Dune: Part 1 [Book/Movie Club Discussion]

Join us to discuss the *first half* of Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel *Dune* (1965), and Denis Villeneuve's film adaptation of it Dune: Part 1 (2021)! 🗓️ Date: October 10th 🕐 Time: 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM 📍Location: Faubourg Downtown, 769 Hornby Street, Vancouver

A synopsis is below. If as you read or watch, you encounter some striking lines or images and/or find yourself wrestling with some burning questions, please note them down and bring them to the discussion; and if you need help accessing either the book or the film, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

We will discuss Part 2 on November 7th, and Dune Messiah in early December in anticipation of the release of the movie adaptation of it (Dune: Part 3) on December 18th.

Synopsis: Duke Leto Atreides is granted stewardship of Arrakis, a desert world whose sole value is melange, the spice that extends life, sharpens cognition, and makes interstellar navigation possible. The appointment is a trap. The Harkonnens, who held the fief for eighty years, withdraw with the Emperor's covert backing, and the Atreides walk into a planet they cannot hold. The betrayal comes from inside the household, and Leto's son Paul and his concubine Jessica escape into the deep desert, where they fall in with the Fremen, the planet's indigenous population, who read Paul through the lens of a messianic prophecy that the Bene Gesserit sisterhood seeded generations earlier for exactly this kind of use. Jessica, a member of that sisterhood, has her own violation to answer for: ordered to bear a daughter, she bore a son, and Paul may be the culmination of a centuries-long breeding program. Around this narrative Herbert builds an unusually dense set of systems — imperial politics, ecology and water discipline, religion as an instrument of statecraft, and prescience as both power and trap. Villeneuve's adaptation renders this world with considerable visual weight while making substantial changes: it strips out Herbert's interior monologue, reworks several characters, and slows the novel's compressed opening into a deliberate procession toward catastrophe.