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The point of the Navigators is that folding space is inherently uncertain and no amount of being good at maths will let you pick the right calculation - unless you cheat by peeking forwards in time to see which calculation was the right one.
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Nov 8, 2021 17:46
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2house2fly posted:Who's to say they do! At the end of the first book Paul explains the problem being that the Guild use their prescience exclusively to look for the shortest, safest path through the future (because that's how the space folding works), which means that they are unable to see anything in the future that isn't a dead certainty or not. They can't sift possible futures and gauge risk/reward because they don't think in those terms. That's a main theme of Dune - that hyper specialising how you think and neglecting the full human experience means you end up making bad decisions. I do like the Lynch interpretation of the story that the Guild and the BG have been shadow boxing over whether the KH can come into existence.
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Nov 8, 2021 19:34
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Georgia Peach posted:Ok, I learned in this thread the Fremen are bribing the guild to keep satellites from spying on them. Why wouldn't the guild spy on them themselves, given that the planet is the source of their power? I'd keep an eye on it at all times. I would imagine they wouldn't take well to showing up one day and going, "Oh, look, a cool terraforming project, huh." This is explicitly explained in the book appendix so: the Guild use their limited prescience to look at Arrakis but everything they see tells them that taking any action at all there causes a nexus of uncertain events, most of which lead to spice production ending. This terrifies them so they don't do anything.
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Nov 10, 2021 10:45
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Georgia Peach posted:If that's the case, isn't transporting massive armies to Arrakis taking action? Why not just tell Emperor Paddy to chill out with the schemes and just keep the spice coming? Maybe I should just read the book. There's another appendix to the book written as a post-hoc investigative report where Herbert does a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of a bunch of stuff that doesn't quite make sense in the story (or rather, where you just have to accept that things go one way and not another) with 'it's all a greater conspiracy!'
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Nov 10, 2021 11:10
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Eason the Fifth posted:I don't have my copy of the book on hand, but if I remember right, the baron did actually believe that, didn't he? He just didn't want to say so? (Not being snide here, I seriously can't remember) Oh yeah it's a complete shock that the mysterious Fremen leader who appears right after Paul and Jessica disappear into the desert turns out to be Paul.
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Nov 12, 2021 21:48
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Kurzon posted:It occurs to me that a warrior who combines those shields with conventional body armor would be unstoppable. The Sardaukar wore body armor when they attacked Arrakis, but Duncan had no trouble knifing them. Do they not have Kevlar gorgets in the far future? The thing that occurred to me is that it is a bit unclear why Fremen stillsuits are a big deal when the Harkonnen and Sardaukar are clearly wearing full environment suit-armour.
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Nov 17, 2021 18:50
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Sodomy Hussein posted:It is explained in the book that you can get all kinds of stillsuits, but the Fremen suits are by far the best and probably the only really effective ones Oh I know in the book it's different, it's just in the film the Sardaukar suits are clearly all-encompassing whereas the Fremen suits are losing you moisture through all the face.
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Nov 17, 2021 20:22
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I guess in totality it's not clear to me that the Sardaukar of the film are actually using stillsuits, as opposed to just simple space marine armor, such as it is. Yeah but your space marine armour presumably isn't leaking somewhere. (and yes I know you can say the reclamation bit is the bit that makes Fremen suits special, but I think it's clear in the book that Fremen suits are special because they are particularly good at preventing loss).
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Nov 17, 2021 20:28
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Also at the start of the film where we have no context for anything Oscar Isaac asks how much money it costs just to bring the imperial delegation to Caladan and we get a number that is implied to be impressively expensive.
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Nov 22, 2021 00:28
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Tarnop posted:If people can't get from the film that the emperor is supposed to be above inter-house feuds then I don't know what to say really. If the emperor could get directly involved with impunity then there would be no need to keep Sardaukar involvement a secret. The emperor's command to keep it secret is stated explicitly in the scene on Giedi Prime with the silence field. Does the film really need a scene explaining why he can't get involved, and why it doesn't matter that his power-play is obvious, or can the audience be trusted to infer that the tangle of laws, traditions and customs that have always defined human politics continue to define them in a future where we've reverted to feudalism? What I thought was really good about all that is using Charlotte Ramping for the scene on Giedi Prime. Using Mohiam for that conversation very effectively establishes that both the Emperor and the Bene Gesserit have an interest in the Atreides-Harkonnen feud, but for their own reasons have to keep their interest secret and that limits their ability to influence events. Also there is a scene explicitly explaining why the Emperor can't get directly involved, Paul explains it all when they're at the planetology lab with Kynes.
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Nov 22, 2021 10:30
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I would compare with the first Death Star scene in star wars: you learn there's something called an Emperor, an imperial senate, a rebellion that is gaining support, Regional Governers and Tarkin's plan. You don't understand how any of this actually works in detail and you don't need to, what matters is that you see the Imperial Officers reactions: they're worried about the rebellion, concerned that the Empire doesn't have the resources to maintain direct control of it's territory, not morally concerned about their weapon of mass destruction but are concerned that the plans might reveal a weakness.
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Nov 22, 2021 15:42
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Famethrowa posted:I think comparing Dune to the best parts of the first Star Wars is pretty apt. I love that scene for how effectively in 60 seconds it dumps on you everything you need to know to understand the context of the events of the film and the stakes for everyone involved.
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Nov 22, 2021 16:39
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The entirety of the Lord of the Rings is the same length as approximately one GoT book.
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Nov 22, 2021 19:00
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There's a bit in the book on Caladan where Leto reveals that some houses have started hording spice - as if they know the price is about to skyrocket because supply is going to be interrupted. The implication is that those houses are 'in the know' about the Emperor's trap to a degree, and that the Landsraad has broadly split between Atreides and Corrino factions. So everyone is aware in some way of the shadow boxing going on, but just like in real life there's thresholds under which nobody calls it out publicly because that would mean an escalation to open war nobody wants.
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Nov 23, 2021 14:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Everyone in dune universe communicates through slow in person messengers and cameras/recordings do seem to exist but there is no apparent culture of anyone recording things or most places having security cameras or anything, so as long as you are on a far away planet you can basically do anything then say "nuh uh, that didn't happen" then everyone just has to go 'welp, no way to know I guess!" Nope because there are things called Truthsayers who are human lie detectors.
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Nov 23, 2021 16:21
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Arglebargle III posted:Well that's going a bit far, it's public knowledge that control of Arrakis is about to change hands. That alone is reason to hedge. No the conversation in the book is Leto explicitly explaining that he and Thufir are watching the other houses to see who smokes themselves out as an ally or opponent.
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Nov 24, 2021 15:47
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jeeves posted:One of the many cool world building done in the second half of Neil Stephenson’s Seveneves is that humanity reached a genetic bottleneck and an entire reborn civilization came out of it, but that period had perfect recordings exist until the present time three thousand years later. Religions would be a lot weirder if you had basically archived livestreams of the day to day happenings of your ancient messiahs. Ideology has broken people in America to the point where they can look at an event that was recorded frame-by-frame from multiple angles and they can reach radically different interpretations of what they are seeing.
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Nov 28, 2021 12:33
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The Emperor isn't incompetent, everything goes according to plan for him until he's blindsided by the appearance of Space Jesus. His flaw is that his jealousy of Leto's popularity means that he doesn't take the obviously correct action of marrying Paul to one of his daughters and instead uses the Harkonnen.
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Dec 6, 2021 22:07
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Baron von Eevl posted:He'd also the only player that both could and would carry that out. The other houses, the BG, CHOAM, they might threaten to delay harvesting but their way of life is very much dependant on spice. Paul's happy to live his life quietly in the desert and never think about it again. Not just their way of life, it's literally a horrible death for everyone addicted to spice.
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Dec 13, 2021 21:26
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Remember when the Sardaukar general asks "Why do you need us? The Harkonnen Legions outnumber the Atreides" He's not asking a genuine question. He's calling out the Harkonnen as bad-at-fighting cowards
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Dec 16, 2021 01:02
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Baron von Eevl posted:How many inhabited worlds are there in this universe? Billions could be genocide or it could be small battles against house armies on hundreds of thousands of worlds. I think the only way a 13 year jihad with a few million Fremen at most gets to those numbers is if only a tiny fraction of worlds openly rebelled and they got very nuked to oblivion. The Dune universe is small enough that each planet is owned by a ruling family who has a seat in the landsraad and the landsraad is small enough that a regular non-mentaty human can more or less keep track of who is in it.
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Jan 5, 2022 12:26
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Ghost Leviathan posted:IIRC that's pretty much what happened, the Fremen legions are explicitly noticed to have flat out glassed some planets. I don't think there are more than a few offhand sentences about it in the original trilogy. The point is it makes more sense to see the Jihad as more a series of hyper-brutal put-downs of isolated rebellions, rather than a reconquista that spread outwards from Arrakis and 40k style had to pacify every single planet in its way.
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Jan 5, 2022 12:51
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