Discuss @Thande 's latest article here.
You've mentioned the Dune link before, but to take that back to Iran, and even Stalin himself is superb. I must confess, I'd never heard of the Persian SSR before.Discuss @Thande 's latest article here.
Just thinking about how averting the initial POD might lead to shenanigans.
- No purge of the Iranian Communists, meaning the Iranian Communist movement is that much stronger when the Soviets and British invade, leading to a post-war Communist boom. Iran fractures and becomes a new front line of the cold war between Anglo-American backed South Iran and Soviet backed North Iran.
- Herbert is instead inspired to write a sci-fi novel set in the early 21st century by the 1954 coup d'etat in Guatemala, which is similarly influenced by corporate concerns as the United Fruit Company lobbied the US government to remove Arbenz's leftist government.
This sounds a little bit like Mid-world by Alan Dean Foster.- That eventually gets reworked and expanded into 'Canopy' in which this marvellous spice can only be extracted from enormous trees using special helicopter type things, but there are horrible snake monsters in the trees and also a vaguely Latin American esque native people.