The world of writing

DUNE TIME

For years, it’s been considered by b some of the best in the industry to be unfilmable. Most of us would just be happy with an adaptation that was watchable.

Certain occupants of Miscellany Manors’ tinfoilclad SF Annex had hoped this year’s star-packed megabucks adaptation would finally do justice to Dune (spoiler alert: turns out it’s rather dry).

The problem stems from the source material or, more precisely, how to handle it. Frank Herbert’s pillar of SF is so densely woven with political and historical backstory that film-makers have been caught between two poles. You could take hours and hours to fill in all the minutiae, the approach preferred by Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose abandoned 1973