I am very excited to announce that my article on Frank Herbert’s Dune entitled “Epic World-Building: Names and Cultures in Dune” has been published in Names: A Journal of Onomastics!
The post-print PDF version can be viewed/downloaded for free on my research profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate.
The article looks at how names can evoke particular settings and cultures, how they helped Frank Herbert create his epic world of Dune on a scale similar to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, and how they also serve to juxtapose West and East. Examples include Bene Gesserit (Jesuit), Atreides (Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus), Leto (mother of Artemis and Apollo), Sayyadina (female religious leader), and Shai-Hulud (immortal thing).
It is part of a special issue on names in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery, so you might be interested in other articles as well (one of my favorites, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, is represented, for example). I know that I pay more attention now to authors’ choice of names in their science fiction stories, and I hope you will too!