DUNE: c/d

discuss possible links between herbert's mania for unconstrained, natural environmental development with his running story about "The Tyrant" with the strong authorial intervention at each step of the way with his seeming inability to settle on an overarching theme for the story (i mean, he seems to revise the whole continuity in every book! first the tyrant hates the bene gesserit - then all of a sudden they're the only hope in the universe - then they're subsumed into the matres?? and that was the master plan??)

As for story arcs - I didn't think there NEEDED to be one. One of the most attractive points of the books is the way that people swap from side to side - you root for someone that you previously hated.

Best baddies ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7DSvMKzMj4

I am going to an SF book club tonight, where the book is DUNE.

I read the first one long ago and man, that was way more than enough.

Dune the first one = Classic.

Probably one of my top 5 SF novels - loved how the setting was based around this hard environmental science (which in retrospect doesn't make sense anyway), but then it kind of deliberately tried to piss off all the physics nerds by inserting all this great psychic/telepathy stuff into the narrative. "Screw realistic FTL travel, let's just stick this alien in a tank, feed it hallucinogenic drugs, and it can bend us through space and time." Also loved the idea of the Mentats - "we don't trust AI so we will train humans to be computers instead."

It is a) one of the few canonical SF novels that really stands up, b) seems to pave the way for New Wave in the 1960's and simultaneously make a break with SF as it was in the 40's and 50's (although admittedly this is pure speculation on my part as it was many decades before my birth - contemporary fans and writers may have felt differently).

The rest of the series seemed like a dud to me though - I've read several of the sequels multiple times and really I can't remember anything much about them, except the impression that Frank Herbert really didn't want to write them (maybe that is wishful thinking).

first few posts on here are great

haven't read dune since i was 12, but

"seems to pave the way for New Wave in the 1960s": it came out in '65! although bits of it were being serialised, somewhere, before then. actually, in 'trillion year spree' or 'billion year spree' or whatever its called uneasy New Wave figure b. aldiss admiringly quotes bits of dune at length in order to say: "now, see, this, this is better than all those stories with typographical fol-de-rol, this is what REAL modern sf looked like"

i fucking LOVE dune

Herbert named one of his characters "Pieter de Vries", which is one letter away from the name of the 20th century comic novelist Peter de Vries. It's a surreal touch. I like to imagine Herbert thinking "let 'em figure that one out."

It was a nod to skot.

it came out in '65!

For some reason I thought it was like 1960-61. But nevertheless Wikipedia dates the beginning of the New Wave movement to 1964 (which is when Michael Moorcock became editor of New Worlds) and the peak as 1971, so it is certainly contemporaneous and definitely could have been an influence on later New Wave writers. Dangerous Visions is debatably part of the New Wave stuff (depends if we just see it as a British phenomenon), but it is often cited as the definitive American New Wave anthology and that came out after Dune in 1967.

Given that no one seems to really like the sequels (apart from me, obv.), and The White Plague is ye liveliest awfulnesse, did Frank Herbert write anything else any good? Or was he a one book writer?

he wrote this hilarious little dirty limerick on a bathroom wall once

i've heard The Whipping Star is good

Whipping Star is my favorite Herbert.

I only read the first 3 or so when I was about 20. I loved them & want to read them again, but the only way I can read everything I want to read, keep up my internet addiction, walk the dog, draw, eat, sleep, keep husband, etc, is to shunt several Beth Parkers off to parallel universes, then reunite them periodically into one super Beth Parker, rinse, repeat.

After all, failing to bathe, change clothes or clean house only buys you so much time.

You need a spice eating monster to bend you some extra time.

I should go back and read Dune again as I remember loving it then devouring the sequels - though they never quite lived up to the first one.

You need a spice eating monster to bend you some extra time.

Failing that, retirement, at least by the time I hit 80. Disability?

reading the first one again 4 the first time since i was like 12 or 13 ... so so dope

Dune is a classic, even outside of its narrow genre.

Has anyone read the sequels written by Frank Herbert's son and a co-author? I assume they're terrible. (TBH, I thought the last book or two in the series by Frank Herbert were borderline-terrible, e.g., God Emperor of Dune).

Yeah they're awful, the old man and woman at the end of Chapterhouse are not intelligent face dancers but AI survivors from the butlerian jihad

Also Heretics and Chapterhouse are awesome novels but there are inexplicable elements in them that don't seem to blend well with the earlier stories but perhaps that's because i never finished reading God Emperor which is quite boring

Yeah, IIRC, nothing happens in God Emperor. Lotsa "thinking" and "plotting."

Guild Navigators are REAL!!!
http://cache.boston.com/universal/bigpicture/13_200716.jpg

(My nerdiest post ever? No, it's probably something to do with Starfleet Battles)

ilx is very booknerd today.

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/259/godemp.jpg

Hmm, did a search and thought this was an ILE thread...

Hey so, is there really any reward in reading past the first one? I've read it maybe three times over the last, let's say 10-12 years...I like a lot of the Big Ideas (mainly the whole notion of a character realizing he is the Prophesied Chosen One and being really freaked out about it), but the characters/plot sort of ooze together in the last third or so and I've just never been tempted by the sequels - they feel like cash-ins, but are they?

http://www.moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

An awesome seriously in-depth looks at the Origins of the Book.

really loved the first one and the fourth (god emperor of dune). The Brian Herbert ones are uniformly terrible.

Before I read it, Dune always had a certain mystique to me. That was the result of some combination of the cover, the fact that my older sister had a copy of it and spoke reverently of it, and my failed attempt to read it when I was too young. (I really couldn't handle long-playing novels until I was in 7th, maybe 8th grade, and still didn't read many then.) When I finally read it many years later, I definitely enjoyed it, but I couldn't get into whatever the followup was. I wasn't that thrilled with Herbert's writing even in Dune, but the story and the whole framework carried it for me.

rereading these right now

there is such a dropoff in quality between dune and dune messiah

about to start children of dune, remember it being better, hopefully?

he really is just making this stuff up as he goes, huh

I remember liking all the sequels I read (up to God Emperor, which is teh total amaze).

but cripes, that God Emperor cover above is astonishing.

rereading dune! can't figure out why these are so eminently rereadable to me, but i've read them a million times. even though there's a bunch of stuff that would normally make me not like it, somehow the story makes it all ok.

finally got the dune encyclopedia, what's the best way to read this shit?

http://lparchive.org/Dune/Update%2001/51-vyrw2f.gif

skinless gifs

what game is that from?

Dune the PC Game. I'm on a Let's Play roll these days.

http://lparchive.org/Dune/

is that the isometric RTS one, where you pick one of three houses?

i don't recall the screen looking quite like that but its been, oh, about 20 years since i've played

(that link is blocked for me)

i like DM too -- it's deliberately very small-scale tho, macchiavellian court politics

also it had my favourite space-opera style cover:

https://www.sffworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/dunemessiah.jpg

It has the weird quality of being this local neighborhood intrigue, while presumably there's this vague but massive cosmic genocide happening offstage. It all felt incongruous, like the focus didn't make sense.

rejected JBR screen names

Maybe check this, if more curious than worried about possible spoilers (on Rolling Speculative, I saw teen Paul as struggling w identity and fate like his 60-born peer and soul mate Peter Parker Spiderman):

Just finished Dune, read it for the first time. Honestly....I really enjoyed reading this, but the ending seemed kind of dud. Everything seemed to wrap up really quickly without too terribly much struggle. And Paul strikes me as kind of a dick. Will reading Children of Dune make me happier?

― Dominique, Thursday, September 22, 2016 12:25 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Dune Messiah is the second, Children is third, incl. in quality, though it has its strong sections/pages. But If you don't already sympathize with Paul's struggles vs. his fucked-with nature and destiny, go no further (if you do, God Emperor mostly smells like ass, Heretics of Dune is yer Return To Form, but not enough to send me in a timely fashion to Chapterhouse: Dune, the last Dune by series creator Frank Herbert. But I'll get there someday, and could see how the follow-ups written and co-written by his son might work okay as space opera, minus any overload of philosophical etc. elements.

― dow, Thursday, September 22, 2016 1:37 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanks -- yeah, most of the time I rooted for him, but some of the time it was clear he was just as capable of being corrupted by power as anyone else. He struggled with it, but also took advantage of his power at times (and also seemed to have an inability to actually deal with the bad stuff that happened to him, other than just shutting it out completely). I guess that's the point? I've also read that in further books, characters that were once "villains" can become more sympathetic.

― Dominique, Thursday, September 22, 2016 3:23 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, they can---they're all crazy, fucked-with and fucking with, in the cultural midst of cultural imperatives---even the God Emperor means to gradually implode the Order of Things by advancing it, teaching "Don't Follow Leaders, Watch The Parking Meters", but sure does take him a long time, and even though as a comic premise it's funny that he likes torture his followers with huge clouds of philosophical bullshit---like he's Mr. Natural, and everbody else, incl. loyal readers, is Flakey Foont, or Dudley Moore in "Bedazzled"---this isn't as good. But as one of the fucked-with Children of Dune he's more sympathetic. And I'd like to know just how the Bene Gesserit got that way, but anyway they do indeed try to save the day in Heretics--maybe trying too hard in Chapterhouse, judging by sneak peaks, but that tends to the Dune way (incl. that of its creator) after all.

― dow, Thursday, September 22, 2016 4:21 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

in the culturalmidst, I meant

― dow, Thursday, September 22, 2016

Strikethrough of that extra "cultural" didn't make it into paste. Local library also has early The Ecology of Dune, come to think of it.

yeah i am not as big on Douchelord Paul now that he is really leaning into it all

he kinda went back and forth through the book and I appreciated the few moments when Jessica was able to check him

Welll---he earns his very own (better not say more, but he does)

i reread dune messiah for the first tme in probably 30 years if not more

there's more of it that i don't follow than i remember lol (the complex motivations that wd be delivered in whispered voice-overs if david lunch was filming it)

i still like its sense of small-scale intimate corrupt court biz and its semi-pointless gaudiness (the conspirators somehow remind me of an aladdin pantomime)

Just started reading/listening to 'Dune' on Audible. Wow. Why did I put this off so long??

It's great that they have atmospheric music and a cast of voices to play the different parts. I'm also reading the book so I know how the hell you spell things like "Kwisatz Haderach"

I'm currently about 3/4 through Children of Dune. Definitely an improvement over Dune Messiah, which I found kind of pointless. This has much more of a fleshed out plot and characters.

I keep thinking about how weird Herbert's writing style is. So much of these books consist of a pair of characters talking to each other in riddles. At times, it can be a bit difficult to see if it has meaning or just sounds deep.

dune messiah sucks

if you're 3/4 through 'children' and still engaged, then you have passed the . . . test

'god emperor' is intensely weird but worthwhile

five and six are more like standard SF (but i like them)

the books by his son are astonishingly terrible; you and i could do better over slack

my name is matttkkkk and I approve this message ^

I read God Emperor about 30+ years ago and recall liking it, so I'll probably read again. Have never read 5 and 6, we'll see if I have patience for them.

I mean... I'm new to all this. I always assumed it would be very dry, which I guess it would be if it weren't so well realised? This is probably an obvious and well-worn observation but you can see where Star Wars and Game of Thrones and any number of other sci-fi/fantasy universes got their ideas from.

i finally got around to Dune at the start of the pandemic & loved it & would love more of it. everyone seems to agree that Messiah is bad & not worth the effort - would i be lost at sea if i skipped it and went right to Children?

very probably.

also mark s. likes it iirc. and it's relatively short

it's a quick read and it sets up the events of Children of Dune, it just feels a bit pointless on its own, there isn't much of a story there

Pinky nail summaries of all 24 books to date, in chrono order, no more spoilery than nec.:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g38012512/dune-books-in-order/

Dune is the ur-text of modern science fiction. It's rare to find a book that draws, successfully, on so many disparate ideas to form a coherent narrative.

Imho, the whole series is untouchable through God Emperor. He could have ended the entire saga there and left everyone satisfied. I understand that bills gotta be paid, though, and the last two books are not unreadable, they just don't add much, if anything, to the story.

("nail" makes me think of Martin Luther)

just finished dune messiah and it was indeed as bad & pointless as i had been led to believe. after the epic sweep of dune this one felt weirdly stagebound, a tale of the galactic struggle for control of infinite cosmic spacetime that takes place entirely in like 3 different rooms, with what feels like only about 8 speaking parts altogether. but ironically i'm kind of more interested in getting to children of dune now just based on the prospect that it will surely be better than this one, and help me feel like the time spent on this one wasnt wasted.

no its good shut up

Red Nation, radical indigenous presenters look at the Dune film from last year in terms of colonialism etc.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eF0TJNCvx5rrrk0E4NwS6?si=49d64aed6f4348c1

Leto II has total recollection of the memories of all his ancestors, which means that he remembers watching The Phantom Menace in theaters.

— Mia Moore (@StopTweetingMia) October 12, 2022

thought this made more sense here than the film threads on ILE

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/43515/the-mystery-of-the-dune-font

“Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!” goes the refrain. “A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!”

some ilx0r needs to create a song out of this imo

Yueh Yueh
oh
no
he gotta go
Ay ya hya chouhada

hey
yueh
baron’s got your wife now
don’t you worry yueh

🐦[Leto II has total recollection of the memories of all his ancestors, which means that he remembers watching The Phantom Menace in theaters.
— Mia Moore (@StopTweetingMia) October 12, 2022🕸]🐦

a thing i like abt the acronym CHOAM is that what it stands for is really no less inscrutable = Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles

Yeah that's David Foster Wallace level

found scribbled in blood on a scrap of paper as he emerged from a multi-week spice bender, soon after he found himself checked in at the group home

the word "honnete" in my corporate acronym has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the word "honnete"

Kyle MacLachlan and Frank Herbert: The Boys pic.twitter.com/xcGURGQ4IL

— Patrick (@Pilgrim945) August 25, 2021

uniting eastern and western WA

a prime up-the-arse corner candidate

in the introduction to Dune Messiah, Brian Herbert claims, unprompted, that Frank Herbert would have been one of the all time great US Presidents (?) had he decided to do that instead of becoming a writer

— caroline (going woman) (@soonrightaway) February 24, 2024

caroline (going woman) @soonrightaway: in the introduction to Dune Messiah, Brian Herbert claims, unprompted, that Frank Herbert would have been one of the all time great US Presidents (?) had he decided to do that instead of becoming a writer

dune messiah continues to deliver

Now I can't get the image of a sandworm with Trump's face on it out of my mind.

spice force

Make Arrakis Great Again

^^ https://www.tiktok.com/@loloverruled/video/7342915568074247454

I didn't have a huge desire to read fhiz but it's one of mum's favourite books - she read all six! -- and I wanted to talk to her about it.

A strange book! Dense and hardgoing and very, very long -- but I enjoyed it. I haven't seen any of the films.

I'm curious though - I spent the whole book thinking the Irulan segments were written in the future about an aged Paul p- but (much more straightforwardly) they're just about the current Emperor, as I discovered when Irulan turns up at the end.

Is this a deliberate misdirection or was I just not paying attention?

deliberate misdirection imo

thopter

Is it ever explained why it is so important to make a million clones of Duncan Idaho?

we need more of this kind of guy

Since it's kind of a plot spoiler, in the first place it was to demonstrate reinstating a ghola's pre-death memories to Paul, by conditioning Idaho to kill him - his history of loyalty shocked him into full recollection. The Bene Tleilax then offered Paul a restored Chani after she died in childbirth, but Paul killed Scytale to escape the temptation. After that Leto II found Idaho a valuable constant in his millennia of rule, and the Tleilaxu would obligingly supply him with a replacement every time one died, as a subtle way of retaining influence on the God Emperor. And then I think Frank Herbert was just in love with the idea of a guy who was reincarnated thousands of times to link the sequels to the original book.
Ironic that Pattinson played Mickey 17 and now Scytale!
I fear I've revealed my full nerd colours there. Please be kind.