The Ecoprophetism of Frank Herbert’s Dune

The article is an attempt to read Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune from the perspective of ecocriticism. The starting point for discussing the desert planet Arrakis and its specific waterless ecosystem created by the author on the level of the ecological fiction is to seek ecomimetic analogies to the Anthropocenic condition of the mid-twentieth century Earth. Dune as an ecoprophetic witness was hugely inspired by Herbert’s ecological and anthropological observations concerned with the native societies well adapted to lead a life in the desert; it projects also the potential future scenarios of a world deprived of water. The speculative character of Herbert’s Dune shows how thinking about the end of the Anthropocene stimulates the anthropological imagination, which instead of giving us a vision of planetary omnicide, may be helpful in projecting non-apocalyptic scenarios of a new beginning.

Article Title	Type	Size
Porownania 31 13 SMYKOWSKI	[pdf]	[257 KB]