Comments on: They mistake forgotten science for fiction

By: TRX

TRX — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 19:42:14 +0000

“Herbert’s Destination: Void, which has almost no interesting plot or characters…is unreadable today.”

That depends. I liked the 1966 version just fine. However, the one you’re most likely to encounter is the “revised and expanded” 1978 version, which I found hard to follow, even having read the original.

By: Space Nookie

Space Nookie — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 15:38:47 +0000

There are some aspects of the “breeding program” he misses, like how political power is passed patrilinearly and how ancestral memory/prescience works along bloodlines. Admittedly the latter is contrived. but it’s pretty clear that the child of an Atreides daughter-Harkonnen son combination would have enormous political power as heir to two powerful estates, ancestral memory advice from long lines of influential barons and dukes, and foresight from a long line of imperial descendants.

It’s kind of notable that Paul struggles in books 2 and 3 because he’s just not enough of a ruthless bastard, which is presumably a characteristic the planned Kwisatz Haderach could have picked up from his Harkonnen father.

By: Bruce Purcell

Bruce Purcell — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 23:02:17 +0000

Larry Niven once said forgotten sciences go mythical. Theology when the ignorant heathen went back to raging in their blindness, Alchemy when it transcended into chemistry, so forth.