The new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction hit novel Dune looms ever closer. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s hyped film is due to hit screens next month. Anxious about attracting cinema audiences, the film’s distributor is desperately trying to pitch it as Marvel-esque, while the novel’s legions of fans are waging a spiritual struggle online to defend the franchise’s “high political art” credentials.

Dune is a psychedelic, epic, and immersive exploration of power struggles and social control. It’s also often ham-fisted and politically hazy. It’s not too hard to see how the novel became wildly popular through word of mouth in the mid-1960s. It borrows madly from almost every major religion, with an obsessive emphasis on mystical, transcendental inner experience.

Its plot centers around vicious imperial struggles for market share and violent liberation struggles. For Dune’s original counterculture adherents — many simultaneously taking wild new drugs, romanticizing Algerian and Vietnamese independence movements, and reading accessible new translations of the Upanishads and Dao de Jing — it must have seemed wonderfully prescient.