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Akalies posted: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. Dune is actually Lynch's most financially successful film.
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Aug 3, 2025 10:12
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THE BAR posted:No, they just secretly lace his food with an antidote; he doesn't know he's poisoned.. He certainly knows it at the end but it’s not clear how long he knew it
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Aug 3, 2025 12:51
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Mano posted:He certainly knows it at the end but it’s not clear how long he knew it Certainly, but it doesn't come into play because of the attempted poisoned needle treachery.
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Aug 3, 2025 13:10
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I was thinking about how both dune films try to avoid making the universe of 10,191 AG looking to much like now. 1984 does fairly well. The Emperor's throne room is the Alhambra turned upside down and there's only so much you can do when the source material says Castle, but even then, the geometry of locations are not what you'd see your average contemporary building. They make an effort to not just try to make thing look like 19th century stuff but with some sci fi do dads on it. Giedi Prime is interesting, because it doesn't look like a castle at all, its a endless series of cubical, open air connected by a tram system. I dunno if its meant to look like office cubical or the idea is that the baron floating around would be easier if there wasn't roofs. I have the "making of dune" and its got some neat stuff about the production design. Real effort was put into making stuff look functional, clunky, and not sleek star trekky looking tech. And it works. Stuff is familiar in function but the design behind it is completely alien in design. 2021 is similar, the Atredies seem to favor big square brutalist structures while the Harkonnen favor rounded, organic shapes. Their stuff looks like insects, the harvester in part 2 looks like a tick, the symbolism here is obvious. Dune is a interesting challange because its so far removed from Earth that these might as well be aliens. Its far far in the future, and unlike something like 40k, no one remembers old earth, there's no desire to emulate the past, because there isn't one. Ancient history of them is the Jihad and the old empire before that, none of that is connected to Earth.
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Nov 22, 2025 06:25
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Re: brutalism and the Atreides, I think you’re conflating Castle Caladan and the Arrakeen base, which are distinct from one another. The Atreides didn’t build the Arrakeen base. Castle Caladan isn’t brutalist at all, despite being a bit dark and beige
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Nov 22, 2025 14:07
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Jewmanji posted:Re: brutalism and the Atreides, I think you’re conflating Castle Caladan and the Arrakeen base, which are distinct from one another. The Atreides didn’t build the Arrakeen base. Castle Caladan isn’t brutalist at all, despite being a bit dark and beige Ah you're right. Castle Caladan in 2024 is all natural light and open spaces.
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Nov 23, 2025 07:47
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Yeah, the Arrakis palace is basically one big bunker. One poster compared it to the Green Zone in Iraq, a fearful enclosed imperial outpost where the only locals permitted are the lowest servants.
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Nov 23, 2025 07:50
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Correct, a medieval bunker like Verdun that includes elements of traditional Japanese architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright. There are some small Brutalist elements here and there, but it’s not the intended design. It wouldn’t make any sense for Caladan and Arrakeen to look the same. You wouldn’t confuse the dining room or the training room for the Arrakeen palace. Jewmanji fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Nov 23, 2025 |
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Nov 23, 2025 14:13
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Well I don't think I've ever been to this subforum before but it was exciting to see a thread dedicated to DUNC, one of the best science fiction books ever published by a repair manual company. No but seriously, I read Dune back in ~2010, then again right before Denny V's part one came out. Then like last year I read Messiah and Children, and despite seeing so many "Children sucks but you gotta slog through to get to God Emperor" takes, I really enjoyed Children. So after glutting myself on this thread I've decided to read God Emperor now. So far I'm one chapter in and I'm loving the return of the in-universe texts (I don't remember if Messiah and Children had them but I feel like no?).
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Dec 14, 2025 16:52
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fresh meat for the god emperor enjoy. it is a weird book. Cerv fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Dec 14, 2025 |
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Dec 14, 2025 20:29
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I loving love God Emp. It and BotNS are sci-fi epics that should be made into music videos instead of movies.
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Dec 15, 2025 00:22
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I actually finished God Emperor last weekend and forgot to  I loved it. Easily my favorite of the Dune books, but it's very difficult to put my finger on why. Just the vibes were right. It really feels like thousands of years have passed, and what was already such an alien setting is even moreso but in a believable way. Mostly it felt "deep" in a cursory way, but still really interesting. "Philosophical" until you actually think about it but that works in a way too, because it did get me thinking about it. And a few decent points that I'm sure are expressed in lots of different ways throughout various media but really worked here; particularly how often this idea of being trapped in the past came up. I'll spoil this part of my thoughts but it's more just observations than out and out spoilers: However, much like Messiah and Children before it, I can't decide if Frank was trying to make a point about characters not thinking poo poo through long term or if they're just idiots. In Dune (1), Stilgar made a huge thing about the dream of the Fremen to have water on the surface, to be able to farm and go outside without stilsuits. By Children, like 30 years later, he's lamenting how Fremen have lost sight of their ways and how nobody wears a stilsuit properly and people don't even live in sietch any more and etc. Wasn't that the point? In a similar vein, Leto II (the second) says he's keeping the museum Fremen around to keep their knowledge so when Arrakis returns to desert people will be able to survive. But then the museum Fremen explicitly don't know how to survive; none of them wear stilsuits or have any knowledge of water discipline, they don't even live in sietch. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, just something that has come up in every sequel so far and it just seems odd. I can buy Leto II enforcing stagnation despite saying he wants innovation, in a way. But I fail to see the big picture with the museum Fremen, at least with Leto's stated reason for their existence. If that makes sense. Anyway the advice I always saw was "read the sequels until they get too weird for you" and I'm not there yet. I'm actually pretty curious to see what the next one is like, though I have also heard quality takes a nosedive. I'll probably get to it later this year.
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Jan 4, 2026 23:28
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The Fremen in Stilgar’s day were honestly seeking to transform their world into a paradise, but they weren’t (and couldn’t be) prepared to deal with the consequences of actually living in it. The museum Fremen of Leto’s day are useless and pathetic, but at least they are psychologically prepared for the idea that Arrakis could be something other than a paradise again. The next book elaborates on where they go from there, but it’s not like they go right back to stillsuits and sietches all day. I like God Emperor and Heretics but I think Chapterhouse falls off skasion fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Jan 5, 2026 |
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Jan 5, 2026 02:37
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I can’t remember what Kynes says in Dune but isn’t the ecological project theorized to take like two centuries? And then suddenly it happens in the span of… 15 years? I think Stilgar probably pictured Fremen culture slowly adapting over generations in a more thoughtful, less traumatic way. Also it’s possible that Stilgar didn’t subscribe to Herbert’s “hard times make hard men” nonsense, and instead had the inverse but equally nonsense racialized conception of the Fremen as being largely unaffected by their environment.
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Jan 5, 2026 03:05
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I don't think you need to hedge/gatekeep about GE being philosophical, it absolutely is. It has a lot to say about technology, tyranny, effort, etc. and uses the story to make its points in a pretty nuanced way. Not saying Herbert is right about all of it (lol) but a lot of how he talks about technology is basically an approachable version of what Heidegger was always saying. Anyway, IMO the next two books aren't bad but the story is definitely over and you'll mostly just be getting more Frank Herbert out of the deal. He's a pretty good writer so unless you're triggered by the SA poo poo and somehow still reading you won't be upset by them, just uninspired. He turns all the weird sex dials all the way to the right. Not like Heinlein, but still...
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Jan 5, 2026 19:52
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George posted:He turns all the weird sex dials all the way to the right. Not like Heinlein, but still... I mean, it's at least a little bit like Heinlein.
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Jan 5, 2026 20:11
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Schwarzwald posted:I mean, it's at least a little bit like Heinlein. Yeah okay, I should have said that it's like Heinlein but only like 5% as much.
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Jan 5, 2026 20:23
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George posted:I don't think you need to hedge/gatekeep about GE being philosophical, it absolutely is. It has a lot to say about technology, tyranny, effort, etc. and uses the story to make its points in a pretty nuanced way. Not saying Herbert is right about all of it (lol) but a lot of how he talks about technology is basically an approachable version of what Heidegger was always saying. He was clearly inspired by something when Miles
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Jan 6, 2026 00:41
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THE BAR posted:He was clearly inspired by something when Miles I can't believe I never realized Akira Toriyama was a huge Dune-head until just now. Think about it.
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Jan 6, 2026 00:59
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Defiance Industries posted:I can't believe I never realized Akira Toriyama was a huge Dune-head until just now. Think about it. Herbert was a true Jules Verne. E: I actually thought Dragon Ball came out before Heretics 
THE BAR fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 6, 2026 |
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Jan 6, 2026 07:45
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I don't know why nobody has ever noticed this before, especially because miles says " I have turned into a Super Saiyan, which is something that you will learn about several years from now in an anime that does not yet exist; by the way, anime probably isn't a word you know either because this book was written in the early '80s."
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Jan 6, 2026 08:02
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Defiance Industries posted:I don't know why nobody has ever noticed this before, especially because miles says " I have turned into a Super Saiyan, which is something that you will learn about several years from now in an anime that does not yet exist; by the way, anime probably isn't a word you know either because this book was written in the early '80s." He even eats like Goku!!
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Jan 6, 2026 08:11
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Stilgar's lamenting that Freemen aren't keeping the old ways even though that was his goal seems very realistic to me, lots of people in the real world want some major change but find out they only like it as an aspiration, not in reality. Boomers complaining about participation trophies that the boomers running schools decided to give to kids is along those lines. Schwarzwald posted:I mean, it's at least a little bit like Heinlein. There was a definite trend of older SF writers putting as much of their weird sex fantasies/theories into their stories as possible, and editors being willing to make 'as possible' very wide once the author was a big name.
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Jan 6, 2026 16:33
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Science fiction stories are like that now. It's all genre fiction, and genre fiction is often horny. Altho it is perhaps more than a little telling to notice what particular weird sex fantasies were common in which circles. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jan 6, 2026 |
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Jan 6, 2026 18:46
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Dune is very into the boner theory of human civilization where hard times make men hard and hard men make soft times and that makes soft men, and Arrakis had a superior boner to the Emperor because desert life makes men better at stabbing dudes with knives than even a space prison planet. Although I don't know if the later books stick with stabbing dudes with knives as the ultimate form of combat for maintaining a space empire.
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Jan 6, 2026 19:30
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There's a difference though - I feel like the SF writers of old started with low or no sex in their stories and focused on things like plot and technology, but then started adding more sex stuff with a veneer of 'this is a really well thought out extrapolation of human nature and not just stuff that gets me going'. For example Doc Smith's 'we need incest to breed perfect beings' isn't just 'stepsister caught in the dryer, oh yeah', it's supposed to be the logical conclusion of superior intellects working to solve the problems of the twin galaxies. Modern horny fiction just starts off horny and runs with it, it tends to lack the 'must be established a non-horny writer first' and 'presented as something sophisticated' pieces.
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Jan 6, 2026 21:30
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It can be more or less explicit but even Doc Smith's earlier Galactic Patrol had Kimball Kinnison be helplessly reliant on his ever-so-slightly dominant big tittied nurse while in convalescence. A later book in the series reveals that the big evil aliens who are secretly behind everything bad in history prefer to act through single-sexed species because they don't understand love (which you can't have without two separate sexes, of course) which means our heroes save the day by introducing attractive men to the women-only Amazonian alien species. So maybe not stepsister caught in the dryer but still not exactly chaste. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jan 7, 2026 |
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Jan 7, 2026 00:19
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Schwarzwald posted:It can be more or less explicit but even Doc Smith's earlier Galactic Patrol had Kimball Kinnison be helplessly reliant on his ever-so-slightly dominant big tittied nurse while in convalescence. That's probably just the kinda thing you get post World Wars where tons of dudes have had that experience. If Spike Milligan's war diaries are any indication at least.
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Jan 7, 2026 00:43
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quote:He wanted—and demanded in no uncertain terms, argumentatively and persistently—a big, thick, rare beefsteak. He wanted baked beans, with plenty of fat pork. He wanted bread in thick slices, piled high with butter, and not this quadruply-and-unmentionably-qualified toast. He wanted roast beef, rare, in big, thick slabs. He wanted potatoes and thick brown gravy. He wanted corned beef and cabbage. He wanted pie—any kind of pie—in large, thick quarters. He wanted peas and corn and asparagus and cucumbers, and also various other-worldly staples of diet which he often and insistently mentioned by name. beefswelling?
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Jan 7, 2026 09:51
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quote:“Take it away,” he said, weakly; then, when the nurse did not obey, he reached out and pushed the breakfast, tray and all, off the table. As it crashed to the floor, he turned away, and, in spite of all his efforts, two hot tears forced themselves between his eyelids. water for the beef!
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Jan 7, 2026 18:37
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How would the Fremen feel about sloppy steaks?
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Jan 7, 2026 19:25
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Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your
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