DUNE: c/d

Yeah Dune is a hangout book really, whatever the narrative offers is very secondary to getting to live in that mental world for a few hours. I must have read it ten times, and every reread it’s like all the background and extra detail are even more familiar, so I find myself nodding my head and saying yeah, absolutely on the money.

it kinda just ...ends, huh?

you got five books to go!!

SO many NAMES of THINGS

I remember owning a 700pp battered copy of the The Dune Encyclopedia (1984). A searchable PDF is much more convenient.

my kindle version had a terminology section but its definitions were more annoying than helpful lol

veg your responses are making me want to reread this thing. think i've only ever done it twice, once for a high school class and once maybe around college or a little after. so probably at least 15 years, and some things are still very vivid, but they're mostly locales/vibes and all the Liet-Kynes ecosystem stuff... not a ton of specific scenes, and certainly no dialogue. "hangout book" feels right for that.

he becomes a better writer as the series goes along, imo, which is your reward as things become increasingly insane

as i mentioned, my friend & i did this as a bookclub together

in all honestly, nerd feelings aside, *should* we read Dune Messiah?

is it good y/n and if so why
& will i need more dune dictionaries y/n

i am still mad pissed that Hetbert killed off Kynes. like, WHY?? he was one of the best characters.
after he got swallowed into the pre-spice bubble or whatever i had a fleeting theory that he was going to become a worm 😂

dune messiah is my least favorite of the bunch but i think others rate it more highly. and it cannot be accused of being predictable sequel fare

My recent re-read of Dune Messiah made me not want to continue the series. Perhaps I should give Children a chance.

I don't like it much either, it's the comedown of politics and consequences after the rush of the first one. But mookieproof otm, and its unpredictability does a good job of setting up bigger and more interesting things down the track. At least it's short!

hmm

well we will decide in a week or two - it’s either this or LOTR (which we have both read but not in a VERY long time)

I remember liking Dune Messiah and have it on my re-read pile but it was a long long long time since I read it.

i like DM too -- it's deliberately very small-scale tho, macchiavellian court politics

also it had my favourite space-opera style cover:

https://www.sffworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/dunemessiah.jpg

It has the weird quality of being this local neighborhood intrigue, while presumably there's this vague but massive cosmic genocide happening offstage. It all felt incongruous, like the focus didn't make sense.

rejected JBR screen names

Maybe check this, if more curious than worried about possible spoilers (on Rolling Speculative, I saw teen Paul as struggling w identity and fate like his 60-born peer and soul mate Peter Parker Spiderman):

Just finished Dune, read it for the first time. Honestly....I really enjoyed reading this, but the ending seemed kind of dud. Everything seemed to wrap up really quickly without too terribly much struggle. And Paul strikes me as kind of a dick. Will reading Children of Dune make me happier?

― Dominique, Thursday, September 22, 2016 12:25 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Dune Messiah is the second, Children is third, incl. in quality, though it has its strong sections/pages. But If you don't already sympathize with Paul's struggles vs. his fucked-with nature and destiny, go no further (if you do, God Emperor mostly smells like ass, Heretics of Dune is yer Return To Form, but not enough to send me in a timely fashion to Chapterhouse: Dune, the last Dune by series creator Frank Herbert. But I'll get there someday, and could see how the follow-ups written and co-written by his son might work okay as space opera, minus any overload of philosophical etc. elements.

― dow, Thursday, September 22, 2016 1:37 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanks -- yeah, most of the time I rooted for him, but some of the time it was clear he was just as capable of being corrupted by power as anyone else. He struggled with it, but also took advantage of his power at times (and also seemed to have an inability to actually deal with the bad stuff that happened to him, other than just shutting it out completely). I guess that's the point? I've also read that in further books, characters that were once "villains" can become more sympathetic.

― Dominique, Thursday, September 22, 2016 3:23 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, they can---they're all crazy, fucked-with and fucking with, in the cultural midst of cultural imperatives---even the God Emperor means to gradually implode the Order of Things by advancing it, teaching "Don't Follow Leaders, Watch The Parking Meters", but sure does take him a long time, and even though as a comic premise it's funny that he likes torture his followers with huge clouds of philosophical bullshit---like he's Mr. Natural, and everbody else, incl. loyal readers, is Flakey Foont, or Dudley Moore in "Bedazzled"---this isn't as good. But as one of the fucked-with Children of Dune he's more sympathetic. And I'd like to know just how the Bene Gesserit got that way, but anyway they do indeed try to save the day in Heretics--maybe trying too hard in Chapterhouse, judging by sneak peaks, but that tends to the Dune way (incl. that of its creator) after all.

― dow, Thursday, September 22, 2016 4:21 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

in the culturalmidst, I meant

― dow, Thursday, September 22, 2016

Strikethrough of that extra "cultural" didn't make it into paste. Local library also has early The Ecology of Dune, come to think of it.

yeah i am not as big on Douchelord Paul now that he is really leaning into it all

he kinda went back and forth through the book and I appreciated the few moments when Jessica was able to check him

Welll---he earns his very own (better not say more, but he does)

i reread dune messiah for the first tme in probably 30 years if not more

there's more of it that i don't follow than i remember lol (the complex motivations that wd be delivered in whispered voice-overs if david lunch was filming it)

i still like its sense of small-scale intimate corrupt court biz and its semi-pointless gaudiness (the conspirators somehow remind me of an aladdin pantomime)

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