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Frank Herbert's Dune, 50 Years On
An anonymous reader writes: This October will be the 50th anniversary of Frank Herbert's massively popular and influential sci-fi novel Dune. The Guardian has written a piece examining its effects on the world at large, and how the book remains relevant even now. Quoting: 'Books read differently as the world reforms itself around them, and the Dune of 2015 has geopolitical echoes that it didn't in 1965, before the oil crisis and 9/11. ... As Paul's destiny becomes clear to him, he begins to have visions 'of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad'Dib.' If Paul accepts this future, he will be responsible for 'the jihad's bloody swords,' unleashing a nomad war machine that will up-end the corrupt and oppressive rule of the emperor Shaddam IV (good) but will kill untold billions (not so good) in the process. In 2015, the story of a white prophet leading a blue-eyed brown-skinned horde of jihadis against a ruler called Shaddam produces a weird funhouse mirror effect, as if someone has jumbled up recent history and stuck the pieces back together in a different order."
Herbert was exactly writing about hydraulic despotism, which is a common thing for varying definitions of "hydraulic". Oil is the big one right now, but water is showing all signs of being the next. As for revolution, anyone compassionate enough to be a good leader will have to face the choice that what path they are embarking upon will lead to death and destruction. Playing a race card is just shock value clickbait...
A good workmanlike book? It is to SF what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, and one of the greatest pieces of world creation ever written.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Frank is a deeper fellow than all but a few really grasp.
"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action."
- Frank Herbert.
How perfectly does that describe the Guardian and most of its readership?
Um... not very well?
soylentnews.org
Wow. Herbert, looking for exotic inspiration for his stories, uses elements of the Arab, Persian and Muslim world thus making his stories very different from the vast majority of scifi at the time, which tended to be was based in civilizations resembling those built by Jews and Christians in moderate climates (most authors start with what they and their readers are familiar with and then get busy telling a story). Herbert floods his stories with words that have a middle-eastern sound, scenery straight out of "Lawrence of Arabia", middle-eastern-style tribal and martial behaviors, and titles the first book "Dune" as if to put a huge capstone advertizing this on the endeavor. This is all obvious to the early readers of the work. The military aspects of Dune are obvious both in the way the off-world forces approach Arrakis (an actual Arabic word) like Westerners approaching the Arab/Muslim world. The Fremen are clearly modeled on the tribal people of the middle-east, and therefore are organized and fight as those people have historically organized themselves and fought (absent the scifi props of worms and such). Even the spice is an allegory both for oil (which from a Western perspective "must flow" and is required for transportation across large distances) and for actual drugs (such as the heroin from Afghanistan)
Decades pass
Ignorant morons pickup the book "Dune", skim through it (or, admittedly, SOME even READ it), and declare that the author was amazingly prophetic and that aspects of what he wrote seem to have a mysterious connection to the modern world etc.
[face palm]
One one level it's very a funny display of extreme ignorance, but on another level it's a disturbing display of intellectual failure. This confusion about cause-and-effect, source-and-sink, and otherwise backward thinking is right up there with cargo cultism and is an indictment of the reasoning and education of the person displaying it.
Huge stretches of the book are internal monologue or whispered conversations in dark rooms, where two people exchange few words and pages are spent on exposition. The book is unfilmable; or rather, you can make a lot of movies with the title Dune but they're going to end up just sharing character names and the general bag of situations.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.