|
I'm honestly not surprised, because nothing about Dune speaks of a fondness for democracy or trust in society. People should just choose to be tough and pull themselves up by their bootstraps onto a giant worm and take a swig of their own piss instead of being soft by expecting some kind of infrastructure to protect them from threats or provide water to homes.
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 03:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Jan 14, 2026 20:02 |
|
|
All I really remember about Tolkien's politics is that he didn't like the Nazis but also had the historical and linguistic knowledge to specifically hate the nazi concept of "aryan" since that was entirely bullshit and made up, which is not the top of the list of most people's criticism of the nazis, but it's valid.Tolkien posted:25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 20:39
|
|
|
So the Flophouse podcast has a long running gag of Tom Brokaw as a massive Dune fan, and as part of that, the most recent episode features his pitch for a Dune Musical, "Baliset Player on the Sietch". Which I would recommend listening to.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2024 14:00
|
|
|
I read the original Dune recently as well, and I feel like as a book, it's probably best suited to being read as wiki entries. There's so much exposition, so little action, and everything is so fatalistic that nothing in the moment really matters that much. Also I knew about it relying on the hard/soft/hard man theory of societies, but it's fairly thoroughly about eugenics. Kinda funny that it places so much weight on having the fightingest fightmen to be superior to the other fightmen, but there's barely any descriptions on how actual battles are fought. There's individual one on one knife duels, but it's unclear what people do in the actual battles that being such an extra fighty fightman really matters for.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2024 15:20
|
|
|
It's definitely the text of the first Dune book that selective breeding can create wild and crazy new abilities in humans. That's explicit. There are also some weird bits where they imply that not only is Paul the result of fancy Bene Gesserit breeding, but that the whole Bene Gesserit grand design is actually fulfilling some kind of human racial instinct to become better to achieve something and defend itself from threats? What it's trying to defend against? I dunno, probably like a big guy with a knife, that's what everything else seems to be about. And then there's something darwinian about the ultimate fightmen being bred off just the harshness of their planets' environments. Although often that gets described as that boner theory of social order where hard times make men hard who with their hardness create soft times that make them go all flaccid so times will get hard again. I think I disagree with the social science that the book offers, although usually scientific inaccuracies don't bother me as much. The descriptions of Arrakis don't give me the impression of Frank Herbert knowing much about how deserts work either.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2024 22:39
|
|
|
Paul recieves training that a lot of people get, and eats an average amount of spice (for a big richo noble) before he starts freaking out. The whole seeing deep into the future and calling upon genetic memories of his ancestors is very unusual, although there was another guy who had a similar breeding for the trait but was deemed a failure because he ended up sterile. I can certainly imagine that Frank Herbert would've tried to walk back a lot of the things he establishes in the first book; there's a lot of background worldbuilding that seems like the series probably shifted on, but the book bloviates too long about the whole genetic breeding element for it all to have been nothing. grassy gnoll posted:Did you read the second book? I generally don't really feel the need to double down on something I'm not particularly enjoying, but I think all the general attempts to imply how horrible Paul will be as future emperor are undercut by how much everything in the galaxy already sucks. They're already throwing around planetary genocides as a matter of course under the old emperor, and apparently noble society is really into showing off at rigged bloodsports. It's pretty cartoonish. Going further sounds like everything just gets weightless. Everything sucks in every direction. Dune is very much a classic sci-fi kind of book in that most of it is crafted around delivering the author's specific ideas, al like a lot of classic sci-fi, most of those ideas are bad. It gets even goofier when you read more about the author and how he was so scared of JFK being charismatic and popular (and wasn't worried about Reagan being charismatic and more popular for Reasons). I don't respect most of his big old ideas on how societies work, largely because I know a lot on my own that condradicts them.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2024 04:26
|
|
|
There's some kind of magic prescience in the setting, so it's very possible that someone hopped up on future juice might've wandered into something real. Although in the book, most the elements of the prophecy only get brought up after they've already happened, which I guess could even be the Fremen making stuff up on the fly as they're being carried away by the moment, as well as their own spice-influenced minor psychic powers massaging the process.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2025 21:02
|
|
|
Everybody in Dune is cynical and thinks that they're smarter than everything else before they are punished by their hubris by the forces beyond the understanding. So it seems thematic for the readers to pick up that attitude as well.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2025 03:51
|
|
|
The actual era of feudalism was just a few centuries between the time of big conquerors wiping away the fragmented remains of the earlier order to establish their new thing and larger administrative states rising up to put a stop to weird crazy feuds between minor nobles breaking out into major conflicts. Feudalism tends to be relatively unstable and only a lunatic wants all his subordinates fighting eachother and killing off the citizenry and other valuable resources, so putting a stop to that is often a top priority. Lord of the Rings at least has more excuses for why things have stagnated for centuries. Humanity is competing against monsters and orcs and diseases instead of just against other humans, and there's magic poo poo in the background that may be messing with things. From the world depicted, it seems like the survival of humanity was genuinely in question at times. Middle Earth is sparsely populated and the Fellowship of the Ring passes through many ruins of long-gone kingdoms, from men and dwarves. Elves are already explicitly fading, Ents too. Also I'm more charitable to Middle Earth's lore because it was constructed primarily for Tolkien to plot out the evolution of his fantasy languages, whereas the central idea that Dune was built around seems to be some kind of weird libertarianism. There's a lot more ideas added onto both, but I disagree with a lot of the further ideas in Dune, and I don't appreciate the cynicism about how everyone is terrible, whereas Lord of the Rings tries to illustrate some of the joys of Middle Earth even though it often makes it sting more how much was lost.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2025 20:15
|
|
|
I think part of people's perceptions of medieval decline also comes from a geographical shift in focus. There still were big cities in Italy even after the fall of Rome (even if the people and money were moving over towards Greece), but it is our tendency in the anglosphere to look way northwest over to England, which even at the height of Rome, was kind of an underdeveloped frontier. Maybe some people look over to Germany, which never had the benefits of the height of the Roman Empire. That gives a much more dramatic impression of a decline. And you get that in Lord of the Rings lore. The action in Numenor happens after the action in Valinor is over, and then after Numenor is destroyed, you shift over towards the main continent of Middle Earth, which never had the wonders of Valinor and Numenor. 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.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2025 15:41
|
|
|
 [url]https://www.tumblr.com/chernobog13/787740426331422720[/url]
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2025 14:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Jan 14, 2026 20:02 |
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2026 19:30
|
|