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.
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)
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
minutesdays part.deleted by creator
: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)