> The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC. I didn't realize that was the official line. I always thought spice was supposed

> The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC. I didn't realize that was the official line. I always thought spice was supposed to be a metaphor for oil rather than water. Especially since spice was only found on a single desert planet but the heroes came from a world covered with water. If water was supposed to represent oil and the heroes had any sense of basic economics, they would have just shipped tonnes of water from their homeworld. Or have gotten water from stellar ice or hydrogen. One of the positive pro-technologies messages from the Dune series is that the spice monopoly is broken once synthetic spice is created. I viewed this as an optimistic future where synthetic carbon-negative hydrocarbons (or solar, wind, fusion, etc) would replace our dependency on oil pulled from the ground.