Now that we knelt before Irulan Corrino, jewel to be seen to believe in, true heiress to the Golden Lion Throne,

we have slightly more than a year till her appearing in Dune: Part Two, recasted as Yelena Belova…

oops, sorry, Florence Pugh.

Don’t worry, darling, beauty is still in the eyes of the beholder; and yea, still I behold thee as a starlet coming up from the scaffold.

What are, in addition to necessary fractal pareidolia of Greek drama repeating itself, two most interesting features of Dune, skillfully hidden under the open sky in the source book, while hardly decodable from the Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One?

Despite Herbert’s own statement in foreword to Heretics of Dune about spice being a metaphor for water, much more suitable is analogy between spice and oil/gas. Subsequent fifty-something years of oil market history were predicted as if in prescience trance. E.g., when Herbert was beginning work on Dune, OPEC hadn’t yet existed, but one could clearly seen it in CHOAM. Saddam Hussein in 1965 served two-years term in, ahem, prison; hardly he knew then his looming fate as Middle Eastern closest possible implementation of Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV Corrino, sitting on spice hoards instead of oil pipelines.

And it’s nowhere near simple imperialism in Imperium, where aristocrats are not much more than landed gentry, corporate managers cosplaying princes and dukes for so long that masks had blended with faces.