BlankSystemDaemon posted:

I can't remmeber where, but years back I found a website that exists just as a museum to science fiction book covers.
I wish I could find it again.

Torquemada posted:

An old thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3806336&perpage=40&noseen=1&pagenumber=11

Dune Genesis posted:

Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape
across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The
story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.

How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book
about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues,
fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent
bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory
that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero
(whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over
the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.

Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of
politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to
give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap
himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it.
Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.

My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted
themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming
bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that
neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.

This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your
critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people
may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being
who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human
mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And
sometimes you run into another problem.

It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want
power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people
are imbalanced-in a word, insane.

That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe.
The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.

It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly
word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ
them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that

picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?

All of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in
the entertainment business first. It's all right to include a pot of message,
but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. Yes, there are analogs
in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places,
whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over
by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an
exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

But that was only the beginning.

While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to
write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there.

The USDA was seeking ways to control coastal (and other) sand dunes. I
had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my
superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next
banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and
others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade.

Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure
its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can
be just as addictive as any other kind of high.

Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence project fed
my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see
the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social
ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It's an open-ended list.

Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions,
psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research,
soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study

rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's cauldron: the psychology
of planetary societies.

Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the
beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the
guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt,
would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism
into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.

Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or
deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an
absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe
attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices
that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are
ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the
ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.

Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation.
Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible
targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to
aim painful barbs.

But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek

play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these
mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do
they learn this?

Enter the fugue. In music, the fugue is usually based on a single theme that

is played many different ways. Sometimes there are free voices that do
fanciful dances around the interplay. There can be secondary themes and
contrasts in harmony, rhythm, and melody. From the moment when a single

voice introduces the primary theme, however, the whole is woven into a
single fabric.

What were my instruments in this ecological fugue? Images, conflicts,
things that turn upon themselves and become something quite different,
myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our common
heritage, products of our technological evolution, our human desires, and
our human fears.

You can imagine my surprise to learn that John Schoenherr, one of the

world's most foremost wildlife artists and illustrators, had been living in my
head with the same images. People find it difficult to believe that John and I
had no consultations prior to his painting of the Dune illustrations. I assure
you that the paintings were a wonderful surprise to me.

The Sardaukar appear like the weathered stones of Dune. The Baron's
paunch could absorb a world. The ornithopters are insects preying on the
land. The sandworms are Earth shipworms grown monstrous. Stilgar glares
out at us with the menace of a warlock.

What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fuguelike
relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape.

As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that
turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time.
What about Paul's gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the
Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination.
Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically
enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always
encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like
the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."

Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a
larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and
in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide
time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.

But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe
fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict
accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.

The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social
networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions-
all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after
all, says this time after time throughout Dune.

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you
reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold
back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make
idiots of us all.

Of course there are other themes and fugal interplays in Dune and
throughout the trilogy. Dune Messiah performs a classic inversion of the
theme. Children of Dune expands the number of themes interplaying. I
refuse, however, to provide further answers to this complex mixture. That
fits the pattern of the fugue. You find your own solutions. Don't look to me
as your leader.

Caution is indeed indicated, but not the terror that prevents all movement.
Hang loose. And when someone asks whether you're starting a new cult, do
what I do: Run like hell.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

The appendix of Dune has section on terminology used in the book, and it makes it clear that there were conscious robots.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I mean, we know thinking machines existed.

The issue is that thinking machines could control and manipulate and strip freedom from you, the way all the smarter than human factions in dune do. Not that a scary robot would come punch you.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I mean, we know thinking machines existed.

The issue is that thinking machines could control and manipulate and strip freedom from you, the way all the smarter than human factions in dune do. Not that a scary robot would come punch you.

davidspackage posted:

Bob of Dune

No Mods No Masters posted:

Dunelords can and do get pretty toxic around failson aficionados. Fortunately that is quite rare

Pedro De Heredia posted:

Jessica, I know it's been 16 years or so, but... what's up with that?

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

That's what Frank himself wrote, in a 1980 issue of Omni Magazine.

No Mods No Masters posted:

Dunelords

No Mods No Masters posted:

Obviously the frank books after geod suffer for lacking their conclusion, but yeah I feel like a lot of the basic premise really undermines god emperor's conclusion. To me geod still feels like the most natural and complete ending for the big frank themes

Xealot posted:

Yes. I agree with whoever said it'd be great to get 3 Dunc movies covering the first book and Messiah, then some kind of HBO miniseries interpreting Children / God Emperor.

That'd pretty much cover everything relevant about Dune.

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm definitely going to read Hyperion

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

I mean, we know thinking machines existed.

The issue is that thinking machines could control and manipulate and strip freedom from you, the way all the smarter than human factions in dune do. Not that a scary robot would come punch you.

No Mods No Masters posted:

Obviously the frank books after geod suffer for lacking their conclusion, but yeah I feel like a lot of the basic premise really undermines god emperor's conclusion. To me geod still feels like the most natural and complete ending for the big frank themes

ruddiger posted:

Can’t stop thinking about that shot of baron harkonen floating up and elongating out of focus while Duke Leto was laid out like a Caravaggio painting.

Movie was good.

gohmak posted:

Stop after you read The Fall of Hyperion.

Halloween Jack posted:

gohmak posted:

Stop after you read The Fall of Hyperion.

Martman posted:

Like, stop reading Dan Simmons entirely after that.

PeterWeller posted:

Yeah, there are robots involved, but it definitely comes off as a much broader luddite movement than just some Terminator or Matrix style war against the machines.

Like I said previously, the problem with Brian and KJA's books in that regard isn't that they add some man v machine conflict that never appeared in Frank's books; it's that they ignore that the Golden Path ended that conflict's existential thread to humanity. I know I harp on it a lot, but that's the whole point of Siona's vision, which is incredibly important because it's what causes her to finally understand and accept her place in Leto's grand plan.

Arglebargle III posted:

Dan Simmons has written a ton of novels and I feel like there's a reason no one talks about any except Hyperion and its sequels.

Defiance Industries posted:

Leto II said that the Butlerian Jihad wasn't about machines, but about machine thinking. That technology reduced the amount of things people could do without thinking.

Frank Herbert's failson made it into Terminator fanfic because he's too stupid to think of anything else.

Martman posted:

Like, stop reading Dan Simmons entirely after that. Not just that series.

El Spamo posted:

There are sophisticated Fortran supercomputer models, but there are no advertising algorithms.

Pedro De Heredia posted:

Well if you say "I don't want my freedom stripped" the robot will have to punch you to ensure compliance, so there's that.

Boris Galerkin posted:

While I wouldn’t be surprised if Fortran still existed and was still running numerical computation code in the far far future, I have to disagree with you that supercomputers would still exist if “thinking machines” were outright banned under threat of being executed for heresy.

A computer that can run Fortran code to simulate tomorrow’s weather forecast could also run the new SpaceMetaFacebook FuckZuck AI.

I also literally cannot imagine how it is comprehensively possible for a human to have the processing power and data/memory recall that could rival the most advanced programs ever built.

Boris Galerkin posted:

I also literally cannot imagine how it is comprehensively possible for a human to have the processing power and data/memory recall that could rival the most advanced programs ever built.

thotsky posted:

Yep, the juice is made from spice.

Arglebargle III posted:

Dan Simmons has written a ton of novels and I feel like there's a reason no one talks about any except Hyperion and its sequels.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Nope, Elacca, the other magic drug source in early books that got eventually streamlined out as redundant.

(Unless some later book merged it so elacca trees grew from spice somehow)