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.
Bruce: A biological attack on America would see the D party using masses of drug-addicted vagrants to shake down the taxpayers as a Godsend.
Jim: The logic of court eunuchry explains far, far too much of America c. 2026.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Absolutely. The state’s willingness to employ coercive measures, even non-violent coercive measures, to achieve ends well beyond their prescribed scope should shock everyone with a conscience or self-respect. But then, they don’t want their court eunuch’s to have self respect, so all the better.
Jim: You know, compulsory and quasi-compulsory schooling is also a form of hostage-taking.
Not Fauci: Antibiotics work quite well. Panic only drives voter turnout to increase government power ‘for your safety’.
Bob Sykes: Hirsch is badly misinformed and confused. The function of the Ivies, and most modern “elite” schools, is not education but networking. They are the places where the children of the Ruling Class meet each other and begin to form alliances, or at least a common set of goals. The Medieval royal courts did the same job for the nobility, although the basic reason noble children were schooled and fostered at the royal courts was hostage taking to ensure against noble rebellions.
Jim: Is America actually worthy of this sort of knob-slobbering? Is the United State?
Bill: Even further back, in the 19th century, sodbusting American pioneers faced mental challenges in the plains: “Prairie madness or prairie fever was an affliction that affected European settlers in the Great Plains during their migration to, and settlement of, the Canadian Prairies and the Western United States in the 19th century. Settlers moving from urbanized or relatively settled areas in the East faced the risk of mental breakdown caused by the harsh living conditions and the extreme levels...
Phileas Frogg: If a government official is emphatically calling something, “evil,” that could, if pursued, accrue more power to the government, you know it’s evil.
Jim: Yeah… maybe. But Russia invaded the Ukraine, and some shady motherfuckers were running a billion bioweapons facilities there. As far as I know, nothing was ever released—and the war continues to grind on, I assume.
Phileas Frogg: When I was a child and I had all of the time in the world to be bored getting driven around in the backseat of a car, I used to look out at large buildings with strange corporate names and wonder what they did in them. I’d concoct stories about secret government programs, or occult meetings, or weapons research, etc. Then I’d imagine sneaking into them and discovering their nefarious schemes. As an adult I’ve come to realize, my boredom induced imaginative ramblings may...
Bob Sykes: “Reported” A nice weasel word. “I didn’t say it” Very nearly every news story out of Ukraine that is published in the western media is an outright lie, and the publishers know it. Those deep strikes are being ordered, directed, and conducted by actual US/NATO officers servicemen. Ukraine itself is a proxy and has no say in what is done. They just provide local meat for the Russian grinder. US/NATO troops have been active on the ground in Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union, well...
Phileas Frogg: Jim, I agree, but as a Catholic I still want the house cleaned up over at the Lateran Palace. With regard to bioweapons, you might be right, but I always liked to think of them as the, “Poor Nations Nuke.” I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve actually tried invading a nation armed with them, so they’re at least sufficiently dissuasive as to prevent American military intervention.
Jim: Phileas, we don’t need to further expand the power of the Vatican to resuscitate manly honor and suppress the women and the olds. Even the Congress’s Commerce, Equal Protection, and Naturalization Powers, properly understood, could do that. As for bioweapons, they have radically different properties and a much-different activation curve. I frankly doubt that they are actually all that useful.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Funnily enough that’s one of the reasons I’m in favor of re-establishing the Papal States as key step in the remediation of the Roman Curia, despite the fact that it’s administered by dubiously Catholic individuals at present. As for modern bioweapons, it’s inevitable and stupid, but perfectly rational. Not every nation can afford, develop, or manage to sneak a nuke into operational existence, particularly under the watchful eye of the various Great Powers, so...
Jim: A law without a court, without an army, is hardly a law at all.
Bob Sykes: The Russians have already set up a separate combat arm for drones.
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.