Apparently a lesson Tolkien took to heart with the Lord of the Rings :D
Anyway, God Emperor is definitely where the series starts to slip. I think possibly because Herbert was starting to age and his mind was not as sharp as it once was. It’s the point in the series where occasional logic issues start to appear.
The God Emperor, for instance, outlawed Holtzman effect shields thus allowing warfare to return to a ranged-combat paradigm. However after he dies and even under the pressure of a massive interstellar war it seems that no one thinks to start using them again. No reason was given for this.
There’s a fall off after Dune with a sharper fall off after God Emperor. As with Japan, blessed with black swanish success in 1941-1942, Herbert caught victory disease after Dune and started playing up those explicit elements he thought fed Dune‘s success instead of the black swanish tacit elements that did the real work. In this respect, Brian Herbert’s and Kevin J. Anderson’s disposable McDune sequels are truer to the spirit of the last 3 Frank Herbert authored books than many Frank Herbert fans like to admit. The expanded Dune universe in the non-canonical Dune Encyclopedia is far more interesting than the canonical expanded Dune universe defrosted by Brian Herbert for Anderson’s hack butchery.
Tolkien probably escaped Herbert’s fall off because, when his black swan struck in the form of The Hobbit, he already had a vast obsessively and meticulously constructed imagined world in place that was robust enough to embrace and extend the unexpected success of his more spur of the moment children’s story.
The expanded Dune universe in the non-canonical Dune Encyclopedia is far more interesting than the canonical expanded Dune universe defrosted by Brian Herbert for Anderson’s hack butchery.
Feel free to shut me down if I’m spamming the comment thread, but this just came to mind.
I’ve read of people being bemused at the way historians in the future world of Dune reinterpret the course of history into their one-humanity imperialist framework (House Washington taking over from House Windsor during the course of WWII, etc.), but count me doubly bemused that few of them realize they are the butt of the joke.
I’d love to hear more about the overt elements that seemingly brought Dune its success versus the more subtle elements that really made it work.
It does strike me as a more general phenomenon, where the pastiche only copies the most obvious elements. Compare the original Robert E. Howard stories to the fragments finished by other authors, the comics, the movies, and the knockoffs — lampooned in Poul Anderson’s On Thud and Blunder.
With regards to that phenomenon I present Exhibit A, one of Howard’s associates: H.P. Lovecraft. Almost no media that self-describe as “Lovecraftian” are anything of the sort. Such works are almost universally a pastiche of tentacles, ghoulish horrors, and people going insane from experiencing the otherworldly. Oddly enough, that rarely happens in actual Lovecraft stories.
What really makes Dune (from my perspective) are the many keen insights into psychology, religion, and the nature of civilization and rulership. All of Herbert’s best books have one or more of those features, Dune just combines them all with a really great act of world-building. As the sequels progress the insights fall by the wayside in favor of prana-bindu and, among other things, weirdly detailed analysis of Dune materials science (the “three Ps”).
What was exciting to me was the discipline of the Fremen. The universe seemed to tilt because the Fremen’s desert training made them that bit more capable than the Sardaukar and their prison planet origin.
Similarly with Dosadi Experiment — the way those Dosadi just understood things and got stuff done was incredible, but this time from having huge numbers of people packed in a small space.
The real world is a lot more incompetent than Herbert’s worlds.
What really makes Dune (from my perspective) are the many keen insights into psychology, religion, and the nature of civilization and rulership.
This. Dune II and III had a bit of this, but were largely saved by being well-constructed thrillers. But they started to lack the incredible sense of mystery and potential that the first one had.
God Emperor was annoying in many ways, not least because the conflict was a potemkin village. It looked like conflict, but everything was the result of Leto’s prescient meddling. Everything.
I thought V and VI were better, though they also had issues. Though they didn’t have the solid insights of Dune, they did manage to recapture a bit of the mystery. The lack of shields bothered me, too, but Miles Teg was a great character.
Lovecraft is similar to Lovecraftians, because he was a nihilist atheist, who thought all good things to be illusions.
Lovecraft was very different from the Lovecraftians, because he was a Yankee, and an American patriot — probably the last one, in fact. He loved America; They do not. And yes, he knew very well that it was the Yankees themselves that destroyed America and turned it into the proposition nation. It was what he was writing about.
Using terminology from the “Mountains of Madness,” he was an Old One. Lovecraftians are Shoggoths.
But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation—a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.
This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving—a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as the Old Ones’ art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner.
Perceptive, Baduin, but I think there’s also more to it. Lovecraft thought, on the basis of developments in scientific understanding, that humanity would be demoted to meaningless bits of temporarily animate manner upon the surface of a dust mote. No God(s), no Truth, nothing good, as you say, was real.
He thought it was the most terrifying possible reality. That’s why his fiction is horror fiction.
The difference between Lovecraft and the Lovecraftians is that the latter, for the most part embedded in modern culture, are not permitted to conceive of an atheistic, nihilistic Universe as a horror. So they ape his forms and themes but miss all content; miss everything that makes him worth reading.
In fact, Lovecraft’s biggest fan, August Derleth, inverted Lovecraft’s atheistic nihilism by splitting the cosmic pantheon of uncaring gods into good and evil camps concerned with protecting or destroying humanity.
Phileas Frogg: “Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.” I wonder how much of this is social norms vs self-perception. Do the wealthy and educated feel in touch with (or that they should be in touch with) national and global events, or is it mere mimicry? How about the working-class? The two are necessarily mutually exclusive of course, but I wonder if there’s a different primary...
Phileas Frogg: As advances in weapon’s have improved the range and effectiveness of the individual soldier’s impact on the battlefield, the number of soldiers has increased in importance relative to the quality of any individual soldier. It’s the Thermopylae Principle in reverse because of weapons advancements. Reminds me of RTS balancing, where to effectively implement melee units developers need to give them either unrealistic speed or durability relative to the ranged capabilities of...
Bob Sykes: Calling Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s militia a mob is a bit much, but they were lightly armed and poorly trained. However, they defeated the US/UN mission to Somalia, or at least fought it to a draw. We’re still fighting Aidid’s grandchildren, and we still haven’t won. The war is now in its 4th decade, with no end in sight. Settling aside our Indian Wars (1607 to 1918). Somalia is the longest US war.
McChuck: Anybody who has ever played a wargame can tell you that your defenses can handle a certain amount of opposition, but when enemy numbers, regardless of quality, exceed that number, you get overrun. The mobs in Mogadishu back in 1993 weren’t well organized, weren’t well equipped, weren’t well trained, and weren’t well led. But there sure were a whole lot of them shooting at the Rangers.
Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...
Namur: Well, it’s all about EROI (Energy Returned on Invested). Can this machine produce more energy in the form of natural gas than it consumes in the first place? Also, the energy to build and operate it also counts. Now, let’s say that it works: we are still far away for something like it that works for Diesel, the holy grail of our energy society.
Wawa: Misery causes drug abuse, whether rich or poor. Junkies and drunks are just self medicating in a self destructive way. When thousands of American soldiers, who were hooked on heroin, returned from Vietman the vast majority quickly kicked the habit. With the reason for their misery gone they stopped using. I noticed this first hand, when a buddy moved in with his girlfriend. Before she moved in he was a social drinker, after a few months with her he was an alcoholic. When she moved out he fully...
Bob Sykes: While the focus in Ukraine has been on the land war, and how drones have changed it, navies seem to be especially vulnerable. The Russian navy can’t seem to cope with them. I bet the US Navy will also be unable to cope. At 70 ton, $5M tank is easy prey to a cheap, small drone. US/NATO navies are unable to suppress Houthi drones and open the Red Sea. Are aircraft carriers viable? Some think that they would have been eliminated by the Soviet navy and air force in the 70′s.
Freddo: The armies of Ukraine and Russia are showing what can be done if it needs to be ready tomorrow and everything is expandable. Boeing is showing what happens when the procurement channel is filled with DEI hires.
McChuck: Laser designators also use a coded pulse system. That avoids spoofing and also enables multiple projectiles to be inbound to separate targets simultaneously.
That’s pretty cool, but where’s the Holtzman effect shield?
I’m beginning to think I should go back and reread Dune.
Can’t go far wrong rereading Dune. Unlike, say, The God Emperor of Dune.
So, is the fourth book the first bad one? (That does seems to be a general rule.)
Apparently a lesson Tolkien took to heart with the Lord of the Rings :D
Anyway, God Emperor is definitely where the series starts to slip. I think possibly because Herbert was starting to age and his mind was not as sharp as it once was. It’s the point in the series where occasional logic issues start to appear.
The God Emperor, for instance, outlawed Holtzman effect shields thus allowing warfare to return to a ranged-combat paradigm. However after he dies and even under the pressure of a massive interstellar war it seems that no one thinks to start using them again. No reason was given for this.
There’s a fall off after Dune with a sharper fall off after God Emperor. As with Japan, blessed with black swanish success in 1941-1942, Herbert caught victory disease after Dune and started playing up those explicit elements he thought fed Dune‘s success instead of the black swanish tacit elements that did the real work. In this respect, Brian Herbert’s and Kevin J. Anderson’s disposable McDune sequels are truer to the spirit of the last 3 Frank Herbert authored books than many Frank Herbert fans like to admit. The expanded Dune universe in the non-canonical Dune Encyclopedia is far more interesting than the canonical expanded Dune universe defrosted by Brian Herbert for Anderson’s hack butchery.
Tolkien probably escaped Herbert’s fall off because, when his black swan struck in the form of The Hobbit, he already had a vast obsessively and meticulously constructed imagined world in place that was robust enough to embrace and extend the unexpected success of his more spur of the moment children’s story.
Truer words never spoken.
Feel free to shut me down if I’m spamming the comment thread, but this just came to mind.
I’ve read of people being bemused at the way historians in the future world of Dune reinterpret the course of history into their one-humanity imperialist framework (House Washington taking over from House Windsor during the course of WWII, etc.), but count me doubly bemused that few of them realize they are the butt of the joke.
I’d love to hear more about the overt elements that seemingly brought Dune its success versus the more subtle elements that really made it work.
It does strike me as a more general phenomenon, where the pastiche only copies the most obvious elements. Compare the original Robert E. Howard stories to the fragments finished by other authors, the comics, the movies, and the knockoffs — lampooned in Poul Anderson’s On Thud and Blunder.
With regards to that phenomenon I present Exhibit A, one of Howard’s associates: H.P. Lovecraft. Almost no media that self-describe as “Lovecraftian” are anything of the sort. Such works are almost universally a pastiche of tentacles, ghoulish horrors, and people going insane from experiencing the otherworldly. Oddly enough, that rarely happens in actual Lovecraft stories.
What really makes Dune (from my perspective) are the many keen insights into psychology, religion, and the nature of civilization and rulership. All of Herbert’s best books have one or more of those features, Dune just combines them all with a really great act of world-building. As the sequels progress the insights fall by the wayside in favor of prana-bindu and, among other things, weirdly detailed analysis of Dune materials science (the “three Ps”).
What was exciting to me was the discipline of the Fremen. The universe seemed to tilt because the Fremen’s desert training made them that bit more capable than the Sardaukar and their prison planet origin.
Similarly with Dosadi Experiment — the way those Dosadi just understood things and got stuff done was incredible, but this time from having huge numbers of people packed in a small space.
The real world is a lot more incompetent than Herbert’s worlds.
Had never thought of it that way, Grasspunk, but that’s also a big part of it. If only the real world contained more Herbert protagonists!
This. Dune II and III had a bit of this, but were largely saved by being well-constructed thrillers. But they started to lack the incredible sense of mystery and potential that the first one had.
God Emperor was annoying in many ways, not least because the conflict was a potemkin village. It looked like conflict, but everything was the result of Leto’s prescient meddling. Everything.
I thought V and VI were better, though they also had issues. Though they didn’t have the solid insights of Dune, they did manage to recapture a bit of the mystery. The lack of shields bothered me, too, but Miles Teg was a great character.
Lovecraft is similar to Lovecraftians, because he was a nihilist atheist, who thought all good things to be illusions.
Lovecraft was very different from the Lovecraftians, because he was a Yankee, and an American patriot — probably the last one, in fact. He loved America; They do not. And yes, he knew very well that it was the Yankees themselves that destroyed America and turned it into the proposition nation. It was what he was writing about.
Using terminology from the “Mountains of Madness,” he was an Old One. Lovecraftians are Shoggoths.
Perceptive, Baduin, but I think there’s also more to it. Lovecraft thought, on the basis of developments in scientific understanding, that humanity would be demoted to meaningless bits of temporarily animate manner upon the surface of a dust mote. No God(s), no Truth, nothing good, as you say, was real.
He thought it was the most terrifying possible reality. That’s why his fiction is horror fiction.
The difference between Lovecraft and the Lovecraftians is that the latter, for the most part embedded in modern culture, are not permitted to conceive of an atheistic, nihilistic Universe as a horror. So they ape his forms and themes but miss all content; miss everything that makes him worth reading.
In fact, Lovecraft’s biggest fan, August Derleth, inverted Lovecraft’s atheistic nihilism by splitting the cosmic pantheon of uncaring gods into good and evil camps concerned with protecting or destroying humanity.