Remember the rumors about a new Dune movie last fall? I wasn't convinced, but as I said at the time, "I don't work the film beat, so don't take my word for anything." And lo, Paramount went ahead and greenlit the project, with Peter Berg attached as director and co-producer with Richard Rubenstein, who produced the two Sci-Fi Channel miniseries based on the novels by Frank Herbert. As Variety notes, "The filmmakers consider its theme of finite ecological resources particularly timely."

Science fiction blog io9 picks up on another resonant theme: "If you want to read Dune as an allegory about the Middle East (and you should)," says Annalee Newitz, "the heroes are the guys who live in caves and bomb the shit out of the developed-world imperialists who've come to suck up their spice." It's radical environentalism meets Jihad vs. McWorld: Who knew? (Well, just about everyone who's read the books, really.)

Oh, yeah: The headline? It's a Dune reference—the same sort of fanboy impulse that led me to track down the cover art from the paperback edition I read when I discovered the series roughly 25 years ago.