The appeal of Dune?

Cafe Society
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I loved the first book, wondered what was missing in Children and Messiah, found God Emperor hilarious, and read Heretics and Chapterhouse to tie up loose ends. It was getting a bit too orgiastic at the end with the sexual enslavement and all :dubious:

I saw the extended Lynch version of SciFi about five years before I got around to reading the book. I loved the imagery and the surreal quality of it. I thought the idea behind stillsuits was awesome and wished I had a voice-powered death ray too. Even the bad stuff was at least funny. For example, I still think of the Guild Navigators as “vagina-faces.” I knew that Sting was in it beforehand, but the fact that the cast included Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, and Linda Hunt rocked my world.

More to the point, when I finally read the book it was during a family vacation to Glacier National Park and after I had started out as an anthropology major. The ecological aspects of it intrigued me, particularly how the Fremen adapted to Arrakis just as they adapted it for them. I also liked the political maneuvering and subtle forms of communication, and how the tech avoided conflating advanced with complex. “Suspensors” were black box technology, yeah, but they used that to adjust the shape of oil droplets in the binoculars to get magnification. They actually use droplets of oil to help the image with high magnification light microscopes in the real world anyway. It was more a matter of precise engineering than some kind of technobabble involving quantum spectra or something like that.

I strongly dislike the SciFi miniseries. The casting was off, and the tech got dumbed down to look more like conventional scifi than the quasi-archaic stuff described in the books. Even if it was more faithful to the storyline of the book, it didn’t feel like Dune.

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It’s probably obvious from my username that I am a HUGE fan of the Dune series and of Frank Herbert. So I have a few hundred things to say, but I’ll try to keep myself organized.

First of all, I am wondering if the people who criticize Lynch’s Dune as missing the visuals and feel of the book realize that Frank Herbert worked very closely with David Lynch on that movie. Very closely. As in wrote parts of the screenplay, was on set much of the time, consulted on designs, etc. So I think it’s fair to say that it actually does capture the book, although in a very stylized, artsy way (as lissener said). The movie is entertaining, but definitely not as good as the book. Same with the miniseries, which I absolutely love. It has the time to go more into the nuances of the story and more time to be really true to the book. I highly recommend the miniseries to anyone who read the first book and enjoyed it.

The second miniseries, Children of Dune, is awesome. It covers both Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. Of course they had to increase the ages of the main characters but otherwise is amazingly true to the books. If you made it through the first three books and enjoyed them, I highly recommend this series too.

My favorite book of the series is Children of Dune, with Dune Messiah a close second and Dune a close third. I kind of think of Dune as the Star Wars of the series: when you first read it, it is so friggin’ awesome. But then the next book makes you realize that the scope of the story is so much greater. In Star Wars, they blow up a space station. But then the rest of the story deals with the fate of the galaxy. In Dune, he gains control of a planet. Then the rest of the story deals with the ultimate fate of humanity.

God Emperor is soooooo hard to get through the first time. But ultimately it is a fascinating book. It is an extremely introspective book with lots of implied but unexplained meaning. There’s not a lot of action except at the end. You have some sympathy for the main character but ultimately he is loathesome. But he is also noble. It is a hard book to swallow, but I do love it.

For me, the next two books are gravy. I loved the action in these books. Lots of hand-to-hand combat. The true power of the Bene Gesserit are being explored in these books. It is great to see the power that was hinted at in Jessica used to such great extent in these books. And there is no doubt in my mind that Frank Herbert fully intended to write a concluding novel.

I have read nearly all of Herbert’s other books and short stories. My absolute favorites are The Dragon in the Sea (otherwise known as Under Pressure or 21st Century Sub), The White Plague, and The Santaroga Barrier. But most of them are fantastic. I think he was truly ahead of his time.

A brief word on the prequels and sequels:

The prequel trilogy that covers the early lives of many of the characters from Dune is decent. Nothing spectacular but a nice snack for someone hungry for a taste of Dune.

The second prequel trilogy that covers the Butlerian Jihad is HORRIBLE. I strongly recommend avoiding them.

The latest Dune novel is fairly decent. Many people like to bitch and moan about them “fucking Frank Herbert’s corpse” and etc. But as a true fan, I cannot resist the opportunity to see how the story ends! I read Hunters of Dune and while it is of course not as good as how I imagine Frank would write it, I am pretty happy with it. As someone who has waited many many years for this opportunity, I cannot feel anything but gratitude.

Lastly, a recommendation to Dune fans. I highly recommend The Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. Scott Bakker. The first book is called The Darkness That Comes Before. It has a very Bene Gesserit-like character in it, and the scope of the story is huge, with various religious orders and sorcery schools that influence the story. The “bad guys” are a bit Shakespearian so far, but I just started the third book last night so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

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Well, I thought that Lissener’s point was well taken, and I did not know that Herbert was involved with the movie, so I’ve put it on my list far another go, i must confess that it’s been a loooong time since I saw any part of it.

For my money the first 3 should be considered distinct from the rest, I’d rate them 1,3,2 for my preference.

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The appeal of Dune? Two things, I think:

  1. The prescience/clarity of current politics. Herbert’s Dune, with its fighting over vital natural resources, religious insanity, Imperial hubris, asymmetric guerilla warfare, etc., resonates very strongly with me re: the world politics of recent years. I wish the Bush administration had read it before they came to power in 2000.

  2. The Deep Thoughts, about man, god, the multi-millenial sweep of history, the variety and crushing sameness of human life, etc. Plus the profound sadness you see in the characters that have to endure the inevitable–Paul and all of the Atreides when they know Duke Leto is a dead man walking at the beginning of Dune, Paul when he grasps the horror that comes along with knowing everything that will happen, God-Emperor Leto II when he reflects on his choice to surrender his own humanity so that the human race will survive.

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Ghani, what do you think of the Dune Encyclopedia?

It sort of irked me that Brian Herbert ignored the material there completely when writing the prequels.

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I like the Dune Encyclopedia. It’s fun, especially for geeks like me. It doesn’t bother me that Brian ignored it, because so did Frank. It was published the same year as Heretics of Dune, and there were some direct contradictions already. Chapterhouse Dune also had some contradictions. The standard fan-wankery is that the Dune Encyclopedia is as historically inaccurate as any history book would be about events that happened over 1500 years ago, and therefore should be considered an “artifact” of Dune (which was the original intention), like the writings of Princess Irulan and the “reports” at the end of Dune and the beginning of Heretics. This idea appeals to me tremendously. I think in some cases the new books would have greatly improved had Brian used it (especially regarding the Butlerian Jihad, which makes about 1000 times more sense in the Dune Encyclopedia than it does in the trilogy). McNelly had a better grasp of the voice of Frank Herbert.

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Y’know, I got the feeling that for some of the designs for the SFTV version they went back and, um, “drew inspiration from” Jean “Moebius” Giraud who (like Giger) had done prelim designs for the aborted Jorodowski version (some of the TV-version Guild had a certain “Arzach” vibe to them, IMO). JeanGir does funky hats/headwear/nimbus like nobody’s business. And eventually they did get Irulan into sensible outfits, in the second series.

Yet I actually liked the funky hats – as I mentioned, I tend to agree with a lot of what Ghanima has said about the aesthetics/visual style of Lynch’s Dune vs. SFTV’s Dune, and the hats, even if a token thing, were to me a welcome step away from too many instances of the SFTV team trying to make things look “realistic” when that was unnecessary.

As to what Frylock/fetus discuss, it has been mentioned earlier that the Lynch movie went too far at the end in doing the Paul-as-God thing; in the 1st book itself, Herbert plays with us quite a bit a game of is-he-or-isn’t-he and when you really look at it, never really nails it down. On the one hand he makes it clear the BG relies on a series of deliberately planted myths spread in order to create self-fulfilling-prophecies; yet at the same time we’re told the Jessica-Paul genealogy deviates from the program and he DOES short-circuit major parts of their schemes – but at the end of the fisrt novel, Paul still has plenty of unresolved issues, his heir is dead, he still needs to make political compromises he’d rather not (hey, if I’m a god, I don’t need to marry the former Emperor’s daughter to gain legitimacy), the opposing powers are still there; in a vacuum w/o the sequels, we leave them at the point he is just then going to begin to change things. The readers are the ones who are left to presume that it means he’ll make everything all right (and what does THAT mean…). Herbert then takes the tack that the eventual pursuit of ultimate “good” may NOT be pleasant, may require many “bad” things to be deliberately done to individuals and collectives both deserving and innocent, and that the ultimate “good” may not even BE what was originally apparent as such.