Regarde Aduck posted:

lol someone thinks time is real

Simone Magus posted:

Get this... time is a worm.

MrL_JaKiri posted:

Imagine 4 duncan idaho's climbing a cliff

kaschei posted:

make sure your stillsuit can reclaim cum before attempting this

MrL_JaKiri posted:

Imagine 4 duncan idaho's climbing a cliff

Phanatic posted:

phasmid posted:

Only he doesn't use Dick's name, he just quotes him as "a human philosopher" or something similar.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2020/10/11/paul-atreides-led-a-jihad-not-a-crusade-heres-why-that-matters posted:

In Dune, Paul Atreides led a jihad, not a crusade
Here is why that matters.

Fans of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, were disappointed to learn this week that the release of Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated film adaptation of the book has been pushed back to October 2021, almost a year later than expected.
...
But fans familiar with the books noticed a major omission in its promotional materials: any reference to the Islam-inspired framing of the novel. In fact, the trailer uses the words, “a crusade is coming”, using the Christian term for holy war – something that occurs a mere three times in the six books of the original series. The word they were looking for was “jihad”, a foundational term and an essential concept in the series. But jihad is bad branding, and in Hollywood, Islam does not sell unless it is being shot at.
...
The trailer’s use of “crusade” obscures the fact that the series is full of vocabularies of Islam, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Words like “Mahdi”, “Shai-Hulud”, “noukker”, and “ya hya chouhada” are commonly used throughout the story. To quote Herbert himself, from an unpublished 1978 interview with Tim O’Reilly, he used this vocabulary, partly derived from “colloquial Arabic”, to signal to the reader that they are “not here and now, but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and time”. Language, he remarks, “is mind-shaping as well as used by mind”, mediating our experience of place and time. And he uses the language of Dune to show how, 20,000 years in the future, when all religion and language has fundamentally changed, there are still threads of continuity with the Arabic and Islam of our world because they are inextricable from humanity’s past, present, and future.

A quick look at Frank Herbert’s appendix to Dune, “the Religion of Dune”, reveals that of the “ten ancient teachings”, half are overtly Islamic. And outside of the religious realm, he filled the terminology of Dune’s universe with words related to Islamic sovereignty. The Emperors are called “Padishahs”, from Persian, their audience chamber is called the “selamlik”, Turkish for the Ottoman court’s reception hall and their troops have titles with Turco-Persian or Arabic roots, such as “Sardaukar”, “caid”, and “bashar”. Herbert’s future is one where “Islam” is not a separate unchanging element belonging to the past, but a part of the future universe at every level. The world of Dune cannot be separated from its language, and as reactions on Twitter have shown, the absence of that language in the movie’s promotional material is a disappointment. Even jihad, a complex, foundational principle of Herbert’s universe, is flattened – and Christianised – to crusade.

To be sure, Herbert himself defines jihad using the term “crusade”, twice in the narrative as a synonym for jihad and once in the glossary as part of his definition of jihad, perhaps reaching for a simple conceptual parallel that may have been familiar to his readership. But while he clearly subsumed crusade under jihad, much of his readership did the reverse.

One can understand why. Even before the War on Terror, jihad was what the bad guys do. Yet as Herbert understood, the term is a complicated one in the Muslim tradition; at root, it means to struggle or exert oneself. It can take many forms: internally against one’s own evil, externally against oppression, or even intellectually in the search for beneficial knowledge. And in the 14 centuries of Islam’s history, like any aspect of human history, the term jihad has been used and abused. Having studied Frank Herbert’s notes and papers in the archives of California State University, Fullerton, I have found that Herbert’s understanding of Islam, jihad, and humanity’s future is much more complex than that of his interpreters. His use of jihad grapples with this complicated tradition, both as a power to fight against the odds (whether against sentient AI or against the Empire itself), but also something that defies any attempt at control.

Herbert’s nuanced understanding of jihad shows in his narrative. He did not aim to present jihad as simply a “bad” or “good” thing. Instead, he uses it to show how the messianic impulse, together with the apocalyptic violence that sometimes accompanies it, changes the world in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways. And, of course, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, the jihad of Frank Herbert’s imagination was not the same as ours, but drew from the Sufi-led jihads against French, Russian, and English imperialism in the 19th and mid-20th century. The narrative exhibits this influence of Sufism and its reading of jihad, where, unlike in a crusade, a leader’s spiritual transformation determined the legitimacy of his war.

In Dune, Paul must drink the “water of life”, to enter (to quote Dune) the “alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, the metaphysical realm where all physical limitations are removed,” and unlock a part of his consciousness to become the Mahdi, the messianic figure who will guide the jihad. The language of every aspect of this process is the technical language of Sufism.

Perhaps the trailer’s use of “crusade” is just an issue of marketing. Perhaps the film will embrace the characteristically Islam-inspired language and aesthetics of Frank Herbert’s universe. But if we trace the reception of “the strong Muslim flavour” in Dune, to echo an editor on one of Herbert’s early drafts, we are confronted with Islam’s unfavourable place in America’s popular imagination. In fact, many desire to interpret Dune through the past, hungering for a historic parallel to these future events because, in their minds, Islam belongs to the past. Yet who exists in the future tells us who matters in our present. NK Jemisin, the three-time Hugo award-winning author, writes: “The myth that Star Trek planted in my mind: people like me exist in the future, but there are only a few of us. Something’s obviously going to kill off a few billion people of colour and the majority of women in the next few centuries.”
...
Unlike many of his, or our, contemporaries, Herbert was willing to imagine a world that was not based on Western, Christian mythology. Herbert did not think of Islam as the “borg”, an alien hive mind that allows for no dissent. Herbert’s Islam was the great, capacious, and often contradictory discourse recently expounded by Shahab Ahmed in his monumental book, What is Islam? Herbert understood that religions do not act. People act. Their religions change like their languages, slowly over time in response to the new challenges of time and place. Tens of thousands of years into the future, Herbert’s whole universe is full of future Islams, similar but different from the Islams of present and past.

Herbert countered a one-dimensional reading of Islam because he disavowed absolutes. In an essay titled: Science Fiction and a World in Crisis, he identified the belief in absolutes as a “characteristic of the West” that negatively influenced its approach to crisis. He wrote that it led the “Western tradition” to face problems “with the concept of absolute control”. This desire for absolute control is what leads to the hero-worship (or “messiah-building”) that defines our contemporary world. It is this impulse that he sought to tear down in Dune.
...
We should recognise Herbert for exploring Islam and religion without essentialising them, without reducing them to a cliché grounded in a timeless original model or relegating them to the domain of superstitious humanoid aliens. But in the same essay, he warned that “if it becomes too prestigious, science fiction will encounter new restraints”, expressing worry about the looming power of self-censorship in the face of respectability. Unfortunately, he was right, and it seems like the subversive elements of his own work, embedded in his deep exploration of “jihad”, have been subsumed into the Christianising “crusade”, at least so far. Let’s hope this extra year allows the film to do better.

Ithle01 posted:

Anyway, I just finished a re-read of Dune Messiah and God-Emperor of Dune and I noticed something that I inexplicably missed about fifteen years ago which is that Leto II was preparing his people for a coming apocalyptic event where humanity could be wiped out. Did Herbert ever follow up on this or was that his idiot kid?

pnumoman posted:

The closest he got was the Honored Matres fleeing something and the scene at the end of Chapterhouse. All we know for certain is that Leto II chose the golden path because it was the only way humanity had any chance of surviving that event, whatever it was.

Failson just said lol, it's the butlerian jihad part II: the robots strike back

Ithle01 posted:

I think we can safely say that the decision to change jihad to crusade was a marketing one and anyone with a brain could tell that a story about a (probably) white guy joining space Muslims and leading them on a jihad across the universe was going to be problematic even though the story has far more subtext than that.

Anyway, I just finished a re-read of Dune Messiah and God-Emperor of Dune and I noticed something that I inexplicably missed about fifteen years ago which is that Leto II was preparing his people for a coming apocalyptic event where humanity could be wiped out. Did Herbert ever follow up on this or was that his idiot kid?

Ithle01 posted:

I think we can safely say that the decision to change jihad to crusade was a marketing one and anyone with a brain could tell that a story about a (probably) white guy joining space Muslims and leading them on a jihad across the universe was going to be problematic even though the story has far more subtext than that.

Anyway, I just finished a re-read of Dune Messiah and God-Emperor of Dune and I noticed something that I inexplicably missed about fifteen years ago which is that Leto II was preparing his people for a coming apocalyptic event where humanity could be wiped out. Did Herbert ever follow up on this or was that his idiot kid?

Wingnut Ninja posted:

I also just finished rereading God Emperor, and I got the impression that when Siona has her vision of the future during her test (nestled in Leto's, uh, neck hammock?), she wasn't necessarily seeing a literal robot apocalypse, but more metaphorical of what would happen if Leto didn't breed humans to be prescience-immune. I'm pretty sure Leto talks about the necessity of the Golden Path being related to things like Ixians trying to invent a computerized guild navigator. Couple that with his explanation that the Butlerian Jihad was more accurately a revolt against machine thinking than actual machines, it seems like the threat is that a prescient machine would essentially lock all of humanity into an inescapable machine-predicted future. In other words, it's not necessarily a literal extermination of every human being by squads of RoboSardaukar, but it's the destruction of humanity's ability to be fully human.

It's entirely possible I misinterpreted that though, since I definitely started to skim over some of his longer brain dumps. Especially his talks with Hwi where she only speaks in half-sentences for virtually the entire time and is constantly pre-empted by Leto. It does a great job of showing how in-tune their thoughts are but it's loving awful to try and read.

Wingnut Ninja posted:

I also just finished rereading God Emperor, and I got the impression that when Siona has her vision of the future during her test (nestled in Leto's, uh, neck hammock?), she wasn't necessarily seeing a literal robot apocalypse, but more metaphorical of what would happen if Leto didn't breed humans to be prescience-immune. I'm pretty sure Leto talks about the necessity of the Golden Path being related to things like Ixians trying to invent a computerized guild navigator. Couple that with his explanation that the Butlerian Jihad was more accurately a revolt against machine thinking than actual machines, it seems like the threat is that a prescient machine would essentially lock all of humanity into an inescapable machine-predicted future. In other words, it's not necessarily a literal extermination of every human being by squads of RoboSardaukar, but it's the destruction of humanity's ability to be fully human.

It's entirely possible I misinterpreted that though, since I definitely started to skim over some of his longer brain dumps. Especially his talks with Hwi where she only speaks in half-sentences for virtually the entire time and is constantly pre-empted by Leto. It does a great job of showing how in-tune their thoughts are but it's loving awful to try and read.

Ugly In The Morning posted:

There was a bit about a vision of someone fleeing killbots in God Emporer but no indication that they were the same thinking machines as the ones the jihad was about, more just “oh hey, one apocalyptic future”. The scattering wasn’t just about making humanity survive one event anyway, it was about humanity surviving any and every event.

pnumoman posted:

The closest he got was the Honored Matres fleeing something and the scene at the end of Chapterhouse. All we know for certain is that Leto II chose the golden path because it was the only way humanity had any chance of surviving that event, whatever it was.

Failson just said lol, it's the butlerian jihad part II: the robots strike back

Ingmar terdman posted:

Denis Dune is canceled we have moved on

Automatic Slim posted:

While enjoyable, the Mary Sueness of the protagonists gets to be too much. Herbert makes some interesting observations about power and the human condition it’s hard to pin him down for any conclusions, only that stagnation of systems and individuals lead to danger.
Can anyone one explain the bit about the face dancer gardeners at the end other than a cliffhanger for Herbert’s unfinished book?

MrL_JaKiri posted:

One of the repeated themes of all the books is "using people as tools will come back to bite you", for one.

Automatic Slim posted:

That’s true. Especially, mentats.

Automatic Slim posted:

Can anyone one explain the bit about the face dancer gardeners at the end other than a cliffhanger for Herbert’s unfinished book?

THE BAR posted:

Hawat worked out okay in the end.

Wingnut Ninja posted:

I also just finished rereading God Emperor, and I got the impression that when Siona has her vision of the future during her test (nestled in Leto's, uh, neck hammock?), she wasn't necessarily seeing a literal robot apocalypse, but more metaphorical of what would happen if Leto didn't breed humans to be prescience-immune. I'm pretty sure Leto talks about the necessity of the Golden Path being related to things like Ixians trying to invent a computerized guild navigator. Couple that with his explanation that the Butlerian Jihad was more accurately a revolt against machine thinking than actual machines, it seems like the threat is that a prescient machine would essentially lock all of humanity into an inescapable machine-predicted future. In other words, it's not necessarily a literal extermination of every human being by squads of RoboSardaukar, but it's the destruction of humanity's ability to be fully human.

Automatic Slim posted:

Just finished Heretics and Chapterhouse. It was years since the first read through.
The child ghoula reawakening is queasy reading.
While enjoyable, the Mary Sueness of the protagonists gets to be too much. Herbert makes some interesting observations about power and the human condition it’s hard to pin him down for any conclusions, only that stagnation of systems and individuals lead to danger.
Can anyone one explain the bit about the face dancer gardeners at the end other than a cliffhanger for Herbert’s unfinished book?

Automatic Slim posted:

Lawrence of Arabia came out in '62, Dune in '65 and LSD started making it's way into upper middle class America.
The plot isn't an accident.

The producers weighed having to to spend time fighting charges of insensitivity and cultural appropriation or change a few words. They made the right call.

phasmid posted:

Personally, I don't know what the gardeners are about and I'll be fine with never knowing..

Bubblyblubber posted:

The gardeners are canonically Cyberdan and Martrex, mysterious entities with a link to humanity's distant past and they're totally real rad OCs do not steal

uber_stoat posted:

is it possible the real deal notes will be released after failson dies? failson would never put them out there, they would lay bare just how uninspired his take on Dune really is.

Yadoppsi posted:

Found an article that says what I was trying to get across earlier: