I get why they did it, but it feels like something is lost as a result.
ngl it's worrying. big part of dune's feel is the way all the current cultures eventually evolve into something that's both unrecognizable and familiar. replacing cultural signifiers may avoid controversy, but it also recreates the problem common to a lot of scifi where most of humanity's culture disappears and you're in space america.
In fairness, Dune was already effectively a retelling of Lawrence of Arabia in Space.
The Atreides and Harkonan are neat stand-ins for the English and Ottoman Empires at the start of the Crimean War. And the story echoes the birth of the Kingdom of Saud, alluding to its potential future status as global superpower. Written in a time when genetics was a young science and eugenics wasn't beyond the realm of dinner table conversation, when we were just seriously getting addicted to petroleum as a global commodity, and when the Cold War played out as an endless series of proxy wars between states, it absolutely does reflect the Western political moment.
That's not even really a bad thing. But I think it's worth stating how deliberately allegorical the Sci-Fi story was intended to be. It's a story about Oil and all the politics surrounding the fight for that scarce resource.
That's how I felt about expanse: it started off very promising and then it devolved into Space America with Space Zombies
There's a chance it's for the better.
spoiler
In the book, Paul does everything he can to avoid the jihad he sees coming, because jihad = religious fanaticism = bad. A crusade is also religious fanaticism and is also bad, but portraying the term "crusade" as an evil to be avoided could be a good thing for an American audience. Crusades are a part of Christian culture, and if you're going to write religious criticism there's less of a risk of it being misinterpreted if you use the audience's dominant religion as an example. If you criticize religious fanaticism using the religion of the Other, it's easy to interpret that as nothing more than "Other bad."
Plus, we're almost guaranteed to get some Christian chuds throwing a fit over it, especially with the rise of right-wing "crusade" imagery. That's always good for a laugh.
Spoilers for a book that came out half a century ago, I guess.
Is it really Islamophobia if you're portraying a religious war as bad, and using a Christian word for a bad religious war instead of an Islamic one?
I thought the point is that the jihad - at least, the one that Paul tries to prevent - won't, strictly speaking, be bad.
Dune Spoilers
He ended up riding the jihad, steering it a bit, but it was never in his power to stop it. The Fremen were, from the beginning, going to cast the Harkonens from their world, and the jihad brought a new vitality to the Imperial apparatus.
Now that I'm writing this, the worm, the unstoppable creature that is the source of spice, I see that the worm is a pretty clear metaphor for the jihad.
spoiler
Whether he could have stopped it is debatable. IIRC for most of the book he talks about a "Golden Path" that would avoid it, but he might make some comment towards the end to the effect of "that was never realistic, anyways." Although that could just be cope at that point. It also seems clear that him dying could have stopped it, and there are multiple points where -- despite his prescience -- he senses he is in real danger of dying.
Great point on the sandworm metaphor, too.
I've only read the first book myself.
Dune
On the point of the "Fremen prophecy" - those "prophecies" are seeded on various planets by the Bene Gesserit and are intentionally vague enough that they can make use of them as needed. It's not so much a matter of destiny as one of artificiality - same with their eugenics program.
But that's where the jihad and the metaphor of the worm come in. It be steered a bit, but it is beyond the scope of anything that the Bene Gesserit are able to engineer, and it is their undoing. This is the closest Dune comes to destiny, and it can just as easily be interpreted as a result of historical forces. Even if the Harkonen plan had gone off without a hitch and the Atreides had all been killed, the jihad would still have take place if only to remove the Harkonen oppressors from Arrakis.
Edit: I can never remember how to do spoilers on the first try.
The whole story really buys into the idea of hereditary leadership, pretty much every good leaders is the child of a former good leader.
Well, the premise is a neo-feudal society, so it's hard to escape that. I'm also trying to remember if Stilgar is anyone's kid, and how the inner circle guys (Duncan Idaho, etc.) fit in. All the Harkonnen parts also show the absolute depravity that can happen unchecked in such a society, so at least there's that.
As well as spiritual messiah stories, everything falls into line with Paul becoming the savior, everything is destiny, everything meant to happen.
The whole exploration of this concept is what I think of as one of the book's strongest points. There's constant doubt from every angle about whether how true the messiah story is, and even though it winds up happening it's still unambiguously described as an artificial creation. It constantly toys with whether religion is something spiritual or a tactic of the ruling class.
spoiler
The Fremen legend is explicitly stated to have been implanted in their culture, and Paul himself is a quasi-artificial creation.
Eugenics too, I mean one of the main factions of the world has the goal of creating an ubermensch by seducing men and controlling their reproductive process while with them, and it kind of works.
Totally fair criticism.
spoiler
Nobody ever calls this out as the obvious cop out it is, “yeah sure we don’t technically have computers but you’re creating super humans who basically are computers”.
I think the idea is that at least they're still human, with increasingly-strong hints at questions like "but are you really human if you turn into X, Y, or Z?" I think your "not even graphing calculators?" argument is interesting, although you do have things like the hunter-seeker that must use some sort of non-AI computing.
Overall, I think it's OK to just lightly touch on these subjects -- having a neat story within a world that raises some interesting questions is fine for me, especially because way too many sci-fi stories geek out about those questions at the expense of better literature.
The whole story really buys into the idea of hereditary leadership, pretty much every good leaders is the child of a former good leader.
The story sells the idea that the Bennie Jesuits believe in hereditary leadership. And, as a consequence, they have embarked upon a project of cross-breeding in pursuit of an Uber-mensch who could be a perfect leader. But what they get is Paul Atredies, a man who can only really see that his fate is already sealed and can do nothing to prevent the Jihad he fears and seeks to avoid.
I'd argue Dune actually has a Marxist spin. It's very obsessed with material conditions and the natural flow of history. Where it does posit on truly "alternative" futures, it focuses on Liet Kynes, the imperial planetologist, who posits the opportunity for Arakis to bloom. Changing the material condition of Arakis is the only way Paul ever sees to truly change the direction of the planet and the universe as a whole.
spoiler
There are several instances in which he sees his death as a possibility, but then concludes he'd become a Fremen martyr leading to the same universe-spanning conquest. He also foresees his sister standing in for him in an instance, and concludes this would be just as bad. At the end he realize that he never really had a choice in the outcome, only the particulars.
Ahh that sounds right. Time for a re-read.
spoiler
The best Dune prescience moment for me is in one of the sequels when Paul gets blinded but has done so much space acid that his future sight is constant and precise enough that he can function as if he can still see. I shoehorned that bit into the ending of a homebrew D&D socialist-noir campaign once, fond memories.
It's probably less islamophobia and more the same sort of reasoning that lead to the Arbiter's name being changed from Dervish during Halo 2's development
I'm interested to see if they reference the Orange Catholic bible at all.
We shall call you Usul, which means the strength of the balls of the penis.
It's more than desert stuff. I almost get the feeling that they'll whitewash the Fremen or toss their culture into a bucket of bleach.
One summon was named Jihad in Japanese but Crusader in English.
I did enjoy 2049 (agreed on the score), but I'm a bit apprehensive of Dune now. I was skeptical of 2049 before I saw it, though, so who knows.
