Famed science fiction author Frank Herbert is renowned for creating Dune, the SF novel that taught people to "take science fiction seriously."
Host | Matthew S Williams
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Episode Notes
Famed science fiction author Frank Herbert is renowned for creating Dune, the SF novel that taught people to "take science fiction seriously." His thoughts on society, ecology, history, and technology - in particular, the development of AI - are still highly influential today.
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Voices of the Future: Frank Herbert | Stories From Space Podcast With Matthew S Williams
[00:00:00] The authors acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the
traditional unceded lands of the Lekwungen peoples.
Hello and welcome back to Stories from Space. I'm your host Matt Williams.
And today, I wanted to revisit a segment that I started a long time ago, but really
have sorely neglected, which I call Voices of the Future.
And in the inaugural episode of this particular segment, I talked about Arthur C.
Clarke and the inspiration that he has had on science fiction, on futurism, and on
me personally, and really how his legacy has been so very, very enduring and so
timeless. Well, today I wanted to address yet another voice of the future, and
that is Frank Herbert, or as he's known by his full name, Franklin Patrick
Herbert Jr.
The seminar American science fiction author who gave us Dune, both the novel
and the series that [00:01:00] bears that name. Now, to fans of science fiction,
Frank Herbert needs no introduction. He's considered one of the most influential
authors of all time, and his book Dune is considered one of two works of
literature that have had an enduring influence and stood the test of time for one
very highly specific reason.
Now, the other book, the other series, I should say, is the Lord of the Rings
trilogy. And to quote Arthur C. Clarke, of all people, he said that he knew of
“nothing that compared to Dune except perhaps for the Lord of the Rings.” And
this is something that literary critics very much agree upon. It's that Whereas
Lord of the Rings taught people to take fantasy seriously, Dune taught people to
take science fiction seriously.
And this was rather important, considering that both of these genres are
typically relegated to the pulp-bin, or dismissed as unserious literary genres.
[00:02:00] Famed author Philip K. Dick, who I intend to dedicate an episode to
in the future, he had said as much when he'd introduce himself to people, to
friends of friends, and tell them what he did for a living, a.k.a. “I write science
fiction.” People would ask him, “Have you ever considered writing anything
serious?”
And when you think about it, this is somewhat surprising, considering that some
of the most well respected and highly reviewed works of literature, such as
1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, The Left Hand of Darkness,The Three Body Problem, Station Eleven, The Parable of the Sower, and many
others.
The Mushroom Chronicles, and more. These are all considered classics of
western literature, and they are all science fiction. And many have gone on to be
adapted into film and miniseries that were highly acclaimed. And in fact, that's
one of the reasons why I decided to talk about Frank Herbert today.
Having [00:03:00] recently seen Dune II in theater, and because of the
controversy, but also the renewed interest that Denis Villeneuve's interpretation
or vision for the movie has had for the book itself. If there's one thing I Can't
seem to hear enough of. It's people making comments online addressing the
white savior take on these movies and how this movie perpetuates that
stereotype on the one hand and people arguing against that saying.
Anyone who came away with that interpretation from this movie obviously
never read the book, or was paying very close attention to the film. In any case,
I will be steering clear of that, for the most part here, in order to address Frank
Herbert's body of work. Dune was not only a breakout novel and extremely
influential the moment it hit the stands in 1965, but Frank Herbert [00:04:00]
also wrote five sequels, which eventually added up to the Dune sextet, or double
trilogy.
But he never quite finished it. And that too is something I want to get into. But
for me personally, the importance of the Dune franchise was exactly what I was
referring to before about taking science fiction seriously. I can recall since about
the age of 18, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create something that would
inspire people the way My favorite books inspired me, and it was something
that had been building up in me for a very long time since I was a kid.
I've always wanted to create, and I've always tried to follow in the footsteps of
the masters, so to speak. Tried to create the kinds of things that I really enjoyed.
And, of course, along the way I had to learn some very real lessons, which is to
quote Japanese poet Basho Matsuo. He [00:05:00] said, “Do not follow in the
footsteps of the masters but seek what they sought.”
And also, “You have to learn the rules in order to break the rules.” So, reading
Dune was what convinced me to try my hand at science fiction writing, because
I'd always been inspired by the classical works of science fiction. But I too
suffered from that same prejudice. Science fiction is not a serious literary genre.It was something that maybe I could do if I was looking to just create something
for fun. And it took the Elder Herbert to set me straight. And after reading All
six Dune books, just burning right through them, I began to do a lot of
homework on the genre of science fiction, to learn what the other masters had
created, and as a sort of way of coming to understand what to do and what not
to do.
And one thing that fascinated me so much about Dune, something that I keep
coming back to, was the notion of the [00:06:00] Butlerian Jihad. Now, this
really doesn't come up in the film, but they did, of course, focus very much on
the whole issue of Paul Moadib and the dangers of messianic thinking and
prophecies and the inherent danger of religion and politics.
And this is why, personally, I think the whole interpretation that this was a
white savior film is so very, very facile and completely misses the point. Frank
Herbert's classic never ever espoused the virtues of white saviors, which is
really, if you think about it, just a sugar coated version of the white man's
burden myth, or messianism of any kind.
It was, instead, a very in depth and insightful commentary on human history,
human social, political, and technical development, how these things are all
bound up [00:07:00] together, and how certain tendencies, certain patterns are
timeless and subject to repetition. But, in addition to all that, it also contains
some very interesting predictions, and it's really that that I want to talk about
today, because, in fact, Frank Herbert's predictions are what made the Dune
universe how it got to its present form in the story, in which we have a vast
empire of humanity across the entire galaxy.
The division of power comes down to a, uh, sort of tripod. Which I believe, was
said in the series, is the most unstable political arrangement of all. On the one
hand, you have the Padishah Emperor, who rules the Imperium. You have the
Landstrat, which is the House of Nobles, made up of all the great houses, or the
Feudal barons who rule individual worlds.
And then you have the Spacing Guild, which has [00:08:00] a complete
monopoly over all interstellar trade and commerce. And then you have a
number of organizations, all of which are dedicated to the realization of human
systems and really harnessing human potential. And like the many great
proscriptions and rules that are part of the Great Convention, as it's called.
All of this exists because humanity, at some point in our future, or the story's
past, roughly 11, 000 years before the story takes place, they rid themselves ofartificial intelligence, computers, and automation of any kind. And this event,
which is very, very important to the whole story, but is relegated to sort of the
deep background of the whole series, is known as the Butlerian Jihad.
Now, while Frank really didn't leave much information on what the Jihad
constituted, or why it was so named, [00:09:00] his son and co author Kevin J.
Anderson, a well known science fiction author, they have since taken up the
Dune franchise, and they've written about the butler in Jihad, and they also
wrote what they claim is the sequel, the seventh and final book.
That would have finished off the entire series based on, quote, copious notes
that Frank's estate had left to his son in his will. And this is also a source of
controversy when it comes to the Dune franchise. And again, we'll circle back
to that in a minute. As I said, Frank Herbert didn't really leave a detailed
description or a full explanation as to what this event was.
really entailed, but it is defined in Dune in the Tendencies as the crusade against
computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B. G. and
concluded in 108 B. G. Its chief [00:10:00] commandment remains in the O. C.
Bible as, Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Now,
B. G., for those who are not familiar, refers to Before Guild.
So, given that the series is taking place roughly 10, 000 years A. G., or After
Guild, echoes of B. C. and A. D. there, this essentially means that this Butlerian
Jihad happened 11, 000 years before the main story. Other tidbits are also
shared in the series, such as the god emperor of Dune, Leto II, the god emperor,
spoke of the jihad, saying that the target of the jihad was a machine attitude as
much as the machines.
Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, Our necessary
selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were
destroyed. Now, for me personally, and I know for a fact a great many fanboys,
these descriptions alluded [00:11:00] to what sounded like a Luddite rebellion.
And these did reflect what some have speculated about Frank Herbert's
thinking, his views on the interrelationship between technology and society and
social evolution, And that he may have feared that the development of machine
intelligence would have a similar effect on humanity.
We'd be programming machines to think, but they in turn would be
programming us with a machine mentality. It's also been suggested that the
name Butlerian is a reference to Samuel Butler, who is the author of Erewhon,which is a late 19th century satire on Victorian society and is considered one of
the Great works of utopian, dystopian science fiction.
And this makes a great deal of sense because in the novel, there's a section
known as the Book of the Machines, which are based on a number of articles
that he wrote, [00:12:00] in which he became the first author to write about how
machines might develop consciousness by natural selection. And one of these
letters was titled Darwin Among the Machines.
In any case, Butler wrote how in this future society, Erewhon, the population
destroyed their thinking machines in an effort to realize their quote unquote
perfect or utopian society. And of course, since the book is a satire, there is
what appears to be deliberate irony in that. Leading the reader to wonder
whether or not this was just a way of commenting on the Industrial Revolution,
which was in its second phase in full swing by the time Samuel Butler wrote
this book, and not a recommendation or something that the author considered to
be a good thing or a step in the right direction.
In any case, the interpretation of the Butlerian Jihad as being some sort of
Luddite rebellion or [00:13:00] puritanical revolt, this is consistent with another
tidbit, in my opinion, that Frank Herbert gave in the third Dune book, Children
of Dune. There's a specific section where the character Duncan Idaho is
reflecting on the state of warfare in the Dune universe around the time that the
story's taking place, and he was reminiscing about how three main factors had
happened.
Basically made warfare in the Dune universe what it was, which was to say it
was very medieval style. And these three factors, they included the development
of shields, which made lasguns and energy weapons limited in use, the Great
Convention and its ban on the use of atomics, and third, and perhaps most
importantly, certainly for my purposes here, was the dynastic nature of the
Imperium, its feudal social structure, which was the direct [00:14:00] result of
the Jihad.
And the way he put it, planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a
large technical class. But the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a
damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Wailaxu, and a few scattered outer
planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet
vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium.
The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large
technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into otherpursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched, and the Empire remained
safely feudalist. Naturally, since that was the best social forum for spreading
over widely dispersed wild frontiers, new planets.
When reading this for the first or possibly second time, I've read the series about
three times now, it occurred to me that this represented Frank Herbert's own
social commentary on the Industrial Revolution [00:15:00] and modern society,
because this is indeed what happened. This is indeed how historians recognize
the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
It led to a complete overhaul of society Not only did machine production
introduce the whole concept of automation, but extended far beyond that. Not
only were factories replacing cottage industries and more traditional means of
production, but a new managerial class arose and the nature of work became
that of workers, managers, specialists, rather than masters and gilded
apprentices.
The nature of time underwent a transformation where labor was now organized
by time, rather than task, and all aspects of society became rationalized. Time
was now measured based on hours, minutes, and fiscal quarters, rather than
[00:16:00] the ebb and flow of the day and the seasons. And of course, another
profound effect this had, which is something that George Orwell, I think,
brilliantly summarized in 1984, was that it also allowed for the unrestricted
creation of goods and services, yes, but also wealth.
And to quote what he said in the Goldstein Manifesto portion of 1984, he said,
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance, it was clear to
all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great
extent human inequality, had disappeared. If the machines were used
deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be
eliminated within a few generations.
And, in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic
process, by producing wealth which it was something impossible not to
distribute, the machine did raise living standards [00:17:00] of the average
human being very greatly over a period of about 50 years, at the end of the 19th
and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
And this, of course, had a profound social impact, as he goes on to say, but it
was also clear that an all around increase in wealth threatened the destruction,
indeed, in some sense, was the destruction, of a hierarchical society. In a world
in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house witha bathroom and a refrigerator and possessed a motor car or even an airplane, the
most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already
have disappeared.
If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. And this was
very much true when looking at the impact of not just the Industrial Revolution,
but the entire growth of a mercantile During the 18th and 19th centuries in
Europe, it led to many revolutions, not the least of which were the English and
French Revolution, and [00:18:00] you had the American Revolution in
between those, overseas, and these were very much led by middle class people
who wanted reform, who wanted secular governance, who wanted rights spelled
out in a charter, in a constitution.
They wanted an end to the arbitrary authority and special favors and conferred
status of feudalism and absolute monarchies. So basically they wanted rights
under the law, but they also wanted the rule of law, rather than just the arbitrary
whims of the rulers. And what Frank Herbert was portraying in the story was
the undoing of that, the reversal of that.
He seemed to predict that this machine mentality, this society based on
rationalized production and rationalized living, that it would inevitably give rise
to machines that automated the Final frontier, so to speak, of human activity,
which was thought, [00:19:00] creativity, intuition, and all this. If, at once,
machines were created that could think for us, there would be nothing left for us
to do.
We would grow complacent, perhaps weak and decadent. And this is what the
Butleran Jihad really seemed to be all about. It was about destroying these
machines because human beings were longing for a simpler life, a simpler time,
when they Performed their own labor, enjoyed the fruits of those labors, and
had a sense of certitude, or at least a sense of concrete limits in their life.
And they would be imposed by a social order, by religious rules, etc. And that
too reflected what many social scientists in the 19th century had said, that the
loss of the medieval order, this was a good thing in so many ways. Material
progress resulted from the advent of industrial production and a secular society,
[00:20:00] but at the same time it also created a sort of social chaos, because
now the old order and the sense of a place for everything and everything in its
place was lost.
And there are many who would contradict this view, who would say that this
was a completely asinine interpretation, like Aldous Huxley, the author ofBrave New World, and I happen to agree with him, but nevertheless, the fact
that this was a pretty pervasive attitude seemed to say something. The freedom
and the social change and social upheaval that came from modernization meant
that there were lots of people longing for a simpler time.
very much. And so I think Frank Herbert really captured this and he built his
future universe where people lived in a feudal state under the rule of an emperor
and the rule of a great house on every planet in the Imperium, and by very strict
rules that forbade automation and computing and thinking machines of any
kind.[00:21:00]
And throughout the series, we are given many, many hints, many distinct
impressions that. This hasn't necessarily been for the better. Not only is the
Imperium very decadent and corrupt and treacherous, thus leading to the main
story arc where Paul Moadib, his house is betrayed, his father is murdered, and
he is now in exile in the desert along with his mother, and they have to leverage
all of the Bene Gesserit teachings and the missionary Protectava and their
legends that they've instilled among the Fremen of Arrakis and all other worlds
besides, they must leverage that in order to basically get justice, get revenge, but
the consequences of that, as is explained in the story, are incredibly far reaching
and terrible and dangerous, and it's all there to illustrate The dangers of
messianic figures and [00:22:00] believing in saviors, it undermines, it
challenges the very notion that such people are needed or even desirable.
But, in addition, as the story continues, we see that Paul Medib and his
successor, his son, Leto II, who becomes the god emperor, they see that, in fact,
this all kind of served a purpose in a way. This terrible purpose, these far
reaching consequences. It's a species memory thing, where the Kwisatz
Haderach, the person who is gifted with perfect memory, who can access the
memory of all their ancestors, and who can see the future with absolute clarity
and precision, once these gifts are unlocked, they're burdened with the
knowledge that Well, as we learn, that humanity is destined for extinction, and
it is in part because of the social order it's now created, its reliance on
[00:23:00] special organizations, the development of human systems, the ban
against any and all automation in computing, and of course its reliance on
messianic figures, absolute rulers, and a single resource, the spice.
Because all of this dependency, Frank Herbert really does a magnificent job of
illustrating, all of this dependency comes down to human beings decided to rid
themselves of any kind of machine influence and a machine mentality. So what
Frank Herbert seemed to be saying was that it is perhaps inevitable that humans
will revolt against thinking machines and Basically undo all of the change thathas been taking place since the Industrial Revolution and that this will
invariably cause us to regress to our previous social state, a feudal state, in
which administration is done all by absolute rulers who are [00:24:00] given full
authority over specific pieces of territory, who answer to a centralized emperor,
and a system geared towards preserving that.
And that this in turn is what led to thousands of years of stagnation and
complacency with humanity and what ultimately the messianic figures, who are
by no means heroes in the story, but who end up taking on the burden of doing
what is an absolute must, need to force humanity out of this complacency and
find a new path.
And by the end of the series, even though Frank Herbert never really finished it,
his last book, Chapter House Dune, was released in 1985, and that was a year
before he died. So he never got to finish the series. According to his son, there
was another book coming that would have wrapped things up, and the sixth
book, Chapter House, certainly had a lot of sort of loose threads, but it felt like
the [00:25:00] story was on the verge of culminating.
The message Frank seemed to be laying down in the book, or at least part of it,
was that human beings needed to find a balance. They needed to do what was
necessary and not trust in absolutes or rules and conventions that would offer a
sense of certainty. And this included embracing technologies that violated the
Great Convention.
And this was something that was hinted at throughout the latter half of the
series, because we see, later the second, the God Emperor, he uses technologies
that are banned by the Great Convention. Things that are very much like
thinking machines, or approaching thinking machines. And he's even
encouraging the development of such machines through his own repression and
restrictions on the Empyrean that he imposes.
And one such invention is a machine that can do the job of a guild navigator. It
can see through space and [00:26:00] time. It can do all the complex, no doubt,
quantum computations that are necessary to navigate through space and time.
And this allows them to run their fold ships without a human operator at the
helm that is entirely dependent on the SPICE for their vision.
In any case, this brings me back to what I mentioned earlier, how the vision that
Frank Herbert sort of espoused and articulated, as I came to interpret it at least,
how it's really undergone a bit of a shift since Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's
son, and Kevin J. Anderson picked up the mantle and began writing prequels,sequels, interquels, as well, basically books that came before the main series in
between some of the novels and prequels.
And, uh, that's it. Of course, the aforementioned sequel, which was released in
two parts, that was allegedly [00:27:00] based on Frank Herbert's notes. Now,
the way that they wrote and released these books, it happened in a rather
methodical way. At first, they created three prequels that predated the main
series that were basically background stories of how the main characters in the
universe, how they got to be where they were.
So, basically, how did they get to their starting points for the main novels? Then
they went back further and wrote three prequels that directly addressed the
Butlerian Jihad. So, the first three prequels were known as the Houses of Dune
trilogy, and the second T. O. Three prequels was the Legends of Dune Trilogy.
Now, even as early as the Houses of Dune Trilogy, it was clear that they had
interpreted the Butlerian Jihad as a very sort of black and white scenario,
whereas Frank Herbert had talked about how the machines [00:28:00] had
Enslaved humans in a metaphorical sense that they had deprived us of our
ability to make living judgments and our sense of creativity, etc.
Brian and Kevin J. Anderson believe that the butler jihad was literally one of
humans fighting for their freedom against machine overlords that had literally
enslaved them. I use the word literal several times because, of course, they were
very glaringly clear on that, especially in the Legends of Dune trilogy.
In short, they believed that in the future, a bunch of rogue humans would
reprogram the thinking machines and their central AI to assume control of the
entire universe and the Imperium, but the AI got the upper hand and turned the
tables on them, and then was ruling over all the so called synchronized worlds
with an iron fist, [00:29:00] and that the League of Nobles, a free group of
human worlds, this is where the Great Houses came from, so all the characters
in the story were essentially predecessors of his father Leto, and House
Harkonnen, and House Korno.
And to give respect where it's due, anyone who tries to take on the mantle of
writing for an established franchise, especially one as popular as Dune, that
takes some very, very serious guts. Nevertheless, I found their whole take on it
just brutally unimaginative and completely, it felt more like fan fiction than it
did the actual Dune franchise.And, spoiler alert, The fact that they chose to end the series, which they claimed
they were writing based on Frank Herbert's original notes, the fact that they
chose to end the series with characters of their own creation from the Legends
of Dune [00:30:00] trilogy, this struck me as very disingenuous and crass,
because there was simply no way that Frank Herbert could have been planning
on concluding the series with characters that he did not create.
Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson admitted that Frank Herbert had not left
any special notes about the butler and jihad and that they were restricted to the
snippets that I've mentioned previously that are contained throughout the series
and that they had to develop story and the characters from their own
imaginations.
So the ending really didn't make sense. It also directly contradicted the last book
in the series that Frank Herbert wrote himself. Now, of course, this is just a
matter of opinion speculation, but what was particularly bothersome about this,
as far as I was concerned, was that it really seemed to misinterpret Frank
Herbert's vision, and instead played to the kind of [00:31:00] cliches and very
accessible and very commercial science fiction tropes that We become used to,
whereas Frank Herbert seemed very interested in exploring the idea of how
technology and humanity's interaction with it, how it moves the needle on
society, how it changes the way we act and think.
The prequels, sequels, interquels, they all fell back on a very, very familiar
trope of, we created machines with intelligence and that was a terrible mistake
because they turned on us and enslaved us and so of course we had to destroy
But of course, this is not meant to be a book review and the direction that the
franchise took after Frank's death is really not material here.
What is, is how Frank Herbert managed to articulate a vision and weave history
and social commentary together in his works that looked at human behavior and
human evolution over [00:32:00] very, very long stretches of time. His books
were set in a fictional universe taking place 10, 000 years after a whole new
dating system was adopted.
And so the reader really has no idea when the story is taking place relative to
where we are today. We just know that By the time the Butlerian Jihad happens
in the deep background of the story, humanity had already expanded to settle
virtually every world, every habitable world, within the galaxy. Now this is a
staple of science fiction, where setting things in a hypothetical time and place,
alternate universes, alternate histories, or in the far, far future, It allows authors
to make comparisons and critiques about today, because as I believe Imentioned in a previous episode, and to quote William Gibson on this,
[00:33:00] author of Neuromancer, all science fiction is about the time period in
which it is written.
But by setting the Dune Saga in a completely unknown time, and the way in
which the story then unfolds over the course of several thousand years, this
allowed Frank to make commentary not just on today, but human history in
general. I mean, the allegorical references to oil and our dependence upon
petroleum were really very clear, given that the spice, the single most important
resource in the known universe, upon which all aspects of civilization depend,
the fact that it is found on only one planet and happens to be a desert planet, was
very much a clear reference to U.
S. dependence upon oil from the Persian Gulf. And given that he wrote the first
installment in 1965, roughly eight years before the OPEC crisis, [00:34:00]
Frank Herbert certainly seemed rather prescient himself, and much about his
ecological commentary, the content of the books that dealt with how Arrakis is
being terraformed over time.
This was directly inspired by what he witnessed in Oregon and other places
around the world where people were fighting desertification. But of course, the
feudal setting, this was very much inspired by the Middle Ages, from both the
European standpoint, the Islamic world, and the contrast between the different
houses and different planets.
It really visibly drew on this. And for students of history who are fascinated by
the Byzantine Empire, by the Ottomans, By the rise of Islam and the Islamic
conquests, by Salah ad Din and his retaking of Jerusalem, the Crusades,
[00:35:00] the age of conquest and imperialism, and mercantile groups that had
monopolies and tremendous power like the East India Company or the Hudson's
Bay Company, and of course by countless mythologies that dealt with the
coming of a savior, the coming of a deliverer.
And the dangers posed by messianic figures and the kinds of faiths that spring
up in the wake of prophets and messiahs. There is a tremendous amount of
human history in that. It's just all these motifs and their significance, their
cultural significance. They're all there in great abundance. So, this in turn, as
well as Frank Herbert's commentary on the nature of technology and how So,
human societies both shape and are shaped by the things that they invent.
This is really what Frank Herbert's legacy and the legacy of the Dune series
come down to. This is [00:36:00] why critics essentially agreed that this was thebook that made people take science fiction seriously. And that's a bit
reductionist, of course. There are many, many works of science fiction that were
very, very serious, and the term hard science fiction is often used to describe
these.
And Dune, for the record, was not an example of hard science fiction. There
was plenty of magic technology throughout, not the least of which was FTL in
the form of folding space and so forth. But his books were definitely very
serious, and in that respect, they were in good company. But Dune,
nevertheless, sort of stands out as the focal point or the catalyst for a lot of this
type of thinking.
The belief that science fiction should be taken seriously because it has the
potential to say some very, very profound and relevant things, not just about
today, but about the [00:37:00] human condition and the human experience as
it's unfolded over the course of thousands of years of recorded history and Of
course, well beyond that, our traditions, our myths, our narratives, they predate
written language by tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, going back to
what is generally referred to as time immemorial, the beginning of human
reckoning.
And it's also the reason why I cite Frank Herbert as a major inspiration of my
own. He, like many others, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley,
Charles Strauss, Alistair Reynolds, he was able to tap into something that was
incredibly relevant in his own time and has remained so long after his death.
So, if there are any people out there who have not yet experienced the Dune
franchise, and they're somewhat on the fence about reading those [00:38:00]
books, or seeing any of the adaptations that have been made now, I recommend
that you dive on in, and that you stick with me as I explore other great writers,
intellectuals, and scholars who have Inspired countless millions, both in their
own time and long after.
As I have already addressed Arthur C. Clarke, I'm looking forward to delving
into the works of Alistair Reynolds, Charles Strauss, and other futurist scientists
and academics, who, while they were accomplished in their respective fields,
made their greatest impact through works of fiction. In the meantime, thank you
for listening.
I'm Matt Williams, and this has been Stories from Space.