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Foxfire_ posted:The Fremen end goal is destroying the entire existing ecosystem and replacing it with a lush water-filled one The Fremen are good ecological stewards and the old ecosystem had it coming. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 05:30
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| # ¿ Jan 15, 2026 20:26 |
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Arnold Schwarzenegger x Carl Weathers handshake meme but the arms are labeled "Fremen" and "Anakin" and the handshake is labeled "gently caress Sand."
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Dec 18, 2020 05:33
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I'd guess that if you didn't have a crazy notion as to how the world should work then you probably wouldn't go super hard into world building.
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Dec 22, 2020 16:17
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wait a minute, I didn't remember any catboys
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Mar 18, 2022 21:57
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Yeah, my understanding is that you'd need a time machine to experience Burning Man as a hippy function.
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May 12, 2022 15:33
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"The villain is defeated, an Atreides is now emperor, and the enemy Corrino is an ally now" is how the first book ends. Most of Children is a rehash of stuff the earlier books did better and what's original is just a prelude to God Emperor.
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Feb 22, 2024 03:16
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josh04 posted:Who's Corrino? Serious answer: the house name of the emperor before Paul takes over.
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Feb 24, 2024 18:14
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Defiance Industries posted:It's the end goal of their entire breeding program. They truly believe it is possible but it's not like... a prophecy or legend, it's an aspirational goal. Yeah, Bene Gesserit "believed" in the KH in the sense that they considered it a potent tool for consolidating political power.
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Mar 23, 2024 22:26
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I wouldn't go so far as to say that prescience is zero percent psychic powers. The book doesn't predate DIA's Stargate Project by more than a handful of years, all of this was very much in the public conscious.
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Jan 17, 2025 02:05
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That's correct. The US government got bad because health care was simply too good.
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Feb 3, 2025 04:15
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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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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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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: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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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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| # ¿ Jan 15, 2026 20:26 |
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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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