The Dragon in the Sea is a thoughtful novel as well as a tense adventure and should lend itself to discussions of how people behave under emotional stress, how one can tell what is sane from what is insane — especially in one's own behavior and thought — and how technological culture may evolve as the world's resources for sustaining technology disappear. These are tough topics that The Dragon in the Sea serves to dramatize, perhaps making them easier to think about.

1. The Dragon in the Sea predates the first actual worldwide oil shortage in the early 1970s. How well did Herbert predict the future? Is the kind of technological conflict he depicts in the novel still ahead of us, or is our culture heading in a different direction?

2. The first notable war involving the theft of petroleum did not occur at sea but on land...