Tag: science fiction

1,195 words

Dune: Prophecy is a six-part, seven-hour HBO miniseries based on Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Great Schools of Dune trilogy (2012–2016). Brian Herbert is the son of Frank Herbert, the creator of Dune and the author of the first six Dune novels. After Frank Herbert’s death, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson began publishing a series of novels set in the Dune universe.

Only two of these novels, Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007), are based on Frank Herbert’s notes (for Dune 7). (more…)

1,920 words

Raw, analog interfaces and whirring computers, primitive digital readouts, clicking binary code, churning cogitators, and flashing buttons. Eerie red light transfusing a zero-gravity space, the silent cockpit of a spaceship, and the white lights of the Mother artificial intelligence mainframe room. The tortured, dying machines of the analog age. (more…)

1,114 words

Brendan Heard, Editor,
Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated
Aureus Press, Issues 1-10, 2022-2024

Voyage to the depths of space and fight a multi-headed hydra while piloting a gleaming land speeder over the snow-covered surface-tundra of a distant ice world or heroically fend off the denizens of a necromancer’s resurrections while saving the beautiful maiden resplendent in metallic-hued swimwear. The entire Western world, nay the universe, depends on the power of real science fiction infused with heroic vitalism, a prior essentialism tinged with fantasy, horror, and the primordial pan-psychism of our ancestors. (more…)

Frank Herbert. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia  Commons

438 words

Frank Herbert was born on this day in 1920 in Tacoma, Washington. Herbert is best-known as the creator of Dune, which is the most widely-read and influential science fiction novel of all time. Herbert, moreover, is an artist of the Right. As I wrote in my review of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Part 1:

Frank Herbert’s vision of the future was deeply reactionary. He depicts a world where liberal democracy failed and has been replaced by a feudal imperium. (more…)

Image courtesy of Theen Moy on Flickr.

2,475 words

If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company. — Lord Byron

There’s more to life than books, you know,
But not much more.
— Morrissey (more…)

1,990 words

Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune (1965) is a brilliant synthesis of the futurism of science fiction and the archaism of fantasy literature. Denis Villeneuve’s continuing film adaptation Dune: Part Two is now in theaters. It is a bit better than the first part, but has all the same problems, and a few new ones, so I can’t recommend it. Like the first part, it is not terrible, just mediocre: dull to my eyes, grating to my ears, trying to my patience, an insult to my intelligence, and worst of all: just another Hollywood attack on white people. (more…)

1,806 words

It’s always nice when the stars align for a particular film, even when the planets and everything else in the sky do not, and the stars in question are hard to see. Regarding the 2013 Tom Cruise science fiction film Oblivion, one telescope reveals 4D levels of Eurocentric defiance against the modern world, while another tells us that such conclusions are probably the signs of an overzealous critic. The film could also be seen as a subtle allegory for the Jewish Question — one profound enough to even provide an answer. In any event, Oblivion offers two hours of inspiring — if somewhat uneven — entertainment, which will be hard to forget once one connects all the twinkling dots in the sky, regardless if the filmmakers had put them there on purpose. (more…)

Frank Herbert. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia  Commons

2,488 words

This talk was delivered on Sunday, October 8th, at a Counter-Currents gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I want to thank everyone who helped organize the event and everyone who came out to attend. I love Texas and am frankly puzzled by its one-star rating.

It is just a coincidence that today’s gathering falls on the birthday of Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, which is the best-selling and most influential science fiction book of all time. Without Dune, there would be no Star Wars. Without Dune, there would be no Warhammer 40K. (more…)

4,030 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Harold Armstead Covington (1953-2018), to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt’s mellifluous rhetoric regarding Pearl Harbor, is a man of infamy. (more…)

2,165 words

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. (more…)

1,792 words

Equilibrium is a 2002 science fiction film that was poorly received and underviewed, largely seen as an also-ran to 1999’s The Matrix, which set the tone and style of cyberpunk thrillers to follow. Equilibrium is unjustly forgotten, a sleeper non-hit that deserves revisiting; a thoughtful and condensed statement on huge volumes of preceding dystopian literature and cinema.

Equilibrium plays to the strength of film as a medium in its ability to succinctly put salient points into character narratives that otherwise require full-length novels and academic treatises. (more…)

3,667 words

Frank Herbert’s six Dune novels fall into three pairs. Dune (1965) and Dune Messiah (1969) chart the rise and fall of Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, a man who becomes a superman and the God Emperor of the known universe. Children of Dune (1976) and God Emperor of Dune (1981) narrate the rise and fall of Paul’s son, Leto II, a superman who transforms himself into a monster and rules for 3,500 years. Heretics of Dune (1984)[1] and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985)[2] are set 1,500 years after God Emperor and focus on the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood’s struggle with their evil twin, a sisterhood that calls itself the Honored Matres. (more…)

9,202 words

There is an elective affinity — a relationship of reciprocal attraction and mutual reinforcement — between a) John Locke’s argument that a child’s mind initially resembles an “empty cabinet” or a “white paper void of all characters” which can be shaped by controlling the education impressed upon the child’s mind, and b) the origins of a literature specifically written for children in the 1700s in England. (more…)