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Oh hey, a Dune thread! I saw the new trailer recently and it hyped me up to re-read the series, and then I saw in the CineD thread that there was a general Dune thread in GBS. Currently about 1/4 of the way through Messiah. I love the visual aesthetic of Blade Runner 2049 and I think it works really well for DUNC. It looks like they're trying to stay very faithful to the book, so it should be interesting to see how well they adapt some of the less-filmable aspects of it. RE: moving the thread, I would argue that Dune isn't so much sci-fi, it's historical fiction that just happens to be set in a future period.  Also, I read through the pronunciation chat a few pages back but it looks like the most important one was missed: Scytale is pronounced like "skittle", right?
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Sep 18, 2020 16:45
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 18:32 |
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So here's a thing: something that's always kind of bugged me is that I don't really buy the inevitable jump from "taking over Arrakis" to "galactic jihad". For the better part of two whole books Paul keeps going on about woe is me, there's no possible way to stop this jihad, nope, nothing I can do, fire up the death squads. But it does precious little to actually show why this is; we see Fremen fired up to overthrow the Harkonnens at the end of Dune in a way that makes Paul nervous, but all of the Fremen prophecy and mythology we see revolves around fighting off oppressors and making Arrakis a better place, not so much "and then when that's done go on and take over the galaxy". It's not implausible, certainly, but it definitely doesn't feel like it should be the only path. Now, I realize that two major themes of the books are the trap of prescience, and how leaders are often shoehorned into a course of action due to larger forces beyond their control. In the case of Leto Sr. being coerced into giving up Caladan for Arrakis it makes a lot of sense, since he's just one player out of many and not the strongest. But Paul being king poo poo of the universe and just going along with it feels like a cop-out. And maybe that's the point, if Paul is just as much of a power hungry rear end in a top hat as everyone else and only blames "fate" as a way to appease his conscience, then that's perfect. I'm just wondering if there's something else there that I'm missing. TL;DR the galactic jihad feels like a case of "we're doing it because it's in the script" (i.e. because Paul foresees it) rather than having any in-universe justification.
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Sep 20, 2020 00:38
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell seems relevant reading. I buy that for taking over Arrakis, since that was a big part of the prophecy/expectation for Paul. It's afterwards where they're sitting around watching Shaddam being stuffed back onto his ship in disgrace, and say "well, I guess now we should go rape the universe" that seems like a stretch. Like it's missing a few intermediate steps showing them develop in that direction.
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Sep 20, 2020 04:47
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Ingmar terdman posted:Leto II is the only person who knows that Ix is a corruption of the roman numeral but he's got one in his name. Shouldn't ever reverend mother have roman numerals in Other Memory also Scytale mentions it during the treasonmoot at the very beginning of Messiah, so I figured it's just something that only pedantic nerds and immortal worm gods bother learning about. Though speaking of the various Letos, it always bugged me that Leto is Paul's father, Leto II is the worm god, but what does that make Paul's first son who gets killed at the end of Dune? Leto 1.5? Nobody ever points out how weird it is that he named his second son the same as his first son.
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Sep 23, 2020 20:20
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Shoehead posted:The trick is he's named Leto II because he's the second Leto after his BROTHER and Paul is just kind of an rear end in a top hat Leto II 2
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Sep 24, 2020 00:00
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If you foresee yourself taking over a planet, you're prescient. If you foresee yourself taking over hundreds of planets and establishing a brutal galaxywide theocracy, you're just an rear end in a top hat.
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Sep 28, 2020 19:13
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Has anybody ever checked the celestial mechanics for Arrakis, because it doesn't seem to make sense. Arrakeen and most of the known civilization on the planet is said to be clustered far up in the northern regions, with Arrakeen being at a fairly high latitude. But at one point in Dune Messiah the sun is described as being almost "directly overhead" during mid day, which wouldn't happen without some extreme axial tilt. And if that were the case there would be significant parts of the year where the sun alternately doesn't set or doesn't rise, which you think would have been mentioned at some point. e: obviously this is the most pedantic of nits to pick, I just find it interesting that he put so much thought into the ecology side but whiffed it on the "what does the sun actually do at high latitudes" aspect. Wingnut Ninja fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Sep 29, 2020 |
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Sep 29, 2020 04:24
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threelemmings posted:Ah, the Tom Jabbar. It punctures only... footballs. Haha, okay, this one really has me chuckling. Mode 7 posted:Is there anyone here who has read the original novels and who is still unaware of the plot for Hunters of Dune/Sandworms of Dune? If so can you please make up what you thought Dune 7 would be like/about in your head, then go read the summaries of those and report back. I treasure my ignorance, but I need to finish re-reading the series before making any good guesses. From what I remember of Chapterhouse 10+ years ago there didn't seem to be any obvious sequel hooks, so presumably just Miles Teg: Space Badass roaming around having adventures? Tree Bucket posted:That's the thing I love about Dune. It is compelling enough that your brain just tries to make it work, even though it's sheer madness from top to bottom. For instance: has anyone does the maths on the amount of energy required to shift an object half a kilometre long long and 40 metres wide through sand at 50kmh? I bet it's rather a lot. IIRC he does mention the immense static charge that builds up and the lightning it creates. Maker hooks must be some heavy duty grounding wires.
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Sep 29, 2020 17:19
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juggalo baby coffin posted:or you can just say 'a massive desert world' and be done with it. One of the things I really like is that he didn't just do that, as Kynes and other characters explicitly point out that a single-biome planet doesn't make ecological sense and that there has to be some unseen force driving it in that direction. The whole sandtrout/sandworm cycle is left fairly vague, and even the info we do get is presented as the best hypothesis by in-universe characters, which leaves plenty of room for error. I'm sure this is where someone says how one of the sequel books spends an entire chapter detailing every facet of sandworm biology and lifecycle with illustrated diagrams.
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Sep 30, 2020 23:43
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phasmid posted:Then every 2nd tier fantasy author in the 70s ignored the implication and just had everything be jungle world or ice world or whatever. It's such an important point in the book that everyone 'in the know' about Arrakis understands but there's just a conspiracy of silence while everybody plunders the planet. I'm sure a lot of later sci-fi definitely traces that inspiration to Dune (hi Tatooine), but I wouldn't be surprised if the idea popped up a lot earlier in the genre. I'm not knowledgeable enough about early sci-fi to say for sure but it really seems to resonate with a 30's/40's pulp sci-fi aesthetic. This week Buck Rogers goes to the Forest Planet! (because we shot this episode in Angeles national forest). Next week, he visits the Tilted Rock Planet! (because we cheaped out and went to Vasquez Rocks again) I could be wrong though. Definitely overdone and a cheap world-building crutch though. There's a great bit in an episode of Stargate where a wormhole malfunction spits the team out into a barren ice cavern and they assume they're on some remote ice planet... until it turns out they're actually on Earth, in Antarctica.
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Oct 1, 2020 02:50
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i meant more in terms of like the specific dimensions of arrakis, rather than the mystery of its single biome. theres no real reason to add that info in specific if youre not sure. just say it's big or earth-ish or whatever. Oh yeah, totally. Specific numbers are often the bane of a sci-fi writer. There's a popular story about how the dimensions and masses David Weber originally gave for ships in the Honor Harrington series meant the ships were roughly the density of smoke, which caused him to go back and adjust things by a few orders of magnitude after that was pointed out.
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Oct 1, 2020 03:14
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Jack-Off Lantern posted:Rock Opera Spice Opera
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Oct 10, 2020 06:46
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"Get in, we're going to drop acid and explore the depths of human consciousness and then gently caress like immortal worm gods". wait what was that last bit
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Oct 12, 2020 21:59
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I keep reading announcements from Amazon about Prime Day as Giedi Prime Day. Just got into God Emperor in my re-read of the series. I had forgotten just how weird things get. Threaten Leto with a lasgun? That's a worm-thumping.
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Oct 14, 2020 05:35
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phasmid posted:Only he doesn't use Dick's name, he just quotes him as "a human philosopher" or something similar. Similar to this, I did love the shout-out in the appendix of Dune that mentions a biography of Alia written by "Pander Oulson".
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Oct 14, 2020 06:04
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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. 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.
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Oct 20, 2020 23:47
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Prolonged Priapism posted:That scene always struck me as something he came up with very early on, when he was learning about real world dune dynamics and stable slopes and such. It highlights the alien and dangerous nature of the desert, but the way they MacGyver out of it feels out of place. The specific mechanics of the whole foam thing definitely felt sketchy, but I think it serves a good narrative purpose of taking Paul down a peg right after he basically unlocks a super power. It shows that he's still not infallible, especially when it comes to the hazards of desert life, and he has to solve some problems by cleverness and elbow grease rather than just relying on being a godlike super-Mentat.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:01
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uber_stoat posted:"I WILL NOT BE YOUR STUD!!!!!!!" "But Atreeeeeeeideeeeees..." "drat you all, fine, I'll do it."
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Nov 7, 2020 05:23
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"Fremen" of course being a shortening of the original, "Free Men On The Sand" movement.
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Mar 4, 2021 07:01
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Brief interruption from profoundly disturbing AI spawned abominations and penis jokes for a relevant pun: https://twitter.com/andresdavid/status/1369308499390382081
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Mar 10, 2021 06:48
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At this point [No @Duneauthor Zone] is being followed about as rigorously as a 55mph speed limit sign.
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Apr 18, 2021 20:29
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pnumoman posted:Imagine hating on tiny super Teg That one kinda bugs me because I'm pretty sure he's like 10 when the book starts, and it seems like at least a few years pass during the course of the book, so he should be a teenager or close to it by the end. Like, yeah he'd be a little shorter than a full grown adult but he'd still be able to get around under his own power. I can't tell if the whole "riding on someone's shoulders" bit was the Sisterhood being intentionally emasculating, if there's some other symbolic reason for it, or if Frank just got tweens and toddlers mixed up.
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Apr 19, 2021 02:00
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Bubblyblubber posted:after the worm's millenia of careful selection, all reverend mothers of the bene gesserit are 9ft tall giant big tiddyed goth girlfriends I retract my complaint and wholeheartedly endorse this as my new headcanon.
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Apr 20, 2021 02:25
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BYOBeefswelling
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Apr 22, 2021 19:06
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Twisted Mentats are 5% ABV.
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Apr 24, 2021 00:19
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Murray Mantoinette posted:You, a ghola tamer, ugly: "Ixians" Me, a twisted mentat, purple-dicked: "Let me play you Thousandozart's famous Concerto for Sixolin and Hundredello"
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Apr 24, 2021 02:14
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AN IDAHO
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May 26, 2021 06:04
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priznat posted:The Fremen only had free reign to do galactic jihad because they had the spacing guild by the short and curlies right? They were good at knife fighting and riding giant worms around but I never really understood how that tracked to galactic conquest. Partly that and partly the fact that many elements of the setting (shields, technological stagnation, bans on computers and ATOMICS) are designed to make infantry battles the pinnacle of warfare, and Fremen are the best infantry fighters. There's some talk about how control of CHOAM and the guild gives Paul additional levers of power, but the main use for the guild seems to be dropping boatloads of death commandos on a planet to personally stab to death every enemy of the imperium. You'd think they could just drop asteroids on major industrial centers until a planet surrenders, but that's not really the kind of sci-fi that Dune is aiming for.
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Jun 2, 2021 21:51
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kiimo posted:they just bounce off shields Makes me wonder how shields would react to a molotov cocktail.
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Jun 3, 2021 01:20
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Reminds me of the Riverworld series, where Philip Jose Farmer originally had characters eyeballing distances in standard units, saying things like "those mountains look 10,000 feet high". Then in later editions he decided to include metric equivalents as well, but just straight up converted the units with exact precision, so they now say things like "those mountains look about 10,000 feet high, or 3,048 meters".
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Jun 4, 2021 17:28
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exmachina posted:Like seriously, every American ever, a metre is just over a yard. A kilogram is like 2 lbs. A litre is approx a quart. This is not that hard And a celsius is exactly not what you think it is. Unless you're staying in Antarctica for the winter.
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Jun 4, 2021 23:54
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euphronius posted:What is a centimeter In American terms, it's slightly more than the width of a 9mm bullet.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:23
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Thopter? drat near killed 'er!
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Jun 10, 2021 03:45
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It seems like the Tleilaxu come out with a brand new iDaho every few years, very conveniently just after you've accidentally crushed your old one or it tried to kill you. It's a total scam.
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Jun 10, 2021 05:28
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Ingmar terdman posted:The clunky late 90s cgi is definitely part of the charm My brain automatically inserted the Babylon 5 background music during the scene where they go board the Heighliner.
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Jun 15, 2021 02:17
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Ror posted:Hebrew Leto II isn't real, it can't hurt y- oh gently caress, nvm, he's right over there ... we're gonna need a bigger mohel.
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Jun 17, 2021 05:07
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In the books it's a kind of martial art style and (arguably more importantly) the training regimen associated with it. It's basically going "what if our knowledge of medicine and physiology continued to develop at the same pace for the next ten thousand years" and then dedicating all of that to being incredible badasses. They have all sorts of weird exercises like spending all day trying to flex a single muscle in your finger to teach you absolute control over your body.
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Jun 24, 2021 02:51
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Mister Speaker posted:Right, yeah, referring to it as a "martial art" I knew was a bit reductive. What I'm curious about is why it's previously unknown to the Fremen - if it's a big witchy secret, how and why does Paul end up teaching it to them? Is it even that important to their successful holy war? I don't think the wild reverend mothers necessarily implies a very close connection to the mainstream Bene Gesserit; the way Jessica describes them makes them sound like a very tenuous offshoot. And the Fremen clearly have a general idea that BG are very skilled in combat since Stilgar calls it "the weirding way" when they first meet, IIRC. They just don't know the actual details of how to do it, since it's a very closely kept secret by the BG. Paul and Jessica teach it to them initially because that's part of the deal they make for being taken in by the tribe. It's also a force multiplier for Fremen troops; take people trained by nature and their environment to be stupendous badasses, add in scientifically optimized training that makes people stupendous badasses, and you get some kind of compound badass-squared that can kung-fu entire planets to death.
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Jun 24, 2021 03:11
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Try our spice! Try our spice! Take your name from desert mice Wear a stillsuit, ride a sandworm, Make Harkonnens pay the price.
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Jul 3, 2021 04:08
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I don't know if it's exactly comedic, but there's definitely a cartoonish quality to his over-the-top villainy that makes him hard to take completely seriously. I know the book says he intentionally cultivates that image to some degree to put people off their guard, but the entire planet is just "ludicrously evil world".
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Jul 14, 2021 03:25
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