This is exactly what I get from Harry Potter acolytes. To which I usually reply, “Yeah, well, I’m gonna hafta take your word for that.”
Yeah, but you had to intuit that from what Herbert had told you about the Bene Gesserit: again, it was totally inconsistent depending on the requirements of the plot - on one page they could beat up a whole patrol of Fremen with their mad weirding skillz, yet on the other they’d be taken captive by the old “chloroform over the face” trick.
I read Dune when I was about 22, I guess, and I LOVED it. Still do. Definetly liked it more than LOTR, which I read when I was 20ish. I just really liked the very well constructed world and the spirituality in the book. It just took hold and didn’t let go. I haven’t read the sequals because… well, I’ve been warned against them. I believe that’s also the reason I haven’t read any “Ender’s Game” sequals, though I have heard the immediate sequal is very good in that series.
Omniscient Mentat: But he’s a Suk doctor, Baron! Everyone knows you can’t break the Imperial conditioning!
Evil Baron: Tell him we’ll kill his wife horribly.
OM: {Pause} Now, why didn’t I think of that?
EB: {Steeples fingers} Ex-cellent.
It’s been over 20 years since I read it, but I thought the movie made it seem like all they did to break his conditioning was threaten his wife, but in the book it took a lot more to break his conditioning, and then threaten his wife.
Yeah, I never thought it was just a simple case of kidnapping someone’s wife to bend them to destroy their House. Loyalty and conditioning in the Dune universe seems a cut above a simple oath.
There are some troubling things about Herbert’s series – “oracular vision”? All those family memories? The rerally extreme changes wrought by melange, and the way it can allow humans to “fold space”? But even that arch-hard core science editor, John Campbell, loved the series and gave it space in Analog.
It gives an interesting and textured future. A Galactic Empire that feels like Renaissance Italy? Well, why not? The future probably won’t be a technocracy dfilled with antiseptic white surfaces, which too many stories and movies seemed to consider inevitable.
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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.
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Replace “melange” with “oil” and “Arrakis” with “the Middle East” and Herbert’s none-too-subtle attempt at metaphor becomes plain to see.
[QUOTE=Smapti]
Color me dense, then, because I still don’t see it. I had always been under the impression that Arrakis was considered a part of the Shaddam Empire. Who does the Empire represent in this scenario? Maybe if the Middle East were absolutely the only place in the world where oil had ever existed, and somehow the rest of the world had still managed to establish a petroleum-feuled economy, and outlawed any other energy sources, then the comparison might make a bit more sense. But this also ignores the fact that the actual Middle East has significant global clout, precisely because of its oil wealth, whereas Arrakis has absolutely none to begin with despite being the obvious linchpin of the entire imperial economy. On the other hand, if the king of Saudi Arabia suddenly went round the bend and decided to declare himself emperor of the world based on his control of the international oil supply, I don’t realistically see the rest of Earth’s nations falling humbly into line. So the comparison doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny on any level, even leaving aside the question of how the melange-induced life extension and precognition abilities fit into the metaphor.
Yeah, I can buy that analogy, actually - if you see the Fremen as nascent Arab nationalists and Houses Atreides and Harkonnen as feuding colonial powers squabbling for control of Arrakis’ wealth. Where the Emperor fits in, I’m not quite sure. Although as Terrifel points out, considering that melange seems to have been crucial to a relatively stable, functional galaxy since whenever, control of its production is remarkably slapdash: production of spice seems to be almost secondary to holding Arrakis in fief.
Once the Western world had become dependent on Middle Eastern oil, though {which let’s not forget is historically a very recent phenomenon}, the race to secure overt control of its production and distribution was on: with colonial empires being disbanded with varying degrees of grace or intransigence, no-one wanted otherwise no longer miltarily strategic {with the exception of Egypt, which controlled the Suez canal} tracts of sand for the sheer hell of it.
In contrast with the scenario in the novel, the British, French Americans knew exactly what they wanted from the Middle East, securing themselves oil deals early on, and then being forced to accept Arab control {and prop up dodgy regimes} as post WW2 nationalism took hold, then suck it up when the dodgy regimes were overthrown.
The resurgence of Islam that followed the Arab nations’ oil-fuelled economic and geo-political renasissance does seem to be reflected in the book’s emphasis on the clean-living spiritualism of the Fremen, though: anyone know how much Herbert actually knew about Islam and Arab culture?
There was a great parody of this, IIRC, by Richard Lupoff writing as Ova Hamlet in Amazing. I read Dune nearly 40 years ago, and this “she twitched, so here are two pages of interpretation” bugged the hell out of me. Back then people were into it because “it’s ecology, man.”
Dragon in the Sea was better.
Er, no they didn’t. Most people spoke Galach, which is a mixture of English and Russian after a couple dozen millenia of evolution and borrowings. The Fremen language was ultimately descended from Arabic (with reforms at certain points, as outlined in the Dune Encyclopedia, to eliminate changes caused by language evolution and bring it back to an archaic form). The ceremonial language Chakobsa was a completely constructed language, created by the Bhotani during the Wars of Assassins. These various languages were merely rendered into modern English (n.b. the presence of “thee” and “thou” does not mean it is Old English) for the purpose of not having the entire novel in an invented language nobody but the author understands.
FWIW, nobody in LoTR spoke English, either; the common language was Adûni or Westron.
Yeah, as has just been pointed out, nobody’s speaking English, it’s being TRANSLATED into English for us by TPTB (The Powers That Be, in this case, the Narrator). But it’s an easy thing to forget. Like if you read Honor Harrington, it’s incredibly easy to forget that all of the Havenites are most likely speaking French to eachother, even though we never see any French actually printed in the books (unless you read the French releases of the Honor Harrington books, with the REALLY depressing cover art).
Now I’m curious. Do you think you could link to a depressing cover?
BTW, I have a friend who loves Dune, but actually thinks the second book is the best in the series. I guess some people like the sequels. I read the first one, but don’t remember it too well. It’s not an easy book to read.
I read the first two, and I saw the two movies (the SciFi channel one and the Lynch one), but not for a while. Coinkidentally, the Lynch one was on HDnet this afternoon and I watched the last 20 minutes (anybody else remember that Alia was played by Alicia Witt who would go on to be smoking hot?)
I liked Dune, I still remember more of it than almost any other science fiction book after an equivalent amount of time. I like the Shakespearean/Capulet vs. Montague take on it, emphasized especially in the SciFi movie. I liked this alternate view of the future which recognizes how much of human history has been lateral, not forward, to date. I like the recognition of how societal structures, especially with things like religion and taboos, become ingrained and are often among the most resistant things to change. I like that the heroes are not necessarily hippie freaks (they do do quite a lot of fighting and things like drowning baby worms to get the water of life) but they don’t represent a return to “inherent justice” (like the Star Wars universe) or “forward progress” (like a lot of other sci-fi) but rather just an alternate path. This is often how real-world revolutions unfold. And I especially like that Paul turns into a tyrannical bastard pretty quickly after getting his own power.
I prefer to view the allegory as exploring what would happen if oppressed colonized natives of mineral-rich areas were to gain power which reflected their natural wealth (which I don’t think has ever happened). Like “let’s see what happens if Irian Jaya and the Belgian Congo were superpowers.”
http://www.wodzu.tonet.pl/republika_prokonsularna/En/hhverseartgallery.htm
There is a page with thumbnails of all the art, with links to pages with more information. My favorite covers are the manga-esque Japanese covers.
I’m going to take issue with this and say that’s exactly what happened to the Middle East, which following the final destruction of the Ottoman Empire was pretty much a dirt-poor litter-box that no-one much wanted - except the French and British out of sheer force of habit - until strategic oil reserves were discovered, neatly coincident with the 20th Century’s growing dependence on the internal combustion engine. They may not have become super-powers in their own right {for reasons which probably warrant a GD thread}, but Arab states like Saudi Arabia or Iraq are pre-eminent in their influence over current super-power - ie. US - policy.
I saw the David Lynch movie (for the umpteenth time) at a science fiction film festival during the first Gulf War. That was a surreal experience –
The Good Guys are fighting a desert war for control of resources that control transportation while being concerned about the use of atomic weapons.
The chief Bad Guy is named Shaddam!
“A Storm is Coming – Our Storm!” (Desert Storm?)
The orange-tinted and green-tined Night Vision scenes in the movie looked eerily like the gren-tinted Night Vision shots being fed to us by CNN and the news networks. (Except that there weren’t any giant sandworms in Baghdad).
And Shaddam was left alive at the end, but with his power broken.
We need to get Lynch to make Children of Dune, with Paul’s kids going after shaddam again.
If you have trouble with galaxy spanning universes, what do you do with ninety percent of science fiction and science fantasy that was written pre-1980? The Foundation series is no less stupid viewed in that context. If you can’t accept such a concept, you don’t truly understand the point to science fiction or science fantasy; you might as well not even read the stuff. Stick to things like Red Mars/Blue Mars/Green Mars (and even then, as with almost ALL science fiction, you can poke holes in the technological assumptions, the plot lines, etc.).
Dune was a masterpiece because, as has been noted, unlike what had been written before it:
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It dealt quite thoroughly with the concept of a planetary ecology and the effect of that upon a society. While there had been glosses of this before Dune, no one had actually gone an premised an entire novel around that intricate issue.
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It has a very intricate plot which pulls you in and makes you VERY much want to find out how it will all end. Given the various twists and turns, you simply cannot predict quite how the result you assume will be achieved will occur. Please note that this was NOT true of much of the science fiction of the day; Heinlein, for example, rarely had plots with much depth to them at all (even Stranger in a Strange Land wasn’t particularly difficult to parse the likely conclusion of, unless you were a horny teen male when reading it for the first time :eek: ). Yes, that plot has holes you can see with hindsight; ALL plots do. Science fiction, especially, asks you to suspend disbelief of such things, but all writers make the assumption you will ignore the holes, the slight irrationalities, etc.
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Unlike most of what was being written at the time, sex wasn’t a focus of the story. The 60’s were filled with all sorts of science fiction that was exploring the new sexual permissiveness. Herbert totally bypassed all that. By comparison, read what was being written by Heinlein, by Niven, etc.
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It was a well-written story. By that, I mean that it was very visual; you could see in your mind the strange things of which Herbert was writing. It only had a few places where it dragged; mostly it moves ahead at a good pace, despite its length. Unlike books like the Thomas Covenant series, the author doesn’t befuddle you with silly vocabulary designed to hide his poor writing skills.
Is it Dickens, or Milton? Probably not. I wouldn’t even rank it with Tolkein, who will, some day, be read in English Lit along with the other “greats” of the language. But if you had to suggest 5 science fiction/fantasy books to read, you’d put it on the list, or at least you should.
I apply Sturgeon’s Law.