Dune: Seminal SF Classic Or Pompous Tosh?

Cafe Society
41

I agree with Terrifel: it’s both.

Cool:

*Computers eliminated
*Shields mostly eliminate use of projectile weapons
*Bene Gesserit/Kiwsatz Haderach
*“Fear is the mind killer…”
*The effects of spice
*As everyone has pointed out, planetary ecology
*Some pretty cool characters
*Fremen tribe, culture well described

Stupid:

*The shield/lasgun thing. Doesn’t make sense from a physics point of view, and is totally unnecessary anyway. The shields should just be able to block laser light.

There are already atomic bombs that the houses have pretty much agreed never to use because the weapons are too powerful. Since the laser-shield interaction would be an equivalent weapon, I see no reason why lasers wouldn’t be banned in the first place. Dumb.

*Everything so frickin’ high and mighty. All these dukes and nuns and what-have-you acting in such a fancy-pants manner. Paul Atredies never cuts a fart, Alia never cracks a joke. Serious to the point of psychological unrealism.

*Water scarce on Arakis. OK, it’s a desert, and water is basically scarce, but that shouldn’t impact the humans who, after all, migrated there via spaceships that are capable of transporting water. Even if the Fremen had gotten there in rinky-dink spacecraft and been stranded there a long time, at the time of the story they were in a position to get as much water as they wanted. Had others wanted to bring a lot of water to Arakis, they could have done so too.

But, overall, a decent book as I remember it. Don’t know how it would seem now.

The sequels unequivocally suck, however.

42

The original Dune was good.

Can’t say that for the sequels, though.

43

I read Dune when I was in my late teens. Then I dubbed it “a boring, interesting book,” which is what I then thought of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches series as well. The story was good in both cases, but the prose! Like molasses, it is. After the first Dune book, however, my interest in the interesting parts wanned, the boring got more so, and I only made it half-way through Children of Dune before giving up on the series.

44

The one thing you have to realize is that Dune isn’t a novel of good-guys-against-bad-guys. Paul Atriedes, Duke Leto, Lady Jessica, all of them, are huge bastards. Yes, they might not torture people to death for fun, but they aren’t “good guys”, they are mafiosi, like all aristocrats.

And I don’t think Herbert intended us to think the Atreides were the “good guys”. That’s another huge departure for science fiction in the 1960s, the protagonist wasn’t a “hero”! The Atreides weren’t overthrowing the Emperor to bring freedom, they were fighting to control the galaxy themselves, they weren’t fighting the Harkonnens because the Harkonnens were evil, they fought the Harkonnens because the Harkonnens were an enemy house. You aren’t supposed to LIKE Paul Atreides, any more than you are neccesarily supposed to like a character in a historical novel.

Some things are contrived. Of course the stuff about shields and guns and lasers is contrived, since the whole point is to allow the characters to have sword fights so Herbert has to introduce some technology that makes it possible for sword fights to exist.

The other thing that doesn’t make sense is that the Emperor doesn’t hold Arrakis himself. It seems pretty clear that spice is essential. The guy who controls spice controls the universe. So the Emperor had damn well better live on Arrakis and have it stuffed with Sarduakar. Paul Atreides ruling from Arrakis made SENSE, Emperor Shaddam ruling from, um, wherever it was, made no sense.

Some things did make sense though. OK, we have interstellar travel, but only with difficulty, so every star system is quasi-independent. Which makes feudal government a possibility. The Emperor is powerful, but only two or three times as powerful as the most powerful planetary families, he can fight any one family easily but can’t fight a majority of families, or even a dedicated minority faction.

I thought Dune did a good job exploring what a millenia-spanning feudal galactic empire would actually be like. No science, no freedom, incessant warfare, slavery, degradation, religious domination, and absolutely no hope for change. And also what the space opera cliche of the “one ecosystem planet” would be like.

45

Yueh’s wife was Bene Gesserit. The implication being that she had conditioned Yueh, as the Bene Gesserit are known to do.

Pieter de Vries and the Baron, then, were exploiting the Bene Gesserit conditioning against the Suk conditioning – which is probably what the Bene Gesserit had in mind, themselves.

The reason that the Mentats could not compute that a Suk doctor could be suborned by kidnapping his wife was that it had been done before (being such an obvious ploy), and failed. Pieter and the Baron were apparently clever enough to figure out what the Bene Gesserit were up to with Yueh’s wife.

46

Very true. The later series is all about Paul’s son attempting to change the system and the results of his attempts.

47

True in a way, but (and I’m not too sure if this is kept for the sequels) all along Paul was fighting for the good of mankind, is that a real spoiler?

In a way the second quote answers the first. The Emperor couldn’t hold Arrakis, so he manipulates the houses for the pride/honour/profit of holding Arrakis itself.

Its different when Paul rules the Fremen from Arrakis. At the end of Dune, Paul asks the Emperor to send back the other houses as the Fremen have just wiped the floor with Sardaukar and are likely to do the same with the other houses. So he can rule from Arrakis and secure the spice for himself because he can defend Arrakis while taking on other houses.

48

Are you sure ?

You’d think Haven would be mentioned, given how central it is to the plot.

49

I think the key is that Dune takes place just at the critical turning point when everyone realized spice was not only valuable, but essential. As Paul makes clear in his speech in front of the Emperor, the Guild navigators and the Bene Gesserit have realized that spice is so much more effective than the drugs it replaced that it would be unthinkably crippling to have to go back to the old drugs – this is addiction on a organizational sense.
That’s why the Emperor and everyone else arrives on Arrakis. But they’re just too late. Because Paul understood the real importance before everyone else and happened to be in a position to seize control of the Spice, he was able to make himself Emperor.

Had the previous Emperor realized earlier just how much the Guild and others depended on Spice, and would support anyone who controlled Spice, I think he would have taken firm Imperial control of the planet (though moving the capital there would be difficult politically without some crisis).
For the record, I think it’s a good book, though not perfect. Couldn’t get into the sequels, though.

50

My criticism of the book seems kind of silly compared to the detailed analyses done by others in this thread. The characters in Dune were constrained to do nearly all their fighting with knives and swords, which is something that I think is pretty exciting. Yet, I can’t remember a single fight or battle in any of the books up through God Emperor that actually was exciting. I read the first three books, at the time the only books, in high school. They were interesting enough to make me complete them, but even at the time I thought that it was a curiously unexciting description of a place where constant bloodshed was the rule. In that respect, at least, the movies were superior. More of the action took place “on screen” and we got a better impression of how lethal these people were supposed to be.
The Harkonnens and their world were my favorite part of the Lynch film. They were so exuberantly evil.

51

I rather liked the sequels, especially Children and Heretics. God Emperor sucked as in a snooze-fest sort of way.

But if we are to compare Dune to LOTR, there are a few points we must consider.

*Both had a major bad guy.

*Both had a secondary bad guy.

*Both secondary bad guys had a toadie.

*Both toadies used their brains, rather than brawn, to do their evil deeds.

*Both wanted to undermine a “good” ruler.

Wouldn’t it be a hoot if casting directors had the same guy play both roles in the movies? The mind boggles!

52

Kyle MacLachlan played Frodo?!

53

To be fair, Brad Douriff was BORN to play the slimy psychopathic toady role. Need a toady? Need him to be psycho? Then why the fuck haven’t you called Brad Douriff yet, you idiot!

54

Silly. Frodo was played by Wood. Natalie Wood.

55

Has he ever played a good guy? In Mississippi Burning he was a racist. In Blue Velvet he was the toadie of a violent pervert. In Child’s Play he was a psychotic doll. In Urban Legend (with Alicia Witt!) he was a potentially dangerous gas station attendant.

56

He plays a doctor on HBO’s Deadwood who is a very kind and moral man, if a touch impatient at times.

57

Interesting. I’ve read the six books several times, and God Emporer is my favorite and the one I would most likely read again on its own.

It is the most introspective, political, and philosophical of the books, and consequently has the least amount of plot progression, cliffhangers, and action. It is basically all about Leto trying to hold his plan together while slowly losing control of his rationality. Gripping in an Edgar Allen Poe sense, but boring to others in an Edgar Allen Poe sense I agree.

58

Exactly.

When I read it (some 20 years ago) I was all about plot progression, cliffhangers, and action.

59

It may be a good book as a one-off, and I didn’t think that Children of Dune was atrocious by itself, but the series as a whole is horrible to me because Dune Messiah is wretched, with Paul becoming a Hitler-like mass murderer then dying a pathetic death. Just ruined the whole point of the story for me.

60

Understandable, although that was a critical theme for both Paul’s and Leto’s motivation and character arc…

The Golden Path that each envisioned (being the Kwisatz Haderach) was that the ruthless tyranny was necessary for humanity’s ultimate survival as a species. One was required to be a generation-spanning tyrant so horrible and repressive that humanity would force itself to dipserse as far across the galaxy as possible. Otherwise, the increasing stagnation of the galactic imperial model, and the reliance upon spice, meant an inevitable galactic collapse and extinction of humanity.

Paul envisioned the choice he had to make, but ultimately didn’t have the follow through and exiled himself as a desert hermit. Leto had the follow through.