Dune Miniseries: The Only Good Exploration of Fundamentalism in Sci-Fi

The Dune and Children of Dune miniseries are two of the best explorations of fundamentalism in television or visual sci-fi. Of course, this is partially due to the source material: Dune and Dune Messiah, in particular, were moving accounts of the growth of a fundamentalist culture and its tragic demise. What makes the Dune miniseries so exciting is that it refuses to play with easy stereotypes but instead shows the full complexity of fundamentalist belief. Even more importantly, these miniseries show the degrading effects of hero-worship on the worshipped, as a cultic group of priests quickly gains power in the Fremen-dominated fundamentalist hierarchy. The series also explores the link between ecology and religious belief, with the desert like conditions of Arrakis leading to a harsh, no nonsense religious belief. Dune's analysis of the deleterious effects of fundamentalist belief are sufficiently broad that they are unlikely to offend Muslims, Christians, or Jews, who are themselves fundamentalists. Instead, these series cause fundamentalists to ponder both the greatness and the pitfalls of their own religious traditions.