Before ‘Dune,’ Frank Herbert learned from native Americans
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Secondly, if you read the Appendices of Book I of Frank Herbert's Dune series, you'll see that he more or less invented the concept of 'planetologist', which in the late 1990s became a recognized academic discipline under the umbrellas of 'planetary sciences' and 'earth system sciences'. This was in response to a sense that the academic study of the subject had been too fractured, i.e. disciplines such as oceanography, geology, ecology and atmospheric chemistry and physics were actually highly interrelated, to the point that the historic divisions didn't make as much sense as they once did. This is now seen in, for example, the scientific study of Jupiter's moon Europa.
As far as the current impacts of human civilization on Earth's climate and ecology, see the original Dune book:
> "The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences - Pardot Kynes in "Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune"
Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.
In the meantime, to answer the OP's question, the issue is that there is an inflection point at which man has enough tech to start changing nature, by disrupting parts of those systems.
That's probably huge distinction between most of Europe/Asia and the rest of the world in the Columbian era.
Aboriginals cultures mostly did not have the ability to shape the land (and where they had they tech, they did disrupt). Forget narratives one way or the other - they were by and large 'way behind'. And things took a an even bigger, massive jump when we harnessed fossil fuels.
The glamorization of 'In Concert With Nature' is I think mostly just the fact that they didn't have the power to do anything otherwise.
Now, if the Inuit had tried to get extremely wealthy by using their rifles to hunt seals and caribou as the basis of a large and ever-growing export industry, they'd have indeed destabilized the ecosystem and there would have been a collapse in the population of seals and caribou, as seen with European hunters of wildlife in North America with beavers and bison and passenger pigeons. If that had happened, the Inuit themselves would most likely have followed the local animals into extinction.
[edit] Note with bison, there was a deliberate extermination policy pursued by the US government as a means of destroying the food supply of various indigenous tribes that relied on bison for sustenance (aka the genocidal starvation program). This doesn't explain the extermination of beaver and other wildlife populations, however.
At least for beaver, free and ecological illiteracy does paint most of the picture (though, in fairness, ‘extermination’ may be too strong)
Do you have any references about this? It's the first time I heard of it and googling for "the genocidal starvation program" only gets me hits on that other genocidal starvation program, the Holodomor.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#19th_century_bis...
Specifically:
The US army and settlers moving West executed buffalo because Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains depended on them. 'Every dead buffalo is a dead Indian' is one of the quotes from the time. The army/settlers would also poison the buffalo carcasses so Indigenous people couldn't eat from the dead carcass, and as a consequence, other animals in the environment (e.g. wolves) couldn't eat the meat either and likewise suffered, and further reduced the food supply.
This took place after the 1868 treaty of the Black Hills. So the US signed a treaty acknowledging Indigenous land and sovereignty. And then started a genocidal campaign, against the people they just signed the treaty with -- tresspassing on treaty defined land to do so and kill the buffalo. The Supreme Court acknolwedged the history of these wrongdoings in a ruling in 1980, awarding financial compensation to the Indigenous peoples -- however the Indigenous plaintiffs did not want monetary awards, they sought rematriation of their stolen land and the upholding of their rights under the 1868 treaty. The battles to uphold those treaty rights continue to this day.
(In 2007, the UN ratified the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms Indigeous claim to treaty rights such as the 1868 Black Hills treaty (albeit in a 'non-binding' way). The declaration has now been ratified by all UN member nations -- US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand originally held out for several years -- and many groups are now operating with that document as a legal/political framework and justification to take their treaty and Indigenous rights cases forward.)
It's called the Noble Savage [1] [2] trope. It's at least as old as the Romans. It's also probably the reason so many of our sports teams bear the images of peoples we committed quasi-genocide [3] against.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NobleSavage [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2016/08/24/real-histor...
Who is “we”? You weren’t alive for the so-called genocide and neither was I nor anyone else on hn for that matter.
Are you saying that I and every other human are owed for any and all unrecompensed wrongs committed against any and all members of our ancestries and that governments should go about facilitating this “business”?
And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies? They are in some sense, double harmful?
I'm pretty sure "if the policy was driven by a desire for genocide, or results in genocide" would cover it.
> And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies?
Some things are worse than other things and we react different accordingly. The justice system of.... well, virtually every society with laws, is based on that idea. You do something bad, you get consequence X. You do something worse, you get consequence Y. The law says specifically what's worse than what other thing and what happens.
The only time that a lot of different things has had the same consequence was the Draconian constitution, which everybody agreed was shit. However, they all liked that it differentiated between different degrees of similar acts, and we still do today.
It wasn't that long ago.
Haha. It's nice to see this opinion written out. I read a few of the Herbert/Anderson books (I had a lot of time on my hands) and came to similar conclusions. I was most disappointed with the post-Chapter House stuff they did. It was allegedly based on extensive material left behind by Frank Herbert for the seventh book, but it very quickly tied in material and tropes from the prequels that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson had written, clearly being their creature and not the father's.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Anderson had been a consultant on the new film.
I don't think Heretics and Chapter-House are badly written, they just feel a bit lost and pointless.
Whereas to me the Brian Herbert/Anderson books are just not well written books.
Anderson wrote crappy Star Wars books, too. I'm really not sure what the breakdown is of Brian Herbert and Anderson actually doing the writing.
I gave the two of them two or three trilogies, so more than a fair shake. Painfully dull is the first adjective that comes to mind. They really took some of the most interesting places and concepts in sci-fi and made them flat.
Hunters and Sandworms were the least bad books by the pair, and there was certainly some hint of Heretics and Chapterhouse in them, but they were still not well written and the ideas lacked the substance of Frank Herbert's works.
As far as the Villeneuve films go, my sincerest wish is that we can somehow make it to a God Emperor film. I have no idea what this would look like, or if it would be any good, but I'll keep dreaming.
I do have to read Frank Herbert's Dune series again so.
I think the drama around the pain box and a couple of other moments was not as good as it could have been, IMHO, but it does do a good job of telling the story (so far), and things are on such a huge scale... very worthwhile. I sincerely hope they manage to film the first three books, at least.
If they pull of at least one more book, or even two, this will be on par with LotR if not a tad better. If the team can keep the level, that is.
I did like the original Dune movie a lot, one of the most under-valued films.
I loved those books back the day when I was younger, they just don't compare well against Timothy Zahn's books, the original Han Solo series and the short stories about small characters from the original movies.
What is sad so, is that the IMHO brilliant Dune encyclopedia was declared non-canon...
EDIT: The quote from Dune about ecology rings true for all kinds of very complex and large systems. Especially those that are of the self-maintaining kind.
I hold my own counsel on what is canon: Anything explicitly and directly written by Frank Herbert. That excludes The Dune Encyclopedia, but I don't think that diminishes it. We shouldn't pretend that it was declared non-canon for any reason other than Brian Herbert and Anderson selling pablum as Dune universe novels.
And yes, the Anderson books were the only reason the Encyclopedia was thrown out. Still damn great content, so.
> Still damn great content, so.
Exactly. It doesn't really matter what a couple of hacks have to say about it.
While I agree with this sentiment, I think it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments. The Cahuilla people, who are indigenous to where I live, for example have always had botanical experimentation deeply integrated in their cultures. Some of the most important people in their cultures were botanists. They had many complex rules around patches of certain plants growing and these important people (who I'll just call "doctors" as an insufficient translation) would claim certain patches and study them for years. Some of this knowledge was shared with the rest of the communities, while some was protected and only shared with their close family members or apprentices. Their "folk taxonomy" had names for every single species of oak that is recognized today in the area. An extremely impressive task given how readily many species hybridize
The same can be said of many indigenous peoples around the world. There's an increasing recognition that the Amazon isn't just some pristine wilderness but rather a "manufactured landscape" that has been deeply shaped by the indigenous caretakers of it. In fact there's also an increasing recognition that oftentimes "conservation" ends up hurting the environments it's trying to protect because it kicks out the indigenous people that the landscape relies on. This can also be seen in California where so much of the ecology is dependent on the cultural burn practices of native Californians
Using that idea of "legibility" that Scott proposes, not accounting for indigenous "tribal knowledge" in planning for their "betterment" does not work. Common language that reflects this happening is when such knowledge is trivialized or rejected using words like "unscientific".
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
OP's point is that this is often overblown. Plenty of ancient civilizations ran themselves into the ground through environmental collapse. I'm currently reading The Big Oyster, which documents evidence of the native population over-harvesting the New York harbor.
Almost by definition, a colonist will be part of a more-powerful civilization than the indigenous populations she encounters. Bigger civilizations have bigger footprints. It takes care to disentangle which cultures are inherently more "at balance" with nature, i.e. could scale less destructively, versus those which are scale limited. (For example, Nordic versus Continental culture, for European examples.)
In the real world indigenous people often wear colourful clothes with very complex patterns. People's clothes can say a lot about their culture, religion and hierarchical structure. Spending some effort on clothes can add a lot of depth into stories world building.
https://www.jenmansafaris.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ang... https://vietnam.travel/sites/default/files/inline-images/vie...
This is a valid criticism of the depiction of aboriginal cultures.
But I've come to believe that there is a subtle racism in not accepting that aboriginals intentionally chose to develop cultures which were durable and in 'harmony with nature.'
They are the same homo sapiens with the same intelligence and nature as the homo sapiens of Europe or from other more 'advanced' societies. They could have chosen to develop their culture in such a way that led to being 'out of harmony' just as easily as some other peoples did.
Aboriginals in say, Australia, had plenty of time to develop a more advanced society (some estimates say they've been there 40k years). When western people depict them as living close to the land, I smell a whiff of the subtext 'because they couldn't do any better'. Yeah they could have done otherwise, but they chose not to!
I work with a group of engineers and lately because of attending a conference, we have started to talk a lot about climate change. Some of the ideas our group initially came up with are really ridiculous, like some kind of machine to extract carbon from the atmosphere and to sequester it.
It's called a tree, they are everywhere, and they do it for free. They will propagate by themselves if we just had the patience to let them do so.
I think headlines and articles should refer to the specific peoples, I'm of the view that we need to normalize mentioning the specific people/tribes/collectives because its overinclusive since all them are separate. Its not really weighed by a random indigenous person saying "I'm fine with Indian" or "I'm fine with First Nations" etc, its more about how it doesn't provide any context for people with 100s of years of shared history, many of which have semi-sovereignty and autonomy.
E.g. most ethnicity questionnaires label white as the descendants of the original Europeans and North Africans.
So, for example Arabs and Berbers count as white in the US??
A lot of people come to the US and inherit its institutions, because of the way they look, and drop all the baggage they experienced from the places they come from. It is very common for people to conform by changing their name and accent and dress style, if their skin color did most if the blending in for them. (Note that Just as many “white” people don't figure it out, and experience poverty or mediocrity which is also quite harsh in the US even if the living and food conditions are generally are decent.)
The same concept has not been conducive to people with more divergent physical phenotypes like eye shape or skin color.
Why not the same for 'Asian'. its not like that is a useful demographic label as it including everyone from the arabian penisula to the Urals to Korea to Indonesia, essentially half world population
In my experience you can learn a lot about someone’s likely customs, dating expectations, traditions, religious upbringing just by knowing what kind of european they have in them.
The 1880s German immigrants to the US completely missed slavery and the Nazis so its tragic for some kid of that heritage to be grouped into the generic white guilt idea if they accidentally walked into a segregated space at Berkeley, for example. Its just not nuanced enough.
I still feel people need to be treated more so as individuals, and that more support for progressive ideas will come from acknowledging the individual. Especially when that individual may have the power or network to help the cause.
I mean... really? I didn't even have a clear idea of what kind of European I have in me until my 20's. No one had ever gotten around to telling me my Dutch-surname came about via Dutch immigrants to Ireland.
What difference should it make for you? I honestly don't get this idea of inheriting guilt or being directly responsible for the actions of your forebears.
And the world building that is lauded for being so sophisticated? It just feels off. For one, there are tens of thousands of habitable planets but all the action takes place on only four. Second, there is the Landsraad but we focus on just three factions. Third, the entire empire relies on spice, yet spice comes from a single planet and they never bothered to figure out why or how it’s made? Moreover instead of the emperor directly controlling spice production (the most valuable substance in the galaxy and the source of ultimate control) he outsources the job to a noble house that is sure to betray him sooner or later. Paul is of course considered a genius for figuring this out, but like how could you not see this coming from page 1?
And then there are the sequels. The second book is confusing as all hell because suddenly there is the great Jihad except we don’t really know why it’s happening, to whom, and who is winning. And Paul is now an emo kid who is both too wise and not wise enough. He can’t stop the Jihad so he does some stuff that he foresaw but makes no sense.
The Children of Dune at least brings things back out of the abstract “you are too dumb to understand just how vast the world is so I won’t bother describing it to you”. But it’s a story with a middle and not really a beginning or an end. I didn’t manage to get further than this book.
I really wanted to like Dune. But I have no idea what I am missing. Did I have to read it as a 15 year old to really get into it? Is there some cultural thing I’m missing? Is it just overhyped?
Regarding the Emperor not controlling the spice production directly - that's because it's part of their customary power balancing arrangement. If the Emperor controlled the spice directly, it would give him the ability to control space travel for all the Landsraad Great Houses, upsetting the balance of power between the two. The Houses can overpower the Emperor with military force, but only if they all join forces - and this is exactly the action that would trigger such an alliance. The other aspect is access to profits: the whole point of CHOAM is to distribute wealth from interplanetary trade to the Emperor and the Houses, which is why it has a monopoly on trade. Again, the Houses simply cannot afford to lose that much profit while having the Emperor gain it (and use it to increase his military strength).
I agree that it's very strange how origin of spice is such a mystery, given that every Fremen knows about it.
“You may see one today,” Kynes said. “Wherever there is spice, there are worms.”
“Always?” Halleck asked.
“Always.”
“Is there a relationship between worm and spice?” the Duke asked.
Kynes turned and Paul saw the pursed lips as the man spoke. “They defend spice sands. Each worm has a — territory. As to the spice … who knows? Worm specimens we’ve examined lead us to suspect complicated chemical interchanges within them. We find traces of hydrochloric acid in the ducts, more complicated acid forms elsewhere. I’ll give you my monograph on the subject.”
...
“Why hasn’t an effort been made to wipe them out?” Paul asked.
“Too expensive,” Kynes said. “Too much area to cover.”
Paul leaned back in his corner. His truthsense, awareness of tone shadings, told him that Kynes was lying and telling half-truths. And he thought: If there’s a relationship between spice and worms, killing the worms would destroy the spice.
That being said, I agree with everything you say. Dune is so frustrating because the prose and perspectives jump from being incredibly wise to totally inane.
For what it's worth I see Dune as much more of a space opera than a avant-garde sci-fi book. For me I basically view it as star wars but as if George Lucas wasn't a hack. When I saw the new movie open with "dreams are just messages from the deep", I was just totally in love with the iconography of dune and was genuinely kind of miffed we don't get this kind of film more often versus whatever star wars is.
The thing with Dune's world building isn't that it's realistic, it's not very realistic, but rather that it's still blindingly original, to my western eyes at least - the way Herbert approaches religion and culture is a really good balance between wow-factor, critique, and avoiding pretense.
All in all I guess it's in the eye of the beholder so my comment contains no insight ;)
I’ll stick with the Culture series where even if it’s crazy it seems like how a truly futuristic society would govern themselves.
That said there are things I like about the setting and I applaud Herbert for trying to deconstruct the whole great man schtick.
i think that is the essence of a Jihad, the followers are not allowed to question it.
It isn't. Arrakis suffered desertification before humans ever arrived, before the book even began. The only climate change that occurred thereafter was a direct result of Pardot Kynes convincing the Fremen they could terraform Arrakis and, after Paul Atreides defeated the Emperor Shaddam IV Corrino and seized control of the Imperium, and subsequently began a deliberate effort to accelerate the terraforming effort until, by the time of God Emperor of Dune, the desert has been pushed back to just a tiny portion of the planet.
TL;DR The entire article is someone with an axe to grind trying to use Dune to do it. Scroll on.
Firstly, the immense influence of humanity on climate and the ecology of a planet and the intertwined nature between social activity and ecology, the motivation for negative impacts on the ecology lying in the exploitation and overuse of the planets resources, and third the disproportionate impact of this on native populations, and the inability of people to understand the consequences of disturbing complex systems. (no surprise given that Herbert was intellectually close to systems thinkers from Santa Fe)
You think Dune does not address climate change because in the story the planet was already deserted? Do you think Animal Farm is a book about pigs?
They weren’t central to the story. FH didn’t waste a lot of ink on them. They formed a backdrop to the story because they should be uncontroversial ideas to anyone with an understanding of ecology.
If FH really wanted to write about ecology he could have spend a much greater proportion of the brook talking about it, when all we have on Sandworm ecology from FH himself is a handful of paragraphs spread across six novels.
As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin - people who swept to power seemingly out of nowhere and established their own sprawling Empire.
Lastly, if we’re looking at FH books on the human impact on ecology, we should start with The Green Brain which was explicitly about ecology.
.. which are the native population of Arrakis as nomadic desert people are the native populations of their respective region, being caught in the feud of great colonial powers of the empire? The inspiration for this are indeed Bedouin, some people argue Berber and of course Arab people and FH explicitly stated that Lawrence of Arabia was an inspiration for the book, which seems pretty obvious.
Similarly it’s difficult to see the Bedouin and Berber tribes as being oppressed . The Romans, Persians etc mostly stuck to the coasts and rivers and avoided the deep desert. The same is true on Dune.
When the Muslim armies swept out of the desert they didn’t throw off oppression, they came out of nowhere to crush the Persians and nearly end the Romans, establishing one of the world’s largest empires. They did plenty of colonisation of their own. And their cultural and scientific impact on the world continues today.
Similarly the Fremen were grossly underestimated by the Empire. They were barely aware of their existence, but as it turned out they were far more numerous, culturally sophisticated and technology advanced than anyone knew.
I've never been able to find this quote again, but IIRC after one of his friends/editors read some of his early work on Dune, they told him something to the effect of, "Dammit, Frank. People want to read stories about people!"
It may be that he doesn't spend much ink on them because it didn't make for a captivating story.
They're very heavily based off of the people who lived in the Caucasus. Herbert basically lifts phrasing used in the book The Sabres of Paradise to describe the Fremen word for word
I read many books in the "Freddy the Pig" series, and picked up Animal Farm when I was 8. I thought it, too, was a book about pigs and read it as a book about pigs. I can vouch that it works as a story about pigs. I didn't realize it was an allegory until maybe a decade later.
I also read Dune as a teen, and took it at face value, too. It was a moderately good scifi book, but not good enough to tempt me to read the sequels. I didn't really think much more about it. I've read a lot of scifi books.
It also seemed to be much more based on Saharan desert culture than Native American culture.
I confess to being out of step in not seeing it as a great story :-/ I've seen all 3 movie versions, thinking "what am I missing" and not finding it.
I'm not sure exactly what to put my finger on but the melting pot of culture and religion explicit throughout the book, wrapped in a psychedelic haze is definitely a draw for me. It's definitely more of a below-the-neck type of experience vs. (say) a Dick novel.
Wrt to the new movie I'm just glad that Denis Villeneuve is getting funded. His sci-fi movies are some of the only big movies in and around the genre (especially if you compare (say) Dune to star wars) which seem to be actively trying to tell a story at their own pace. He's a very smart and unpretentious person too, any interview with him is a much watch for me.
...and then of course I stopped thinking of Star Wars altogether. :)
Dune was neither the first nor is the last and linking it with climate change is purely some kind of bias.
> "The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase."
This is from Children of Dune.
That said, what purpose did the sandtrout serve in that other place it was introduced from, I guess the early settlers weren't looking at the planet and thinking "nice place, but too wet."
Or could just be someone being stupid, like how kudzu has spread throughout the US Southeast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_powder
...Maybe Southeastern US chefs are creative enough to come up with a truly unique and delicious way to bite back?
The real answer to the GP’s question is that if you squeeze a sandtrout you get basically a concentrated dose of the spice.
Maybe this was expanded on post-Chapterhouse but I don't count those as canon.