Hard Places Breed Hard People

Cover art by Arik Roper

Seven C-Realm listeners join KMO on a conference call for a discussion of the themes of Dune, the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. They carry on the discussion from the previous episode about gender inequality among the various inhabitants of the far-future galactic Imperium whcih is the setting for the novel. Nobody in the Imperium pretends to uphold equality as a universal value, but is that worse than life in a culture that professes to value everyone equally but clearly doesn't? Dune depicts a pan-galactic feudal civilization governed by an indispensable corporate monopoly. Might corporate feudalism await our own civilization in the not-too-distant future?