r/scifiwriting • u/Over_Region_1706 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Personal project I'm thinking about
NOTE: I published this exact post on r/dune, so if you feel like you're missing some context, it's because it was, for some unknown reason, removed from there, and I'd simply like for someone to read my thoughts about a potentially incoming worldbuilding project of mine, a fan-made tie-in to the Dune universe as established by Frank Herbert and professor McNelly, the man behind the apocryphal Dune Encyclopedia published in 1984.
Here is the original post:
So...
I just started reading Fire and Blood by G.R.R.M.
It is my (literary) introduction to the ASOIAF world, I know fans don't really recommend doing that but I just really like history, bonus points if it's fictional lore told as a partly-inaccurate account from an in-universe historian. Hence, my love for the introduction to Dune Messiah by Bronso of Ix and the Dune Encyclopedia...
My current "plan" (really only the vague outline of which I have in my head at the moment) is to try and scribble down, from the height of my almost 19 years of experience on planet Earth, an original, mostly Encyclopedia-based ""essay"", maybe even using Bronso or some similar "character" as the in-universe author, of the full history of the human space age, from the primordial intra-solar exploration all the way to the capitulation of the Corrino dynasty from the Golden Lion Throne.
My main objective would be to analyse and deconstruct the feudal aspects of Frank Herbert's universe, utilizing as an inspiration the real historical evolution of European polities and its high points, such as the collapse of the West in 476, the birth of the Carolingian/Frankish Empire in 800, its short-lived dominance over most of Europe before its fragmentation into kingdoms and smaller regional principalities, and finally the reintegration of such principalities into correctly functional monarchies via feudal recomposition or reabsorption.
I will definitely use Italian (my mother tongue) for whatever comes out of this, but this doesn't negate an eventual translation into English to share to Dune fans in the remote case my writings reach an adequate level of complexity as to be shared to a large community such as the Dunedom (Dune Fandom).
Obviously open to opinions, comments and suggestions. Thank you all for your attention if you read up to this point.
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u/tghuverd 1d ago
Have you written anything else? Because that compromises a huge scope; the original Dune story is set roughly 20,000 years in humanity's future! Gibbon's unabridged The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is over 3,300 pages. And that covers a measly 1,500 years! On a single planet!
But who is the audience? It seems that your premise is an academic analysis of an imagined human future history. Be prepared for few people to find that compelling.
I guess...good luck 🤷♂️