Vice's science-based Motherboard vertical is turning its attention to the DUNE-iverse. Motherboard Does Dune. For the last week, the staff has been hosting a weekly Twitch stream focusing on science topics related to the franchise. Motherboard staffers Edward Ongweso Jr., Gita Jackson, Jason Koebler, Brian Merchant, and Tim Marchman spoke with experts like Mikki Kendall about issues ranging from economics to ecology to eugenics to psychedelic spirituality.
In a series of conversations with fans, experts, and tech and science fiction writers, which will be aired on our new Twitch channel, we're going to get to the guts of Dune, and take a good hard look at one of our core but still stubbornly obscured science fictional mythologies.
We're going to look at how Dune reflected and accelerated the counterculture's interest in psychedelics, drugs, and mysticism, and its controversial treatment of race and foregrounding of eugenics. We'll dive into Dune's parables about oil scarcity and threats to planetary ecology, its treatment of colonialism and geopolitics, its questionable appropriations of religion. We'll talk about how while Dune may not ever have had a good movie adaptation, it launched an entire genre of video games that endures to this day. Dune is a weird beast.
When we're through, we'll understand a little better the future that Dunepredicted, the ways in which we are still living in that future, and why, for better and worse, its DNA, its spice, is everywhere we look.
You can listen to the audio from the three episodes (so far) via Motherboard's Cyber podcast stream.
