Just The Caffeine Talking

Ecological SF

I've been re-reading Frank Herbert's Dune after seeing the stunning new film version by Denis Villeneuve, and I noticed something which I found hilarious, in my usual contrarian way.

Consider the two factions struggling for control of the desert planet Arrakis:

On one side you have the villainous Harkonnens, fortified in the spaceport city of Arrakeen, only venturing out of their bubble to gather spice in the desert — but the dreaded sandworms mean no permanent presence is possible. Their spice harvesters are flown out, operate for a few hours until the worms approach, then are lifted off back to base. Aside from a few raids on the nomadic Fremen, the Harkonnens stay put in Arrakeen and rely on supplies imported from off-world.

On the other side you have the noble Fremen, who live in the rocky desert regions, cultivating plants which can survive the climate, hunting native and imported animals, and obsessively stockpiling water with the goal of someday transforming Arrakis into a world where humans can live without protective suits, with rain and rivers and lakes.

Who are the more environmentally responsible?

At first it seems obvious. The Harkonnens are on Arrakis only to extract resources. They have lots of big noisy machines and go around being greedy and oppressing people. They make no effort to understand the planet, they just want spice. In contrast, the Fremen say noble desert-warrior stuff and are often accompanied by wooden-flute music or female vocalists singing in an unrecognizable language. Sure signs of environmental consciousness, right?

Except . . . 

The Harkonnens "live lightly" on Arrakis. They oppress every human in reach, but humans are alien to the planet. They extract spice, but it's a renewable resource created by the sandworms. The Harkonnen "footprint" is confined to one city and its environs.

The Fremen, meanwhile, are planning to terraform half the planet into a more Earthlike environment — which is explicitly stated to be deadly to native Arrakis life. They have adapted to live on Arrakis, but they plan to adapt Arrakis even more. How many species — how many thousands of species — will go extinct when half of Arrakis is covered by an alien ecosystem?

This points up an interesting historical shift in how we view the natural world. Frank Herbert was born in 1920, and grew up during the Great Depression, when giant public-works programs aimed at turning deserts into pasture or cropland. Until the 1960s or so, preserving the natural environment was specifically about preserving it for use by humans. And it is this paradigm which the Fremen embody. Arrakis is their home, and they want to make it more fertile and pleasant.

But beginning around the time Herbert's novel Dune became a best seller (and in no small part because of Dune), a new strain of environmental thought began to appear. The goal was no longer preserving the natural world for human use but preserving it for its own sake. The most extreme version is the "Voluntary Human Extinction" movement, which literally seeks to remove humans from the world altogether. 

In the space exploration realm, this idea sometimes crops up in opposition to human colonization of other worlds. I find this very hard to understand. Protecting the Amazon rainforest or the Pacific coral reefs is obviously a good thing, but what good is achieved by making sure lifeless, radiation-blasted rock remains lifeless forever?

But, amusingly the Harkonnens's colonial, resource-extractive presence on Arrakis is more in tune with this viewpoint than the efforts of the Fremen are.

All of which goes to show that if your ideology is indistinguishable from that of the bad guys, maybe you need to think about it a bit more.

A Curious Omission

Dr. Kelly and I went to see Denis Villeneuve's new version of Dune a couple of weeks ago. It was good — the director has shown himself in the past to be a skilled and faithful adapter of science fiction stories to the screen. Good acting, beautiful visuals, a good score . . . 

But no food! It's a little astonishing that a movie made by a Frenchman, set on a planet famed for its spice production, doesn't have any memorable food scenes. We see Paul and his mother eat breakfast in one scene, but not what they're eating. This production won't give Andrew Rea anything to re-create for a Binging With Babish video.

It's particularly disappointing to me because it means the film leaves out one of my favorite scenes from the book: the banquet in Arrakeen. I know why the scene was cut — it's talky, it's full of minor characters who don't play much part in the bigger story, and it's part of a sub-plot the director decided to drop from the screenplay.

Still, it's a pity because we miss the only dishes actually named in the book: langues de lapin de garenne, roast desert hare in sauce cepeda, aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, and "a true pot-au-oie." Translations: lapin de garenne is simply rabbit (odd to have both rabbit and desert hare in the same meal); sauce cepeda sounds like a mushroom sauce but I can't find a reference to it outside of the novel, aplomage may be an extraterrestrial creature — likely from a planet orbiting Sirius — the word to me looks like a kind of featherless bird; chukka is another fictional food; and a pot-au-oie would be potted goose (probably some kind of confit). The rabbit tongues are a particularly decadent-sounding dish, reminiscent of the Roman fondness for parrot tongues in garum. To me, the meal comes across as unpleasantly rich — suitable for a winter feast in a cold climate, but far too heavy for a hot desert setting.

Either Mr. Herbert was trying to convey that the dinner was a display by the Duke, with costly imported food that will impress the rubes; or he was showing that the Atreides have just come from a very different world and their preferred foods are out of place; or he just made up some cool-sounding dishes. My money's on the last option. 

Were I to write that scene, I'd have done things a little differently. For one thing, this is a society in which the nobility are paranoid about poison, which suggests the entrees should all be big common-pot dishes: soups, stews, maybe big baked pasta or rice dishes. Cactus dishes seem appropriate, as would dates. Make a big rabbit pie as the first course, followed by cactus soup, game birds with dates served over couscous, and fresh off-world fruit to inspire awe among the desert planet inhabitants.

Now I have to go start making dinner.

 

Building A New World

My first foray into teaching worldbuilding went so well I'm doing it again — only more so. This Saturday (November 6) the Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop is offering the first of a two-part online course I'm teaching. It's called "Building the Iceberg," and is all about science fiction worldbuilding.

In session 1 we'll be looking at the role of alien beings and societies in SF, and creating a worked example. Session 2, on November 13, will delve into the physical details of planets and star systems. 

This is an especially appropriate moment to offer this course again, as right now everybody's talking about Frank Herbert's Dune and Denis Villeneuve's magnificent film adaptation. Herbert's novel is acknowledged as a masterpiece of worldbuilding, and Villeneuve's film shows how to do it in cinema.

So come look under the hood with me and let's build a world!