There are small people in my family; I read Margaret Wise Brown's classic children's picture book Goodnight Moon a lot at the moment. I am a science fiction fan, and regardless of the increasingly bad sequels, Frank Herbert's Dune occupies a position near the top of my favourite SF reads, the image of that sand-covered planet and its giant worms never failing to transport me. My heartfelt thanks, then, to the Quill & Quire blog in Canada for alerting me this morning to a children's book mash-up which I can't believe I haven't seen before, it feels so made for me: Goodnight Dune.
Take a look: it is sheer genius from Julia Yu. The picture of "a cow jumping over the moon" becomes "Shai-hulud bursting out of the dune", the pair of mittens becomes a pair of gom-jabbar and the young mouse is a young muad'Dib.
Wise Brown's "old lady whispering hush" – anyone else ever found her vaguely creepy? - is transformed into a "bene-gesserit witch whispering 'they tried and died'" who is far creepier, all amid pictures which wonderfully mimic Clement Hurd's.
Goodnight Moon seems prone to this kind of treatment – there was a Goodnight iPad which published a few years back, replacing Wise Brown's gently old-fashioned ending with "Goodnight remotes and Netflix streams, Androids, apps and glowing screens, goodnight MacBook Air, goodnight gadgets everywhere."
I think I prefer Yu's, though. There are too many bowls of mush in my life these days, and not enough devil worms. Goodnight Dune is a much-needed corrective, and I'd buy it if I could. I can't, so I'll comfort myself with imagining the SF-ification of some other children's picture book classics. Yu writes that she was inspired by this College Humor post, which includes The Very Deadly Bounty Hunter, a la caterpillar, and Oh, the Times and Places You'll Go! by Dr Who, instead of Seuss.
How about The Cat in the High Castle? Or Where the Wildlings Are? Although Dr Seuss and Maurice Sendak can be mind-bending enough, I guess, without additional Philip K Dick or George RR Martin … Over to you. Please delight the mind of this sleep-addled, SF-loving mother.
