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winnydpu
May 3, 2007
Sugartime Jones
I was cleaning up my Kindle and book database and I rediscovered a short article Frank wrote for Omni in 1980. Seemed worth posting:



Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert

Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape
across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The
story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.

How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book
about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues,
fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent
bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory
that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero
(whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over
the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.

Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of
politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to
give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap
himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it.
Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.

My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted
themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming
bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that
neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.

This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your
critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people
may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being
who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human
mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And
sometimes you run into another problem.

It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want
power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people
are imbalanced-in a word, insane.

That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe.
The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly
word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ
them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that
picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?

All of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in
the entertainment business first. It's all right to include a pot of message,
but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. Yes, there are analogs
in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places,
whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over
by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an
exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

But that was only the beginning.

While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to
write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there.
The USDA was seeking ways to control coastal (and other) sand dunes. I
had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my
superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next
banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and
others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade.
Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure
its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can
be just as addictive as any other kind of high.

Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence project fed
my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see
the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social
ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It's an open-ended list.

Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions,
psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research,
soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study
rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's cauldron: the psychology
of planetary societies.

Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the
beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the
guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt,
would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism
into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.

Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or
deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an
absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe
attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices
that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are
ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the
ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.

Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation.
Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible
targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to
aim painful barbs.

But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek
play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these
mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do
they learn this?

Enter the fugue. In music, the fugue is usually based on a single theme that
is played many different ways. Sometimes there are free voices that do
fanciful dances around the interplay. There can be secondary themes and
contrasts in harmony, rhythm, and melody. From the moment when a single
voice introduces the primary theme, however, the whole is woven into a
single fabric.

What were my instruments in this ecological fugue? Images, conflicts,
things that turn upon themselves and become something quite different,
myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our common
heritage, products of our technological evolution, our human desires, and
our human fears.

You can imagine my surprise to learn that John Schoenherr, one of the
world's most foremost wildlife artists and illustrators, had been living in my
head with the same images. People find it difficult to believe that John and I
had no consultations prior to his painting of the Dune illustrations. I assure
you that the paintings were a wonderful surprise to me.

The Sardaukar appear like the weathered stones of Dune. The Baron's
paunch could absorb a world. The ornithopters are insects preying on the
land. The sandworms are Earth shipworms grown monstrous. Stilgar glares
out at us with the menace of a warlock.

What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fuguelike
relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape.
As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that
turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time.
What about Paul's gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the
Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination.
Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically
enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always
encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like
the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."

Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a
larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and
in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide
time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.

But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe
fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict
accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.

The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social
networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions-
all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after
all, says this time after time throughout Dune.

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you
reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold
back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make
idiots of us all.

Of course there are other themes and fugal interplays in Dune and
throughout the trilogy. Dune Messiah performs a classic inversion of the
theme. Children of Dune expands the number of themes interplaying. I
refuse, however, to provide further answers to this complex mixture. That
fits the pattern of the fugue. You find your own solutions. Don't look to me
as your leader.

Caution is indeed indicated, but not the terror that prevents all movement.
Hang loose. And when someone asks whether you're starting a new cult, do
what I do: Run like hell.

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pnumoman
Sep 26, 2008

I never get the last word, and it makes me very sad.
And then there's Brian.

Ingmar terdman
Jul 24, 2006

winnydpu posted:

Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions,
psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research,
soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones.

same

Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
I expected Frank's line of "CHOAM is OPEC," but I did not expect the crucial element to be... water.
I guess in Dune, water symbolises oil and spice symbolises spice-?

Murray Mantoinette
Jun 11, 2005

THE  POSTS  MUST  FLOW
Clapping Larry
I can't find the source right now but in some interview Frank said that water also just symbolizes water, which is itself an increasingly rare natural resource.

phasmid
Jan 16, 2015

Booty Shaker
SILENT MAJORITY
Scarcity is what he's alluding to. The fiefdoms of space levy ridiculous taxes from their subjects and so you get "great" houses who have their own stockpiles of spice, which seems like the best currency in any market of the Imperium and meanwhile their underlings live in near-total poverty. Fremen water discipline is harsh enough that they make fun of "water-fat" offworlders.

Bubblyblubber
Nov 17, 2014
Water symbolizes oil, spice symbolizes :catdrugs: and ultraspice symbolizes bitcoins.

duh

Ventral EggSac
Dec 3, 2019

Space Vagina Magic represents the sex Frank had with his wife

kiimo
Jul 24, 2003

Pussy Magic represents the metalanguages of pheromones.

Because the Fish Speakers can translate them. In the Hitchhiker universe this is done with Beaverfish

phasmid
Jan 16, 2015

Booty Shaker
SILENT MAJORITY
It was a good essay.

Colonel Cancer
Sep 26, 2015

Tune into the fireplace channel, you absolute buffoon
Really when you think about it the metaplot of Dune is a unsubtle metaphor for Frank Herbert's writing career

Take the plunge! Okay!
Feb 24, 2007



Colonel Cancer posted:

Really when you think about it the metaplot of Dune is a unsubtle metaphor for Frank Herbert's writing career

Are you saying we should train a tiger to eat Brian and Kevin J?

Colonel Cancer
Sep 26, 2015

Tune into the fireplace channel, you absolute buffoon
No, he should have stuffed some worms up his rear end and kept on writing instead of following failson Paul's ark and releasing the jihad upon the universe. It's like poetry,

Colonel Cancer fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Apr 28, 2021

Murray Mantoinette
Jun 11, 2005

THE  POSTS  MUST  FLOW
Clapping Larry
The Honored Matres are us and we're fleeing a greater horror (the failson books) back to this thread (the old empire)

Ingmar terdman
Jul 24, 2006

The spicediver edit of the lynch film is very good. As a lynch fan and a dune fan I've always found the movie to be fine but this edit definitely elevates it.

I've never seen the smithee version with the added exposition scenes so it's hard for me to disentangle that from this, but I had a good time. It's almost certainly the version I would go to for a rewatch

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



Ingmar terdman posted:

The spicediver edit of the lynch film is very good. As a lynch fan and a dune fan I've always found the movie to be fine but this edit definitely elevates it.

I've never seen the smithee version with the added exposition scenes so it's hard for me to disentangle that from this, but I had a good time. It's almost certainly the version I would go to for a rewatch
Yes, it's definitely the version of the 1984 movie that's for people who like Dune.

1000 Sweaty Rikers
Oct 13, 2005


e: a day late here in Australia

Murray Mantoinette
Jun 11, 2005

THE  POSTS  MUST  FLOW
Clapping Larry

Tace Vim posted:


e: a day late here in Australia

I can't wait to have to spend paragraphs explaining this to the chat group, bereft of both Dune and Starwars fans, that I just inadvisably pasted this to

Ingmar terdman
Jul 24, 2006

There's no thread for it, but dean stockwell has a wild resume

Spinz
Jan 7, 2020

I ordered luscious new gemstones from India and made new earrings for my SA mart thread

Remember my earrings and art are much better than my posting

New stuff starts towards end of page 3 of the thread
I know his lower front teeth better than my own^

!Klams
Dec 25, 2005

Squid Squad
Erg 'Spergs

The Cool Wahads

The Lil' Makers

Suk my Rimwall

Spiceblown thumpers

The Shaddamned

Flakey
Apr 30, 2009

There's no need to speak. You must only concentrate and recall all your past life. When a man thinks of the past, he becomes kinder.

!Klams posted:

The Cool Wahads

loving lol

Spinz
Jan 7, 2020

I ordered luscious new gemstones from India and made new earrings for my SA mart thread

Remember my earrings and art are much better than my posting

New stuff starts towards end of page 3 of the thread
While researching for my thread I found this link from goon Neo Rasa, an extended fan edit of Lynch's Dune.

It's good!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJykw3H4PDw

Only registered members can see post attachments!

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



Spinz posted:

While researching for my thread I found this link from goon Neo Rasa, an extended fan edit of Lynch's Dune.

It's good!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJykw3H4PDw


I've been talking about that edit a bit, but I'm glad to see it's catching on.

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose
G U N C

Riot Bimbo
Dec 28, 2006


The butlerian jihad is a viable solution to 2021 tbqh

Johnny Aztec
Jan 30, 2005

by Hand Knit
I'm always down for a jihad, or three.

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.
Hell yeah get those butlers, snobby servile fucks

Colonel Cancer
Sep 26, 2015

Tune into the fireplace channel, you absolute buffoon
Acquiring multiple mentats to "mine" spicecoin

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Riot Bimbo posted:

The butlerian jihad is a viable solution to 2021 tbqh

I keep saying in the tech nightmare thread that I'm really starting to see how it happened

Johnny Aztec
Jan 30, 2005

by Hand Knit
So, are we going to skip WW3, the Bell riots, and all that, and head directly to JIHAD?

kaschei
Oct 25, 2005

Colonel Cancer posted:

Acquiring multiple mentats to "mine" spicecoin

Good luck competing with the Tleilaxu ghola farms. If you don’t have at least 10 kiloduncans, it’s not even worth teaching them the mining thought patterns.

Riot Bimbo
Dec 28, 2006


Johnny Aztec posted:

So, are we going to skip WW3, the Bell riots, and all that, and head directly to JIHAD?

nah, it's just way more concurrent than previously thought.

Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Riot Bimbo posted:

nah, it's just way more concurrent than previously thought.

All the dates and counts of years were subject to a translation error; the events of Dune in fact take place over August-November 2023.

Dessel
Feb 21, 2011

Sorry for poo poo posting, I know the film has a...contentious cult film reputation that doesn't follow the source material too well but I just watched it on a whim..


What's up with the turret carousel in the 1984 film? The one with bunch of high ranking guys in a starship using controls and screens to fire below in the final battle of the film? Is it a complete rear end pull with no basis in source material? I couldn't find a single mention on Google about it either.

Help me, the turret carousel is haunting my dreams :psyduck:

Spinz
Jan 7, 2020

I ordered luscious new gemstones from India and made new earrings for my SA mart thread

Remember my earrings and art are much better than my posting

New stuff starts towards end of page 3 of the thread

Dessel posted:

Sorry for poo poo posting, I know the film has a...contentious cult film reputation that doesn't follow the source material too well but I just watched it on a whim..


What's up with the turret carousel in the 1984 film? The one with bunch of high ranking guys in a starship using controls and screens to fire below in the final battle of the film? Is it a complete rear end pull with no basis in source material? I couldn't find a single mention on Google about it either.

Help me, the turret carousel is haunting my dreams :psyduck:

It's not in original books at all. My guess out of my rear end is it's that retro aesthetic with the added strangeness of submarine but on land
No meaning whatsoever

1000 Sweaty Rikers
Oct 13, 2005

Dessel posted:

Sorry for poo poo posting, I know the film has a...contentious cult film reputation that doesn't follow the source material too well but I just watched it on a whim..


What's up with the turret carousel in the 1984 film? The one with bunch of high ranking guys in a starship using controls and screens to fire below in the final battle of the film? Is it a complete rear end pull with no basis in source material? I couldn't find a single mention on Google about it either.

Help me, the turret carousel is haunting my dreams :psyduck:

heh I was thinking about that scene recently. probably another of David Lynch's neat and weird inventions he added to the film like heart-plugs, weirding modules, cat-milking machines, squoods and pugs.

BlankSystemDaemon
Mar 13, 2009



David Lynch's movie, which at one point he didn't want associated with his name because he and the executive director had a disagreement until it turned out that it was actually making money, is a film loosely based on a cursory glance at Frank Herbert's book - nothing more.

Colonel Cancer
Sep 26, 2015

Tune into the fireplace channel, you absolute buffoon
Death of the author binch, the movie owns

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skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Colonel Cancer posted:

Death of the author binch, the movie owns

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