The Secret History of Dune
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
For me a part of the brilliance of Dune is that Herbert does not commit this sin. He maintains the momentum with only few and relevant digressions. I read the book again after three decades and was amazed that the depth I remembered came from a sparseness of words. I had spun off mere suggestions in the text into baroque textures in my head.
It reminds me of the cartoons of James Thurber, who could evoke more with the curve of a line than most artists can with any number.
I think this is part of what makes Dune so hard to adapt to film. There is less elaborate description to go by compared to Herbert's more verbose colleagues from Victor Hugo to George R.R. Martin. The imagination of each reader has more room to diverge.
I did like the look of Blade Runner 2049 though, so I have hope for the upcoming movie.
It's so ambiguous, rich, and open to interpretation that it's a daunting universe to visit as a casual tourist - and it's so stark and amoral that it's hard to feel comfortably at home in it, even if you're a fan.
Which is why it's such a challenge for directors. The visuals are critical, but it would take an uncanny imagination to make them work as metaphors as well as images.
IMO Lynch was a bit too literally imperial and historic. The movie feels more pedestrian and earth-bound than the books do, with some of the grandeur squeezed out by obvious signifiers and references.
The Jodorowsky version would probably have been amazing. I'm looking forward to the Villeneuve version, but I think Jodorowsky's Dune would have been a real game changer for SF movies - and all the characters would have been strikingly but plausibly weird, the BG included.
well, unless you consider the "prequels" and two subsequent novels as "fanfic", which I do, and am apparently not alone since they seem to want to change canon so much.
> I think Jodorowsky's Dune would have been a real game changer for SF movies
even as far as he got was an amazing game changer for SF movies. the teams he put together, his story boards, and almost every aspect of what he created went on to define the sci-fi genre at the time. it's no coincidence that so many of those involved in Star Wars had been involved in Jodorowski's Dune adaptation.
As others mentioned here, and as the doc drives home, it’s pretty much Star Wars.
It wasn’t necessarily a wholesale ripoff, but are there a large number of similarities? And could they have been truly just coincidences? There had to be massive pollination from that Dune version to Star Wars Episode IV.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0287839/
Ed: apparently the upcoming movie will get a companion TV series about the bene gesserit:
https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/11/dune-the-sisterhood-warn...
IMO the biggest weak spot of the miniseries was that it was about 50/50 good actors and terrible ones; and nothing shows this up more than scenes shared between both types of actors. The adaptation of Gormenghast had the same problem. It's almost better to have all indifferent actors, rather than have John Hurt swapping lines with someone who would be lucky to get a role in a soap opera.
It was really brilliant of him to have the Butlerian Jihad as context for an in-world technology limitations - while also simultaneously showing off a highly-developed and syncretic social structures, especially with the use of religion, to still give it a believable and excitable feel of the future. It gives the book a universe feel that is very hard to re-capture when reading other books by some other sci-fi masters of their era.
Shudders
Not for everyone.
"I wrote Frank Herbert over a period of about two years, and it was published in 1981. In the course of writing it, I read all of Herbert’s novels, stories, and essays, as well as a lot of his newspaper writing (which, by coincidence, included a stint at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the local paper for the region in which I now live.) I interviewed him several times, and, in a small way, we became friends. His ideas came to influence me deeply. I had always loved Dune and Dune Messiah, and especially the idea that predicting the future too closely can lead to a kind of paralysis. But the deeper I went, the more substance I found. Ecology, mysticism, and a kind of hard-headed insistence on the relativity of human perception and the limits of knowledge combine into a richer mix than is found in a lot of science-fiction. There’s some really cool stuff here!"
(Yeah, that's Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Publishing...)
It is a must-read for all Dune fans.
As an aside, kanly seems to be a loanword from Turkish with the same meaning, from kan (blood). For a study of other borrowings see (https://dergipark.org.tr/download/article-file/155177)
herbert was hired to write an article about how oregon was using grasses to stabilize their dunes, and the article, 'they stopped the moving sands', was never published, but inspired the novel to come
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-dune18-2010apr18...
see also this article about arabic words & islamic themes in the book
https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-...
90s pastiche fantasist robert jordan borrowed herbert's technique and even some of his lexicon
The fraternity doesn't require a specific religious belief, but lodges generally slant Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. Many of the various degrees delve into Islamic lore and philosophy. For example, the most public-facing Masonic group (not a degree itself) is the Shriners (they raise money for a bunch of children's hospital they run) and the trapping are Islamic.
Rather than copying per-se, both are simply taking what they learned as they rose through the different degrees and are applying that shared philosophy to their writings.
Coincidence is seeing this article just after returning from the vacation's, still imagining riding on a Shai-Hulud.
The only true comment that would like to add to this thread regarding Blanch's "The Sabre Paradise" is something that I've heard from an old teacher: most, probably all the books are derived from Homer's Odyssey; which created most of the writing styles, characters constructions and interactions, world creations, etc. After, there's not a single book that brought anything new to the writing, except the way you mix or the characters that you replace.
But even with this idea in mind, we cannot say that reading Homer's Odyssey means that you've read ALL the books, and there isn't not even that this is the best of books. To be honest I like the imagination created by it, but it's real "drag" if you try reading it...
At the end, for me at least, what counts is the mood: I prefer Dune over "The Sabre Paradise", the same way that I prefer J.R.Talkien's Lord of the Rings over "All Quiets on Western Front", even if both are based on the developments of the Great World War (I).
If you have time (and mood) read'em all... But still, keep away from "Odyssey" (there are a lot of more fun versions of the same story)! :)
PS: My next books in line are the (new for me) "Hyperion" and "Three Body Problem" from Liu Cixin. And recommended detours? :)
Have you read The Sparrow or any of Ted Chiang's short stories?
[0]: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/Exhalation%20-%20Te...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Oth...
These are great, inspiring, detailed oriented articles which brush the history of the teams who loving the book, tried to port it. The first part gives many details on Herbert inspiration and sources, and explain what drove Jodorowsky and Lynch (among others) to make a movie out of it. The following articles are about the games, Dune 1 and Dune 2 (the first RTS game!).
This is a great read and the whole website is a treasure trove of great articles about the history of many games of legend, check it out!
Here's the advice I give to people about the entire Dune series:
Read Dune. If you don't like it, stop.
Read Dune Messiah. If you don't like it, stop.
Read Children of Dune. If you liked Messiah you'll probably like this as well.
Read God Emperor of Dune. This one stands alone. Lots of people hate it. Whether you like it or not, don't stop.
Read Heretics of Dune. If you don't like it, stop.
Read Chapterhouse: Dune. Weep that it's over.
In my experience, people who like Dune generally will enjoy at least through Children of Dune. Anyone who enjoys God Emperor of Dune is insane (maybe why it might be my favorite).
Regarding the other Dune books, read them out of curiosity if you like, but they're not really Dune books despite being in that universe. I've read about seven of them out of optimism and hope but didn't enjoy them at all. Even Sandworms of Dune which is ostensibly based on Frank Herbert's notes for Dune 7 wasn't enjoyable to me, although it was least bad.
Here is the plot of God Emperor of Dune: <SPOILER> sits on their butt all day and discusses politics. Oh, there's a sort of assassination plot happening on the side, but let's not let that distract us from hearing political ruminations!
As for (some of) the Dune books whose position in canon is of some dispute:
... I can't recall anything that happened in Dune 7. Surprisingly forgettable. Then again, I don't remember a lot of Heretics or Chapterhouse in the first place.
The pre-prequels are set during the events of the Butlerian Jihad and suffer horribly from the sin of feeling the need to explain the genesis of every single important piece of lore in the series. Be amazed as every important event in the universe happened within a hundred years of each other, no matter how unrelated they are to one another.
The plot isn't the sum of these works, it is the scaffolding provided so that the author can explore various themes and theses.
Otherwise I thought the entire series worth reading, Messiah and God Emperor included.
Was there anything in particular that turned you off? I do remember putting off reading it for several years because it simply didn't sound that interesting and the feudal aspects sounded more like fantasy than sci fi. I'm genuinely surprised by that comment though because I thought there was more than enough intrigue and mystery introduced early on, I was hooked almost instantly.
When I was very young and first found the Dune books, I liked Dune, but failed to finish Dune Messiah, let alone the rest. A few years later I re-read Dune, plus Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I needed some maturing I suppose.
I stopped after that at the time because my parents only had the first 3 books, the book's front matter listed exactly those 3 books, and there was no internet yet to tell me there were 6 books instead of 3.
> Anyone who enjoys God Emperor of Dune is insane (maybe why it might be my favorite).
Some more years later I was browsing the sci-fi section of a bookstore and to my surprise found 3 more Dune books. Read them all, enjoyed them all, even God Emperor of Dune.
I read one or maybe two of the prequels; enough to decide that continuing reading the _other_ Dune books was not a good idea.
If you can, please read the book first before seeing/doing anything else in the universe. Don't let your imagination be spoiled!
(I'm not very interested in reading the sequels. Children of Dune was a terrible movie, IMO.)
Which makes me wonder what I missed with regards to J.R. Tolkien and George R. Martin.
A second "R", for one.
I have since reread the first book a fair few times (most recently via the excellent Audible audiobook production) but never had any desire to try the subsequent novels again.
At some point, I was so sucked into the Dune universe that any continuation would have intrigued me.
God Emperor would be my favourite, with Children of Dune following after
I highly recommend it.
You can skip everything by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070703213605/http://www.digita...
I enjoyed Messiah
But I just couldn't go through Children. I had to put it down. Felt like an average TV series.
I’ve never been able to finish Heretics, though. I just get too bored.
It isn't a spoiler that melange is used to make interstellar travel possible just like it isn't a spoiler that Ned Stark is married to Caytlin Stark.