The Greenland Box

How a cold, sparsely populated island has become a global truth test

In Frank Herbert’s novel ‘Dune’ – with its blood-soaked canvas of a whole universe of rules-based empire, incessant lying, enthusiastic mass murder, and some very critical raw materials – there’s a famous scene featuring a box.

Herbert – as most bros reading him for life hacks fail to understand – loved irony of the savage type. That’s why the box reveals the truth about you by lying to you: Put your hand in it and you will feel it burning so hot (though it isn’t, not really) that you will scream and shrink away (and, if you are a man, you will be murdered, for your pains as it were, by a very harsh nun-witch headmistress). Because you have been found out to be merely human, which the nun-witch headmistress thinks makes you an animal. It’s complicated.

Or you happen to be a deeply flawed ‘ubermensch’ produced by thousands of years of obsessively controlled human breeding experiments plus – very Herbert that, again – some last-minute coupling mutiny.

In that case, you won’t flinch, the headmistress will let you live (though not your father), and you will move on to become a charismatic, vaguely Islamic-looking rebel leader destroying the space equivalents of a perverse, sadistic Zionist death cult (called Harkonnen) and of the American empire, too (here led by the kind of wily, ruthless emperor US President Donald Trump really would love to be, if with a dash of glitzy real estate tycoon, of course). After that happy ending, however, things will get a little out of hand.

But this is where we leave the Herbert-verse and return to our own small, single-planet but no less blood-soaked world. There, a truth box has materialized – a little like that mysterious obelisk among that tribe of screaming, fighting prehistoric hominins in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (my last science fiction analogy for today, I promise). And it’s called Greenland.