DUNE: c/d

i fucking LOVE dune

Herbert named one of his characters "Pieter de Vries", which is one letter away from the name of the 20th century comic novelist Peter de Vries. It's a surreal touch. I like to imagine Herbert thinking "let 'em figure that one out."

It was a nod to skot.

it came out in '65!

For some reason I thought it was like 1960-61. But nevertheless Wikipedia dates the beginning of the New Wave movement to 1964 (which is when Michael Moorcock became editor of New Worlds) and the peak as 1971, so it is certainly contemporaneous and definitely could have been an influence on later New Wave writers. Dangerous Visions is debatably part of the New Wave stuff (depends if we just see it as a British phenomenon), but it is often cited as the definitive American New Wave anthology and that came out after Dune in 1967.

Given that no one seems to really like the sequels (apart from me, obv.), and The White Plague is ye liveliest awfulnesse, did Frank Herbert write anything else any good? Or was he a one book writer?

he wrote this hilarious little dirty limerick on a bathroom wall once

i've heard The Whipping Star is good

Whipping Star is my favorite Herbert.

I only read the first 3 or so when I was about 20. I loved them & want to read them again, but the only way I can read everything I want to read, keep up my internet addiction, walk the dog, draw, eat, sleep, keep husband, etc, is to shunt several Beth Parkers off to parallel universes, then reunite them periodically into one super Beth Parker, rinse, repeat.

After all, failing to bathe, change clothes or clean house only buys you so much time.

You need a spice eating monster to bend you some extra time.

I should go back and read Dune again as I remember loving it then devouring the sequels - though they never quite lived up to the first one.

You need a spice eating monster to bend you some extra time.

Failing that, retirement, at least by the time I hit 80. Disability?

reading the first one again 4 the first time since i was like 12 or 13 ... so so dope

Dune is a classic, even outside of its narrow genre.

Has anyone read the sequels written by Frank Herbert's son and a co-author? I assume they're terrible. (TBH, I thought the last book or two in the series by Frank Herbert were borderline-terrible, e.g., God Emperor of Dune).

Yeah they're awful, the old man and woman at the end of Chapterhouse are not intelligent face dancers but AI survivors from the butlerian jihad

Also Heretics and Chapterhouse are awesome novels but there are inexplicable elements in them that don't seem to blend well with the earlier stories but perhaps that's because i never finished reading God Emperor which is quite boring

Yeah, IIRC, nothing happens in God Emperor. Lotsa "thinking" and "plotting."

Guild Navigators are REAL!!!
http://cache.boston.com/universal/bigpicture/13_200716.jpg

(My nerdiest post ever? No, it's probably something to do with Starfleet Battles)

ilx is very booknerd today.

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/259/godemp.jpg

Hmm, did a search and thought this was an ILE thread...

Hey so, is there really any reward in reading past the first one? I've read it maybe three times over the last, let's say 10-12 years...I like a lot of the Big Ideas (mainly the whole notion of a character realizing he is the Prophesied Chosen One and being really freaked out about it), but the characters/plot sort of ooze together in the last third or so and I've just never been tempted by the sequels - they feel like cash-ins, but are they?

http://www.moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

An awesome seriously in-depth looks at the Origins of the Book.

really loved the first one and the fourth (god emperor of dune). The Brian Herbert ones are uniformly terrible.

Before I read it, Dune always had a certain mystique to me. That was the result of some combination of the cover, the fact that my older sister had a copy of it and spoke reverently of it, and my failed attempt to read it when I was too young. (I really couldn't handle long-playing novels until I was in 7th, maybe 8th grade, and still didn't read many then.) When I finally read it many years later, I definitely enjoyed it, but I couldn't get into whatever the followup was. I wasn't that thrilled with Herbert's writing even in Dune, but the story and the whole framework carried it for me.

rereading these right now

there is such a dropoff in quality between dune and dune messiah

about to start children of dune, remember it being better, hopefully?

he really is just making this stuff up as he goes, huh

I remember liking all the sequels I read (up to God Emperor, which is teh total amaze).

but cripes, that God Emperor cover above is astonishing.

rereading dune! can't figure out why these are so eminently rereadable to me, but i've read them a million times. even though there's a bunch of stuff that would normally make me not like it, somehow the story makes it all ok.

finally got the dune encyclopedia, what's the best way to read this shit?

http://lparchive.org/Dune/Update%2001/51-vyrw2f.gif

skinless gifs

what game is that from?

Dune the PC Game. I'm on a Let's Play roll these days.

http://lparchive.org/Dune/

is that the isometric RTS one, where you pick one of three houses?

i don't recall the screen looking quite like that but its been, oh, about 20 years since i've played

(that link is blocked for me)

I think you're thinking of Dune 2, which was a strategy game. The first is an adventure game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JROGmTAnS-g

that dune gif is offtm because a sandworm would have disposed of the body long before it could decompose

dune 2 was sweet as hell

never played dune 1, will dosbox

oh wow i just looked at the top of the thread - didn't remember i had started it!

it's nice to read some people talking about how they like the Dune sequels. So I am not alone in the world. But I never finished Heretics or started Chapterhouse.

I am very envious of anyone who has that Dune Encyclopedia. I remember marvelling at it in shops.

they have some good parts but as a whole they are not that great, honestly

my dune encyclopedia is a PDF ;_;

I take it that all the prequels etc. by Norbert Herbert are complete nonsense?

depends how much you like things like licensed star wars or star trek novels

but yeah IMO utter shite

i mean i think like SW or ST novels they have little in the way of the spark of creativity that made the originals great and they are basically just boilerplate sci-fi stuff w a thin layer of in-universe flavor on top

I never knew about the dune encyclopedia! Any good?

I plowed thru the first 3 books in my reread. Books 2 and 3 are much worse than I remember, but something abt this series requires that once I start reading, I have to read it through its entirety... I recall the last two being a return to the quality of book 1 so am curious to see how I feel about it this time around.

relieved to be finished with god emperor of dune so i no longer have to stand around in the subway trying to hid the crazy looking cover...

http://images.wikia.com/dune/images/b/b6/God_Emperor_of_Dune_Cover_Art.jpg

is it weird that I really love Herbert's prose in Dune? feel like a lot of people arent into it but i love it, his descriptions of topography feel like action even when its purely descriptive

Yeah, "planetary romance, " like it says on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia site: not that much science, but what there is (re early use of ecological themes in SF, anyway) enhances the power of the setting, which is also a character, in effect.
Really enjoyed the first two books all through, rooting for the rebellious children of Destiny, but the struggles of the main character in Children of Dune, trying to make (a new) sense of his future(s) get so torturous and sometimes inchoate--appropriately so, but still it got to be too much for me: like, how much of this is to be sympathized with, and waited out, 'til we get to the cool plot twists again---and they do come!--but also, wondering how much we're supposed to take as stunning insights, rather than characters grasping at straws. (Also, some of the secondary and tertiary characters can make pretty stupid moves).
My recent thoughts on God Emperor of Dune, and what might lie ahead, are general impressions, though still may possibly be considered spoilery:
ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Just started reading/listening to 'Dune' on Audible. Wow. Why did I put this off so long??

It's great that they have atmospheric music and a cast of voices to play the different parts. I'm also reading the book so I know how the hell you spell things like "Kwisatz Haderach"

I'm currently about 3/4 through Children of Dune. Definitely an improvement over Dune Messiah, which I found kind of pointless. This has much more of a fleshed out plot and characters.

I keep thinking about how weird Herbert's writing style is. So much of these books consist of a pair of characters talking to each other in riddles. At times, it can be a bit difficult to see if it has meaning or just sounds deep.

dune messiah sucks

if you're 3/4 through 'children' and still engaged, then you have passed the . . . test

'god emperor' is intensely weird but worthwhile

five and six are more like standard SF (but i like them)

the books by his son are astonishingly terrible; you and i could do better over slack

my name is matttkkkk and I approve this message ^

I read God Emperor about 30+ years ago and recall liking it, so I'll probably read again. Have never read 5 and 6, we'll see if I have patience for them.

I mean... I'm new to all this. I always assumed it would be very dry, which I guess it would be if it weren't so well realised? This is probably an obvious and well-worn observation but you can see where Star Wars and Game of Thrones and any number of other sci-fi/fantasy universes got their ideas from.

i finally got around to Dune at the start of the pandemic & loved it & would love more of it. everyone seems to agree that Messiah is bad & not worth the effort - would i be lost at sea if i skipped it and went right to Children?

very probably.

also mark s. likes it iirc. and it's relatively short

it's a quick read and it sets up the events of Children of Dune, it just feels a bit pointless on its own, there isn't much of a story there

Pinky nail summaries of all 24 books to date, in chrono order, no more spoilery than nec.:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g38012512/dune-books-in-order/

Dune is the ur-text of modern science fiction. It's rare to find a book that draws, successfully, on so many disparate ideas to form a coherent narrative.

Imho, the whole series is untouchable through God Emperor. He could have ended the entire saga there and left everyone satisfied. I understand that bills gotta be paid, though, and the last two books are not unreadable, they just don't add much, if anything, to the story.

("nail" makes me think of Martin Luther)

just finished dune messiah and it was indeed as bad & pointless as i had been led to believe. after the epic sweep of dune this one felt weirdly stagebound, a tale of the galactic struggle for control of infinite cosmic spacetime that takes place entirely in like 3 different rooms, with what feels like only about 8 speaking parts altogether. but ironically i'm kind of more interested in getting to children of dune now just based on the prospect that it will surely be better than this one, and help me feel like the time spent on this one wasnt wasted.

no its good shut up

Red Nation, radical indigenous presenters look at the Dune film from last year in terms of colonialism etc.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3eF0TJNCvx5rrrk0E4NwS6?si=49d64aed6f4348c1

Leto II has total recollection of the memories of all his ancestors, which means that he remembers watching The Phantom Menace in theaters.

— Mia Moore (@StopTweetingMia) October 12, 2022

thought this made more sense here than the film threads on ILE

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/43515/the-mystery-of-the-dune-font

“Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!” goes the refrain. “A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!”

some ilx0r needs to create a song out of this imo

Yueh Yueh
oh
no
he gotta go
Ay ya hya chouhada

hey
yueh
baron’s got your wife now
don’t you worry yueh

🐦[Leto II has total recollection of the memories of all his ancestors, which means that he remembers watching The Phantom Menace in theaters.
— Mia Moore (@StopTweetingMia) October 12, 2022🕸]🐦

a thing i like abt the acronym CHOAM is that what it stands for is really no less inscrutable = Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles

Yeah that's David Foster Wallace level

found scribbled in blood on a scrap of paper as he emerged from a multi-week spice bender, soon after he found himself checked in at the group home

the word "honnete" in my corporate acronym has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the word "honnete"

Kyle MacLachlan and Frank Herbert: The Boys pic.twitter.com/xcGURGQ4IL

— Patrick (@Pilgrim945) August 25, 2021

uniting eastern and western WA

a prime up-the-arse corner candidate

in the introduction to Dune Messiah, Brian Herbert claims, unprompted, that Frank Herbert would have been one of the all time great US Presidents (?) had he decided to do that instead of becoming a writer

— caroline (going woman) (@soonrightaway) February 24, 2024

caroline (going woman) @soonrightaway: in the introduction to Dune Messiah, Brian Herbert claims, unprompted, that Frank Herbert would have been one of the all time great US Presidents (?) had he decided to do that instead of becoming a writer

dune messiah continues to deliver

Now I can't get the image of a sandworm with Trump's face on it out of my mind.

spice force

Make Arrakis Great Again

^^ https://www.tiktok.com/@loloverruled/video/7342915568074247454