What kind of stupid asshole would think Härkönen, with two umlauts, is a Russian name?
"if it sounds foreign and strange its ebil like gommunism"
-- Americans
In the Finnish language ä and ö are letters in their own right, so they're not really umlauts in this case
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So is å, but it's only included in the Finnish alphabet because there are lots of places and people with Swedish names in Finland
Finland could've been a Soviet if their civil war had gone a little different.
He was born and raised during the peak of the Cold War and that's going to do nasty things to a motherfucker's brain.
But that first book was downright prophetic in so far as it spelled out the collapse of the then-modern bipolar global regime. Nation-states mired in a backwards technology, yielding more and more power to regions with the largest excess reserves. Native peoples engaging in asymmetrical warfare to topple global behemoths. The way in which zealous religious conviction - once a fundamental lever of control over the public - mutates into something far beyond the empire's control.
The ecological aspect of the book was also profound (although, that may just be from my 21st century-pilled brain's perspective). Re-imagining the Middle East as an Eden-like ecological paradise, contingent on warring imperial factions halting their voracious consumption of fossil fuels? That's good shit.
I think Herbert has a very dark and cynical take on the trajectory of human development. And that looks bad on paper. But he also recognizes the potential for revolution and a re-imagining of civilization. He just sees these as fruit of a tree planted by prior generations and not something the current people - even the Mentats and Messiahs - have an easy hand in manipulating in the moment.
The only bio of Herbert was written by his son and sucks, but it also has a lot of interesting details. Herbert hung out with Marxist artists when he was young, but his dad was a cop in the white ethno state known as Oregon, and Herbert himself worked for awhile as a speechwriter for a Republican senator. He would also subject his own children to lie detector tests.
He would also subject his own children to lie detector tests.
wtf why did he do that
Space Feudalism. The Good Guys are , arguably benign, fascists. eugenics everywhere. A grim and dark future indeed.
His later works are not much better in that sense,
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although it can be said that God Emperor Leto II uses reasoning that resembles a kind of magical dialectical materialism in his grand plan for humanity.
Doesn’t Paul know his actions are going to cause billions of innocent deaths but he’s powerless to stop it? He does terrible things but it’s not exactly his fault, he’s another victim of the Bene Gesserit if anything.
I later books he postualtes that a benign dictator will be required to ensure the safety and success of the human species. Who is the tankie now?
Also they have fleshlights that squirt drugs. But that is only tangentially related.
There is a long list of people who have said "I don't support the Soviet Union, but I do support [a socialist experiment with goals identical to the Soviet Union]".
They also have chairs made of dogs or dogs who act like chairs. I never fully understood the mechanics but they are extremely confortable.
I thought Finnish might be a Germanic language but apparently it's Uralic.
Yeah Finnish couldn't possibly be so related to English. Have you ever seen or heard any Finnish? It's like alien speech. Absolutely uncanny.
I knew Danish was a Germanic language and my mind kind of lumped all of Scandinavia together.
Both Sweden and Norway were under Danish rule for a good while, so that's why those three have very similar languages today.
As far as I know, Norwegians and Swedes used to speak a language that was very much like what is spoken in Iceland today.
Shares some weird elements with Hungarian apparently, but perhaps by coincidence more than anything.
sorry for responding to such an old comment but they have similarities because both are a part of the finno-ugric language family
Slavic = Communist
Both of those associations would make nationalist Finnish types emit screeching only dogs can hear
Well, there are a few that were popular in the early revolutionary days that are definitely more Soviet than standard names
Like Мэл (Mel) which stood for "Marx, Engels and Lenin" or Elmira (Эльмира) for electrification of the world (электрификация мира)
Rural electrification is extremely cool and based. Now we just need rural fiber lines.
The worst thing is that at some point someone has almost definitely said that unironically
I have it on good authority that Frank Herbert came up with the name Duncan Idaho while trying to figure out where he could acquire both potatoes and black coffee simultaneously.
No one can beat Orson Scott Card’s names: Ender Wiggin, Mazer Rackham, and Bonzo (Bonzai?) Madrid.
Yes, and you're calling them soviets despite the fact they're obviously finnish.
the absolute brain poisoning that Americans had to incurr to be like "Soviet? Eeeeviiiiill"
I'm reading the first book rn, it's really taking its time. Still captivating though.
