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SlothfulCobra posted:Although it's unclear why in Dune, Arrakis has been the source of the most important commodity for galactic society for millennia, but it's not understood, it's not heavily settled, the planet isn't even particularly valued by galactic society. It's used for a dumb scheme to kill off a minor house. The Emperor wasn't even very concerned about the spice supply, that was for the guild and the Bene Gesserit. He was more worried about the development of a superior fightman, since the pillar of galactic power is beefy guys with knives. The Atreides are anything but a minor house. The emperor isn't concerned with their better than average house troops. He knows his Sardaukar can obliterate them if necessary, and the novel shows exactly that. The emperor is concerned that Duke Leto has gained the loyalty of many other houses and may be able to lead a coalition that will threaten his position. And he is very concerned about the Spice supply because the entire galactic economy and the CHOAM corporation that keeps all the noble houses happy and content is based on the continued flow of spice.
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Feb 5, 2025 18:39
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The Atreides also have a blood relation to the Emperor, so he makes the (reasonable) conclusion that any coalition they lead will end with the Atreides on the throne.
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Feb 5, 2025 18:55
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Leto had been staying officially single almost certainly specifically to give the Emperor a way out through diplomatic marriage, I'm pretty sure.
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Feb 6, 2025 04:59
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feedmegin posted:It's not the orcs that have that, though, they don't know how all that stuff works as far as I can recall, it's the wizard guy who's doing that and they're the hired help who just do what he says. 
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Apr 4, 2025 00:27
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Apr 5, 2025 08:22
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Finished Children of Dune. And while I would prefer it to be no talk about literal nine years old being married of to adults in order to continue the family line I guess Frank Herbert had other ideas.
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Apr 5, 2025 10:41
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Alhazred posted:Finished Children of Dune. And while I would prefer it to be no talk about literal nine years old being married of to adults in order to continue the family line I guess Frank Herbert had other ideas. Do not study medieval history.
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Apr 9, 2025 21:00
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Alhazred posted:Finished Children of Dune. And while I would prefer it to be no talk about literal nine years old being married of to adults in order to continue the family line I guess Frank Herbert had other ideas. You get to read God Emperor now, which is my favorite and it kicks so much rear end. There are two more Frank Herbert books after that, and if you're dying for more Frank Herbert you should read them but if the sex stuff creeps you out, as it should, I recommend giving them a pass as it hits a crescendo there.
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Apr 9, 2025 21:38
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There are also a bunch of other Frank Herbert books you can read, they're just not about Dune.
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Apr 11, 2025 18:35
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I read Herbert's The Godmakers, which turned out to be Dune, and I also read his collection of short stories, Eye, which was full of sex stuff that crept me out. (Not exclusively sex stuff, but most of the rest was him aping Asimov's style badly.)
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Apr 11, 2025 19:18
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What style?
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Apr 16, 2025 18:44
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PeterWeller posted:What style? I suspect this is a dig at Asimov but I'll take this opportunity to complain about the bad short stories I read. The style in question is Asimov's basic mystery novel approach to scifi, where a scientist or detective or other thinking man is confronted with a confounding situation that's politically delicate and in need of urgent resolution but is also being (not always deliberately) obfuscated. Some scifi invention or scientific conceit will be central to things, and figuring things out will either involve an understanding its ramifications or else how those ramifications serve as a distraction from a more trivial yet over looked solution. This is the I, Robot stories. This is Asimov's Robot Detective series. This is most of the Foundation books. If you've read any of his books for young boys, they're largely like this as well. His stories aren't all like this, but most that people care about were. Herbert's Eye has a couple stories along this line as well. The Tactful Saboteur is maybe the biggest offender. It stars a notable agent of the Bureau of Sabotage, an agency of the future space intergalactic government that acts to baffle the other branches of its government to moderate the worst excesses of democracy (naturally). That's just the background, though. The actual plot revolves around a missing agent who was a member of a newly inducted species into the future space government that periodically (on the order of decades) undergoes a kind of metamorphosis of identity, becoming a different person. The protagonist has to discover what happened to them, and importantly determine if they've become another person with top secret knowledge of the Bureau's workings yet none of the loyalty their previous identity had. It goes into weird places in regards to gender, too, of course. The whole thing is this over complicated mess. The Bureau of Sabotage is too big an idea to serve as an unexamined setting element, and the specifics of the alien species are too esoteric a device. It's not just that you can't solve the mystery because the author has kept clues from the audience, but that you can't solve the mystery because "made up alien species's weird biology" ain't something anyone else can deduce. It's way less elegant or clever than any of Asimov's "a robot cannot kill a human, but it can transport a murder weapon to a suspect mistakenly cleared for not having an opportunity" or the like.
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Apr 18, 2025 01:29
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Other short stories include a couple other detective novels of varying degrees of sci-fi-ness (and Asimov-ness), a Ray Bradbury pastiche where some white picket fence Americans about to leave to colonize another planet conspire to smuggle a grand piano with them so that their son, the child prodigy virtuoso, can play on the new world, a story about a scientist who invents a device that halts combustion (assuring that the next great war must be fought with sticks and stones), and a baffling work of erotica where a young woman sleeps with her mentor for career advancement and in the process they save a city from being ritually destroyed by the all powerful city planning bureaucracy of the future space government.
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Apr 18, 2025 01:37
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Schwarzwald posted:I read Herbert's The Godmakers, which turned out to be Dune, and I also read his collection of short stories, Eye, which was full of sex stuff that crept me out. I liked the story about the future war where IR tech was super advanced so wars where all about hiding your heat signatures. Schwarzwald posted:Other short stories include a couple other detective novels of varying degrees of sci-fi-ness (and Asimov-ness), a Ray Bradbury pastiche where some white picket fence Americans about to leave to colonize another planet conspire to smuggle a grand piano with them so that their son, the child prodigy virtuoso, can play on the new world, a story about a scientist who invents a device that halts combustion (assuring that the next great war must be fought with sticks and stones), and a baffling work of erotica where a young woman sleeps with her mentor for career advancement and in the process they save a city from being ritually destroyed by the all powerful city planning bureaucracy of the future space government. Is there a story about some hyper religious woman who lives on a planet where the native aliens just gently caress and suck all day long, and the air is full of bugs. So she goes to the not insane humans and goes "can you do something about the bugs?" and they''re "Sure!" and oops, turns out the bugs were required for the aliens to reproduce so she has doomed them, which is fine to her because sex is bad and a sin, but her internal dialog is her horrified she had doomed an entire race to extinction because of such a petty thing. I've read a lot of short story collections, but i think thats from Eye?
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Apr 18, 2025 02:21
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That was (and sometimes still is) a pretty common approach to sci-fi, having a self-contained story revolve around a particular mystery, device and/or twist. Especially because they were usually short story formats published in magazines, probably. I doubt Asimov or Herbert were doing anything too new in that respect. Been said that Dune is basically a counter/response to Asimov's Foundation series, inverting most of the core premises.
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Apr 18, 2025 04:28
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I worry I don't have the words to articulate things precisely as well as I'd like, but as someone who once made a point to read a decent amount of 40s/50s science fiction (although its been nearly 20 years, now, jeez...) there is a particular Asimov-ness to his stories that other self-contained scifi stories about a particular mystery, device and/or twist don't have. Herbert's stories really do feel more in imitation in a way that your Waldos and such do not.
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Apr 18, 2025 04:46
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George posted:You get to read God Emperor now, which is my favorite and it kicks so much rear end. There are two more Frank Herbert books after that, and if you're dying for more Frank Herbert you should read them but if the sex stuff creeps you out, as it should, I recommend giving them a pass as it hits a crescendo there. I think I need a break. Reading the the three books it seems to me like the books ends when something really exiting is about to happen, then spend the next book talking about how exiting that was before yet again ending when something exiting is about to happen.
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Apr 18, 2025 11:39
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Schwarzwald posted:I suspect this is a dig at Asimov but I'll take this opportunity to complain about the bad short stories I read. I meant it as a dig at both. I thought you meant style in terms of prose style, which neither Asimov nor Herbert have much of.
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Apr 18, 2025 18:22
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Alhazred posted:I think I need a break. Reading the the three books it seems to me like the books ends when something really exiting is about to happen, then spend the next book talking about how exiting that was before yet again ending when something exiting is about to happen. While you can describe GE in those terms is in in many ways the exception to every rule of the series.
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Apr 19, 2025 03:08
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I remember liking Heretics and being mostly disappointed in Chapterhouse, but I haven't read those in almost 20 years. Heretics did get very, uh, anime at the end, didn't it. Main character going zip zoom super fast, eating and punching his way to victory. Something about Bene Gesserit cat people.
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Apr 25, 2025 08:47
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Imo Heretics is extremely silly schlock but there is some entertainment to be mined there if you're in the mood (shut up Gurney!!) Chapterhouse wasn't entertaining or interesting, it was dumb and boring, which is the most lethal combination there is. I only got a third of the way through it
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Apr 25, 2025 12:41
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https://deadline.com/2025/06/dune-3-casts-nakoa-wolf-momoa-ida-brooke-1236436045/ Deadline is reporting that they have cast the twins.
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Jun 19, 2025 03:33
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Defiance Industries posted:https://deadline.com/2025/06/dune-3-casts-nakoa-wolf-momoa-ida-brooke-1236436045/
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Jun 19, 2025 07:24
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I wonder what they're implying, having Leto be played by Duncan's son though
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Jun 19, 2025 07:36
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Defiance Industries posted:I wonder what they're implying, having Leto be played by Duncan's son though well, Duncan is the main character of the series
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Jun 19, 2025 08:01
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Now I have no idea what to think about this movie. I don’t know how they’re going to successfully blend Messiah and Children into a single film unless they go way off script. I was hoping for a relatively faithful adaptation of Messiah (at least as faithful as Part 1 and 2 were). I figured Villeneuve wouldn’t really want to touch Leto II.
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Jun 19, 2025 12:13
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I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because I think they did an excellent job with 2, and I went in to that one thinking "well the first part was good but that was all the easy stuff to adapt, now he has to tackle the heavier themes."
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Jun 19, 2025 16:27
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He split the first book into two movies. And he cast an adult to play Alia in the second one. I seriously doubt Villeneuve is trying to condense Messiah and Children into a single movie and is instead doing a vision like with Anya Taylor-Joy. And I think the only things implied by casting Momoa's son are: 1) nepotism is alive and well; and 2) Leto II is not a pasty outsider who was adopted into the Fremen like his father.
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Jun 19, 2025 23:29
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Schwarzwald posted:The style in question is Asimov's basic mystery novel approach to scifi, where a scientist or detective or other thinking man is confronted with a confounding situation that's politically delicate and in need of urgent resolution but is also being (not always deliberately) obfuscated. Some scifi invention or scientific conceit will be central to things, and figuring things out will either involve an understanding its ramifications or else how those ramifications serve as a distraction from a more trivial yet over looked solution. I still get a giggle out of Book-A-Minute's summary of I, Robot being "Here's a logic puzzle thinly disguised as a story!" (readers: "hooray! \o/")
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Jun 22, 2025 17:45
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 [url]https://www.tumblr.com/chernobog13/787740426331422720[/url]
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Jul 7, 2025 14:13
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Personally I'm more a fan of: 
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Jul 7, 2025 14:41
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Watched the Lynch version and it really is a mess. It also completely misses the point by making Paul unambiguously the hero, he even makes it rain. But it also gets weird in a way that I wish Villeneuve's version would've gotten. I really like his Dune movies but everything is clean and minimalistic in a way that Lync's version isn't:   Also, the cast is insane. I was not ready for Patrick Stewart and Brad Dourif appearing.
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Aug 1, 2025 07:45
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Alhazred posted:Watched the Lynch version and it really is a mess. It also completely misses the point by making Paul unambiguously the hero, he even makes it rain. But it also gets weird in a way that I wish Villeneuve's version would've gotten. I really like his Dune movies but everything is clean and minimalistic in a way that Lync's version isn't: Yeah a lot of the production design for the Lynch version was perfect.
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Aug 1, 2025 18:37
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Lynch's Dune has been called the last old-style sci-fi movie, more Flash Gordon type of thing after Star Wars completely changed the game. Alien too, I think probably deserves some credit for permanently changing the public ideas of sci-fi. (Huh, and it came out in 1979, same year as Mobile Suit Gundam)
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Aug 2, 2025 04:30
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While it didn't make the final cut, David Lynch's Dune filmed the greatest (and only) cat milking scene ever in a major motion picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFKjE6lg52M
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Aug 2, 2025 05:02
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:While it didn't make the final cut, David Lynch's Dune filmed the greatest (and only) cat milking scene ever in a major motion picture: Huh, that scene was in the movie I watched.
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Aug 2, 2025 09:21
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I thought it was a deleted scene that's only in the Director's Cut version, but I could be wrong. Also in googling to check that, I discovered that the 1984 Feyd-Rutha action figure came with the cat as an accessory, so maybe it was in the original.
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Aug 2, 2025 16:21
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Isn't the cat milking thing somewhat of a reference to the book? I thought I remembered Thufir's poisoning had some weird catch to it in the book, but it's been a long time since I've read it or seen the Lynch cut(s).
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Aug 2, 2025 17:58
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Mister Speaker posted:Isn't the cat milking thing somewhat of a reference to the book? I thought I remembered Thufir's poisoning had some weird catch to it in the book, but it's been a long time since I've read it or seen the Lynch cut(s). No, they just secretly lace his food with an antidote; he doesn't know he's poisoned. E: It doesn't result in anything, but show that the Harkonnens are the bad guys. Well, antagonists.
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Aug 2, 2025 18:03
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Hollywood accounting is a longstanding umbrella for many crimes. I'm sure we can all forgive a young David Lynch's need to expense a cat milker while he had the opportunity.
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Aug 2, 2025 21:03
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