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'Religious Forces In Frank Herbert's Dune Genesis'

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The year 10,191 is not all that different from life in recent times. There are religious forces making an impact upon the culture as well as strong opposing political forces both wanting to become the dominant power. The two powers are from two different planets and they both have the same goal, gain control of the spice melange. If one has control over the spice, then one also has control over the economy. Even though these two powers are huge, they still have one person above them called the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. In Dune, Frank Herbert creates a metaphor for the late twentieth to early-twenty-first-century United States society with the blending and balancing of political and economic forces with religious, cultural, and ecological …show more content…

In an article that Herbert wrote in Omni Magazine titled “Dune Genesis”, he discusses background information he used while writing the novel. Herbert wanted to create a piece that would embody the Messianic upheavals that periodically overtake the world. Within the novel, he would include demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, and the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders. The reasoning for this was that superheroes upset the power balance and structure and that those erroneous mortals would eventually replace them. Herbert also included analogs of modern day situations within the novel. Such examples would include scarcity of water in the novel and oil in real world and CHOAM and OPEC. Herbert visited Florence, Oregon to write an article about a USDA project to control coastal sands and dunes, hence the title of the novel. Herbert wrote in “Dune Genesis” about how the Florence project sparked an interest on how we impose ourselves on our planet. A central theme for Dune was ecology, but also different types of ecology: environmental, social, political, economic, and language. Herbert used imagery, conflicts, things that start one way and end quite differently, myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our familiar ancestry, products of our technological evolution, our human desires, and our human fears to create the allegory of

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