Sunday, May 2, 2021

The Technological Golden Calf

 

I first picked up the classic scifi book Dune by Frank Herbert when I was in high school, and only at my father’s insistence.  I struggled through it, and literally in the second I finished it I went back and started it again.  Having read it once I now had enough context to read it again and understand a lot more.  I now read it again every year or so and, remarkably, I still find new thoughts stirred up even by passages I have read many times.  It is one of my TOP FIVE scifi books I’ve ever read.

Towards the end there is a scene where Stilgar, one of the protagonist Paul’s friends, mentors, and at the time of the scene I am recalling a key right-hand man, hears Paul’s commenting about rain on his birth world – a water-rich world nearly-diametric opposite the desert planet Arrakis where he now is – and repeats, almost chants, Water from the sky! with worshipful tones.  He had, noted Paul, become a creature of the Kwisatz Haderach, the prophesized messiah.

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