A Geek History of Time - Episode 120 - Dune Finished Part VI

Episode Date: August 14, 2021

I'm not here to poke holes and suspended this belief. Anyway, they see some weird shit. They decide to make a baby. Now, Muckin' Merchant. Who gives a fuck? Oh, my God, which is a trick on you, baby. You know what I'm saying? Well, you know, I really like it here. It's kind of nice. And it's not as cold as Muckin' on the floor. So, yeah, sure, I think we're gonna settle.

If I'm a peasant boy who grabs sword out of a stone. Yeah, I'm able to Open people up. You will yeah any time I hit them with it, right? Yeah, so my cleave landing will make me a cavalier I thought it was empty headed, but being trash is probably a really good group. Because cannibalism and murder, we'll go back just a little bit, build walls to keep out the rat heads. And it's a little bit of a ground tunnel. A thorough intent doesn't exist.

Some people stand up quite a bit, some people stay seeing quite a bit. So let me just... This is a geek history of time. Where we connect Nurgere to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock on a world history. Well, actually now now sixth grade history, so still world history. But history in English teacher here in Northern California. And as far as things going on, my son has now succeeded

in making it almost all the way through two days, wearing big boy underpants. Nice. He finally this evening, right before bedtime, he had an accident. There is one caveat. This is going to the potty to do number one. Right after lunch, literally on the way from our downstairs to his bedroom, he crapped his pants. So we still have a way to go all the way to go with bowel movements, but as far as urine goes, he's on track. We're very happy with that. And all it took was roughly three, three hot wheels, cars.

Oh, okay. Every time he tells us, Mommy Daddy, I gotta go potty. And then he goes potty. He gets a hot wheels car. Nice. Which was great. And it worked. Like, because, you know, given him a cookie,

and whatever kind of an prevalent, you know, offering him chocolate, and bevelin, whatever. But a toy, a toy is a motivating factor. The problem is, we've kind of created a monster because for the last couple of nights, or for the last couple of mornings, he'd wake up and say, Daddy, I gotta go potty.

Okay, we go in, he goes potty. Okay, great, you earned a car. And then five minutes later, Daddy, I gotta go potty. Like, okay, and we go in and just a little bit. He'd go to the bathroom, all right, well, there's no quantitative requirements. Okay, right, you get another car. And I was complaining about this to my wife,

I was like, he's gaming the system. And she said, no, no, if he's gaming the system, it means he's learning how to hold it. Mm-hmm. I said, okay, all right, okay, all right, all right. This once, we'll let him game the system. Cause you're actually gaming him. Yes, yes, but yeah.

So anyway, that's what I have going on. Welcome to Toddler Parenting, everybody in our audience who's not a parent. For those of you who are, who are ahead of being a curve, you're welcome for that warm fuzzy set of memories of your own kids going through this phase. Now, who are you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony.

I am a Latin and drama teacher up here in Northern California. And I will just say this, if you want to get out of having to spend your retirement on hot wheels for the next several weeks, ramp it up. So literally like find a hot ticket one, like take him to Target until here's the one, which we picked the one that you really want, and that's the milestone one. Okay. And so then it's, okay, when you've gone as many days, you get this one. Okay. But then the cool thing is like after that and then you're like, okay, now you're, you're, you know, your big boy and you got, you know, that this one, now it's going to, you know, be this many days and you just stretch it out.

Yeah. Yeah. This is why food is a motivator is so much better. But different currency for different kids, man. man. I remember very, very vividly. I will not say fondly. But I'm going to say that about most things having new children. I remember very vividly, not necessarily fondly,

although I enjoyed at the time. So yeah, that's basically it for me. I don't really have anything as monumentous as that, except that my dog, my pug Skruh, burped like a human. That was just weird. Anything else you wanna say, Skruh? Like, you didn't remember?

I mean, you just sitting there, he's just like, brrr, and I was like, am I recording a podcast with Ed? What happened? Like, so. So pardon me. Yeah. All right. So let's see.

When last we talked, I discovered that this was a meditation on power and not not a myth, not a myth. Yeah. Such was doing. And we may have uncovered why I'm attracted to very Star Wars things. Yeah, yeah, because too many people are post moral or just or just not interested in Fair enough moral judgments. I think I think using phrase like post moral

I think using phrase like post moral is more intellectual than I think Herbert deserves in regard to this. Because he has a lot of very big ideas, but I don't think he's being very, very, I'm trying to think what the... I don't think he's being overly intellectual about those ideas. I think he's talking about big things, but he's not being self-conscious about how smart he is about them. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. Saying something like post moral makes it sound like, well, you know, I'm de- The choice that I've made. It's a choice that I've made. I'm beyond all that. No, it just doesn't occur to him. Mm-hmm.

And kind of as an addendum to what we were talking about last time, I think part of that is that the level of the genre and the level of the culture of science fiction at the time. There were people like Roddenberry who was trying to make a conscious moral kind of kind of decision, you know, statement about these things. And Sirling who was like, he never saw an anvil. He didn't love dropping, you know.

Very much fits with me love dropping, you know. But I think very much fits with me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think within, within much of the rest of science fiction, within mainstream science fiction, which Herbert was kind of expanding the intellectual horizons of mainstream SF, but his mindset was coming from a place of Asimov and Heinlein and those guys, and Heinlein occasionally moralizes, but his moralizing is like, you know, it's wrong for a guy to hit a woman. Kind of, you know, very individual,

not big systemic kind of issues, are not something that those guys were looking at through a moral lens. Right, right. And I think I want to include this at Dundin because now what I want to talk about in this, our final episode talking about Dune the novel, is I want to talk about Dune's position and influence

within the genre. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is not an overstatement to say that Dune is a huge cultural touchstone. Even if, as we said back in the first episode, even if you haven't ever read the book, you get references to the spice. You get references to the quizatz, Haderok. You have heard some portion of the litany against fear. I will not fear right right the mind killer And and usually you know if you haven't read the book

That's probably all you know about you litany against fear. Yeah, you know Fierce the mind killer. It is the small death that brings total oblivion. I will face my fear I will let it pass over me and through me and with With my inner eye I will look back and see the place that is left and all that will remain as me. Okay, there's more to it. Sure, sure. And it's actually much more profound

when you read the whole thing. It's actually a really good meditation on what your fear actually is and how fear actually works. But anyway, I'm getting off the subject. That part of that fragment of this book is something that people who probably couldn't tell you that the book was written by Frank Herbert. They know that thing even if they're not clear on where it came from. And the internet, I think, has been a place where nerds who do know Dune have had this kind of playground to be able to share these in jokes that in the nature of all things mimetic, those

things have then taken on a life of their own and have yeah they've grown past their origins. Yeah they've they've they've agglomerated their own meanings and they've turned into something related to the difference that we don't even know from whence they came. Yeah nice. And like I are I are Dune Cat. Uh huh. you know, and all of the other, you know, right. The infrared Dune Cat. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Sequel of, or prequel of the UV, UV Dune Cat. Yeah. Yeah. And then that can only be stopped by the SPF.

Dune Cat. Yes. Yes. So, but so, so so doom and the novels to a lesser extent that the novels that came after it is this huge touchstone and I think part of that is because of the position it holds it held within the evolution of of the position it holds within the evolution of holds. I'm a better way to put that, the position it holds within the evolutionary record

of the genre of science fiction. Okay. So, as I said in the last episode and earlier on, it is one of the first really major, essentially mainstream science fictional works that is soft science fiction, that is dealing with sociological issues, political ideas is more focused on what the society around

the main character looks like and how the main character achieves his goals via society and via his own potential being unlocked and his own expanding consciousness, whatever. Rather than I have invented a widget, and my widget is now going to give me the power to do whatever. Right. Right. You know, he's a social superhero, not a techno superhero. It's as kind of kind of a clumsy kind of kind of analogy,

but that's the best one I can think of to describe it right now. And so it's important to note that at the same time, that Herbert was developing Dune very shortly before this, a few years before this, the foundation, the very first of the foundation novels got published by Isaac Asimov. Okay. And foundation is another book that kind of doesn't have a moral argument to make about what it's saying. Okay. So you probably wouldn't get into it.

But it is built on the idea of psycho history. And the very beginning of foundation is a bureaucrat winds up meeting up with an eminent historian who has come up with the school of thought of psychohistory. And basically, this historian says, I have developed enough computing power and I've gathered enough data. And of course, because this was written in the early 60s, that means he's got a computer

bank, the size of a high-rise building. Right. And he says, with the computing power that I have available, I am telling you today that the Intergalactic Empire we are living in right now only has another 50 years before it collapses. Okay. And here are the reasons, and he lists off these bizarre random, you know, women skirts have gotten this many centimeters below the knee. This thing over here, it's like freaking omics.

And essentially it is he has all of this data and he's looking at the larger cycles of history. And of course, everybody just pooped completely poo-pooes and whatever. And they say, okay, yes, no, you're eminent and everything and we respect you a whole lot. So here's a deal. Yes, you want this money to go continue building your experiment. Okay, great. And so he sets up this place out on the very edge of civilized space. And he knew they were going to turn him down because they always turn people down who prophesied that the empire is

going to fall apart. Right. Right. And what he's actually doing is he's building his own library of Alexandria. Okay. I was just saying it sounds like he set up for the arc to hasten the rebuilding of cycles and civilization, cycles and history and all that kind of stuff. And it's all, and it's this very important kind of groundbreaking stuff within the genre. What's funny is reading it now, it's incredibly dated because all of the scientists are men. You hear them talking in a way that very clearly they're all from the mid-Atlantic states and they're all white guys.

And so it's very clearly a product of its time. But he's expanding what it is that we're doing with the genre of science fiction. Now, Dune comes along. And what's interesting about the relationship between these two books, or these two series, is eventually in foundation, my theory is that Asimov got bored. is that Asimov got bored. And eventually a psychic, a hugely powerful psychic comes along, who is able to read people's minds, and nothing could predict him. And so this incredibly powerful psychic winds up essentially being the shadow puppet of,

you know, sets himself up as a Shadow Puppet Master, who all of a sudden, Harry Seldon is the name of the Psycho historian. All of a sudden, the folks back at Foundation listened to Harry Seldon's next film, 50 years or 100 years what it was after the last one, and Harry says, okay, so at this point you should be seeing this, this, this, this, and this this are happening and they're like, none of that's happened. Why hasn't any of the, oh god, Harry was wrong. What are we going to do? They figure out, very smart people figure out, wait a minute. There's a force acting on what's going on that Harry wasn't able to predict and that figure

within the books is referred to as the mule and dune his Herbert's response to foundation. Okay. Where he says, no, no, no, I don't, whatever, psycho history. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Yes, there's this psychic, you know, a guest doll. There is, there is the ur consciousness, you know, universal subconscious, whatever. Okay, great.

Yes. And okay, with enough computing power, you could predict all of that. But what about this guy? I want to look at this guy. What does this guy look like? And so, in a way, doing is a response to this earlier idea. And I think in many ways, what that does is more interesting. And I think both of these, well, I don't think I know, if you can just talk to anybody who has done

any kind of scholarly study of the genre, both of these works are incredibly influential, are incredibly important to the development of the genre of science fiction. And in this funny way, they kind of stand in tension with each other. I don't necessarily want to say an opposition to each other, but in tension with each other.

Because Dune, for all of everything that Herbert is saying about the mass subconscious and the zitgeist and the genetic will of humanity It's still very very very powerfully individualistic. We're still focusing on the importance of the one man the lone figure of Palmoa deep and then his son, right, you know, God Emperor, Latoa Trades Latoa the second and of God Emperor, Latoa Trades, Latoa II. And then how that shifts all of the humanities, whole arc gets shifted by these powerful figures, whereas ultimately within the foundation series,

spoiler alert, for a series of books that are 50 plus years old, eventually the mule gets found and defeated in the course of human history is put back on the quote unquote correct upward arc, you know, toward greater prosperity, greater career, mental health, whatever you want to call it. And so there's this interesting kind of dichotomy between the two of them. And anytime you see an interstellar empire in science fiction, since either one of these two works, they are borrowing on tropes that were codified by these two works in one way or another. tropes that were codified by these two works in one way or another. Right.

They might be responding to deconstructing, just running with, like, okay, no, I'm going to play with this. I'm going to steal this one and spin it in a different direction. You know, right, right up to a very recent Hugo Award-winning science fiction novels that have taken the colonialist and I'm going to say white supremacist, but only in the sense that the assumption was all of these people are going to be white people. And more modern authors have looked at them and said, no, I'm going to make a moral statement about it. And for the life of me right now, sadly, I'm completely blanking on the title and author name. But just in the last couple of years, with major

science fiction awards, there's a wonderful, and I'm gonna have to look it up and talk about it in a minute. But there's a wonderful series that makes very cogent, very pointed statements about imperialism, about colonialism, about individual rights, and about white supremacy, in which the interstellar empire is ruled by an empress who is a black woman. And one of the central issues is the armies that the conquering civilization use are humanoid drones, who you find out partway through the first book in the series, they are taken from

the populations of subjugated worlds. Their personalities are wiped away, and the personality of essentially an artificial intelligence is imprinted on them. And so the author is talking about race and is talking about colonialism and is talking about conquest and is making very pointed moral statements about all of these things. Now what is the name of this work? I've got a one you forgot.

I have to know. Yeah, because this, what when, do you know when about it was done? Four or five years ago? Oh, okay, okay. So because what you're talking about is an echo of Truce-Ibacara, the Star Wars book. Yeah.

Which came out long before that, but it was essentially you just described entenishment. You described the Poehquics and the becurens and the luex and feel free geek timers to correct me on pronunciation of those names, but you just described the entire idea of entenishment with in trussbacher, it had a much more religious flair to it. Okay, found it. Oh yeah, yeah. Found it. It is by Ann Lecky. The first novel is Ancillary Mercy. Okay.

And from Wikipedia, I'm just gonna read to this. I'm sorry, Ancillary Mercy is the last novel. Sorry, the first one is Ancillary Justice, published in 2013. Mm-hmm. The novel follows Brec, who is both the sole survivor the last novel, sorry, the first one is Ancillary Justice published in 2013. The novel follows Breck who is both the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness. Okay. So the ship isn't artificial intelligence. Right. All of the troops that are carried by that ship carry the ship's consciousness and they are wired in with one another so they act as a guest doll.

And what you find out partway through spoiler alert, which find out partway through the book is the bodies for that artificial intelligence are essentially enslaved. Right. They are conquered people who have had their humanity strip from them and have been turned into robots. They are now the vessels for us. And they are and they are commanded by Academy trained upper class officers from the Imperial power. Right. And in the Imperial culture, just as a kind of a knife in the gut to, you know, older science fiction stuff.

Sure. Within that empire, darker skin color means higher cast. Oh. As this kind of throw-we-detail that pissed so many puppies off. Like just like, why, why they got it wrong? Sure, sure. Also, the fact that it was written by a woman and like, why you gotta have just politics and science fiction?

Like, have you read, dude? Like, let's look at politics and science fiction. You read it and you're not. Yeah, he's not, he's not making moral judgments, but he's saying shit about politics. Mm-hmm. Like, Star Trek, much ever. Yeah, like, again, the whole idea of speculative fiction

is inherently political. Yeah. Yeah. Like, for fuck's sake, I mentioned William Gibson on a completely different note in our last episode, but I got to say it here. Like, read William Gibson. We talked with, with, with, uh, Theo on our, in our interview episodes with him. We did, he and I got talking about Cyberpunk.

Yeah. Like, the whole genre of Cyberpunk makes these huge statements about politics. about cyberpunk. Yeah. Like the whole genre of cyberpunk makes these huge statements about politics. Absolutely. Yeah. And economics and, you know, class warfare or class consciousness, whatever you wanna call it. Like there are so very clearly the haves and have-nots. And like Gibson himself has a great essay

where he talks about science fiction writers as the court gestures of literature that that they get away with saying things nobody else can say because you're not supposed to take them seriously because it's just science fiction right right It's that we're just you know, yeah, yeah, well that we're get a position, but at the same time well, you know don't take them too seriously. It's just science fiction. Right, right. It's that weird, getaway decision. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that weird getaway decision, but at the same time, well, you know, don't take them too seriously, it's just science fiction,

but I'll actually know what they're saying is really powerful. You know, we tell ourselves not to take it seriously, but at the same time, the gesture is also a profit. And they're not always a perfect profit. Right, right. You know, but they're showing us things about ourselves, they're bringing up things that we're not comfortable, you know, talking about.

Right, and the only way we can countenance them or tolerate them is in this context. Yeah, yeah. So these two works up to Lecky and the Anseleri series have reverberated throughout the entire genre of science fiction and Star Wars. So Dune, Desert Planet, Giant Worms, nomadic people wandering in the desert.

So we have Tatooine. Tatooine. Now, Dune doesn't have multiple sons, but you know, whatever. Oh, we tacked on another son's daughter. Yeah, so, but Desert Planet, Tuscan Raiders another sun. Yeah, yeah. So, but, but desert planet, Tuscan raiders wandering the desert, right, old mystic,

yep, living out in the desert, who leads, who leads the, the protagonist to an expansion of his consciousness and a growth beyond his original limits, Jedi's powers are basically psychic. I mean, there's not the same level of weird transhumanism there. It's like I'm telling a space opera story and I need Wugi Boogie. Right. Right. It's Wugi Boogie. Yeah.

But still, and then in one of the very first clips that we see of the planet Tatooine, there is that skeleton, the ribcage and the spinal column of the very first clips that we see of the planet Tadawin, there is that skeleton, the ribcage and the spinal column of the crate dragon along the edges of the dunes, which looks very serpentine high, how you do, and my name is Shai Hulu, I'm a sandworm. Like, you know, and then there's later on you have the tentacles from the Sarlac pit. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah.

And so just visually, obviously, the influence is there. Then we meet Jabba the Hut. Right. And he's basically a big fat worm. Yes. Yeah. With, you know, fetishes.

Yeah. A plenty. So like it's very, very clear that there are, that at the very least, the visual vocabulary imprinted on Lucas's psyche. I mean, Lucas was obviously, and people who listen to the show will know and will be typing furiously that Lucas was also influenced by by Japanese movies.

Yeah, of course he was. But also this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then from Star Wars, we get everything that's come since it that has involved desert planets and all of that visual of again,

all of that vocabulary, all of those tropes. Again, you're gonna come to Star Wars from Star Wars, you're gonna go back to Dune. The very idea of an intergalactic empire is something that I'm going to say as Movin Herbert essentially gestated it roughly the same time. Okay. Previously, we see stories that take place in space, take place on human colonies in the far future, whatever.

But there isn't the same focus on how are we going to run an overarching interstellar civilization? Right. It's more that it's an absolute thing that exists as background with some clever writing, but not really much diving into the celestial bureaucracy. Yeah, literally. Nice.

I like that. And so, anything anybody's written about, no, no, the power politics of an interstellar empire, they're going back to doing. Right. If they're talking about the massive social changes taking place and all of that, then they might be going back to foundation. And I'm sure friends of mine are gonna say, well, they're all going back to foundation.

Sure. Whatever. They're also going back to, before they get to foundation, they're going to do in first. Yeah. And I mean, I mentioned this before, but like the first movie, I love Riddick.

Yeah. So the first movie, Pitch Black, is not Tatooine. It is an industrialized world. In some ways, they crashed on a planet that had no freaking night, except for the moment where they did, hence it's called pitch black. But like they they immediately happen upon maybe not immediately, but like prospectors, you know, they've got prospectors with them. They happen upon like a science station or a prospecting station. You're not sure. It's it's not like you have moisture farmers. This is, you know, who are living on, you know, sand plantation, sand tations.

Nice. Thank you. But you have that. In the second one. Oh. Oh. God. Oh, so terrible.

Like, there were some good things in it, which is why I love the third movie the best because it took all the things I love about pitch black and the three things that I loved about the second movie and put them in the third one. But in the second one, you have this intergalactic conquering empire. You have the, what are they called, the necromancers. And you have that empire aspect of it. And then in the third one, you go back to a world of deprivation. Yeah. You know. So just yeah, like you said, there's so many things that are, I was just thinking the, what do you call it, that intergalactic empire. Yeah. The things that we've seen that have that and that one comes in to mind. Yeah. Well, yeah, of course. So, so it has this profound influence on genre since it clearly impacted Star Wars very, very heavily.

Yeah. And within, I want to talk in detail about its impact on gaming, about on role playing and war, war gaming. Sure. And all of that kind of stuff. Because the idea of the emperor of humanity and a star-spanning empire, as a setting in a role playing game, we see it like all the time. We see it, I think, more often in science fiction games, I'll stop in my head. I'm going to say we see this idea of an intergalactic civilization, intergalactic

empire. Yeah. More often in a game context than we do in just like novels because the scale of a novel is one thing. If you're going to create a role playing game or a war game, you have to have an overarching story, You have to have an overarching world. So you've got to be thinking on a more macro scale. Sure. Kind of by necessity. Sure. And so, are you at all familiar with the game Traveler? It has been brought up to me a couple times. That's about as far as it as I've gotten. I think I might have like thumbed through it,

but I might be mixing it up with something. Okay. So, Traveller is kind of the granddaddy of science fiction role playing games. Before Star Wars had an RPG, before there was Cyberpunk, before any of those. Traveller showed up. I'm trying to remember exactly what year, but it was late 70s. Okay. And Traveller was basically okay, so create yourself a character,

everybody is part of a crew on a starship. And the it was immensely open ended, like depending on how what kind of game the game master wanted to run, you could be a bunch of mercenaries, you could be free traders, you could be pirate hunters, you could be just having a survival game on an alien planet. It was all kinds of stuff. Sure. Any number of things to do. Well as time went on, there was more and more detail kind of built out about, okay, if you're going to play in the setting that we're kind of using as our own background, here's what that setting looks like. And there was an intergalactic empire. And that intergalactic empire looked in very many ways a lot like Dune. There was an emperor,

there was an imperial feudal system with imperial dukes and having territories that were referred to as marches and duchies, and all this kind of thing. Now there was, there was a really great kind of kind of schism within humanity between Vilani and Solomani. And there's this kind of backstory of some time in our prehistory, a group of humans was plucked off of Earth by ancient aliens and deposited on another planet. Okay. And on that other planet, they, that group of humans were living amongst

the ruins of a pre-human intergalactic empire that had fantastically god-level magical technology. But the problem was, so they were surrounded by all magical technology, but the problem was, so they were surrounded by all this technology, but when they messed with it as often as not, it blew up. And so they were surrounded by all this technology, and so they had this massive leg up on humans still on earth. But they became very high-bound and culturally incredibly conservative, because capping mechanism.

Yeah, don't go fucking with that unless you're doing it exactly the right way we have. Right. You know, and food preparation. This was a wonderful detail that I want to say it was Mark Miller, the original writer of the game that I hope, well, I don't know, whoever came up with it was brilliant. But on this other planet, we're from Earth. Our digestive systems are used to eating Earth, animals, and plants. On this alien planet, everything has to be processed so humans could eat it.

And so the people who learned how to cook became the upper cast. And so food preparation became this huge big deal. And so anyway, so the very first human interstellar empire was Vellani. Well, they encountered the solo money. Okay. And all of a sudden both sides were like, wait, the fuck are you? Because Earth humans, the Soleimani had had themselves, independently come up with a way to travel faster than light. And then they got a hold of Villani tech and Earth humans immediately went, we're gonna reverse engineer the shit out of this.

And we're gonna make it better. Right. And so Earth humans who didn't have the natural hide bound, whoa, whoa, whoa, conservatism in the Vlani, essentially eventually wound up running the empire. They overthrew the Vlani and the Solomani became the one in charge. And by the time of the game,

there was just this kind of back and forth kind of rivalry between Soleimani and Villani, and jokes made about Villani beer being like awful. But there was this, and there's a game explanation for this whole story being the case that I could get into, but it's quite long. Basically, it explained that there was a board game that this whole conflict was originally the backstory for. And it explained why the one who is the imperial player has to play a certain way.

Okay. Whereas the one who is the barbarian space barbarian player can do all kinds of crazy shit. Right. The the the barbarian players like I know I can't fight because if I don't do this right it's gonna blow up I gotta be you know. Okay. So anyway. Um and so traveler with its interstellar empire, was very much a response to these ideas out of dune. It was, we have this central empire. The emperor is a massively powerful figure and the player characters are so far removed from his sphere of existence

that he's essentially religious figure. Right. Right. Right. Like there's no they're not they're not ever they're going to be dealing with the bureaucrat. Yeah. At the planetary you know shipyard level. Right. Right. You know. Um and and you know. But but the the the framework in which everything operates is taken straight out of, out of dune. With some ideas also thrown in from a foundation in terms of, you know, kind of, outlook on things and how everything works.

Interestingly, traveler is contemporaneous with Star Wars. Okay. Like it might be, as it's shortly traveling, is I think shortly after. Okay. But it and the used future kind of aesthetic of Star Wars is clearly an influence on like what life is like as a player character in Traveler. Uh huh. But Traveler is is much more hard science

fiction. Traveler, you can you can play a traveler game and have it be space opera, ask, but mechanically, everything is no, no, conservation of mass is a thing conservation of energy is a thing. Okay. You know, unless unless you play as a character from a specific place, you're not gonna have psychic powers. And those psychic powers are gonna be relatively minor. You're not gonna be doing anything as flashy as the Jedi.

Mm-hmm. And so it's much more contained. Sure. So that's traveler. Okay. As, you know, running around in an interstellar empire. Now, the other one that I need to talk about, because it's me, is Warhammer 40,000. Okay.

And I think it was our episode three. Yeah. Yeah. And 40K would not look anything like it does without doing. Okay. Okay. In the universe of Warhammer 40,000, first off, it's impossibly far in the future.

Does that sound familiar? Yeah. And humanity venerates the God Emperor of humankind. Now this was not an element in the original novel, so I'm kind of fudging things a little bit, but spoiler alert, Paul's son, Lito the second, winds up becoming an even more powerful psychic

than his father and winds up becoming an even more powerful psychic than his father, and winds up essentially merging with a sandworm becomes effectively immortal and acts as the emperor of, and is the emperor of humanity for the next thousand years or more after he ascends the throne. And so he is, he is the God Emperor, the title of the novel is God Emperor of Dune. And so this idea of the Emperor as not merely the pontifix Maximus, but as not merely as the High Priest, but as the deity. Right, right, the Godhead. The Godhead himself is directly taken straight out of dude. Now, there are other new wave science fiction and fantasy elements in there as well. There's some Michael Moorecock thrown in

with the idea of the emperor of Grand Britain being this figure who's essentially shriveled husk, living in an amniotic bubble, which the emperor of mankind, of course, the more hammer 40,000 may or may not be a corpse. Yeah, I remember that. Sustained on his throne for the last 10,000 years with the sacrifice of, you know, with the 10,000 psychics a day. Right. Everything and just like in Dune,

everything is over the top. Right. Everything is beyond operatic. And everything is post moral. But in a way that, again, because 40K was being a response to that, you're as nice. Nobody is the good guy. Yeah.

You know, that's different than this is a meditation. Yes. Yeah. It's a satire. Damn it. I need more 40k fans on Facebook to remember. It started out as satire, folks. And to their credit, a great many of them do still get it.

Right. But not enough of them. So anyway, that's my pet peeve there. But so, and then the book itself wound up becoming, The book itself wound up becoming, it went mainstream. At the same time, essentially, the same time that's strange in a strange land, which we've mentioned before when we talked about Heinlein. That got picked up by the counterculture. Dune got picked up in the same way as Lord of the Rings. And so these terms and these phrases,

let me get to fear all of this kind of stuff percolated. For years and years and years, kind of in the science fiction fandom subconscious. It doesn't seem to you know, you mentioned Lord of the Rings and we've talked about Star Wars. Obviously Star Wars is the the definer or the codifier of mainstreaming a thing. Yeah, partly because it's not actually sci-fi, but to the vulgar masses it counts. And you mentioned Lord of the Rings, which is clearly fantasy, and that has mainstreamed as well. And both of which were movies.

Doom was also in movie. But what I'm noticing is that the spreading out, the percolating to the vulgar masses did not happen for Doom as it had happened for, like it is a giant in this one genre. Yeah. Whereas it's not a genre spanner. No, you're right.

So, and I wonder, I wonder why? I keep going back to the, you know, again, I'm not as sophisticated a consumer of sci-fi or fantasy as you. So could it be that the vulgar masses do need that moral component to it? Or could it be that Herbert is not doing the things in his book?

Like we never really talked about robots. No, well, because there aren't any. Right. That shall not create a machine and semblance of a human any. Right. That shall not create a machine and semblance of a human mind. Right. Is, you know, which is imagination capturing and might be the thing that bridges over.

That could be, I think, I think. Because if it's ours, you follow two robots to start the first 22 minutes of the movie. Yeah. They take you to the actual protagonist, 22 minutes later. Yeah. I counted it. It's the first 22 out of 122.

It's like you're sick of the movie. Sixth of the movie, yeah. Yeah, is devoid of your protagonist. Yeah. So, I don't know. I think it seems, it's interesting to me. It had all this influence, but into things that were still,

like the things that it directly influenced, still seem to stay within their lane. Whereas the things that people are like, oh yeah, I was looking at Kurosawa and Dune, I was looking at, like I was talking about Riddick. Yeah. It didn't, it didn't have mass crossover repeal either, but it takes Dune as one of its influences, not all of its influences. So I'm just, I'm curious what happened there. I think the issue is, um, Star Wars is easily digestible. And the Lord of the Rings movies are easily digestible.

Yes, they are. Before the movies, everybody had heard of the Lord of the Rings in kind of the same way that everybody had heard of doing. Okay. Like people knew, oh, the hobbit. Yeah, that's that story about that guy, kind of thing. Everybody had heard about doing because everybody is,

you know, one or two degrees of separation away from a hardcore fantasy science fiction nerd, who like knew everything about it. Right. Like there was, there was edge percolation into consciousness. Uh-huh. You know, people using the phrase

GROCK in the counterculture in the SISTS, Stranger and Strange Lands, kind of the same thing. Lord of the Rings had the advantage of getting a blockbuster series of movies that took what is, and I love Tolkien, you all know everybody in the audience,

you all know what a massive Tolkien fiend I am. I do have to say this, it's not an easy read. Like, so if you're a casual, it was made digestible. Yeah, if you're a casual reader, reading the Lord of the Rings is going to be an undertaking. If you're a hardcore, massive nerd book of war, then like, no, no, it's going to be catnip. But for a lot of people, it's just, it's not going to be accessible until it gets turned

into a movie. And so lots of people now know who Legolas is. Right. Right. Right. And there are whole, whole, whole, whole genie, genesis of memes built around Legolas is a pretty boy. Like, you know, himbo Legolas. Sure. You know, you know, dad, bod, gimli, whatever. Right. Right.

You know, there are like these whole branches of meme evolution built around these things because of the movie. Yeah, yeah, because it got made digestible. Dune got a movie made by David Lynch, who is a genius in his way, but is not a popcorn movie guy. his way, but is not a popcorn movie guy. True, true. And the Dune movie is Phantasmagorical and operatic and dark. It also suffers from being very identifiable

as an 80s movie. It is also very dated. Yes. It is also very dated. Yes. It is also, I mean, the Vangelisk score alone. It's like, we're done, you know. But it is also, Lynch also had shit to say. Right. You know, Lord of the Rings, like Tolkien expressly said,

I didn't set out to tell a morality tale. Right. He told one in the end, but he was telling a fairy story. It was a moral morality tale because it was a fairy story. Right. Star Wars is Buck Rogers. And so Buck Rogers has a good guy in a bad guy and that's how that works.

But it wasn't like Lucas said down and said, I'm going to say something about the duality of man. No, that, that, that, that, that, that, yeah. Well, and, and I would, yeah. So, Dune has suffered from its own self involvement. Yeah. Because, because the Lynch movie is very self-involved and very self-indulgent, all of the dialogue in the book is incredibly self-involved, self-involgent. And so I think,

I think that's more of what it is, is just it's so wrapped up in trying to save something with both those Ss being capitalized, that it just isn't popular fiction. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, because I'm thinking about Star Wars is, I mean, yes, they look like they're in the Bee Gees. But honestly, that kind of hairstyle can be attributed to a long time in space and no space barbers.

Like it really can. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, there are certain aspects of it that are like, oh, okay, everybody had really long sideburns. It's clear the 70s movie, but at the same time, it is timeless. Some of that has to do with the music too. And Lord of the Rings, the movies were made by somebody who was specifically going to be loyal to the source material and in spirit, if not in letter. Yeah. And I think both of them, therefore, were, they were John Ford movies without being John Ford movies. Oh yeah. Whereas the Dune movie, that was very clearly a David Lynch movie. So I think you're right. Yeah, you're right. So it doesn't have that vast appeal. Yeah, there's a very clear thumbprint on every aspect of both the novels DNA and there's multiple thumbprints on the

movies DNA. Yes. Yes. And yeah, so I'm really excited. This is this is where I'm going to start fanboying out I am really really excited having seen what I think are gonna be the last trailers We're gonna see before before actual release of the film. Uh-huh the new dune movie. Mm-hmm has me I am so hyped. Okay. I am so excited because I think Fingers crossed. I am so excited because I think fingers crossed. I think with the names who were involved, who were gonna be on the cast with the fact that all of the dialogue in the trailer looks like they went through the novel and said, okay, no, seriously,

write this like you can actually say it mm-hmm and and I hope That that the doon movie might manage To make the actual story of the book, something that is more widely known. I mean, it's never going to be Star Wars. It's never going to be Lord of the Rings, but it might be Game of Thrones.

Right. You know, which also, by the way, Game of Thrones, we can see some influences within the genre from... Oh, sure. ...from... Like, you know, a dynastic struggle, um, you know, the conflicts of nobility, the meditations on power. Also, I mean, it's a fantasy straight-up fantasy

is supposed to be encloaked as a planetary romance, but, you know, I don't think George R.R. Martin would have had the confidence to write an epic sweeping fantasy story like a song of ice and fire if there hadn't been Dune as one of its precursors. Okay, yeah. So that's the hill I'm gonna die on in regard to. That particular relationship, there you go.

Those of you who are Georgia or Martin fans, anybody who wants to tell Georgia or Martin on Twitter that I said this, fine. I didn't know who's on Twitter. I would actually be really happy to have him come at me because that would give me so much more clouds. Like, I cannot begin to tell you. And I would just fanboy immediately,

so it wouldn't even really be a fight crumple. Like, I... Okay. So, and I don't think I'm saying anything that controversial anyway, but, you know, there we go. Right. So, it has this remarkable position as being this cultural touchstone that has been amazingly influential and amazingly important within the evolution of the genre, but it's still

like you said, never turned into something that is broadly known. It's in the same way that other things that came after it are. It seems to me to be the bizarre version of Avatar. Okay. Avatar, until the Avengers Endgame decided to stay out longer, specifically to break the record. Yeah. Yeah. Avatar was the highest grossing film of all time ever. That means everybody went to

fucking see it. Yeah. And a lot of people went to see it multiple times and nobody really remembers it. It's thoroughly unrememberable. Yeah. Yeah. It's unremarkably. Yeah. It's thoroughly unrememberable. Oh, yeah. It's unrememberable. Visually. Yeah, it's stunning. Or gaskets. And nobody cares. Like, I mean, visually, it is amazing, but people remember Star Wars more. You know, narratively, it's kind of empty. I mean, I already saw it.

It's a himbo movie. I was gonna say, I already saw it. Dances with wolves. I already saw the last samurai. I already saw white people make the best whatever's yeah You know I already saw that and this just had some ableism thrown in on top of you know how It's a bit staggings. Yeah, but you know it but that movie was seen by everyone and has been since forgotten Yeah, this book it had the staying power of a soap bubble.

Yeah, yeah, it really did. A beautiful, fantastic soap bubble with a tremendous cast. You know, it opened our eyes to the idea that Zoe Saldana, Saldana can be on screen so long as she's not actually black, everybody will like her. Which is really weird to me because she was a fantastic Uhura. But that seems to be like she's either Gamora or she's a Navi, you know? And people like actually got a syndrome based on Avatar.

I don't know if you know about this. actually got a syndrome based on Avatar. I don't know if you know about this. People got depressed because they went and saw Avatar and were upset that this world isn't the Avatar world. And it became a depression, a type of depression. Really? Yes. And yet nobody remembers movie.

Yeah. Right? It's just not memorable. It doesn't stay. Well, it was, you know what it was. Okay. It was, it was the cinematic equivalent of a proguroch album cover. Yeah.

You know, I wish I could remember the name of the artist, but you know, sure. Literally floating islands. Mm-hmm. And, and you know, huge sweeping vistas. Yeah. You did super saturated. Yeah, you did super saturated. Super, super saturated colors,

all that kind of stuff is, yeah. Yeah, it was called Avatar Depression Syndrome, by the way. Wow. And it was, yeah, it was this whole thing back in 2010. It was nuts. And the Depression Syndrome only lasted, you know, for that long. Yeah, because nobody remembers the movie that day.

Right. So it's wild. How immensely popular it was and yet it is Teflon, right? Whereas Dune, well, I don't like sand. That's everywhere. Yeah. But I mean, Dune is is you can trace back Everything to Dune in some respect or another when it comes to this genre and yeah, so I'm

Indicently influential and Everybody remembers it, but nobody has read it. Yeah, you know, and and where is this foundation the same way. Yeah So I was I was In my late 30s before I finally read foundation. Okay. And I had, you know, all of my literary SF friends were like, you know, no, no, this is critically important. This is, you know, foundation. It's foundational.

Yeah, that literally, you know, and's foundational. It's foundational, yeah, that literally. And it just took me for a bit to read it because I felt like it was gonna be like eating my vegetables. And I think for some science fiction fans, Dune is the same way because it's been commented on in other forms by other authors doing other stuff with the tropes and it's like, well, okay, all right, I gotta go back and eat the broccoli. Kind of kind of thing.

You know, I know one of my friends just recently read it for the first time and was both very amused and I think pleasantly surprised by the fact that he could look at it and go, oh, okay, this is a planetary, this is the supplantary romance, this is a 60 space opera novel. Oh, okay, I don't know what I was afraid of. Like, you know, and by the way,

oh my God, this dialogue is clunky. Like, well, yeah, there's a lot of exposition going on here. But, you know, but, but it was, it was kind of this revelation of, oh, okay, I thought this was going to be like going back and trying to read Nietzsche directly, like, you know, you know, try to, try to, you know, call, you know, try to, and, and no, it's, it's a planetary romance. He's, he's talking about big stuff, but it, that's what it is. It's a planetary romance. He's talking about big stuff, but that's what it is.

It's a planetary romance. It's just a very important one because of when it happened and always happened since. Right. So yeah. So yeah. So there we go.

That's... That is my commentary on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on on on Dune the novel on another occasion after Multiple episodes have passed maybe after I've had probably after I've had the chance to actually see the new movie Uh-huh, we can talk about the David Lynch movie and we can talk about the the mini series version from sci sci-fi channel Which I actually think was a better adaptation of the book. Everybody says that about both that and the one for the shining. The mini series for the shining was also a better adaptation. Again, Kubrick put his thumb on it.

When you have a seminal... Oh, turr. When you have a seminal... Oh, turr. Yeah. When you have an otter. Yeah, that wrecks the transfer of media from book to movie. It seems. The one time I would say it didn't do that is Princess Bright. Yeah.

Although I would say that Rob Reiner is not really an otter either. No. He's a phenomenal director. He's directed very different movies. Yeah, I think. Yeah, but I would ask, yes, there's a certain touch that you can be like, okay, well, it's close to Rob Reiner. Yeah, movie, but he does, he bounces around between paradigms.

I think very effective. He and Ron, oh no, Ron Howard? Yes, yeah. I was gonna say Ron Williams, but that wasn't right. But he and Ron Howard both. Andy Williams. Andy Williams. Ron Howard was OP.

No, no, I'm saying Andy Griffith. Andy Griffith. Andy Williams played Potsy. Played Potsy, there you go. Yeah. Why? Yeah, Andy Williams got blamed for shooting JFK. No.

Yeah, he played the potsy. Oh, nice. Yeah. Okay. But, oddly, I'm not mad about that. No, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's because he couldn't keep his mouth shut. No. Ralph Mouth. Yeah, that one, that one. Hey. Good, good day, good day sir. So anyway, so yeah. Ron Howard.

Ron Howard. Howard, I'm not going to get his name for some reason. Okay. Which is weird, because you've talked about another author named Howard. Yeah. But Ron the Duck and and Rob Reiner.

Yeah. Yeah, they're both, they're both. Ron the Duck and And Rob Reiner Yeah, they're both they're both just good directors. Yeah, like they can take anything and make it good And I would put them I would say they have a point of view, but they subsume it to what the the Movie needs, but they still have a style. Whereas John Ford, he was a good director. You could, he's the studio director though. You know, and these guys aren't studio directors. These are known directors if you want a certain thing, you go to them.

And I think those two could easily do that switch that authors clearly cannot. Yeah, David Lynch and the other one you were talking about. Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick. Yeah. Just who discovered Dr. Livingston down by the knot. Nice.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah, it's for another episode, but just Stanley was a messed up individual. Stanley Kubrick or Henry Morton Stanley. Oh, very much so. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

You might be able to relate that to the movie Barry Linden, but I'm going to let you do that because I fucking hate that. All right. All right. At some point, I also don't hate you. So I'm not gonna say that either. So. But yeah, so, so I think, I think,

Dune suffers in the popular imagination or suffers in representation. Yes. In the popular imagination, because of the fact that it was this big important book saying these big important things. And so nobody ever looked at it as something to make a mainstream science fiction

we're gonna get people to put their butts in seats in Bipopcorn movie. The effort by Jotarowski to do it, never got off the ground, had some amazing pre-concept art developed for it. Had some wonderful, I mean, there's a whole documentary about Jotarowski's tune. Wow. A production that never went anywhere.

There was so much preparation, so much work that went into it. I wanna say HR Geeger was involved as one of the visual designers. But again, with Jotarowski, we're talking about an art house director with very specific kinds of aesthetic and cinematic kind of ideas.

And he never got anywhere with it. Lynch took it and was like, oh yeah, no, no, no. I see themes here and I can do things with this. And Lynch is Lynch, like we said. And instead of getting picked up by a studio and having a studio go to, hey, we got this young guy out of USC film school you

Do something with this right, right? You know like if they if that had happened with dude we might have gotten A movie out of it. Mm-hmm. That that would not have been what we got And it would and it would be a a, it would take up a more central position within popular culture. But as it stands, it has been this thing percolating, I love that verb for this that you use originally, percolating in the background, influencing all of these other things that have then gone on to become huge.

And for people who have read the book and who love the book and who are fans of that universe, it holds this very powerful emotional resonance that leads them to then continue circulating the memes and doing all of those things that then drive what presence it has in the rest of the popular consciousness. So now that we've gotten all the way through all of that and come staggering out of the desert, out of the desert, out of the desert, you know, out of rhythm, shuffling with our still suits awry.

What do you think, what do you take away from all of us? Oh, well, I think the last 20 minutes or so has been a large part of that. It's just that, you know, Dune very much didn't cross over genres for the reasons that we stated. And yet it influenced everything that did cross over genres for the reasons that we stated. I don't know that I have anything new to add to it. I think you've handled it quite well and taking us, taking us, taking us, to chat on a wild ride. So I, you know, I'm gonna miss teaching Latin

for that reason. Yeah. I will always be like, you know, I'll deal with past tense verbs and stuff like that. And then I'll, everyone's wild. I'll just run into one where I don't remember it. You know, I thrive. He thrived.

He throw, thrave thrab Shat and I just always say that and the So much fun yeah wake up. Yeah, or I'll do that with like a plural of any animal like is you know And cuz kids will ask me is it fish or fishes? Oh my well it depends. You have multiple species and it's fishes If it's just one type then it's fish, you know. What about deer? Well, no, that's just sheep. What? So, but yeah, no, I think you've done a fine job there and I'm glad to be done with doing, but I think... Are you as glad to be done with the doon as you were to be done with Batman? No. I think, are you as glad to be done with Dune as you were to be done with Batman?

No. No, just because I've been passive this whole time, whereas with Batman was like, okay, five episodes of me being passive, which is a lot, but it needed to happen and then five episodes of me digging into fake memory cults, murder of shit. And it was just, oh my God, it was cool. And then digging into like the war on terror.

Yeah. That was depressing as fuck. So nothing has been as heroinism. It's cruel, like, yeah. But you're welcome. So, well, now that you've done this magnum opus on Dune, I guess the only thing left to do is to discuss the knife fight scene and how it perfectly mirrors the Iquip match between Randy Orton and John Cena back in tooth. No, okay. No, okay. No, everybody. No,

no, no, no. I want, I want the truth on record here. No, no, he started saying that and he's acting like he's getting a look for me like, oh, fuck, no. No, no, the look he's getting for me is, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, what? Dude, dude, wait. There's an equit match between John Cena and Randy Orton and I just love watching the two of them go at it. They're both men and they're prime, but it's John Cena at one point. I mean, it's basically you gotta beat the guy until he says I quit, right?

Yeah. And at one point, because it's wrestling, Randy Orton gets out of pair of handcuffs and chains John Cena to the post and is beating him in the stomach with a kendo stick. Oh, shit. No, it's like retain, you know? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, but still. And you just see the

wealth showing up on it. And John Cena doesn't quit, you know, and so just like, you know, and how's he gonna get out of this one and stuff like that. And this is really cool. So I don't think it's necessarily tied to the knife fight that we see between Paul and Fadre. Fadre. But I do think it would be similar to the needle neck in your hand. No, there's a Gomsjabar. Yeah.

Yeah. So there is definitely a Gomsjabar quality too. No, I'm not going to say. I'm not going to say. But honestly, that one is much more tied to the rock versus mankind I quit match from the Royal Rumble where the rock hits him I think 12 13 times over the head with a steel chair while his hands are chained behind him. She's supposed to only have been five and the rock went crazy. Okay. Oh it's bad. Yeah but

either way that's that's all I have to add. Okay. Just nothing. So, sorry for the last minute and a half. So, whatever. Where's people? Where could people find you on the social media? I can be found, as always, at EH Blalock on the Twitter machine, I can be found at Mr. Blalock on TikTok and EH BlallayLock again on Instagram. Now where can you be found?

Oh, you can find me at the Harmony on the Twitter and the Insta. You can also find me every Tuesday night at 8.30 pm, Pacific Daylight time on twitch.tv, forward slash capital puns. So now that you've taken us through Dune, all the way through, do you have any book or movie recommendations? I do.

I do. Aren't Dune. I do. Okay. I very, very highly recommend the Ancillary series by Anne Leckie, which I mentioned as being a response to Dune, a very moral, very consciously anti-colonial anti-imperialist, feminist, anti-racist novel in response to Dune. The novels are Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy.

It's referred to as the Imperial Raj, RADCH. I've never figured out how to pronounce that properly. And it's very, very powerful. And it says things, it is, it is, as I said, it is, it is inherently and openly political. But it is also a really great adventure story and kind of part mystery novel. And so I very, very highly recommend the series. Please, please, please go out. And Lecky deserves all of the royalties

she can get for it because they're amazing books. So again, Ancillary Justice is the first one by Anne Lecky. All right. How about you? Well, there's a book by Michael Mann, MANN, he's a sociology professor at UCLA, but also has professional rights, basically, in Belfast. And he wrote a book called Fascists.

And it's a little bit old, quite honestly. I believe. So, yeah, I flipped through it earlier. I wanted to see it. Because it's, if you want to see, it was oh four, I think, but this print might be oh five. If you want to see a really good, I've got a couple really good books on the growth of fascism, all of which were written prior to 2010, which is if you look at scholars, they have been saying essentially since people started going apeshit over Obamacare, that's when they said, oh America is going nuts, y'all, like they said it as far back as that because they were looking at those responses and the way that the responses were lining up. Yeah. The rhetoric being used and the othering that was happening. But I really recommend this book

Fascists by Michael Mann. It's it's really good. It goes essentially region by region. So it's both chronological and regional, and so it gets you from Italy essentially through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Spain. So, which I really think that's valuable to take a look at, because you see where it grows up in different places with different cultures. So that's the one I would recommend. And probably next week I'll have a different book on fascism to recommend. Just because this is kind of twig my brain and there's a few books on it that are that are really good. So yeah, one of them is called the Dark Continent. And it's not about European colonialism in Africa. It's actually about

fascism in Europe. Oh wow. So yeah. But anyway, that would be my recommendation for a book. And then the only other one I would recommend would be Truce at Bacchara. After you've read your Ancillary series, read Truce at Bacchara and see if there's not an echo. And Truce at Bacchara is a Star Wars book. I don't remember the author, because I never remember authors, quite honestly, but I'm looking at it. I think it's Kathy Tiers.

No. Yeah, it's Kathy Tiers. Okay, cool. Okay. All right. Well, for a geek history of time. Oh, wait. Do they know where to find us? Oh, yeah, no. Collectively, the two of us together can be found on Twitter at Geek History Time. And our website, of course, is www.Geek History Time.com. So that's where they can find the two of us if you want to collectively excoriate us for an error, or even better, you know, praise us for bringing up something cogent and meaningful, then that's where we can be found. And please, please give us a rating, give us the five stars

we've earned, and subscribe. So next time you want to, you know, get a deep dive into the connection of wrestling to European post-war economic theory, you know where to look. So please subscribe, give us a five star rating. Coming down the aisle, the coal and steel union. Rate, subscribe, review, stitcher, Spotify, and the iTunes store. There we go. There you go.

Well, for Geekos Reef Time, I'm Debian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock, and until next time, remember, fear is the mind killer.