Swim in Strange Waters
(In reply to Frank Herbert’s Dune)
The thing about sand is,
Well, it’s a rock,
And powdered stone is still a block –
And once you’re twenty metres down,
It’s just a ton of golden brown.
Devoid of oxygen and food,
Where only microbes get to brood,
So very small, and slow, and still –
They cannot swim, they have to drill.
There are no giant worms down there
The size of whales,
Alas, it’s true.
I guess I shouldn’t really care,
To judge by sales –
And yet, I do.
I want to feel my outlook change,
But don’t seduce me
Out-of-hand.
I want my aliens so strange –
But not as loose
As shifting sand.
The thing about deserts
Is that they are dry –
And empty beneath the pitiless sky.
And nobody can risk a tear,
Just burrow through their stony fear.
So tyrants trek across the myth,
Where nomads form a monolith –
Yet carbon, oxygen, and rain,
Still need to cycle round again.
I want to feel I’m getting smarter,
As I read,
Each future tale –
But once-more logic is a martyr
To our need
For epic scale.
The science doesn’t always fly –
It’s often fraught,
And limply bland.
I guess not all of hard sci-fi
Is solid thought,
But soft as sand.
