Dune and Philosophy
Edited by Kevin S. Decker
The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series
To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, at williamirwin@kings.edu
The Dune series of books is often compared to The Lord of the Rings for its scope, depth, and wide influence on speculative fiction. Works focusing on any of the six Dune books by Frank Herbert and thefilm projects by Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch are sought. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium. Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader.
Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:
- A society structured by spice: addiction or life enhancement?
- From Dune to Arrakis to Rakis: the radical ecology of complex living systems.
- The eternal Duncan Idaho: gholas and personal identity.
- Free land, Fremen: moral justification of resistance against tyranny.
- “A spiritual melting pot”: reasons for religious inclusivism and exclusivism.
- Decline and fall: the history of philosophy and the end of empire.
- The Paul Stamets connection: what is reality on psilocybin?
- “Fear is the mind-killer”: is emotional control ethically virtuous?
- The Golden Path and the Bene Gesserit: prophecy and power.
- The latest Kwisatz Haderach: the ethics of selective breeding and autonomy.
- Does House Harkonnen give us a clue to the nature of evil?
- Escaping enframing: Herbert’s evasion of technology in his soft science fiction.
- The M.C. Escher connection: recurrent themes that turn into paradox.
- The fugue and the Christ-figure: Paul Atreides as an undermined anti-hero.
- A Thousand Sand Plateaus: Children of Dune and the Deleuze-Guattari connection.
This book is scheduled to be published in conjunction with the projected Dune movie sequel in fall 2022
Submission Guidelines:
1. Submission deadline for abstracts (350-500 words) and CVs: June 1, 2021.
2. Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: September 7, 2021. Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to: kdecker@ewu.edu
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In