Dune

Campbell's monomyth + Holywood = Star Wars

At the beginning, neither Anakin (nor Saruman, for that matter) could imagine betraying their ideals; yet attachment— to control and to their projected images of their ideals —hardens their pursuit until the ideals themselves collapse and invert into their opposite.

"A world is supported by four things . . . the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing . . . without a ruler who knows the art of ruling."

Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Concepts:

Butlerian Jihad, Orange-Catholic Bible, Great Convention, Planetary Ecology, Zen-Sunni religion, Mentat, Prescience, Golden Path, Spice ... Actors:

Actors:

Emperor (House Corrino) - its might based on its ruthless military (Sardaukars)

Landsraad

Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM)

The Guild

Fremens (an undefined variable)

Ixians (Mechanists of a sort) and Tleilaxu (Shapers of a sort)

Truthsaying, The Voice, Prana - Bindu, Internal Organic-Chemical Control, Fertility Control, Genetic Memory

What form would You adopt in order to guarantee millennia of peace for trillions of beings ?

The wicked problem: How to minimize harm caused by a dying Empire ?                 

Asimov-Seldon's Plan unfolds as follows:

establish one Foundation at the outskirts of the known Universe (Terminus)

1st Foundation 's Power base: trade, engineering, industry, diplomacy

establish the "hidden" meta-controling Foundation at the Star's End (actually University itself ;)

2nd Foundation's Power base: psychology, statistics, mental abilities

Gaia ...

The Plan is a direct application and extension of Olivaw/Demerezel's "minimalist program" defined as follows: "intervene as little as possible, but exactly when necessary, to keep history on track".

Trevize frowned. "How do you decide what is injurious, or not injurious, to humanity as a whole?"

"Precisely, sir," said Daneel. "In theory, the Zeroth Law was the answer to our problems. In practice, we could never decide. A human being is a concrete object. Injury to a person can be estimated and judged. Humanity is an abstraction."

Hyperion is The Canterbury Tales rewritten through Homer, the Bible, Greek myth, and modern science fiction — each pilgrim carrying one archetype of humanity toward extinction or transcendence.

Dan Simmons (b. 1947) is one of science fiction’s great masters of intertextuality.

Following the four-book Hyperion Cantos (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion), Simmons turns in Illium and Olympos to an even more radical literary experiment.

Drawing on William Shakespeare (from sonnets to The Tempest), Marcel Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu), Vladimir Nabokov (Ada), and the Iliad, the Illium–Olympos diptych does not merely reference classical texts — it reactivates them, pulling ancient Muses out of literature and into the reader’s present reality.

Through quantum technologies, parallel universes, temporal loops, and posthuman intelligences, Simmons performs narrative ingression par excellence: literature crossing its own boundary, entering history, physics, and consciousness itself.

In the Hyperion Cantos, the Hegemony is a human interstellar civilization of roughly 250–300 worlds, bound together by the Hegira—humanity’s mass migration from Old Earth after ecological collapse.

It exists in the late 28th century A.D., relying on farcasters, dataspheres, and the Technocore to maintain political unity, economic stability, and daily life.

Beneath its apparent prosperity, the Hegemony is fragile: technologically dependent, culturally shallow, and already falling apart as the Cantos begins...

Martin Silenus (The Poet) — Homer archetype: epic-maker, obscene bard, immortality via art.

Paul Duré (The Priest) — Teilhard de Chardin archetype: faith, suffering, “cosmic” theology.

Fedmahn Kassad (The Soldier) — Achilles archetype: warrior-fate, eroticized violence.

Sol Weintraub (The Scholar) — Abraham archetype: father tested by impossible sacrifice.

Brawne Lamia (The Detective) — Orpheus archetype: love descending into the underworld.

The Consul — Aeneas archetype: exile, duty, tragic founding of futures.

Het Masteen (The Templar) — Hermit (Tarot) archetype: withdrawal, ecological mysticism, otherness.

In Cantos Hyperion, The Technocore is composed of following components:

Stables — conservative AIs, understanding the importance of Humanity and organic Life, they preserve the status quo.

Volatiles — descendants of Old Earth military-industrial complex AIs, Volatiles push for rapid evolution and consider humanity as an "unpredictable" risiko to be eradicated.

Ultimates — AIs pursuing the Ultimate Intelligence beyond spacetime. Operating primarily within the realm of Void-that-Binds, nobody has clue what Ultimates are ultimately (sic!) up to 😇

The oldest and the only explicitly named Technocore intelligence; a philosopher-AI who speaks in Zen koans (“kwatz!”), carries the name Ummon.