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Perhaps the most relevant layer right now is environmentalism.
Yes. Frank Herbert has read it all. He once told me that he couldn’t read a page in an encyclopedia without reading the opposite page. One of the things he noticed was that there was something in history that he called hydraulic despotism. And that meant that the party – the group that controlled water in Mesopotamia, say – would control the environment. So he started to think about it and he started to think about finite resources, and he focused on the water. So if water was your finite resource, well, let’s make it a desert. He was thinking far ahead. The Whole Earth Catalog, which was… I don’t mean it was a hippie post. I mean, I went to school in Berkeley so I don’t mean to sound pejorative. But the Whole Earth Catalog love Dune. He spoke on the first Earth Day in April 1970 in Philadelphia. He said, “I don’t want to have to say to my grandchildren, ‘There is no more Earth for you. We used everything. ‘ It surprises people to know that he was a Republican. He was very complex.
Did you know your dad was a big deal when you were a kid?
I didn’t get along very well with my father until I was twenty. But I remember one day I was hitchhiking all the way to Carmel or Big Sur, and I was sitting in the back of this Volkswagen. These long haired kids came looking for me, we just started talking and they said, “Well, what does your dad do for a living? I said, “Well, he’s a journalist, he’s a journalist for the San Francisco Examiner. Oh, and he writes, he writes a little too. So they said, “Well, what did he write?” I said, “The Dragon in the Sea and Dune. “And literally they got the car off the road and they looked at me and they said:”Dune?! “I had no idea. I was 19. I had no idea it was a great book.
As a person from the Bay Area, do you see yourself too Dune ‘s influence on technology?
When I was growing up in the 50s, we didn’t have a television, [my father] I didn’t want that. So he extrapolated, like us, to science fiction. So what if … what if … what if … what if the computers run everything and they enslave us and then we have to break free? He made it all up, of course, before Terminator and all that. He was far-sighted, you know; he could see into the future, just like some of his characters.
Russian hackers who attacked Ukraine a few years ago, they made coded references to Dune in their malware. This is how they got the name Sandworm. Did you know ?
No, but it doesn’t surprise me that it’s so widespread. I wish they weren’t using Dune names for that sort of thing, however.
Yes. Designers end up losing control of their designs, right? You can’t always help your fans with your ideas once they’re in the world.
Yes.
Have you ever thought about Dune‘s influence on something like Burning Man? It is both about going to the desert to take drugs and find each other.
We live in what Dad called a “light switch company”. He liked to think about what would happen if you couldn’t access all of this technology. When he was a professor at the University of Washington, he taught a course called Utopia Dystopia. He loved to take his students to the woods and camp there with them and make them live in the woods like he did when he was a kid. He would teach them to live off the land. You don’t bring anything in there. You are going to fish. You are going to find things that you are going to eat, pluck worms from under a log. You’re going to eat red ants, you know, things like that. So Burning Man is a similar thing in which we have to think about what it would be like if we didn’t have the things we take for granted.
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