An interview with Grace Robinson, presenter at the 2026 Sturgeon Symposium on the University of Kansas campus in October, about Frank Herbert's "Dune" and Sharia water law.Do you or someone you know need professional tech guidance for your author, coaching, or independent publishing business? If so, check out our sponsor Cloudessy, providing fractional Chief Technology Officer services. Simplify your tech stack, prevent launch failures, and build systems that actually support growth.https://marketing.cloudessy.com/30-minute-tech-stack-update/The following interview occurred November 6, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.Brian Pauls: Welcome, Grace, to the Cosmic Codex. Very glad to have you here.Grace Robinson: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.Brian: I would like to start out and find out from you, before we get into your paper and Dune: what was the impetus for your interest in speculative fiction in the first place?1Grace: I will have to blame my brother for this one. He was really, really, really into Star Wars growing up, and so every time it was, “What movie are we going to watch? What book are we going to read?” it was always Star Wars. Growing up with that, and especially with the Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon when we were kids—I remember Saturday mornings, we would get so excited because my mom would put it on the TV for us.I’ve always been a big reader, and I read Dune for the first time when I was probably 12 or 13. I didn’t really revisit it until I wrote this paper, and it was really cool to reread the book and see what I missed when I was 12. When you read it for the first time at that age, you don’t understand all of the different things that are moving around and the bigger powers at play. So I thought it was a really cool book to reread, but also to write a paper about.Brian: You mentioned you were a big reader. That is not as common as it once was, because there are so many distractions. You can spend your time on video games, you can spend your time on programming computers, you can spend your time watching YouTube videos—and that’s not to mention the distractions that have been around for years, like just television. So I’m wondering, what for you made you a reader, regardless of what type of genre or fiction or nonfiction you were reading?Grace: It was definitely my parents. From a very young age, they encouraged us to read. Growing up, I always remember getting upset with my parents—“My other friends are doing XYZ things”—and my parents were like, “No, we’re going to read, we’re going to enrich our minds and not worry about what the other people are doing.”I think it also helped to have them as role models. My dad doesn’t read books all the time necessarily, but he’ll sit and read the news for an hour every day. And my mom was a big reader growing up as well, so having her as a role model—“Okay, my mom reads all the time, so I’m going to read all the time.”My favorite gift that I ever got, I think, was actually my first Kindle, because then I had every book I could ever want at the press of a button. That was kind of a game changer for me. Now I have a Kindle as well, and I have a Kindle stand and page-turner buttons that I can use to read. So I think there are ways now that make it easier to read.But it is hard when there are a lot of distractions. I don’t think I read very much when I was in my undergraduate degree, just because it’s so busy and there’s so much going on. Probably my junior or senior year, I was like, “Wait a minute, I really miss reading,” and then I picked it back up—reading for fun.Brian: I think that’s natural. I’ve certainly gone through phases in my life when I have read less, even though I also started out as a voracious reader, and have kind of come back to it. It depends on what season of life you’re in. But kudos to your parents. I think it’s tremendously important, for not just intellectual development but development as a citizen, to be able to read, digest, and analyze complex information and make up your mind.Speaking of that, you have gone into a rather complex, language-oriented field. You are a graduate student in law, is that correct?Grace: Yes, I am.Brian: Tell us a little bit about what led you down that path.Grace: When I was in high school, I completed a mock trial program through my school, and it was one of the more fun things I had done in high school. I was a competitive swimmer, and when I blew out my shoulder, I needed to find something to do, so I ended up starting with mock trial. I wasn’t necessarily the best at it, but it was a lot of fun to be in a courtroom and present a case and try to win.Going into college, I knew that I wanted something that made me more relatable to people, because—no shade to a lot of the attorneys, but some of the most incredible attorneys I know are also not the best at speaking with people or interacting as ...
Show More
Show Less
Nov 14 20261 hr and 11 mins
Oct 30 202621 mins
Oct 10 202621 mins
30 mins