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T.S. Smelliot posted:Currently reading messiah and it was slow at first but it's picking up, a good read Messiah was a pretty quick read for me and I enjoyed it. I've been going through in order and am about 80 pages into Heretics. I didn't like it as much as the other books at first, but it's growing on me.
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Apr 8, 2018 10:57
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I remember reading a Dune thread here several years ago (can't remember if it was GBS or TBB) and everyone was all "Don't bother with God Emperor, it's just nonsense and isn't worth the investment.” I don't think it had a single defender at the time. It warms my bitter black heart to see things have changed, because God Emperor owns bones
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Apr 8, 2018 13:09
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Communist Walrus posted:I remember reading a Dune thread here several years ago (can't remember if it was GBS or TBB) and everyone was all "Don't bother with God Emperor, it's just nonsense and isn't worth the investment.” I don't think it had a single defender at the time. It warms my bitter black heart to see things have changed, because God Emperor owns bones I first read it when I was 14 or 15 and knew it was somethin’, even if I didn’t quite understand it all yet. Love that book. Chapterhouse, on the other hand... eh. I think it’s really just incomplete because of Herbert’s death.
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Apr 8, 2018 13:23
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I first read it when I was 14 or 15 and knew it was somethin’, even if I didn’t quite understand it all yet. Love that book. God Emperor is probably my favorite of the lot even though it’s just Herbert’s weird rantings disguised through the lens of a hideous omniscient manworm
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Apr 8, 2018 13:40
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the first draft of god emperor was entirely first person leto II, and i'd kill to be able to read it
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Apr 8, 2018 13:46
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Murray Mantoinette posted:God Emperor is probably my favorite of the lot even though it’s just Herbert’s weird rantings disguised through the lens of a hideous omniscient manworm As a novel, it’s kind of weak. As a thought experiment, it’s fantastic. You’re not meant to agree with everything, or anything, Leto II says. Most of it is abhorrent. It’s not a book that tells you why, it’s a book that wants you to ask “Why not?”
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Apr 8, 2018 14:48
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Communist Walrus posted:I remember reading a Dune thread here several years ago (can't remember if it was GBS or TBB) and everyone was all "Don't bother with God Emperor, it's just nonsense and isn't worth the investment.” I don't think it had a single defender at the time. It warms my bitter black heart to see things have changed, because God Emperor owns bones GBS goes through edgelord cycles. Sounds like some real maroons were posting in that thread.
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Apr 9, 2018 02:14
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My first experience with God Emperor was listening on audiobook while running and somehow it accidentally ended up on shuffle and played (from what I can tell) the first chapter, a chapter where he kills his Duncan, and the last chapter. Because of the narrative structure, nothing was particularly jarring or indicated that I was skipping whole chapters until a voice thanked me for listening to the audiobook and that it was over. I always heard about how God Emperor is so weird to people but none of it seemed very strange to me after that experience.
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Apr 9, 2018 06:40
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Bump I am rewatching blade runner 2049 and the VISUALS and the WORLD BUILDING make me excited for the N E W D U N E M O V I E
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Apr 11, 2018 01:13
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Murray Mantoinette posted:God Emperor is probably my favorite of the lot even though it’s just Herbert’s weird rantings disguised through the lens of a hideous omniscient manworm That's what's good about it. It's the bizarre outcome of the events of the previous book and it's such a far echo into the future of the first three, and is so completely warped from them, that it becomes fascinatingly weird. Also the Billy and Mandy homage to it where Billy is God Emperor Mandy's Duncan Idaho is fuckin' great.
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Apr 11, 2018 01:54
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Murray Mantoinette posted:I thought the whole point was that the universe became less boring and predictable? That was his intention for humanity at large. Maybe I misinterpreted/forgot Leto's intentions but IMO old setting was much more fun. There were rival houses, consiracies, various centers of power such as the landsraad and what will the guild think, and what are the bene gesserit plotting etc. By the God-Emperor all if it is gone or irrelevant but at least Leto is interesting enough to make up for it. With him gone there is just Leto's uniformity and Bene Gesserit who are boring and scared shitless of doing anything interesting (accidentally having another messiah).
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Apr 11, 2018 09:15
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Sekenr posted:Maybe I misinterpreted/forgot Leto's intentions but IMO old setting was much more fun. There were rival houses, consiracies, various centers of power such as the landsraad and what will the guild think, and what are the bene gesserit plotting etc. By the God-Emperor all if it is gone or irrelevant but at least Leto is interesting enough to make up for it. With him gone there is just Leto's uniformity and Bene Gesserit who are boring and scared shitless of doing anything interesting (accidentally having another messiah). You're off. Leto's golden path was about subjecting mankind to an awful pressure cooker that had nowhere to go but outwards in all directions away from the old imperium. the total collapse of society more or less completely changed the imperium, and flung humanity out into the stars in such broad and strange directions, with ixian no-ships that don't need navigators to fold space, and can't be traced by precience, there is nothing that can ever wipe out humanity. Mankind was stagnant. Yes there was dramatic intrigue that could write so many different stories in the imperium of Duke Leto I or paul atreides, but it was stagnant. The guild's monopoly on space travel essentially created a centralized imperium. Imagine you live in a fictional city, and it's huge but you can only travel to places connected to the city subway, the only practical, safe way to travel throughout the city. This was the imperium on a galactic scale. trillions of lives, all connected, and in such a way that something like a machine mind or anything malevolent and able to exploit precience could use it to wipe out or destroy humanity. Leto wanted to make sure that humanity not only could, but wanted and needed to leave the imperium, and that future generations would be increasingly more immune to the powers that paul and leto possessed He saw the horrors his father was ultimately responsible, sighed, and set out to one-up him to make sure that nobody else could follow in their footsteps. So, by the time of Heretics, even though the old imperium is still there, and the bene gesserit, ixians, and tleilaxu still exist, there is a completely new order, balanced between the new power brokers. There is no imperial court per-se, there are more modern spheres of influence. The bene gesserit, ixians, tleilaxu, and even the worm cult on arrakis are vying for power within the remains of the old imperium, when the honored matres and scattering tleilaxu return and start loving poo poo up, demonstrating leto's point that the imperium was vulnerable and stagnant. Honestly the intrigue and plotting of Heretics is way more intense and crazy than anything Herbert pulled off in Dune thru to God Emperor. Those are exellent books, but Heretics is about the old imperium sort of becoming a new wild west i have never read chapterhouse because heretics' weird poo poo about women grooming and trying to gently caress a teenage duncan idaho keep making me stop the audiobook
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Apr 11, 2018 09:27
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Sekenr posted:Maybe I misinterpreted/forgot Leto's intentions but IMO old setting was much more fun. There were rival houses, consiracies, various centers of power such as the landsraad and what will the guild think, and what are the bene gesserit plotting etc. By the God-Emperor all if it is gone or irrelevant but at least Leto is interesting enough to make up for it. With him gone there is just Leto's uniformity and Bene Gesserit who are boring and scared shitless of doing anything interesting (accidentally having another messiah). That was one of the fun overarching themes of Heretics and Chapterhouse, I thought. The old Imperium was full of political rivalry and conspiracy. So imagine you’re The Bene Gesserit, who have been some subtle behinds-the-scenes powerbrokers for millenia, with all their abilities devoted to spycraft and intrigue and interrogation and then all of a sudden the Honored Matres come in and are like “subtlety? What’s that oh by the way we’re melting the surface of several of your planets” and you’re thrust into an active warfare role all of a sudden. The fun philosophical parts of the last two books to me were the BG organization and its individuals wrestling with how to do this, and how to survive in a suddenly completely chaotic universe, while still maintaining as much of their old grace and fluidity as they can.
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Apr 11, 2018 09:43
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^^^^ Well, sure I get all that on some level but don't try to tell me that Heretics and Chapterhouse are good books 
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Apr 11, 2018 10:54
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Sekenr posted:^^^^ They’re not good gently caress you they’re great 
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Apr 11, 2018 14:52
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first three are great, next three are uneven, from pretty good to pretty bad and the rest is utter shite if i had to recommend dune to someone, i'd say stop after the first three.
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Apr 11, 2018 15:11
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heretics and chapterhouse fall short of the heighs of Dune and God Emperor but they're actually alright books if you can get past herbert's weird sex poo poo. which is difficult. but characters like Odrade and miles teg are legitimately interesting
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Apr 11, 2018 15:44
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basic hitler posted:heretics and chapterhouse fall short of the heighs of Dune and God Emperor but they're actually alright books if you can get past herbert's weird sex poo poo. which is difficult. but characters like Odrade and miles teg are legitimately interesting i like the plot, i don't like the prose. thewhole plot of the 3 books should have been condensed into a 50-page epilogue for children of dune, like the epilogue in return of the king. e.g. everything goes to poo poo, leto II becomes a tyrant and religious fanaticism is bad, ya'll
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Apr 11, 2018 15:49
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Apparently The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is actually coming out this year, so I want my animated Jodorowsky's Dune now.
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Apr 11, 2018 16:29
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I was just thinking about how badly the prequel books hosed up even the concept of the butlerian jihad. I had always read it as humanity overthrowing the stagnation that robot servants had created. Then Herbert’s idiot son decides that nah, that doesn’t have enough shooting and terminators. Ugh.
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Apr 13, 2018 23:49
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I was just thinking about how badly the prequel books hosed up even the concept of the butlerian jihad. I had always read it as humanity overthrowing the stagnation that robot servants had created. Then Herbert’s idiot son decides that nah, that doesn’t have enough shooting and terminators. Ugh. Kevin J Anderson never saw a thing that he couldn't poorly imitate. That Brian Herbert chose him of all people to work with really shows you what level his writing is.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:49
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Remember when they turned folding space into a Star Wars hyperdrive
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Apr 14, 2018 02:27
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Improbable Lobster posted:Remember when they turned folding space into a Star Wars hyperdrive Invented by a super genius midget.
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Apr 14, 2018 02:39
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I was just thinking about how badly the prequel books hosed up even the concept of the butlerian jihad. I had always read it as humanity overthrowing the stagnation that robot servants had created. Then Herbert’s idiot son decides that nah, that doesn’t have enough shooting and terminators. Ugh. Really though? I think the shooting and terminators are a depressingly much more realistic vision of what's to come.
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Apr 14, 2018 03:29
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Really though? I think the shooting and terminators are a depressingly much more realistic vision of what's to come. As opposed to having every part of your life plotted and predicted by incomprehensibly advanced predictive algorithms?
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Apr 14, 2018 03:36
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What does your heart tell you, when looking at the entirety of human history.
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Apr 14, 2018 03:40
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Defiance Industries posted:As opposed to having every part of your life plotted and predicted by incomprehensibly advanced predictive algorithms? Yeah but it's not weird space-catholics who are doing the prediction.
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Apr 14, 2018 03:40
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Really though? I think the shooting and terminators are a depressingly much more realistic vision of what's to come. Nah that's loving trite
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Apr 14, 2018 03:46
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:Really though? I think the shooting and terminators are a depressingly much more realistic vision of what's to come. this is weird given that the butlerian jihad feels like Herbert himself was prescient given the arguments that could be made about social media affecting people and so on
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Apr 14, 2018 04:07
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:What does your heart tell you, when looking at the entirety of human history. You don't follow the news then, I take it. Besides all that, Kevin J. Anderson wrote it in the most predictable and uncreative way, it's like hearing a ten-year-old tell you about his original character who isn't just Master Chief.
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Apr 14, 2018 04:28
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I guess I've watched the Terminator movies a little too often then.
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Apr 14, 2018 04:29
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Also after thinking about it some more it's partly that I The characters can be flat and the philosophy and themes, to say the least, are mere wisps in Frank's shadow. But I still appreciate what KJA was trying to do. He brought a few things to the table that surprised me, like the inversion of Harkonnen and Atreides and the third faction of cyborgs. So it's a matter of expecting them to be total crap and they pleasantly surprised me by being only mostly crap. I haven't read the proper Dune books in a while but I also think the stultifying omniscient AI you're talking about is kind of reading current trends back into the scanty details hinted at in Frank's books, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that point.
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Apr 14, 2018 04:57
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The Butlerian Jihad was a reaction against thinking like a machine as much as it was against thinking machines
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Apr 14, 2018 05:06
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gently caress kja/brian herbert
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Apr 14, 2018 05:12
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:I haven't read the proper Dune books in a while but I also think the stultifying omniscient AI you're talking about is kind of reading current trends back into the scanty details hinted at in Frank's books, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that point. From God-Emperor: quote:"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." Especially coming from Leto, whose Golden Path was largely about destroying the power of prescience and its hold over humanity, I don't think he was intending to present machines as killer robots who enslave humans just like in the movies Kevin J Anderson stole his ideas from. Reducing the question of the conflict down to "machines tried to kill humans so we dont have machines" loses any sort of interesting questions or nuance raised by the Jihad and makes it a simple matter of winning an existential conflict and then destroying the aggressor.
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Apr 14, 2018 05:12
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A_Bug_That_Thinks posted:The Butlerian Jihad was a reaction against thinking like a machine as much as it was against thinking machines Having the Jihad be a philosophical movement is boring as poo poo bro. It's way cooler when it's a fight to the death against Lord Cybertrex-8000. It's even cooler when Lord Cybertrex-8000 gets shoehorned into the sequel novels and one of the setting's most notable and defining features gets tossed by the wayside because the authors are hack frauds
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Apr 14, 2018 05:19
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Communist Walrus posted:It's even cooler when Lord Cybertrex-8000 gets shoehorned into the sequel novels and one of the setting's most notable and defining features gets tossed by the wayside because the authors are hack frauds This part is strongly implied in Chapterhouse, isn't it? Someone gets a sense of the future that Leto was trying to make humanity capable of escaping, and it's definitely robots (or at least robotic and materialistic culture) seeking and destroying them.
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Apr 14, 2018 05:43
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paul_soccer10 posted:Bump yes. i'm not as high on dune as everyone else (i consider it a solid book and recognise its influence but don't view it as a peak of the sci-fi mountain range), but denis villeneuve managed to impress me so much with the aesthetics of 2049 and i think the imagery in dune is excellent grist for his direction that i moved from lukewarm on the movie to extremely eager to see it.
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Apr 14, 2018 05:47
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Let that Terrence Malick fella have a go at it, that I would pay to see. Tell him it has voiceovers.
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Apr 14, 2018 05:49
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Doc Hawkins posted:This part is strongly implied in Chapterhouse, isn't it? Someone gets a sense of the future that Leto was trying to make humanity capable of escaping, and it's definitely robots (or at least robotic and materialistic culture) seeking and destroying them. It's implied that the Honored Matres were chased back into the Old Empire by some kind of super advanced outside force. It's Brian Herbert and KJA that decided it was Lord Cybertrex-8000 who was BACK FOR REVENGE.
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Apr 14, 2018 07:15
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