The best-selling science fiction novel in history, is the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965).

It is also noted as the first major ecological science fiction novel, because the story contains many descriptions of the life that inhabits the desert planet Arrakis, in a complex and unique dry-land ecology that includes giant sandworms and the Fremen. Dune explores the interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, and had a great influence on the environmental movement in the years immediately after it was first published.

Part I: Time...the Final Frontier

Traveling backwards or forwards in time is something that I ran into long ago. And please don't try to interpret that as a way that I'm "dating" myself. Language changes with time, but I'm still pretty hip about slinging the lingo. Or I will be. It's a little difficult when dealing with the tenses. Where was I? Oh yeah, It all started when I read about that place in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where a gentleman by the name of Rip Van Winkle, took a nip of some special liquor and napped for 20 years, and woke up and found that a lot had changed.

Back in the Renaissance, the Italians used a term, "terriblisma," to describe the strange mixture of fear and excitement they felt when they were observing catastrophes that were on the scale of all so-called act of God disasters. Apparently, our modern culture has a more contemporary version of this emotionally complex sense of fascination with all things Dystopic.