First of all any article referencing Brian Herbert as an authority on Dune is suspect as a result. Those atrocious fanfiction additions are best used as cat litter box liner, period.
Secondly, if you read the Appendices of Book I of Frank Herbert's Dune series, you'll see that he more or less invented the concept of 'planetologist', which in the late 1990s became a recognized academic discipline under the umbrellas of 'planetary sciences' and 'earth system sciences'. This was in response to a sense that the academic study of the subject had been too fractured, i.e. disciplines such as oceanography, geology, ecology and atmospheric chemistry and physics were actually highly interrelated, to the point that the historic divisions didn't make as much sense as they once did. This is now seen in, for example, the scientific study of Jupiter's moon Europa.
As far as the current impacts of human civilization on Earth's climate and ecology, see the original Dune book:
> "The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences - Pardot Kynes in "Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune"
Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.
I don't think fiction is Brian Herbert's gift. If you haven't, I encourage you to read Dreamer of Dune. It's his biography of Frank Herbert. While I loathe his contribution to fiction, I found his biography of his dad well done and rather touching.
To be honest, having Kevin J. Anderson as co-writer doesn't help. He wrote some of the worst Star Wars, now Legends, books out there. And given how bad some of those Legends books are that is something.
I loved those books back the day when I was younger, they just don't compare well against Timothy Zahn's books, the original Han Solo series and the short stories about small characters from the original movies.
What is sad so, is that the IMHO brilliant Dune encyclopedia was declared non-canon...
EDIT: The quote from Dune about ecology rings true for all kinds of very complex and large systems. Especially those that are of the self-maintaining kind.
> What is sad so, is that the IMHO brilliant Dune encyclopedia was declared non-canon...
I hold my own counsel on what is canon: Anything explicitly and directly written by Frank Herbert. That excludes The Dune Encyclopedia, but I don't think that diminishes it. We shouldn't pretend that it was declared non-canon for any reason other than Brian Herbert and Anderson selling pablum as Dune universe novels.
My understanding is that he was somewhat involved and also approved of the Encyclopedia. My interpretation is that his objections to it weren't really objections so much as making clear that he wouldn't be bound by anything in it; and that this is being used to re-write history and make it sound like he disliked the Encyclopedia.
> Still damn great content, so.
Exactly. It doesn't really matter what a couple of hacks have to say about it.
> First of all any article referencing Brian Herbert as an authority on Dune is suspect as a result. Those atrocious fanfiction additions are best used as cat litter box liner, period.
Haha. It's nice to see this opinion written out. I read a few of the Herbert/Anderson books (I had a lot of time on my hands) and came to similar conclusions. I was most disappointed with the post-Chapter House stuff they did. It was allegedly based on extensive material left behind by Frank Herbert for the seventh book, but it very quickly tied in material and tropes from the prequels that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson had written, clearly being their creature and not the father's.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Anderson had been a consultant on the new film.
I was pleasantly surprised by the new film, already looking forward to Part two. Even more so now that I know Anderson was a consultant. I made a conscious decision to not read anything from him, or Michael A. Stackpole for that matter, a long time ago.
I do have to read Frank Herbert's Dune series again so.
I think the drama around the pain box and a couple of other moments was not as good as it could have been, IMHO, but it does do a good job of telling the story (so far), and things are on such a huge scale... very worthwhile. I sincerely hope they manage to film the first three books, at least.
I liked the Gom Jabar Scene, the pain box part that is, a little bit better in David Lynch's adoption. Jessica's despair about this whole thing was done better by Villeneuve, if you ask me.
If they pull of at least one more book, or even two, this will be on par with LotR if not a tad better. If the team can keep the level, that is.
I did like the original Dune movie a lot, one of the most under-valued films.
I tell most people to try God Emperor and if they hate it, they might as well be done. In my experience it's a rare breed that enjoys Heretics and Chapterhouse. I'm part of that breed, but I have also read them through many times; and I can't say that I was part of that breed before I had read them through many times. It could also be a rare breed because I don't think most people make it through God Emperor.
Anderson wrote crappy Star Wars books, too. I'm really not sure what the breakdown is of Brian Herbert and Anderson actually doing the writing.
I gave the two of them two or three trilogies, so more than a fair shake. Painfully dull is the first adjective that comes to mind. They really took some of the most interesting places and concepts in sci-fi and made them flat.
Hunters and Sandworms were the least bad books by the pair, and there was certainly some hint of Heretics and Chapterhouse in them, but they were still not well written and the ideas lacked the substance of Frank Herbert's works.
'Heretics' was my favourite book the last time I reread the series, because it finally gave us a glimpse of a large and chaotic civilisation beyond the reach of the stultified empire. I agree that it took many rereadings to get there though.
Interesting. I adore God Emperor, but I feel as if it's lightest on plot of all six books. In any case, I love the plot device of Leto's Stolen Journals as a way for Leto/Frank to expound philosophically on themes of religion, government, and nature. That book is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to stimulating observations.
As far as the Villeneuve films go, my sincerest wish is that we can somehow make it to a God Emperor film. I have no idea what this would look like, or if it would be any good, but I'll keep dreaming.
Now I’m halfway through Heretics and I believe the last 3 books would make an excellent dialogue-heavy anime. Very hard to see them as widely popular films.
> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.
While I agree with this sentiment, I think it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments. The Cahuilla people, who are indigenous to where I live, for example have always had botanical experimentation deeply integrated in their cultures. Some of the most important people in their cultures were botanists. They had many complex rules around patches of certain plants growing and these important people (who I'll just call "doctors" as an insufficient translation) would claim certain patches and study them for years. Some of this knowledge was shared with the rest of the communities, while some was protected and only shared with their close family members or apprentices. Their "folk taxonomy" had names for every single species of oak that is recognized today in the area. An extremely impressive task given how readily many species hybridize
The same can be said of many indigenous peoples around the world. There's an increasing recognition that the Amazon isn't just some pristine wilderness but rather a "manufactured landscape" that has been deeply shaped by the indigenous caretakers of it. In fact there's also an increasing recognition that oftentimes "conservation" ends up hurting the environments it's trying to protect because it kicks out the indigenous people that the landscape relies on. This can also be seen in California where so much of the ecology is dependent on the cultural burn practices of native Californians
> it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments
OP's point is that this is often overblown. Plenty of ancient civilizations ran themselves into the ground through environmental collapse. I'm currently reading The Big Oyster, which documents evidence of the native population over-harvesting the New York harbor.
Almost by definition, a colonist will be part of a more-powerful civilization than the indigenous populations she encounters. Bigger civilizations have bigger footprints. It takes care to disentangle which cultures are inherently more "at balance" with nature, i.e. could scale less destructively, versus those which are scale limited. (For example, Nordic versus Continental culture, for European examples.)
I recently started reading the book titled "Seeing like a state: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed" by James C. Scott [1] which talks about how starting with a simplified idea of how to structure a complex system (i.e. a system with many interdependencies) without taking into account details at the ground level end up in disaster.
Using that idea of "legibility" that Scott proposes, not accounting for indigenous "tribal knowledge" in planning for their "betterment" does not work. Common language that reflects this happening is when such knowledge is trivialized or rejected using words like "unscientific".
There's no inherent reason superior technology would lead to the destabilization of an ecosystem (aka 'harmony with nature'). A good example is the introduction of the hunting rifle to Inuit culture, as I understand it. Prior to this hunting near the Arctic Circle was a far more difficult endeavor, as sneaking up on seals and caribou is not easy even with a high skill level. As a result, famine became much less common and hunting took much less time.
Now, if the Inuit had tried to get extremely wealthy by using their rifles to hunt seals and caribou as the basis of a large and ever-growing export industry, they'd have indeed destabilized the ecosystem and there would have been a collapse in the population of seals and caribou, as seen with European hunters of wildlife in North America with beavers and bison and passenger pigeons. If that had happened, the Inuit themselves would most likely have followed the local animals into extinction.
[edit] Note with bison, there was a deliberate extermination policy pursued by the US government as a means of destroying the food supply of various indigenous tribes that relied on bison for sustenance (aka the genocidal starvation program). This doesn't explain the extermination of beaver and other wildlife populations, however.
> a means of destroying the food supply of various indigenous tribes that relied on bison for sustenance (aka the genocidal starvation program)
Do you have any references about this? It's the first time I heard of it and googling for "the genocidal starvation program" only gets me hits on that other genocidal starvation program, the Holodomor.
The book 'Our History Is the Future' by Nick Estes goes into detail on this.
Specifically:
The US army and settlers moving West executed buffalo because Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains depended on them. 'Every dead buffalo is a dead Indian' is one of the quotes from the time. The army/settlers would also poison the buffalo carcasses so Indigenous people couldn't eat from the dead carcass, and as a consequence, other animals in the environment (e.g. wolves) couldn't eat the meat either and likewise suffered, and further reduced the food supply.
This took place after the 1868 treaty of the Black Hills. So the US signed a treaty acknowledging Indigenous land and sovereignty. And then started a genocidal campaign, against the people they just signed the treaty with -- tresspassing on treaty defined land to do so and kill the buffalo. The Supreme Court acknolwedged the history of these wrongdoings in a ruling in 1980, awarding financial compensation to the Indigenous peoples -- however the Indigenous plaintiffs did not want monetary awards, they sought rematriation of their stolen land and the upholding of their rights under the 1868 treaty. The battles to uphold those treaty rights continue to this day.
(In 2007, the UN ratified the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms Indigeous claim to treaty rights such as the 1868 Black Hills treaty (albeit in a 'non-binding' way). The declaration has now been ratified by all UN member nations -- US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand originally held out for several years -- and many groups are now operating with that document as a legal/political framework and justification to take their treaty and Indigenous rights cases forward.)
It's not inherent, but having a powerful technology you understand may tempt you into applying it to things you don't understand to force them be more understandable. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it does not, and one has to have a measure of humility, so that having a powerful hammer not to start treating everything as a nail. European civilization, unfortunately, fell into this failure mode not once (maybe others too, we just know about European failures the most). We still can observe it in hi-tech where "we just add some ML and big data to it and it's solved" led people astray many times. Sometimes it worked, surely, but sometimes the amount of subject domain knowledge required to deal with the problem was vastly underestimated. One example just from recent days is the Zillow fiasco. It doesn't have to be on the planet Pandora, we can see it everywhere, both in history and around us right now.
I think that with sufficiently advanced technology, there would be immense understanding of nature resulting in elimination of any need to be in conflict with the nature because one would simply solve their needs by enveloping or integrating with nature instead of going against it.
Yes, but 'Enough Tech and Knowledge to do Whatever Whenever at Planetary Sale' ... that's a million years away.
In the meantime, to answer the OP's question, the issue is that there is an inflection point at which man has enough tech to start changing nature, by disrupting parts of those systems.
That's probably huge distinction between most of Europe/Asia and the rest of the world in the Columbian era.
Aboriginals cultures mostly did not have the ability to shape the land (and where they had they tech, they did disrupt). Forget narratives one way or the other - they were by and large 'way behind'. And things took a an even bigger, massive jump when we harnessed fossil fuels.
The glamorization of 'In Concert With Nature' is I think mostly just the fact that they didn't have the power to do anything otherwise.
> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?
It's called the Noble Savage [1] [2] trope. It's at least as old as the Romans. It's also probably the reason so many of our sports teams bear the images of peoples we committed quasi-genocide [3] against.
The last residential school closed in 1996. Forced sterilizations lasted through the 80s in the US. The current US president was alive during the Navajo livestock reduction.
Well maybe I’d say that by “our”, I mean the people who self-describe as “fans” of at least one of those teams, or people who have been to a live match featuring at least one of those teams in the last five years, or something like this.
Go back far enough and pretty much all land is stolen. It's not like the same native American tribes ruled parts of America since the dawn of man, they fought for territory all the time like everyone else.
> Ah, I see you're an adherent of the "finders-genocide, finders'-grandkids'-keepers" sociopolitical philosophy.
Are you saying that I and every other human are owed for any and all unrecompensed wrongs committed against any and all members of our ancestries and that governments should go about facilitating this “business”?
I think it’s more like should be deep consideration on how can the United States of America as a country acknowledge that it committed genocide against several nations and discussion on how to best support the survivors of that genocide. There are living people now who are survivors of genocidal policies like forced sterilization and family separation; how is the United States acknowledging and supporting them?
What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?
And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies? They are in some sense, double harmful?
> What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?
I'm pretty sure "if the policy was driven by a desire for genocide, or results in genocide" would cover it.
> And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies?
Some things are worse than other things and we react different accordingly. The justice system of.... well, virtually every society with laws, is based on that idea. You do something bad, you get consequence X. You do something worse, you get consequence Y. The law says specifically what's worse than what other thing and what happens.
The only time that a lot of different things has had the same consequence was the Draconian constitution, which everybody agreed was shit. However, they all liked that it differentiated between different degrees of similar acts, and we still do today.
Right, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the label genocide adds anything to the conversation. We can say there were this many murders and this many sterilizations and this much property damage and then do whatever restitution calculation. It’s being or not being genocide seems irrelevant.
Genocide has a specific meaning of a specific set of policies with the intention of causing a group of people to become utterly extinct. I’m surprised you’re unaware of this technical term?
Another mist opportunity is that in fantasy stories indigenous people always wear drab brown. In the real world indigenous people, like everyone else, do care about fashion and how they look.
In the real world indigenous people often wear colourful clothes with very complex patterns. People's clothes can say a lot about their culture, religion and hierarchical structure. Spending some effort on clothes can add a lot of depth into stories world building.
> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?
This is a valid criticism of the depiction of aboriginal cultures.
But I've come to believe that there is a subtle racism in not accepting that aboriginals intentionally chose to develop cultures which were durable and in 'harmony with nature.'
They are the same homo sapiens with the same intelligence and nature as the homo sapiens of Europe or from other more 'advanced' societies. They could have chosen to develop their culture in such a way that led to being 'out of harmony' just as easily as some other peoples did.
Aboriginals in say, Australia, had plenty of time to develop a more advanced society (some estimates say they've been there 40k years). When western people depict them as living close to the land, I smell a whiff of the subtext 'because they couldn't do any better'. Yeah they could have done otherwise, but they chose not to!
I work with a group of engineers and lately because of attending a conference, we have started to talk a lot about climate change. Some of the ideas our group initially came up with are really ridiculous, like some kind of machine to extract carbon from the atmosphere and to sequester it.
It's called a tree, they are everywhere, and they do it for free. They will propagate by themselves if we just had the patience to let them do so.
> and Mr. Herbert had close contacts among the Quileute and Hoh peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State
I think headlines and articles should refer to the specific peoples, I'm of the view that we need to normalize mentioning the specific people/tribes/collectives because its overinclusive since all them are separate. Its not really weighed by a random indigenous person saying "I'm fine with Indian" or "I'm fine with First Nations" etc, its more about how it doesn't provide any context for people with 100s of years of shared history, many of which have semi-sovereignty and autonomy.
While not entirely the case, white as an ethnic group is mostly a new world thing that has seeped back to the old world. White also is a large group with individuals a lot wouldn’t think of as white
E.g. most ethnicity questionnaires label white as the descendants of the original Europeans and North Africans.
Steve Jobs passed, and his heritage is all the way in Syria.
A lot of people come to the US and inherit its institutions, because of the way they look, and drop all the baggage they experienced from the places they come from. It is very common for people to conform by changing their name and accent and dress style, if their skin color did most if the blending in for them. (Note that Just as many “white” people don't figure it out, and experience poverty or mediocrity which is also quite harsh in the US even if the living and food conditions are generally are decent.)
The same concept has not been conducive to people with more divergent physical phenotypes like eye shape or skin color.
Syrians definitely are Caucasian (unless they are 100% Arab I guess, but I’m not sure there’s all that many of those in Syria.) If Syrians don’t count as white I don’t see how Greeks can be or many other Balkan peoples.
Not Arabs (and not 100% sure about berbers) since Arabs didn’t arrive until the Arab invasions in the 7-800s AD. Peoples idea about the northern Middle East and North Africa is relatively skewed by modern day demographics. This is why people poke fun at pictures of Jesus for not being Arab or black despite the fact he was likely to look similar to Syrians etc or other groups native to the region. They are projecting the modern day into the past.
yet there are so many Hispanic/Latin subdivision get listed on every form.
Why not the same for 'Asian'. its not like that is a useful demographic label as it including everyone from the arabian penisula to the Urals to Korea to Indonesia, essentially half world population
I agree with this as well, I hate how comedians perpetuate this invalidation when someone is trying to tell you their background and the comedian is like “so white, white and white, you mean ‘white’”
In my experience you can learn a lot about someone’s likely customs, dating expectations, traditions, religious upbringing just by knowing what kind of european they have in them.
The 1880s German immigrants to the US completely missed slavery and the Nazis so its tragic for some kid of that heritage to be grouped into the generic white guilt idea if they accidentally walked into a segregated space at Berkeley, for example. Its just not nuanced enough.
>In my experience you can learn a lot about someone’s likely customs, dating expectations, traditions, religious upbringing just by knowing what kind of european they have in them.
I mean... really? I didn't even have a clear idea of what kind of European I have in me until my 20's. No one had ever gotten around to telling me my Dutch-surname came about via Dutch immigrants to Ireland.
You'd know more about me and my family background from knowing that I come from multiple generations of "The one kid that picked up and moved away from the family at 18" on both sides, than you would from knowing what kind of immigrants my family all ultimately were.
I can acknowledge off the top of my head that there were plenty of opportunities to be exclusionary, or not help inclusionary legislation or actively participate in exclusion, or merely being a recipient of a GI Bill mortgage.
I still feel people need to be treated more so as individuals, and that more support for progressive ideas will come from acknowledging the individual. Especially when that individual may have the power or network to help the cause.
> The 1880s German immigrants to the US completely missed slavery and the Nazis so its tragic for some kid of that heritage to be grouped into the generic white guilt idea if they accidentally walked into a segregated space at Berkeley, for example. Its just not nuanced enough.
What difference should it make for you? I honestly don't get this idea of inheriting guilt or being directly responsible for the actions of your forebears.
It doesn't make a difference to me, some people are susceptible to actually playing along with that idea of responsibility. My observation is that some of those people are less applicable participants than others.
Dune is the most confusing book series I have ever read. My introduction to Dune was via Dune II and eventually Dune 1 video games, and I thought the setting was amazing and very well thought out. Then I read the first book and was thoroughly confused: Paul is a Superman, but supermen are bad? Except nowhere in the book does it imply that. It reads like a teenager’a superhero fantasy novel.
And the world building that is lauded for being so sophisticated? It just feels off. For one, there are tens of thousands of habitable planets but all the action takes place on only four. Second, there is the Landsraad but we focus on just three factions. Third, the entire empire relies on spice, yet spice comes from a single planet and they never bothered to figure out why or how it’s made? Moreover instead of the emperor directly controlling spice production (the most valuable substance in the galaxy and the source of ultimate control) he outsources the job to a noble house that is sure to betray him sooner or later. Paul is of course considered a genius for figuring this out, but like how could you not see this coming from page 1?
And then there are the sequels. The second book is confusing as all hell because suddenly there is the great Jihad except we don’t really know why it’s happening, to whom, and who is winning. And Paul is now an emo kid who is both too wise and not wise enough. He can’t stop the Jihad so he does some stuff that he foresaw but makes no sense.
The Children of Dune at least brings things back out of the abstract “you are too dumb to understand just how vast the world is so I won’t bother describing it to you”. But it’s a story with a middle and not really a beginning or an end. I didn’t manage to get further than this book.
I really wanted to like Dune. But I have no idea what I am missing. Did I have to read it as a 15 year old to really get into it? Is there some cultural thing I’m missing? Is it just overhyped?
The narrow locality is intentional. Remember, this is "feudalism in space", with many things - like shields - deliberately contrived to make it somewhat plausible. A very important part of the resulting arrangement of society is how static it is, not just in abstract matters like social structure, but also very literally in movement of people. The vast majority in this universe never leave their own planets, simply because they don't have access to space travel at all.
Regarding the Emperor not controlling the spice production directly - that's because it's part of their customary power balancing arrangement. If the Emperor controlled the spice directly, it would give him the ability to control space travel for all the Landsraad Great Houses, upsetting the balance of power between the two. The Houses can overpower the Emperor with military force, but only if they all join forces - and this is exactly the action that would trigger such an alliance. The other aspect is access to profits: the whole point of CHOAM is to distribute wealth from interplanetary trade to the Emperor and the Houses, which is why it has a monopoly on trade. Again, the Houses simply cannot afford to lose that much profit while having the Emperor gain it (and use it to increase his military strength).
I agree that it's very strange how origin of spice is such a mystery, given that every Fremen knows about it.
I thought it was well understood where spice comes from: The worms. The issue is that they would not survive off Arrakis and that people are unable to synthesize a replacement.
“Ah-h, the worms,” the Duke said. “I must see one sometime.”
“You may see one today,” Kynes said. “Wherever there is spice, there are worms.”
“Always?” Halleck asked.
“Always.”
“Is there a relationship between worm and spice?” the Duke asked.
Kynes turned and Paul saw the pursed lips as the man spoke. “They defend spice sands. Each worm has a — territory. As to the spice … who knows? Worm specimens we’ve examined lead us to suspect complicated chemical interchanges within them. We find traces of hydrochloric acid in the ducts, more complicated acid forms elsewhere. I’ll give you my monograph on the subject.”
...
“Why hasn’t an effort been made to wipe them out?” Paul asked.
“Too expensive,” Kynes said. “Too much area to cover.”
Paul leaned back in his corner. His truthsense, awareness of tone shadings, told him that Kynes was lying and telling half-truths. And he thought: If there’s a relationship between spice and worms, killing the worms would destroy the spice.
To a certain extent it's supposed to be a a little bit teen superhero-y, so you get dragged along with the myth of Paul Adreides too i.e. he wants you too like Paul, so you get dragged along by/with him.
For what it's worth I see Dune as much more of a space opera than a avant-garde sci-fi book. For me I basically view it as star wars but as if George Lucas wasn't a hack. When I saw the new movie open with "dreams are just messages from the deep", I was just totally in love with the iconography of dune and was genuinely kind of miffed we don't get this kind of film more often versus whatever star wars is.
The thing with Dune's world building isn't that it's realistic, it's not very realistic, but rather that it's still blindingly original, to my western eyes at least - the way Herbert approaches religion and culture is a really good balance between wow-factor, critique, and avoiding pretense.
All in all I guess it's in the eye of the beholder so my comment contains no insight ;)
Well you can’t create a whole universe in a book, only the faintest facsimile. And you have to understand Dune in the contest of history, the only comprable world in modern history at the time was LOTR, which was far less alien than Dune.
That being said, I agree with everything you say. Dune is so frustrating because the prose and perspectives jump from being incredibly wise to totally inane.
Maybe it’s one of my mental illnesses, but I really hate the way Herbert uses the word “thing.” Maybe it’s reminiscent of the time but I never saw another old scifi book use it in that way.
Dune was fresh for its time because it introduced some ecological thinking into pop culture. Reading it in 2021, none of it is fresh anymore, so we're left with a generic SF story.
I really didn’t like Dune at all either. I was so excited to read it as it was highly recommended but before I got half way through I knew I hated it. It was boring and a bit pretentious to boot. I also don’t tend to like settings that just project some past era unto a far future as I feel it’s a bit lame and uncreative. I originally planned to read all three just to be sure until I found out it ends with his son as a giant worm.
I’ll stick with the Culture series where even if it’s crazy it seems like how a truly futuristic society would govern themselves.
That said there are things I like about the setting and I applaud Herbert for trying to deconstruct the whole great man schtick.
I liked 'Dune' and read it as a teen. Haven't managed to read all the rest. The last book still missing. Also 'Dune' but much more so the others are choke full of religious stuff. A difficult read and the reason I shy away from the last book. But I liked 'Dune' a lot.
> How Is ‘Dune’ So Prescient About Climate Change?
It isn't. Arrakis suffered desertification before humans ever arrived, before the book even began. The only climate change that occurred thereafter was a direct result of Pardot Kynes convincing the Fremen they could terraform Arrakis and, after Paul Atreides defeated the Emperor Shaddam IV Corrino and seized control of the Imperium, and subsequently began a deliberate effort to accelerate the terraforming effort until, by the time of God Emperor of Dune, the desert has been pushed back to just a tiny portion of the planet.
TL;DR The entire article is someone with an axe to grind trying to use Dune to do it. Scroll on.
The prescience of the book in regards to climate change doesn't lie in the fact that it's some sort of literal retelling of the climate science of earth (hint, it's an allergorical piece of fiction) it lies in the fact that the book recognizes three key aspects.
Firstly, the immense influence of humanity on climate and the ecology of a planet and the intertwined nature between social activity and ecology, the motivation for negative impacts on the ecology lying in the exploitation and overuse of the planets resources, and third the disproportionate impact of this on native populations, and the inability of people to understand the consequences of disturbing complex systems. (no surprise given that Herbert was intellectually close to systems thinkers from Santa Fe)
You think Dune does not address climate change because in the story the planet was already deserted? Do you think Animal Farm is a book about pigs?
> lies in the fact that the book recognizes three key aspects.
They weren’t central to the story. FH didn’t waste a lot of ink on them. They formed a backdrop to the story because they should be uncontroversial ideas to anyone with an understanding of ecology.
If FH really wanted to write about ecology he could have spend a much greater proportion of the brook talking about it, when all we have on Sandworm ecology from FH himself is a handful of paragraphs spread across six novels.
As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin - people who swept to power seemingly out of nowhere and established their own sprawling Empire.
Lastly, if we’re looking at FH books on the human impact on ecology, we should start with The Green Brain which was explicitly about ecology.
>As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin
.. which are the native population of Arrakis as nomadic desert people are the native populations of their respective region, being caught in the feud of great colonial powers of the empire? The inspiration for this are indeed Bedouin, some people argue Berber and of course Arab people and FH explicitly stated that Lawrence of Arabia was an inspiration for the book, which seems pretty obvious.
I’d debate the extent that they were ‘caught’ in the feud. The imperial powers barely ventured into the desert. They had barely any contact with the true Fremen. Most of Arrakis was unexplored and considered uninhabitable.
Similarly it’s difficult to see the Bedouin and Berber tribes as being oppressed . The Romans, Persians etc mostly stuck to the coasts and rivers and avoided the deep desert. The same is true on Dune.
When the Muslim armies swept out of the desert they didn’t throw off oppression, they came out of nowhere to crush the Persians and nearly end the Romans, establishing one of the world’s largest empires. They did plenty of colonisation of their own. And their cultural and scientific impact on the world continues today.
Similarly the Fremen were grossly underestimated by the Empire. They were barely aware of their existence, but as it turned out they were far more numerous, culturally sophisticated and technology advanced than anyone knew.
> They weren’t central to the story. FH didn’t waste a lot of ink on them. They formed a backdrop to the story because they should be uncontroversial ideas to anyone with an understanding of ecology.
I've never been able to find this quote again, but IIRC after one of his friends/editors read some of his early work on Dune, they told him something to the effect of, "Dammit, Frank. People want to read stories about people!"
It may be that he doesn't spend much ink on them because it didn't make for a captivating story.
> As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin - people who swept to power seemingly out of nowhere and established their own sprawling Empire.
They're very heavily based off of the people who lived in the Caucasus. Herbert basically lifts phrasing used in the book The Sabres of Paradise to describe the Fremen word for word
I read many books in the "Freddy the Pig" series, and picked up Animal Farm when I was 8. I thought it, too, was a book about pigs and read it as a book about pigs. I can vouch that it works as a story about pigs. I didn't realize it was an allegory until maybe a decade later.
I also read Dune as a teen, and took it at face value, too. It was a moderately good scifi book, but not good enough to tempt me to read the sequels. I didn't really think much more about it. I've read a lot of scifi books.
It also seemed to be much more based on Saharan desert culture than Native American culture.
I confess to being out of step in not seeing it as a great story :-/ I've seen all 3 movie versions, thinking "what am I missing" and not finding it.
I think the thing with Dune is that it has a really strong litmus test to it i.e. if you find the setting interesting then it's a really interesting world, whereas if you don't it can seem quite arbitrary and (I guess) odd.
I'm not sure exactly what to put my finger on but the melting pot of culture and religion explicit throughout the book, wrapped in a psychedelic haze is definitely a draw for me. It's definitely more of a below-the-neck type of experience vs. (say) a Dick novel.
Wrt to the new movie I'm just glad that Denis Villeneuve is getting funded. His sci-fi movies are some of the only big movies in and around the genre (especially if you compare (say) Dune to star wars) which seem to be actively trying to tell a story at their own pace. He's a very smart and unpretentious person too, any interview with him is a much watch for me.
I guess we'll be having the adventures of Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck and someone is going to try and adapt the sad Brian Herbert prequels/'sequels'?
Well, all civilizations are full of stories of men waging war on oceans, burning down forests to reclaim lands, breaking mountains and all the wageries of such things.
Dune was neither the first nor is the last and linking it with climate change is purely some kind of bias.
Frank Herbert himself stated from the beginning that Dune is a book about the dangers of charismatic leaders. The characters are just humans and make stupid decisions and mistakes, but they affect huge numbers of people directly (the religious and political stuff - hell right up front Paul learns about hitler and asks "what was so bad about this guy, he didn't even kill that many people?"), an indirectly (the effects of severe resource extraction by foreign powers on the land and the people - even 17y.o. me could see that it was at least in part commentary on oil dependence).
If you want to rant on people interpreting art as metaphorical/allegorical, at least consider if the author intended it to be such. At least then you might be able to muster some credibility.
>Dune is not an allegory for anything any more than Lord of the Rings is an allegory for anything
Which I'd consider bad news for the argument because Lord of the Rings is, despite Tolkien's opposition deeply allegorical. Whether it's the machinist east vs the pastoral West, the ideal Catholic community, the return of the King as a Christ like figure, and so on. It's at times painfully obvious.
You, just like Tolkien appear to have a conservative attitude towards fiction which always tends to deny obvious, often political intent in fiction because from your point of view, which I wouldn't even agree with, it allegedly diminishes art.
> Which I'd consider bad news for the argument because Lord of the Rings is, despite Tolkien's opposition deeply allegorical.
Tolkien was quite right that his work was not allegorical. He created a fantasy world to explore themes that were important to him. It was not some coded message where Sauron is Hitler or something. He rightly despised such allegories, as do I.
> You, just like Tolkien appear to have a conservative attitude towards fiction which always tends to deny obvious, often political intent in fiction because from your point of view, which I wouldn't even agree with, it allegedly diminishes art.
I deny attempts to twist the plain meaning of words to fit a narrative. Tolkien created a fictional world to tell a story and convey certain universal truths he felt were important. Frank Herbert did the same. Some people, however, would like to twist that to fit a political agenda. Yes, for some strange reason I find that appalling. It doesn't simply diminish the art... it destroys it. As many are wont to say in such situations: go make your own art.
> Tolkien created a fictional world to tell a story and convey certain universal truths he felt were important
Honestly I don’t really care if anyone wrote an allegory or not, but how is this different than writing an allegory? If I had to define what writing an allegory in fiction means I would probably use this exact phrasing.
This should tell you and all english (and german) teachers enough. Not everything has a deep meaning, and certainly the protagonist isn't sad because he has blue curtains.
Actually if you look into it a little more, and speak with authors today, a lot of authors heavily think about the themes they’re trying to explore in their work and how to best express them. Similarly, sometimes authors aren’t even aware of some things they’re exploring in their work (for example, latent trauma).
Honestly, writing literature is not dissimilar to programming in this way. You have to consider the structure of your piece as you build it, and then even if you do so you might create unintended behaviors.
Good links both, but in both cases he never expresses or implies his works are allegorical. He's quite clear in both of these links why he wrote. In the first one he states his point was: "Don't trust leaders to always be right." He expands on that in the second:
"I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: 'may be dangerous to your health'. I mean I think the most dangerous president we've had or one of the most dangerous at least, not because he was a bad guy but because people didn't question him... one of the most dangerous presidents that we've had in this century was Jack Kennedy because people said 'Yes sir, Mr. Charismatic leader, what'll we do next?' And we wound up in Vietnam. People don't realize that he was one of the major moving forces getting us into Vietnam."
And further: "And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon because he taught us to distrust government... and he did it by example... which is the best kind of teaching."
He openly talks about wanting to know why people drank the koo-aid or said Sieg Heil and murdered Jews and Gypsies... but at no time does he say his work was allegorical. These were simply ideas he wanted to convey in his work.
It's funny, though... at around the 30:00 mark in that second link there was someone very offended at his writing of gay characters, saying that his writing of them would only lead to violence against gays. His response was insightful, truthful, and pure comedy gold... but the kid seemed very disturbed. He, like some in this thread, seemed to read into the book what he wanted to read, and was incensed when no one else agreed with him. :D
One last note: That second link was almost certainly a great talk, but the UCLA's recording is clearly damaged. The recording cuts out so much that it is extremely aggravating to try to listen to it.
The desertification of Dune was caused by ancient settlers introducing the sandtrout.
> "The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase."
So Dune itself was not prescient but Children of Dune was, however that was probably written at nearly the same time.
That said, what purpose did the sandtrout serve in that other place it was introduced from, I guess the early settlers weren't looking at the planet and thinking "nice place, but too wet."
Hypothetical: The original planet had more natural barriers for the sandtrout and sandworms so that they wouldn't spread globally, or they had natural predators. A too wet world that could (for the settlers) benefit from aridification of a region isn't outrageous, think about constructing dams and levies to create more dry land.
Or could just be someone being stupid, like how kudzu has spread throughout the US Southeast.
We don't really know because the sandtrout have been all but outright confirmed to be alien in origin - probably the only known example of alien life in the Dune universe.
Maybe this was expanded on post-Chapterhouse but I don't count those as canon.
I haven't read the biography, but Herbert gives the impression of someone who had at least a LOT of things planned out well in advance. Or at least that is the impression I get as I'm making my first read through of Frank's Dune books (I'm on God Emperor now).
