I intended to have this counterpart to the previous thread posted tomorrow, but I figured why not now.

I am a lifelong fan of the Dune series, from the Lynch 1980s movie to the book (that I read years later and loved) to the unfinished works in the Path of Dune collection. Some of the post-Frank Herbert stuff isn't so good to me, but the setting and story and worldbuilding as a whole were always an inspiration for me. It lead me to believe that science fiction didn't have to always be stuffy, that it could be loaded with powerful pathos moments and compelling complex characters.

I admired Isaac Asimov and his overall body of work, but characters in his stories were almost like walking talking plot devices leading to what he really wanted to talk about, by contrast.

It went over a lot of people's heads, but the message that messiah figures and chosen ones and Great Man Theory in general was a dangerous and even ruinous concept was quite a novel message to weave through Dune's themes, especially in its Frank Herbert-written sequels.

Some of Dune aged very poorly, especially stuff like the gender essentialist woo about what women could do versus what men could do in the Bene Gessarit versus the Mentats, respectively. It also has a sort of "the gays are evil" old people bias, as presented with Baron Harkonnen. Even so, I'm a full believer in the idea that it's possible to accept criticism of things we enjoy without going full treat defender against such criticisms.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I would if I had the time, but I'd probably get lost in the weeds with apocrypha like the Jihad-era brain-vatted cyborg hunts of unaugmented humans and how the techbros of today would totally do the same thing, up to and including bowing to machines as their gods, and how the early-age Atreides on Caladan had the right idea about what to do with those bazinga cyberbrains. :sicko-crowd: :porky-scared:

    • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This smacks of Brian's heresy :no-oil:

      spoiler

      Mostly joking, but there's an interesting conversation to be had about the differences between how Frank and Brian interpret the Thinking Machines and Butlerian Jihad. I think it betrays a quite shallow understanding (on the part of Herbert the Younger) of the abstract concepts that drove the "psychedelic" feel of the original Dune works.

      I, personally, am a subscriber to the Frank-puritan read of there were not necessarilly robots, there were not necessarilly cyborgs, but there were people who decided to allow computers to do thinking for them leading to a civlization of people voluntarily enslaved by their dependence on this technology and the inhuman machine-logic (The Algorithm (TM))that runs it.

      Both are interesting tales with a bit of prescient social commentary to them; I just find the inferred Frank take to be more compelling. I also don't think it helps that with Kevin J. Anderson in the mix all of the ummmmm supplemental material just read like Star Wars EU novels to me.

      E) but I'm uhhh not trying to litigate anything here. I wasn't joking about the minutes days part.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I, personally, am a subscriber to the Frank-puritan read of there were not necessarilly robots, there were not necessarilly cyborgs, but there were people who decided to allow computers to do thinking for them leading to a civlization of people voluntarily enslaved by their dependence on this technology and the inhuman machine-logic (The Algorithm ™)that runs it.

        That's a compelling take. You might have convinced me.

        The present day has plenty of hard-determinists already, and in the name of ideological purity, most of the ideas I've heard for how to reform society around adherence to determinism were Butlerian-era nightmarish to me.

        • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          :yea:

          spoiler

          I do not hold this percieved misunderstanding against Brian, though, because alot of the things that make this read of the text obvious are relatively new changes to our condition. Like, much of Brian's work is around the turn of the millennia and the internet and digital technology while there and impressive and certainly more highly evolved than in the 90's it is still (I think it's safe to say) before these more insidious systems were developed and widely adopted. We weren't having widespread conversations about how Twitter as a platform incentivizes anti-intellectual social interaction or youtube/facebook algorithms curating the information you recieve for you etc. back then.

          It does lead me to ask though, how Frank perceived this so well despite being even further temporally removed from these things; but I think these same lines I drew with the internet and social media can be drawn with capital-curated media substituting the much more explicitly 1 to 1 translation of The Algorithm (tm)