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.
Isegoria: Apparently “Descendant “ appears in his The State of the Art collection.
Bill: Eventually, the US Army will get to the logical conclusion of this line of development, namely, the smart suit from “Descendant” , a 1987 short story by Iain Banks. After a bad crash, the protagonist is badly injured; can he walk back to base? The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet. The suit walks faster than I do. It reckons it is only twenty percent stronger than the average human. Something of...
Isegoria: I’m reminded of Feynman’s anecdote, in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, about struggling to speak Portuguese: Now I wanted to say, “So, I learned Portuguese,” but I couldn’t think of the word for “so.” I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished the sentence like this: “CONSEQUENTEMENTE, aprendi Portugues!” When the two men came back with the baggage, she said, “Oh, he speaks Portuguese! And with such wonderful words: CONSEQUENTEMENTE!”
Phileas Frogg: I had no clue Murakami used this method. Honestly my prose can get a bit purple at times, I should try it out. Now I just have to learn enough to write in another language.
Gaikokumaniakku: It is very hard to give honest and constructive feedback on complicated student projects that might prove a student has skill. If it were easier to give feedback, training desired skills would be much easier. Whether any form of training can really imbue a student with skill is questionable. Skill is like a delicate seedling: the teacher can try to provide the right conditions and after that everyone can HOPE that the student manifests skill by mysterious processes. Of course,...
Gaikokumaniakku: There are top-down and bottom-up approaches. In the hard sciences and engineering, we sometimes try to induce parents to send their bright 14-year-olds for special programs that could be called “baby’s first internship.” These top-down programs may or may not inculcate some detectable level of professionalism. These programs certainly are not common enough, or effective enough. But the scientific community is aware that more high-quality personnel are needed. Some...
Isegoria: I see that Swift’s knowledge engine has an entry in Technovelgy.
Bill: The Giertz method sounds like Swift’s knowledge engine, used for generating new ideas: These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.” The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round...
Bruce: Great catch James James! All the stuff about well-fed people and well-fed horses sounds like why the Mongols invaded everyone with food. Like starving men from small Viking settlements going after any seaside town with food.
Gaikokumaniakku: “Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop.” This is why teachers ought to make sure that their students take notes on paper, and teachers should not police those notes. The doodles and vagaries of paper ostensibly devoted to notes are the nesting-grounds of...
Gaikokumaniakku: “…given the important nature of the research performed by academics in the sciences and engineering, does he support having them them funded by the government, working in academia, and their work freely available in academic journals?” I don’t speak for Caplan, and he doesn’t speak for me, but I have a few choice jeremiads on the topic of why the peer-review system is broken. Engineering is so vitally important that I believe humans must prioritize its success despite the...
James James: This version of the quote comes from Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men (1927) by Harold Lamb. The original comes from Rashid ad-Din’s “Compendium of Chronicles”, according to Wikiquote.
Phileas Frogg: “Total freedom, then, is the enemy of creativity, and constraint its companion.” This is why boredom is so valuable. Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop. The mind, thus confined, suddenly begins to produce truly astonishing imaginations and...
Isegoria: There is, David Epstein explains, a very bright side to the scientific carnage: The so-called replication crisis over the last decade has been painful for many scientists, but researchers in every discipline have been learning from it and working to improve their fields. It was, after all, scientists themselves who raised the alarm about their colleagues’ work (and in some cases their own work) in the first place. Increasingly, researchers now share or formally preregister their hypotheses at...
Jim: The question, perhaps, is what to do with the boys and young men once they have been freed from bondage. Bryan Caplan, low-T Catholic mischling and natural-born slave that he is, proposes unpaid labor accruing to the Boomer and Israeli owners of the occupational gigacorporations. After he is sent to the Idaho potato farms established to permit the United State’s lipservicedly reformed academics, lawyers, traders, and assorted other Boomerregime water-carriers to perform honest labor for the...
Jim: At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the schooling apparatus, operated as it is by the least-competent white-collar workers in United State society, could be more exploitative than the relentlessly metastasizing tumor that is Corporate America, but its open secret weapon is that the very worst crime available to the inhabitants of Earth is simply to waste boys’ and young men’s precious, fleeting, and unrecoverable time. All education-related policy proposals not opening with...
Isegoria: Caplan isn’t recommending that we forbid science, math, and engineering classes. In fact, he’d probably recommend teaching those subjects much more thoroughly to the handful of students who expect to use the material beyond school.
Curious: How does Caplan plan on creating the next generation of scientists, mathematicians and engineers? And given the important nature of the research performed by academics in the sciences and engineering, does he support having them them funded by the government, working in academia, and their work freely available in academic journals? There have been several excerpts from his book, but none of them discuss these issues.
Gaikokumaniakku: The marrow is the culture that values the knowledge that can be preserved in books. Colleges still have some of their old books of knowledge, but I question whether the people in charge of the colleges are teaching students to engage with the knowledge. It seems the desire to learn things that are both true and interesting was carried out of the colleges by nerds as soon as Internet access became available to run-of-the-mill civilians. The people sucking on the broken bones of college...
Gaikokumaniakku: “‘Science!’ has died and been buried…46 years of my life…” It is better to struggle for a worthy vision of truth discovery than to surrender and willingly embrace ignorance. This gives us a small measure of cold comfort as we endure the collapse of civilization. The spirit that moved Galileo is not dead. We may not live to see it manifested. We may die in the smoldering ruins of decadence, but the spirit will prevail even if we might not live to see it.
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.