that was all his name was henry um well sometimes history gets really lucky or sometimes historians get really lucky uh we get lucky with the archives uh the tribal roles of the ho tribe they're not very big there's not a lot of people in them in this time period and there's only one henry uh and looking through them I was able to find out this guy's name his name is henry martin and you know what he is and in the records , the person described as Henry Martin was born at you know exactly the right time to be the right age, and not only was I able to do it, but he's also a fisherman, which is how it's described in the story, I was.

I was also able to piece together a little bit of his backstory because I came across one of these other really lovely finds, an anthropologist's account of the Quillute Tribe and the rest of the Queen's Reservation in Western Washington and before I do that, I should explain uh , that the uh ho people, the entire community, uh, is a band of the larger quilliut people, so there are two political entities, the ho tribal nation and the balance tribal nation, uh, but there is a broader sense in which this is all under the quillude umbrella, uh and it wasn't unusual for people to live or spend time on the Quilly reservation like Henry Martin did, and the reason I know this is because we have an account from an anthropologist about what things were like on that reservation, in the 1920s and 1930s, and one of those stories is kind of a heartbreaking story because it's a story of government neglect and harassment by government agents, but remarkably one of the people who is harassed and ends up fighting with a government.

The agent is Henry Martin, uh, who would have been living on the Quilt reservation and was detained in what appears to be an illegal stop, um, of an Indian agent who worked as a teacher and, the police guy, and also as a judge. So not only was he arrested by this guy, he was also convicted or sentenced to 60 days of hard labor and refused the sentence. This was a challenging time not only for Henry Martin but for the fast-living quillid community on the reserve. led to other moments of sort of conflict and challenge and then sort of a collapse of relations between the US government and the queen nation which then led to a really difficult time on the reservation and a lot of the people who They moved like Henry Martin did somehow.

You know I was able to understand this backstory and realize that this wasn't just some kind of thing like, you know, Huck and Jim, where there's a conveniently located Indian. man simply in the woods hoping to pass on his wisdom to a young teenager. This is someone who was in a sort of exile and who lived a pretty difficult life and presumably passed on a lot of that to Frank Herbert in his two years. together we don't know what they talked about other than that um uh henry martin explained how to live off the land um but I think there are reasons to assume and I'll get to them in a second uh that some of the politicians The experience that Henry Martin lived was also passed on to Frank Herbert.

Frank Herbert had it at the same time that he was quite interested in the American empire. He was also really fascinated by the indigenous experience that was visible around him in Western Washington. particularly in the world, just after World War II, at a piano recital, he met another quillian man named Howard Hanson, who grew up on the reservation and became, by all accounts, Frank Herbert's best friend . It's a little bit complicated. Howard Hanson grew up on the Quillia reservation and identified himself as Quilliot, but interestingly he, he, had no identified parents, so it's not unusual for a parent to be unidentified.

In his case, his mother was not identified to anyone either. He was willing to say publicly that he was just a baby he looked like, but he grew up on the reservation and was identified by elders as someone who had a particular interest in history and a particular interest in tradition, so he was given quite a bit of training. extensive. to become a sort of repository of the history and lore of the quillie people and he took it very seriously. He left the reserve after the second world war he joined the merchant navy and traveled the world he kept in touch with frank herbert the entire time and then returned in the 1950s and saw what felt like a devastating change that had happened in the place where the reserve had grown um the queen's reserve uh in the push that's the name of the place it's one of It's very wooded and it's actually one of the wettest places on the North American continent and I had seen the The logging that was going on around the reserve ended up drying out many of the water-retaining trees, so the bare earth held a lot less water and it felt like I was watching the place go from a wet, healthy place to a dry, almost vacant land and that is something he described in a book he began to write. he wrote and as he wrote he shared it with frank herbert uh it's called twilight on the Thunderbird and twilight is both the twilight of the reservation and the twilight of the queen's town and the kind of cultural dissolution that he thought would come with environmental destruction um the novel was published in 2018 very late, uh, but he had to self-publish it right before he died, but he published it and I talked to his wife, the version that he published is pretty much the version that Frank Herbert read. uh and frank herbert edited and it seemed like frank herbert took it very seriously because this story that uh howard hansen gave about the ecological transformation of logging in western washington is a story that seeped into frank herbert's consciousness um, how do we know that?

Frank Herbert became very interested in Quilliute's themes and at the same time he imagines and writes the Dune series, he is also thinking about Quilliute's life and ends with his account, I'm sorry, his son's account and the account of The Widow by Howard Hansen whom I was able to interview Frank Herbert was deeply influenced by the ideas of Howard Hanson and in the 1970s, in the 1970s, partly under the influence of Hansen, she became very interested in the red

power

activism that had place on the West Coast and in the Amid his success with Dune, his first novel is out and is finally starting to sell.

Publishers want more Dune novels. He decides to stop Dune-related activities so he can write a novel that he describes as a kind of I love a novel that he has desperately wanted to write for quite some time and the novel is called Soul Catcher. It is the only non-science fiction novel he published during his lifetime. It is a novel about the politics of queens and it takes place exactly behind the scenes. which um howard hansen had described uh felling it begins with the rape of a woman by a white logger of a quillian woman by some white loggers and features a type of relationship that is almost identical to henry martin's relationship with frank herbert is a major relationship complete man who walks up to a young white teenager and shows him the ways of the forest and teaches him the exact same lessons that we know Henry Martin passed on to Frank Herbert um the difference is this at the end of the novel, the older man is trying to using the younger boy to make a political point, he kidnaps him and wants to take him home, which you know what settler colonialism has done to the town queen and he decides. he wants to kill the young man, so he defends Frank Herbert, and the young man lets it happen, so in a way, Frank Herbert imagines himself martyring himself for this cause as a way of expressing how serious he is about quality. about politics uh, it's not just that he writes this book uh with that very dramatic ending, also after publishing it it doesn't sell very well and yet he is completely undaunted, the publishers are begging for more installments of the dune series and he He says actually What I want to do is apply for a federal grant so I can do ethnographic research with Howard Hanson as my research assistant and I'm going to tour Native communities gathering knowledge and write another novel about Native life in Washington. which does, um, can't get any publisher interested in publishing it.

I haven't been able to get a manuscript. The point is that the moment you know Dune is so loud in his ears, everything he wants to write about is. It's the quality policy, um, and the policy of thenative life in Washington, um, so the question is: is this dune game correct? Does any of this appear when making the novel? I think those are really good reasons to think beyond the general type. intellectual influence that Dune is a way for Frank Herbert to think about a lot of these issues, so one reason for thinking that is that I mean both Frank Herbert's son and Howard Hanson's widow said that Dune was deeply influenced by Howard Hanson and we have two accounts of this really extraordinary conversation between the two of them.

This happens long before Dune exists. writing, um hanson tells herbert that the white men are eating the land, that they're going to turn this whole planet into a wasteland like north africa and he's thinking about the push, he's thinking about the queen's reservation there and frank herbert answers yes, like a great dune this is a story that frank herbert told his son this is a conversation in which frank herbert says yes that is exactly right and once you see that you can understand how dune takes place on the driest planet in the galaxy and it's a story of well, among other things, the possibility that this dry planet could be, you know, it was once wet, now it's extremely dry and hospitable and it could get wet again.

You can see how that whole game is kind of a game on this question of the quilt reserve, which is one of the wettest places in the country, is drying out, becoming bare and becoming a big dune, but if it could be restored, It's not just that the ecology of the dune seems, as far as I know, to be influenced by the plume. you would experience and particularly because of what is happening in the push, it also seems to me that the dune characters are based on these experiences, which is why the most intriguing characters in the dune universe are the fremen uh, which are the indigenous people of arrakis and You know, these kinds of questions about who they really are, who is supposed to represent a lot of the language that they use, or is it or does it sound Arabic or Turkish-Persian, it's clear that Frank Herbert is making a lot of linguistic gestures, towards the middle.

East and the Islamic world, but you know, I looked at Frank Herbert's papers. He didn't know much beyond armchair type knowledge about the Middle East and wasn't particularly interested in Middle Eastern politics. He really cared about indigenous politics. in western Washington and once you know that it's not hard to see foreigners as well as a type of people that you know, humidity reverses the quillia, so people from the drier place instead of people from the drier place wet, um, the fremen also have a special relationship with these big, scary creatures that surf on the sand dunes, the sandworms are huge, and in that you can see some kind of relationship, you know, connection or mapping of the people who had these relationships also quite serious with large and fearsome animals uh that uh passed by the Pacific coast whales uh you can see sandworms as a kind of terrestrial version of whales um the reason why I think this is so important uh this connection is that it is through the fremen that all the really interesting stuff is put into practice.

The reason Dune is a countercultural novel has a lot to do with the fremen um and Frank Herbert was very interested in indigenous experiences and particularly the use of the mind. altering drugs in the southwestern United States and had actually used peyote and some other mind-altering drugs before writing dune, but he also saw dune as a way to comment on a larger issue that is a conflict between what he called the Western man. and some kind of other way of thinking about the world, so the way he saw it, what made doom and what made dune so powerful was that dune was a rejection of western man and I think you can see how much of the countercultural funk that goes into dune comes from its commitment and is to indigenous politics, so now we're getting to a strange part in the talk that has to do with the fact that some people have read dune at least three times and others haven't. have you read at all, um, I don't want to delve into the plot of dune and how I see it relates to all of these themes, I just want to say this, the entire dune series, as I see it, is just one extended conflict. between frank herbert's two political commitments, so on the one hand dune is a story of empires and empires never go away, even when you know the empire is overthrown it just becomes a new form of empire, so that frank kerber seems somewhat compromised. to the idea that empire is a very important and possibly obligatory political form and the extractive mission is correct, the idea that going to distant parts of the galaxy and becoming difficult to find materials like deep sea imperialism, that is a Part of it just doesn't go away by doing so, on the other hand, Dune is really haunted by the possibility of the loss of indigenous customs.

He is very concerned, in quotes, with Western man and the scientific and technological forms that in a way would displace other ways of understanding the universe, so this is Frank Herbert's vision of the relationship between indigenous people and Europeans, and throughout the novels, the novels get weirder and more right-wing as they go on, but you can see these two themes clashing with each other. others um throughout all the novels and if you can go into some of that in q a if you want, I don't want to walk you through the plot of all the novels which add up to about 2500 pages in total, but I do.

I want to end it with a quota or something so I find it a little disturbing about this. I find these themes not only interesting as a way to think about Dune, but also somewhat painful to contemplate because of the historical ironies they raise. Um, I think once you've read Dune in context and understood a little more about Frank Herbert's world, you'll be able to see how there's a long tail shadow cast over Dune, which is surprising because Dune is one of the most successful science fiction films. franchises never the equilib community is not particularly large we are talking about less than a thousand enrolled members in the tribal nation and you know the reservation in the push is about a square mile so it is surprising to think that such a small community The community has an enormous intellectual influence on this set of novels that are so important, but it becomes even more surprising when you know something else, which is that there is also a refreshingly long shadow on another of science fiction's most profitable fantasies. franchises that is Twilight.

I don't know who Red Twilight is. I won't confess it, but the Twilight novels are set in the same part of Western Washington where Frank Herbert had said "Soul Catcher" and this came from Stephanie Meyer. Who is the author of googling the wettest part of the United States and just showing up on the same part of the earth, so they are located in Forks, Washington, which is the closest logging town to La Push, but also are? partially set in push because there's a group of the push that is identified in the text as coolut uh who are werewolves so all the werewolves in this twilight franchise are from the push and they're from the queen's reserve there and the reason for I mean, Stephanie Meyer, in her Google search, discovered the reservation of uh Quillia and discovered that, um, the Quilley community has an origin myth based on wolves and she thought about turning them into werewolves and I mean, this It's been a very strange thing for both Forks, Washington, but.

Also, and more importantly, for the nudge, on the one hand, it's been this incredible moment of visibility, especially because, you know, the nudge and you know the word quilliot has suddenly been on the lips of a lot of teenagers, but it's also been, as you can imagine, kind of strange, so here are some and there's a lot of this, there are some themed products that are sold only by several of those who know hot topics, and nordstroms and several other companies, uh uh . So this supposedly cool badge here is just made up, it's made by the Twilight franchise, but it's sold as some kind of quality thing and you probably won't be surprised to learn that none of the prophets go to the Queen Nation um and then there's something so frustrating. in this thing that you know as fremen uh as werewolves uh that's cool, they would have this enormous influence, but there doesn't seem to be the um commensurable uh interest in quillude as themes in their own right and one of the reasons I know that is because they There have been repeated conversations about turning Soul Catcher into a movie, which is actually about quality politics.

In fact, right now there are plans to turn it into a movie, with Chris. Iyer, who is one of the most prominent native directors, directed it um Howard Hanson before he died, was hired as a consultant and was going to work with them on the novel just to make sure that it really had the perfect quilly perspective that he was worried about. that Frank Herbert wouldn't have done that and I talked to Chris yesterday about this and he says that on the one hand it's really exciting, it's a dark political movie that ends in a very strange way, with the native man being a kind of stand-in for um henry martin killing the young man who is a substitute for frank herbert uh and doing it as a kind of act of political revenge and in that way it is a kind of spicy and difficult movie and chris's The view is that it is a movie that is going to have to be very difficult to make for that reason, so the other movies are millions of dollars behind them.

This is a movie that has basically stagnated and has been stuck in various incarnations for several decades. I said there are some painful ironies here and one of them is simply seeing how quillified ideas and quality images are picked up in all these other films and yet they can't. do it on the screen in a more, you know, the right way, another one is this, the big idea that frank herbert gets from howard hansen is the idea of ​​ecological change, howard hanson is looking at what's happening with the Reserve of Coulee in the push and he's seeing a total transformation and he communicates that to Frank Herbert in all the accounts of what they talked about, that's what they talked about, uh, and then Frank Herbert maps this square mile of land into an entire planet and imagines.

What if it's not just a reservation? What if it's an entire planet that dries up? What happens if the entire planet turns into a kind of sand dune? That's the planet Arrakis and you know the dunes are powerful in many ways, but in one way this book is powerful is that this is the first book that makes people imagine climate change on a large scale, you know, terraformed planets. Herbert can see something much bigger or he can imagine a much bigger change afoot, the reason why this irony just sticks in my throat or this sticks in my car, as irony is that right now the quality reserve is deeply endangered by climate change.

It's not like Howard Hanson imagined deforestation would lead to the place drying out and becoming a wasteland; Rather, deforestation has meant that the land simply can't hold moisture, so there are a lot more floods at the same time as the climate warms, which is something Howard Hansen didn't really imagine would happen when he was writing about this in the 1950s, that the coastal reserve was being battered by waves and the soil was eroding to the point where there are regular drills as the school children only have to practice leaving school in the event of a very severe flood. sudden, so this small piece of land has somehow become the model for Frank Herbert, who mapped it on Arrakis and then allowed it. many readers map Iraqis on Earth.

Earth's climate change has effects everywhere, but one of the most poignant and difficult effects to contemplate is what it's doing to that little square mile of landing on the push okay, thank you very much for coming to this talk, happy indigenous peoples day, and I would love to address it in q a, so I'm happy to take it there. Wonderful, thank you very much, Daniel, that was it. Fascinating as one of those people who has read Dune probably more than three times. I'll try to keep you from getting too into the details and all that, but I appreciate all the context you gave and also.

The part about Frank Herbert's first book and sort of seafloor mining reminded me that Dune actually starts with the Atreides family living on an ocean planet that they control and then being transported to this dry planet that they are. then assigned by the empire, so that's a fascinating context for that movement, so thanks for that. I would say that from monitoring the chat, most of the questions, or at least most of the questions, seem to be on topic. The question of white saviorism, um, and how Frank Herbert saw himself in relation to the indigenous peoples, who he was learning about, how that plays a role, obviously, in Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune, being a white guy who learns and then leads the indigenous people. that he meets um, if you could talk a little bit about that and how he sees the pen today, how he sees hisinterpretation, if you have any connection to it and if you have any particular feelings about it, yes, yes, I think that question about white savior politics is exactly the right question, so in Dune, there is a kind of glorification of the Fremen customs, but the guy who really gets you is the out-of-the-world heroine, Paula Tradies, not, you know, the Fremen.

They themselves are not main protagonists, they are main characters, but they are not main protagonists in that sense, uh, and so, basically, Paul and this is the term that FrankKerber uses goes native and takes a concubine friend and takes it from a name , but he's also right and there's a really important way in which he doesn't give up his identity, his identity outside the world, and I think we can map that to a kind of white or Western identity in Frank Herbert's mind and that's one of The uncomfortable things about Dune is that it tends to use indigenous people as a backdrop for the white protagonist's character transformation.

Um and I think that's something that a lot of people have found a little disconcerting, maybe exciting but also a little uncomfortable about Dune. I think Frank Herbert was interested in the question of where he fit in. As a descendant, he describes the permanent character of him. in Soulcatcher as an invading immigrant, someone who is very understanding and very interested in the culture, but can never get there, so I think he was also interested in what his role in all of this was supposed to be and the fact that in Soul Catcher, the way he solves it is by having his stand-in just be martyred. uh on the one hand you know a different kind of resolution than you lead the quality hordes against the galactic empire on the other hand as Chris Erase pointed out.

It still makes the white man the center of the story, and there's a way that the white character is always centered in all of this, no matter how sympathetic, the depictions of indigenous people are great, thanks for that response I think . Another common question we've been seeing is about Frank Herbert's politics. Did he move from right to left like you mentioned? You know as the Dune books progressed they became more feudal, they became more conservative. in their governmental structure, uh, they lean towards the messiah complex, um, where were Frank Herbert's policies? Do you think they changed?

Yeah, definitely, I mean, the important thing to recognize is that he starts on the right, I mean this. It's not a move to the right, uh, the politicians he works for are very conservative, uh, and he's, you know, the fact that Richard Nixon is campaigning for Frank Herbert's mentor, basically, gives you a idea, but Herbert can, it's not like that. I don't even know if he's moving more to the right or if he's just less interested in the parables and just wants to say the quiet part out loud. The strange thing about the later novels is that, I mean, they're set in what it's like 2,500 or 25,000 years in the future and the characters who have some kind of ancestral memory that they like to remember the distant past, still think about politics terrestrial in the 20th century and keep mentioning it in such a way as if there is a moment where someone is describing a scientific concept that involves the word liberal used in a technical scientific way and one of the characters says oh oh God, I'm sorry, you just made me think about the 20th century on earth and how liberals are so horrible and just want to tax everyone and use social security to get people on their side but really they just pray to keep people away. middle class, sorry, go on, were you explaining something, so it's like that kind of thing and so on?

On the one hand, this may seem disconcerting, right? You wonder how someone who is so sympathetic to indigenous peoples also looks so much like the anti-government libertarian right, but somehow everything is fine because Frank Herbert sees him as the main predator. that is a problem for the indigenous peoples it is also the main predator that is a problem for your bank account which is the federal government uh so there is a kind of return to the policy of territorial autonomy that is right-wing countercultural uh very understanding with a reading of what indigenous culture is and actually kind of consistent, so, you know, yeah, he's kind of a right-wing version of counterculture and I think he finds tensions in indigenous life and indigenous politics. that seems to work perfectly for him in that sense i wanted to know this is my question i'm sorry if you have read the works of ursula k le guin uh who was also heavily influenced by indigenous peoples her father was an anthropologist who worked in california yeah uh yeah and uh, but I wrote very different stories that, you know, had a very, very, I would say, total antipathy towards the empire.

They were societies that were set up completely differently and, uh, you know very notably in one of the last great speeches of his. accepting a lifetime achievement award said we live in capitalism its power seems inescapable so was the divine right of kings any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings resistance and change often began in art and very often in our art the art of words i I was wondering if you had done any work contrasting or studying their two approaches. No, that's wonderful. Yeah, I haven't researched that. I've read your stuff and you're absolutely right, I mean, and I believe.

That just shows that, you know, Frank Herbert takes the politics of his fascination with indigenous life in a direction that is not a mandatory direction, that it is a chosen direction and the green just goes in the other and just shows you the possibility, uh. on the west coast for people who are more or less contemporaneous with each other um and you know at the end of his life frank herbert moves to um I mean, first of all, he's dodging the irs all this time um he moves to a part pretty remote from Hawaii um and he identifies as one of the native Hawaiians um, but he's still like a lifelong member of the NRA and a supporter of Ronald Reagan, so you know, an outspoken advocate of capitalism um, so that ends in a different part.

We have a new question here that ties into something I wanted to ask you as well about the role of women and gender roles in Dune and whether you had addressed that at all, for those who aren't. I'm not familiar that there's an order of nuns, um called Bene Jesuit, that are behind the scenes in the empire, kind of opposed to something inside, but basically trying to pull the strings from their position, so I think there's a lot of things. . Interesting things about reproductive choice, um, that come up in relation to that, um, in terms of women leaders, women on both the indigenous side and the empire side, so I was wondering if you'd touched on that at all, it's surprising. much of science.

Fi stuff from mid-century or a little later, I mean, you can imagine distant planets, you can imagine spaceships, but the gender roles will have to be the same, and that's not to say that Frank Herbert won't do anything with it, but It is notable that it leaves a lot of room for female characters and sometimes heroines, but at least in the early novels there is a very clear sense that women work with poison, men work with swords, women manipulate power . behind the scenes and using sex to do it and the men that you know are heroic and have battle plans and that kind of thing, the most interesting thing to me was and it was so complex that I didn't figure it out. it's the politics around sexuality so dune is actively homophobic the villain and dune not only has a russian name so that's the cold war context but he's a pedophile and as you know he's looking for men youths. sexually assaulting um and that's part of his ability and then you know in all the stereotypes that come with it, he's kind of um you know physically repulsive uh you know he has a desire that's uncontrollable um and uh frank herbert wrote about homosexuality in a really, you know, downright negative way, um, uh, and his son was gay, uh, his son was not only gay, but he was also an activist, uh, he was a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, uh, in the bay area, and he died pretty early from um, eights.

And so I interviewed the kind of surviving family chosen by that son who died, who were able to fill in some of that story there and it's just a very difficult relationship between a son who is also scientifically minded. very interested in science fiction and technical stuff and a father who never really accepted it and then he wrote very public fiction where the villains are gay um, so that's, I mean, it gets even stranger in the later novels, but that's something that interested me quite a bit uh yes um I have a question from Danny here um about how uh how did Herbert manage to reconcile his sympathy for the indigenous peoples and their dish um at least in the United States with his support for the imperial policies that They devastated indigenous peoples in other parts of the world and did you think about this contradiction at all? um, he portrays his indigenous heroes here in a very heroic way, as you point out, um and he seems to lament that white men are eating the land, but then he embraced these very imperial projects at the same time, yeah, yeah, I don't think he ever he figured it out and I mean he described his books, the first book he wanted, he was eager to explain, you know, he said, okay, there's a moral, here's the moral, and he would do it.

Would he explain it in the interviews at the end? He said that he is just a scherletographer. It's like the themes come and become paradoxes and confront each other. I think one of the reasons novels have this weird structure where heroes become villains. and projects that you know you're very involved in and one novel is undermined by the next, it has to do with the fact that he can't solve it politically, so first of all you know that the free man will take care of everything. galaxy and then they turn green arachus again to rejuvenate themselves, but then they realize that once they've done that, they've lost their indigenous customs, so they have to turn it back and you know it's like arrakis just keeps going back and forth . and he never quite resolves it and part of the problem is that he sympathizes quite a bit with the indigenous people when they are weak and persecuted, but when he imagines them winning, he has to, he gets a little angry and then they become villains. and they are no longer really tough and they are no longer cordial and they no longer live off the land and they no longer have the qualities that he likes and then he has to start the cycle.

Again, would it be safe to say that he has some sort of concern about demagoguery and power differentials? I mean Paul Freeman, absolutely, so I mean one of the strangest things about Dune is that at the end of the first novel Think, oh, this guy Paul seems lovely, what a great hero and then in the second novel, he becomes Hitler and Frank Herbert said, Yeah, I just wanted to show you how quickly you know you can like a politician and they can become. in a total tyrant like jfk that's what we keep mentioning um but uh part of that what's interesting is that for someone who is deeply concerned about tyranny and demagoguery and power and power and balances the one thing you can never imagine is liberal democracy, right?

It's never, ever just an inclusive welfare state where everyone gets along and I think part of that is that if you look at the federal government from an equity perspective, there's not a lot of enthusiasm or progress toward successful participation in internal politics. a liberal framework and a welfare state like you know indigenous people were like minority citizens, then yeah, Dune keeps going through all the political alternatives except one where people just vote for representatives, that's the one you'll never be able to OK, it sounds horrible. just a truly dystopian future, um, we had another specific comment about, specifically, you know, you would mention that you know Herbert is modeling this largely off of the trillions of earths that it's written in large, uh, but obviously a lot of people makes the connections to the Middle East and spice oil, yeah, um, like the kind of fuel that runs the universe.

We have a comment that, uh, Herbert includes those references to the Middle East because he draws heavily on the travel writings of Lawrence and Wilfred Infestage in the Arabian Peninsula, which is. you know, kind of like the British imperialists, uh, did you look at that angle on the whole international imperialism? Yeah, and you know again, this is the book report that got out of hand when I started. I assumed he was just reading. a lot about the Middle East and I wish I could fill the gap and it's pretty obvious that you know this spice substance that's so important is that you know oil and of course Herbert's first novel was about oil drilling. he thinks a lot about oil drilling, um, and that puts him in the oil plus the desert he's in, you know, he already has the Middle Eastern mentality and he read a lot about it, including Lawrence's seven pillars. of wisdom and you know that you canmap Paul Trady's white savior kind of story onto the Lawrence of Arabia story, and in fact, Lawrence of Arabia had just opened as an Oscar-winning film the year before Dune started appearing on Cereal, so I want to to say that that type of reference was available to many people.

What struck me in going through Herbert's archives was that I expected the Middle Eastern stuff to be deeply thought out and it just didn't seem like he, I mean, had a lot of sort of linguistic decoration and some ethnographic details, but he didn't seem to have No kind of deep interest in Middle East politics, um, and the more I read about it, the more I realized that Western Washington, uh, was the real context for a lot of this or, obviously, all of this feeds into, But I realized that Western Washington was the focus. In your opinion, well, the Middle East is a very boring place anyway, no one cares that it's not like anything else, um, let's see, uh, Does anyone want to know if you have anything else posted about further explanations or explorations of Dune and Frank Herbert for fans? of the book to read or do you have something in the works uh yeah I'm serious so you know it started out as just a magazine article for n plus one um I sent them something so I hope they do it. print something but you have your frequent shopper card it looks like we're having a little interference um but I'm also doing a larger academic article and I've talked to the editors of the washington post about a shorter version of This Time with a Movie, can you everyone make sure to be quiet?

Before continuing, thank you very much. Someone else also wanted to know if you saw parallels to Faulkner's Bear with its theme of ecological degradation and a child. learning from an old Indian who is the last of his tribe um, I hadn't particularly thought about that, but that literary trope of the young man learning from the old native that I felt, I mean, frankly, I thought was made up at the beginning. when i read it and until i located, quote, indian henry, i just assumed that, you know, maybe she ran into a guy one day or something, but i had a hard time imagining that this relationship was actually as described, um , like that, and that's because it seems like a literary cliché, um, but once I was able to complete Henry Martin's story, I did and saw how Frank Herbert had clearly been thinking about it when he was writing Soul. catcher i i started to think it was plausible but I also realized that that relationship was not just learning the customs of the forest but it was probably learning some kind of indigenous political perspective as someone who spent his formative years and says maybe in the 80s. and I babysat a lot and saw a lot of racks of middle class white women during that period that I wasn't necessarily supposed to look at.

I would be fascinated by your analysis of the tropes of romance novels of the era, which leaned heavily on the white woman kidnapped by a wild indigenous man uh theme so that's what I'm giving you for free that's another one yeah, I know this is a long history of a lot of this stuff um I'd be interested I'm listening if you have more information on the crossovers between Dune and Star Wars, which you obviously also know a very popular franchise and the various influences there, yeah, I mean it was clear at the time, so Frank Herbert went to see Star Wars. and he immediately started preparing his lawsuit um uh and wrote down a list of all the things that he had identified and some of them are pretty obvious um you know the fact that it's a dry planet where there's moisture farming in the star wars and it's pretty uh it relates pretty clearly to the kind of activities they're doing in dune to conserve water um but I think actually the most interesting thing is the differences between the two um you know dune is very difficult to film, it turns out and Star Wars, ya You know, it just writes itself at this point, and I think a lot of that has to do with the politics of them, so Dune has some really moody, weird politics and the deeper you get into the novels, the more it gets.

The Star Wars case has bright lines of morality, there are the good guys and the bad guys and you know, it's interesting what the right morality is, especially in the third movie where, um, the rebels side with the Ewoks which in um uh George Lucas. I understand that the Viet Cong were fighting against the United States. You know, it's a surprising kind of movie to make in the '80s, but still, once you're in the cinematic universe, it becomes very clear who to identify with, how to identify with them and that you're just fully rooting for them, uh, Dune never tells you that, um, the first novel is some kind of literary ambush, you're supposed to root for Paul, but then they tell you how stupid you were to support him and then.

All the subsequent novels continue to undermine that, I think, because Frank Herbert has, on the one hand, empire as a project, and on the other hand,

indigeneity

is a project and you just can't resolve the two. George Lucas doesn't seem to have any political problems in that way so it ties into a question we just received from Lauren Baker who says, referencing Legwin again, that every utopia contains a dystopia and vice versa. The dystopian elements of Dunes seem pretty obvious. Is there a utopia on the other side of some of the characters or perspectives or Herbert just couldn't make that fake work work, yes, there is talk that he was preparing everything for a final seventh novel where he was finally going to realize a political vision that he was, who endorsed, um, but we never got there, he died um and that novel was never written um yeah, no, what is it, it's not that everything is dystopian in the world he describes, it's just that everything is unstable and there's an abiding interest in the disturbing and in um, you know.

You think it's a good idea, but it turns out to be a bad idea, so you have to rethink it. He was also very influenced by Zen and his interpretation of his Zen meant that you always gave in to chance and rejected the plans you had. had put and you can see by making a kind of statement that people who can improvise get carried away and surprise themselves, so his son Brian takes over the series long after knowing the sixth novel, he try to do. revitalizes the series now, is this the same son or a different son you were talking about before?

Who was gay and had these difficult experiences with his father while he was growing up? Yeah, there's two sons, one is Bruce, who, uh, he's the one who dies um and uh the other one is Brian who just comes to feel like he's um he's the heir to him he's a literary heir he's also the financial heir uh and it ends writing a biography and writing um like 12 more Dune novels his Twitter account is The author of Dune considers himself the author of June and, you know, fans have a split among orthodox herbitarians who reject the later novels as non-canonical and people who are willing to consider them as extensions. of the universe, um, that's where you end up, but it's been interesting that a lot of the um dune franchise has been controlled by this guy who has special access because he's the son who's also the biographer, etcetera, etcetera. interesting, we actually have a couple of questions that have come up about um avatar in relation to dune, whether Spice is in any way equivalent to being in getium in avatar and do you think that Herbert would have also prepared a lawsuit against avatar with his story about a white human soldier who goes to another planet on a resource extraction conquest mission and instead goes native and leaves the righteous indigenous people in their battle against the forces against them.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's something really interesting about American culture. in the '60s there were a lot of films and you know, important novels that are in some way about the empire and that clearly have some relationship to the United States and are usually intensely critical. I mean, it's interesting that there are these popular anti-Imperial movies like Star Wars like you know, we won't make a movie like Avatar and you know we can, you know a lot of them have a kind of gentleness about having a white savior, so it's not that they are not asserting the rebels against the empire are as much as people who defect from the empire and then lead the rebellion uh leading the Ewoks leading the Fremen whatever but it is absolutely extraordinary that US pop culture is so resolutely anti-imperial and yet the foreign policy of the United States does not seem to adjust, so there is a kind of perpetual state of dissent and a fairly popular ascendancy.

I mean, if you tried to extrapolate politics from what viewers like, you'd think this is a really anti-imperialist country, and then if you were trying to extrapolate what voters want from American foreign policy, you might end up with a different conclusion. um and I mean one of the reasons I was so interested in all of these movies. This is just trying to square that circle to figure out how culture and politics relate in that way, but you're right, Cameron, it's a really anti-imperial film, I mean, that's not to say there isn't problematic politics in it, But I like it. it's clear where the animosity is um and unobtainium is just another version of oil or rubber, you know, any kind of products of colonial extractive projects, yeah, exactly, yeah, um, what do you see as Herbert's perspective on the Technology as a social force?

Yes, it's interesting. um, it does something very strange in dune that is actually repeated in star wars um, it places dune in a world where technology is basically, um, banned, uh, there's this prehistory of the universe in dune where they had a moment that was not known actually explained, where I just decided that computers were a terrible idea, so it's a space like a stage where there are no computers or robots, so they still have laser guns and atomic weapons, but no one is allowed to use them because there is some kind of mutual assured destruction.

So basically everyone is poisoning each other and attacking each other with knives and I mean, that's the technology, you know, there are still spaceships, but that's basically the technology in tune and um, and the technology was one of the ways Frank Herbert thought about this. issues of

indigeneity

and culture, he got really nervous about technology taking over the way people thought and creating some sort of inorganic life form, so Dune is a response to that in the later novels, they get to be more tolerant. of technology frank herbert actually was, he was back to the lander but he was also a tinkerer, so he would patent, you know, solar technologies and different, you know, agricultural technologies.

He described himself as part of the techno peasantry. and then, in a very strange way, he became very enthusiastic about a technology that is the personal computer and decided that this was like the weapon of libertarian liberation. If everyone had a personal computer, the government wouldn't have these mainframe computers that everyone would have. they simply have their own computer, so also at the height of Fatal fame, to what must have been the enormous frustration of his editors, he put the dune train on hold once again to write a computer user manual like If it was like how to do it? use a frank herbert computer, you can get it on ebay, that's awesome and i'm going to have to look it up now.

So can you imagine him now in the role of Twitter troll as a yes, I mean, in a way? I think Frank Herbert, I mean, I think the reason the books are coming back is because it used to be that the counterculture was leftist and the right did it right, so the right stood for, you know, the family values ​​of go to the church. not doing drugs, that kind of thing, and the left, you know, was much more tolerant of all those things that we are now in a world where there is a countercultural right where you see, I mean, you are seeing it in all kinds in ways, so I don't want to say it's that far to the right, but you know, Elon Musk is basically just trying to escape the planet, you know, and go to space in some techno-libertarian dream.

Elon Musk is a big dune fan and his partner, Grimes, his album is named after a guy like dune uh a ref had a reference to the dune books in it um you know we also have the eight incels uh radiant government uh conspiracies across the ether I mean, that's like all of that is a rejection of family values, a rejection of the establishment, a rejection of the government, and then you have kind of Odin worshipers, heavily armed and militias you know, trying to take over the government to protest, protest, protest, massive regulations, that's a world that Dune recognizes.

This is the countercultural right and that's why I think Dune is showing up in the zeitgeist, is it because it actually charts a lot of this politics of a right that rejects the establishment rather than just a leftist who does well, thank you, that has been very fascinating

daniel

uh danny, do you have any more questions or does anyone have anything else? Now you have the opportunity to put them in the chat here. Yes, you will havea couple of minutes because I have a couple of minutes to reflect on what was inspired by your comment on Twitter, Lorena, because I forgot to mention in my introduction that among Professor Imravar's many notable achievements and writings, I have a him on Twitter. on hiatus when I started following him on Twitter was kind of anticlimactic because I hit follow and then saw he was on Twitter.

Your tweet pin was like I'm on a Twitter hiatus until I finish my next book, so I've never, ever seen any tweets from you, but a colleague of mine is raving about your Twitter, your Twitter prowess, I mean, he was raving. for about 20 minutes about how great your tweets are, so I just want to give a shout out. a uh a um uh twitter twitter twitter conjugations by Professor Immerbar where can people find you on Twitter dan uh yeah, I'm not actively into this, but um d my first initial d imravar my last name no, that's my Twitter username um yeah, apologies for whatever you're going to read there make it from an author it's not that it's not dune out there right I had one oh god sorry guys go ahead just uh I forgot I couldn't ask about the authors Natives of science fiction and fantasy, uh, Daniel, I don't know.

If you have any that you particularly recommend, I know, I recommend Rebecca Roanhorse as an Indigenous author who writes Indigenous-based science fiction and fantasy and is very popular right now. She has a new book called Black Sun, I think she's about to come out. she has a series called lightning trail that she's been working on for a few years and batteries if you want to let me if you want send me a private message I'm happy to work on it a little bit and get you a There's also a list of recommendations and I think one of The reasons why it's important to say this is that science fiction as a genre has really resisted a lot of voices that weren't white or male and it's a genre that emerged outside of empire and is supported along the way, so it's really Amazing to see in the last 10 years a complete Cambrian explosion of science fiction from all perspectives and I mean the genre is growing and getting funkier and weirder. and it just doesn't have the same kind of vibe that it used to have, yeah, it's been fascinating over the last few years. you said see the sad puppies word the red puppy the bunny puppies wars you know there's been this big divide in what direction sci-fi should go between something very open and inclusive and from all directions versus like it's not white guys fighting space monsters, so it's not real sci-fi, yeah right, a question occurred to me while you were being asked while answering someone else's question,

daniel

, which is too long to have been written in the chat box , so I'm going to throw it out there when you were talking about how for Herbert you know there's all these strident semi almost Middle Eastern allusions, um, but when you really dig into it, um, the record there's not much there.

True, he didn't really know much about the Middle East; he didn't seem terribly concerned about Islam. When you brought up that point, he really reminded me of something, if this isn't too tangential. Samuel Huntington um and the clash of civilizations um there. was a Middle Eastern scholar from Ireland living in London by the name Fred Halliday, I'm not sure I know his work but when the clash of civilizations came out and there was a big debate about Huntington and the book Um Halliday was the only one scholar I read who made this interesting point thought: forget what Huntington says about Islamic civilization in the Middle East.

He doesn't know anything about the Middle East. The book in which he just stole a couple of ideas from Bernard Lewis. fundamentally, uh, what you're talking about in this cosmic language is actually your own racial anxieties about America becoming a browner country and a lot of people dismissed the holiday observation as if you were, what's the point? you are talking? Huntington is an international country. kind of relationships, it deals with US foreign policy, US nominalist issues and vacations, he said mark my words, it's all about the US and about five six seven years later it came out Huntington's last book, which was titled Who Are We? and it was precisely a meditation on his race. anxieties about America becoming more Hispanic and less Anglo and he basically says the quiet part out loud, he says that we are fundamentally an Anglo-Protestant culture and um, the rise of Spanish and all this immigration is destroying our identity and even many Huntington's followers and admirers were very uncomfortable with this, since Francis Fukuyama wrote this very critical review and Huntington had been his teacher.

All these people who loved Huntington had to distance themselves from this because it was a proto-Trumpian thing, but I say everyone. I mentioned this episode about how basically the vision of the holidays was verified by Huntington's final act, so to speak, and it really reminded me of what you were saying, in a sense, for a lot of these people who have big cosmic thoughts and deal with other planets and big first order questions at the end of the day it all comes down to here at home and I don't know if you see any parallels between Huntington and Herbert in that sense, but that's what you made me think about when I made that point, yeah, and you know the way you described it in the hunts in the Huntington cases is quite negative, right, he tries to describe the world as much as he can, you know describe it as his backyard, it's the way you state the case.

You know, science fiction always gets it right, it's always extrapolating, it's always imagining, okay, let's see what I see around it, so what am I thinking, let's imagine this happening in the world at large, I don't think it's So. I think it's a really exciting feature of the genre and, to me, it's not a problem for Herbert that he was able to take so much of what was happening in Western Washington and ruin it. down to the galactic scale, you know, and you really try to work out its implications, that's an interesting way to think about a set of problems, it's an interesting way to think about a historical situation or episode, I mean, some of it doesn't It doesn't bother me at all, but it's just a reminder that yes, when science fiction authors offer you these kinds of strange, wonderful worlds, there's usually something behind it, I mean, that's not something sinister, it's just true, there is something there that they're really responding to they're not just making things up, and I was delighted to discover, as an investigator in the Herbert case, how specific some of those things really were fabulous, well, I want to thank Professor Imravar for his generosity. of time and intellect in sharing his analysis with us this afternoon.

I want to thank the Evanston Public Library for their long-standing partnership with Northwestern's Center for International and Area Studies and I want to thank Lorena Neil in particular for always providing extraordinary uh skill in her moderation of these events and I want to thank everyone who came out tonight for this fabulous discussion. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and I hope you continue to check out these events as we are forced to keep them on zoom and then finally one day when we meet at the Evanston Public Library on the corner of Orrington and Church , but I think this was a great event, a stimulating discussion and Thank you very much for sharing your ideas with us, Professor Immervar.

Yes, thank you very much for inviting me. Yes, thank you very much. Join the science fiction and fantasy book club. Thank you all. Have a great night. Good evening, Lorraine.