Dune: Seminal SF Classic Or Pompous Tosh?

Cafe Society
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This thread was really spun off from a recent Tolkien-bashing, which I didn’t want to hijack any further. It was probably provoked by a similar response to both books: both, I think, when you first read them at the age of 14, are the greatest thing since fish grew legs, but how well do they stand up to a more jaded reappraisal? I re-read Dune recently, for the first time after a hiatus of twenty-odd years, and damn me if it hasn’t aged badly.

The prose isn’t too bad - probably better than the more turgid bits of LOTR - but strip away the cod-Islamic mysticism, and all you’re left with is a more pretentious version of Flash Gordon or Burroughs’ {Edgar Rice, not William S.} Barsoom novels, both of which at least revelled in their silliness.

C’mon, there’s a galaxy-spanning empire {and what exactly does a galactic emperor do all day?}, which is run along medieval Italian lines? All, apparently, so matters of great - nay, galactic - import must be resolved by knife-fights. Witness the climax: why not just shoot Feyd-Rautha? Noble but tragically doomed dukes. Evil barons. Gay evil barons, no less. Poisonings. Oy, the poisonings. I know lasers mysteriously couldn’t be used against shields, but would it kill someone to re-invent the revolver - especially since the Harkonnens nicked Arrakis back with artillery?

Oh yeah, and plot holes you could drive a truck through: how is House Atreides betrayed so Paul and his Mum are forced to flee to the kung-fu desert hippies from gangsta city? Why, the evil Baron has found a way to subvert the Imperial conditioning of Wellington Yueh, a Suk doctor so he turns off the shields. Gasps of astonishment - how can this be? Why, the villain has abducted and threatened his wife! Curse his fiendish ingenuity!

I won’t hold his son’s pimping his dad’s books against Frank Herbert, but I will hold the sequels, which are even more stupidly impenetrable, against him. Even as an eager teen I could only get half-way through Dune Messiah, so God knows what Chartered Accountants Of Dune, or whatever the latter sequels were called were like.

I am, however, almost tempted to blame Herbert for George Lucas, who as I’ve remarked before elsewhere, started out wanting to re-make Flash Gordon, which was A Very Good Thing, and ended up re-making Dune, which was A Very Bad One. Space operatic swords-and-sorcery is fun, Machiavelli For Dummies with added {I almost typed addled} space-borne dope-smoking mysticism is dull.

The prosecution for Pompous Tosh rests: anyone want to make a case for Seminal SF Classic?

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I don’t generally have too much to do on Sunday mornings either. So, you don’t believe that the measure of a good book is its mass? :rolleyes:

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Sure, I’ll bite. I love the book - and have ever since I was 14 or so and read. What I find surprising and satisfying is that I still enjoy the book - I re-read it a few years ago as an adult and found it still a fun, thought-provoking read.

Look, I am not going to try to defend the plot holes or get caught up in a go-round about whether Harkonnen should’ve been able to turn Yueh. The bottom line for me is that the world Herbert created was compelling, complex and sufficiently internally consistent that I (and YMMV) didn’t find the exceptions distracting. Its fusion of socio-political commentary on empire and Islamic, Christian and other religious influences gives Dune a sense of epic scope.

Dune is a hugely ambitious book - one of the most essential human plots is “our hero went on a journey” - as Joseph Campbell would frame, it is the basis for most known hero myths. This type of myth demands the type of Greek mythology plot-twists and king’s court dramatic flourishes and Herbert’s world seems up to the task of supporting them.

It has no irony or post-modern self-aware commentary - it takes itself very seriously and earnestly as it tries to present a credible world and the characters within it as the elements in a classic mythic story. As with Star Wars, the Matrix and other mythic-style sci-fi, it isn’t for everyone. Those that get caught up in and “buy” the universe being portrayed as a credible vehicle for a mythic plot typically become pretty fanatic about it. Those that see the wizard of oz behind the curtain are flummoxed that anyone would buy the malarkey.

You are one of the latter. I am one of the former and have enjoyed the ride…and both points of view are reasonable.

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Ok, where to start?
well, let’s correct an error - guns don’t work against shields, so revolvers are pretty useless in most combat. Only slow-moving objects penetrate them, and most of a bullet’s damage comes from the speed. There are pistols and other guns in the setting, but their use is limited to opportune times.

And there’s nothing mysterious about the shield-laser reaction if you take the technology presented as a given, which should be standard practice when approaching this sort of SF.

The whole book is multi-layered, and if you think the politics is just a veneer on top of a Flash Gordon-style story, all I can say is that you must not have read the same Dune I read. Sure, Arrakis and Barsoom are both desert planets, but that’s kind of where the similarity ends. Dune isn’t a “rollicking adventure story” where the hero leaps from encounter to encounter. There’s an overall arc, and several different layers:
there’s a religous/mystic layer, postulating what our modern religions could concievably develop into given millenia of change.
there’s a political layer, postulating what sort of setup would arise given the relative difficulty of space travel in the Duniverse. The feudal model is a very plausible one in the circumstances, others have come up with it as a possibility in their writing, and it serves as much more than an excuse to play with knives.
There’s a sexual politics layer, with an exploration of masculine vs feminine and the positioning of Paul as a uniter of those two strains. Granted, “genetic memory” is magic rather than science, but it makes for a good story.
There’s an ecological layer, but Fremen are far from space Hippies - they’re jihadis whose cause is ecological determinism as religion. And they kick ass.
There’s the psychology-as-political-tool layer that wonders if it would be possible to manipulate whole peoples via myth and story. No-one thinks Asimov is a hack for Foundation, which plays around with the same thing.

There are more layers…

As to why Paul didn’t just shoot Feyd? well, firstly, he’s not Malcom Reynolds :slight_smile:
Secondly, he had something to prove, not just to the audience, but also himself. And lastly, he acts in the conventions of the setting. The Duello code was part of their culture, and I thought nothing wrong in it arising naturally given the technology that Herbert proposes.

So to conclude, I think Dune as a masterwork, complex and multi-layered mythbuilding on a level with* Lord of the Rings*. It is deservedly a classic.

Of course, the sequels are just indefensible :wink:

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Dune is defintely a good book. You’re judging it on both meaningless externals and with the bias that a good space adventure is something to be sneered at.

The main innovation with Dune (yes, it was probably done elsewhere, but Herbert made it important) was the work of creating a logical and scientific alien ecology. Planets before that were merely stage settings; Arrakis is a real work, with animals that were perfectly part of the scene, and a society designed in a way that a society would logically grow in that world. It wasn’t just a society placed on a desert planet: Herbert worked out the intracacies of that society in much greater depth than most SF writers had done before.

And even if the social structure of the Empire was derivative, it made fascinating reading.

The rest of the Dune books are crap, occasionally rising to mediocrity, but the original is still a major SF landmark and a great read.

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Quick PS:
The other thing about Dune that separates it from the pulpy serials is that all the sentient actors (i.e. not Worms) are human, there are no BEMs or green men (little or big & 4-armed).

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Man that brings me right back! :smiley:

I read them both at age 14, I won some book tokens in my 3rd year of grammar school and got them both (after rather dryly choosing a french dictionary and atlas the two years before :rolleyes: ) Valued rather more too as they have the signature of my old headmaster in the front cover, a good man to have as head who died sadly a few years ago.

I re-read LOTR before seeing the Fellowship in the cinema but I’ve not read Dune again since.

Nostalgia hijack over, please continue :slight_smile:

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If Mentats are so smart, why didn’t Thufir Hawat work out that Jessica wasn’t the traitor?

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The best part of *Dune *is the appendices. Everything else is pulp filler. Ever subsequent title is garbage of the first order.

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Geez, so much hatred for the sequels, and here I am, with God Emperor of DUNE as my favorite book of the series. I thought the military campaigns in Heretics and Chapterhouse were also rather interesting, and Duncan Idaho was a rather cool character, even with him being the Kenny of his universe. :smiley:

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Geez, so much hatred for the sequels, and here I am, with God Emperor of DUNE as my favorite book of the series. I thought the military campaigns in Heretics and Chapterhouse were also rather interesting, and Duncan Idaho was a rather cool character, even with him being the Kenny of his universe. :smiley:

Oh, and one thing that always amused me with the books in general was how perceptive the Bene Gesserit witches were. “Oh, I see by your stance that you do not trust me, you had roast beef for lunch, and your dog piddled on the rug in the second guest room 5 minutes ago.” :smiley:

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Seminal SF classic or pompous tosh? I see no reason why it can’t be both.

I read Dune a few times, but could never really get into it for some reason. I’m not sure why, really; it seems like the sort of thing I should have enjoyed, with its spacegoing swordplay and focus on minutiae. It’s got appendices! Just like LOTR! What’s not to love?

I think that Herbert did a masterful job of creating a science fictional evocation of established religious themes, in that his book seems to have more rules to it than plot. Some have already been mentioned here: why can’t you shoot people? Well, because they wear anti-shoot-people belts all the time. Why does nobody suspect that the doctor is the traitor? Well, because it’s impossible for him to be. (Except, opps, it isn’t.) Why are there no robots, or even sophisticated artificial intelligences? It’s illegal, that’s why. What the hell kind of future makes it illegal to build a robot?! Screw that noise; I’m converting to space atheism. You can have my robot when you pry it from my cold, purple-stained fingers.

Herbert spends an enormous amount of time trying to establish a backdrop of intricately interlinked religio-politico-economical influences so that his characters’ actions will carry great weight and import, and in the end it’s all kind of a wasted effort since the story never veers far from “good guys vs. bad guys.” He does earn points, however, for giving a major supporting character the name “Duncan Idaho.”

Admittedly, much of my disaffection for Dune probably stems from the fact that I could never quite wrap my head entirely around what was supposed to be going on, or why. I’m supposed to accept that all this hullaballoo is on account of the spice melange, a vastly potent substance that gives the human mind the power to transcend space, time and death. If so, then the administration and supervision of this resource as presented in the book seems, to put it mildly, whacked-out in the extreme. Every single power bloc in the Empire relies absolutely on melange, and yet the Emperor seemed entirely content to entrust a relatively unsupervised, squabbling assortment of petty backstabbing officials to guarantee the availability of this precious source of all life and commerce, instead of turning Arrakis into the largest Sardukar garrison in the universe and living there himself. Somehow I think Renaissance politics would have been significantly different if Milan was the only place in the world that gunpowder could be made.

I also don’t recall that it’s ever explained exactly why it’s impossible to synthesize melange, which is really just psychotropic worm poo when you get right down to it. Obviously this would shoot a big hole in the Emperor’s monopoly, but he really didn’t seem too anxious about it in the first place, from the way he allowed so many shenanigans on the planet.

I’m not sure whether Herbert can be faulted for not envisioning a day when lasers would be freely available at Radio Shack, but it’s more than a bit odd to learn that anyone in the Dune universe could apparently unleash nuclear holocaust with a keychain laser pointer.

Whatever its other shortcomings, however, Dune will assuredly continue to hold the SF grandmaster title for “Most Intricate Linear Narrative Technique”-- Third Person Plural Semi-Omniscient or whatever the hell Herbert was playing at there. His writing style is the literary equivalent of a hair in the projector gate.

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A very nice summary, Terrifel. I can live with a few plot holes, but when they end up undermining the credibility and consistency of the fictional universe the author has created, my eyes start to roll. OK, I’ll buy that the Butlerian Jihad did away with thinking machines, who were replaced by quasi-omniscient human Mentats: why, then, are they so bloody thick? Why does no-one figure out what’s actually going down on Arrakis? Even the Baron, so slouch in the scheming department, seems to be wilfully stupid when it comes to wondering why a few scattered bands of desert rabble are decimating his troops. Does it not occur to anyone except the Atreides to go take a look?

And the Emperor: all throughout the novel we have it drummed into us that the nobility are paranoid about personal security for fear of assassins and treachery - yet when the plot requires it, he obligingly goes on a camping holiday on this arid and dangerous hell-hole. Why? So Paul can waltz in and pinch his throne with a minimum of trouble {a climactic knife-fight notwithstanding}. And just why did the Emperor have it in in for House Atreides anyway? We’re told that Leto was becoming too popular with the minor Houses, but there’s no evidence of this anywhere in the book: if I were Shaddam IV, I’d be more inclined to do the dirty on the Harkonnens, who were definitely scheming for my throne.

That’s my main problem with the book: it aspires to be more than mere space-opera, yet it isn’t sufficiently rigorous or consistent. If you examine the supposedly depth and complexity of Herbert’s fictional universe closely, none of it makes much sense at all: all you’re really left with is a Flash Gordon episode with ideas above its station.

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Because Mentats can only work with the information they’re given, and Thufir was deliberately fed false information by the Harkonnens and the Emperor. Also, because the reputation of the Suk School for instilling an unbreakable conditioning toward personal loyalty to their employers created a paradigm whereby Dr. Yueh, a Suk doctor, could NOT be suspected of betrayal.

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It must also have created a paradigm whereby no one even tried. A threat to a loved one is the simplest subornation technique there is.

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My family were Frank Herbert worshippers from way back. I managed to make myself the black sheep by never getting through the first book, which I found to be boring and pretentious to the extreme. I remember my sister telling me “Yes, it seems bad at first, but you have to keep reading. Eventually it stops being bad and gets really really good!!!”

Finally in college, I ploughed my way through. The bad section my sister referred to started on page one of the book and continued through to the last page. Badness from start to finish. Hated every moment of it. I called my sister and reported my opinion. Her response? “Well, you’ve got to read some of the sequels before you really get into it.” :eek:

Needless to say, I never did :smiley:

I have never understood the fascination with this book or this series. Thinly disguised propaganda for mind expansion through the use of recreational chemicals has been done much better elswhere. The politics were all contrived and needlessly weighty. The plot was not strong enough to pull all the baggage Herbert had loaded in. Not to mention that Herbert’s issues towards women showed through and had me wincing throughout. (Do you suppose it’s barely possible Herbert had a lot of domineering women in his life, and wished he had some kind of mystic power over them? Just maybe.)

IMO Dune should be forgotten. It added nothing to literature, to the genre, or to anything. It was far worse than the pulp scifi mentioned in the OP, which were at the very least a quick read.

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One thing that bugs me about the book (and I know it’s a petty complaint, but still…) is that these characters–who live thousands and thousands of years into the future–speak old English.

There is really no reason for this, and it makes my eyes roll because I find it to be uninspiring and unoriginal. At least in LOTR, it made sense given the setting. But in the year 10,000, in a galaxy far far away, I doubt people will be speaking a dialect considered ancient by today’s standards. The old English card is seemingly played way too much in science fiction and fantasy. It’s as if the writers think that by dropping a few thys and thous into the dialogue it automatically ups the gravitas by a factor of 10. But I just think it just gives the story a distracting pretentious feel.

I found the denseness of Hawat to be implausible as well. Yes, he was being fed bad information from the Harkonnens, but certainly the possibility that he was being duped should have figured into his consciousness a little bit more than it did. What good is a mentat if they can’t think around corners and smell a set up when it is right in front of their face? For someone who was as prized as he was, he didn’t show himself to be that brilliant. He took the Harkonnens bait and ran with it.

All that said, I don’t think the story was bad. Just not all of what it is cracked up to be. I don’t think I’ll even bother with the sequels.

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Ergo, Mentats are thick.

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Well, obviously, to each his own, and Case Sensitive, I think you do a great job with your argument; you clearly know the material and have thought this through - sounds like you are entitled to your opinion.

I choose to disagree. At least one, if not the, key point of difference has to do with “space opera palace intrigue.” IMHO, from what I know of the Roman Empire - where petty disputes toppled kingdoms, empires were won and lots for directly proportional reasons of justice and hubris and where truth truly was stranger than fiction - I am entirely capable of disgesting the various twists and petty behaviors and inexplicable-buried-in-their-history motivations. I am at peace with a mental narrative that says “and in this empire it was known that the Atreides and Harkonnens were warring clans” and just leave it at that.

As for a Mentat or some other aspect of their seemingly super-powered world breaking down, again - given what I have seen of human imperfection and the ability to find a Murphy’s Law way to have events like the Titanic or Chernobyl to keep us humble - sure, I can see a Mentat not figuring stuff out…

Again, YMMV. But I have found a place for your concerns in my perspective on the book so find they don’t keep me from enjoying it…

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One of the main things I really loved about Frank Herbert & Dune was how much time he spent in people’s heads. It was awsome listening in on a conversation between two Bene Gesserits and every word, every gesture was a chess move that could mean life or death within 10 moves, yet to an outside observer it would appear they were discussing the weather.