Our friends over at Sindbad Sci-Fi are co-organizing an event around Frank Herbert’s Dune this weekend. If you are in London be sure to check it out. Here is the official info from their site:

Spicing Up Sci-Fi: The Dunes Strike Back

2 pm | Saturday 28 April 2018

British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB

Award-winning journalist and commentator, Faisal Al Yafai, will chair a stellar panel of creative visionaries, equipped with an ecological focus, who will showcase their parallel worlds and alternate futures in film and SF literature. From exhilarating cosmic conquests and intergalactic rescue missions to speculating on the environmental crisis of civilisation and survival beyond post-oil futures.

Curated by Sindbad Sci-Fi, the event is being staged in partnership with MFest, the UK’s inaugural annual arts festival of Muslim cultures and ideas.

Featuring:

• Nafeez Ahmed, a best-selling British investigative reporter, international security analyst and author of Zero Point, a political science-fiction thriller featuring mass riots, blackouts, financial meltdown and a new oil war in Iraq to keep the world economy afloat.
• Soren Lind, scriptwriter and co-director, will present a UK debut of the plot for In Vitro, a forthcoming CGI post-apocalyptic dystopia set in Bethlehem, co-directed with Palestinian filmmaker and artist Larissa Sansour.
• Beaming up to join the panel from the United Arab Emirates is Noura Al-Noman, acclaimed author of the Ajwan space saga – a Young Adult book series causing a sensation in the Arabic speaking world.
• Panel luminaries also include Naomi Foyle, author of The Gaia Chronicles, an eco-science fantasy quartet set in a post-fossil fuel Mesopotamia.
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The panel will highlight the themes raised in Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi epic novel, as a springboard to explore the sociological impacts of today’s real pressing ecological issues. Dune, loaded with Islamic etymology, centres on a power struggle to control ‘the spice’ – an enduring ecological metaphor that still resonates today.

The event promises to stage a hot discussion that will attract a rich cross-section of the good and the great of sci-fi fandom, newbies, Arabists, environmental activists, writers, artists, curious minds and more. I do hope you can join us!

Tickets £5 | Concessions £3

Book via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/spicing-up-sci-fi-the-dunes-strike-back-tickets-43553180736