Denis Villeneuve’s eagerly awaited remake of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune features a host of barons, dukes, and princes living under a Galactic Emperor.
In his dystopia, Herbert depicts a highly stratified society of competing guilds, noble houses, human computer schools (‘Mentats’) and religious cults, with a Padishah Emperor playing them off against each other to retain his place at the top of the heap.
Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) the son of a ruined Ducal house rises to become a Madhi-like figure on the planet of Dune, the only source of ‘Spice,’ a substance that both enables faster-than-light space travel and prolongs human life. Thus an intergalactic battle over natural resources ensur
The new Apple TV+ series Foundation (based on the Asimov trilogy) also features a galaxy spanning empire.
The interstellar aristocracy is a familiar trope in sci-fi movies – witness George Lucas’s Star Wars, with the evil emperor Palpatine. Lucas has been widely criticised for his invention of ‘Midichlorians,’ a fictional master race.
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