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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/26/2011 1:53:39 AM

Arpig

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I thought the Dune books were embarrassingly bad. The series started out bad, and just got worse.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/26/2011 4:28:24 AM

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin
But as it appears Christianity has had it's day, it no longer features heavily on our lives and perhaps because of that morality has suffered, we seek material gain as opposed to spiritual gain, what's next ?

Did you miss the reference to Doctor Yueh giving Paul his sister's bible?

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/26/2011 7:35:52 AM

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

Bingo !

the Harkonnen, erm, well, us,

Harkonnens = unfettered industrialists. Think about the period when Dune was written. people were just starting to become conscious of the damage being done to the environment.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/26/2011 7:42:08 AM

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It's hardly the only of Herbert's books dealing with ecology, either: The Green Brain, Hellstrom's Hive and The Jesus Incident all have that as a main concern as well.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/26/2011 3:15:22 PM

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The 2000 TV mini-series adaptation was much better than David Lynch's.
In fact, it was almost perfect—except for one thing: it was such a shame that the mentats did not have ruby stains (from juice of Sapho) on their lips! That was such a huge and completely unnecessary drawback to the 1984 version! If I were Jan Vlasák or Jan Unger, I would have revolted, unless the movie make-up artists had put such ruby stains on my lips.
It would have been such a cheap effect—and I still cannot understand why they failed to implement it. That was a huge disappointment for me.
Other that that, it was perfect, it was so close to the book as its film adaptation can possibly get, seriously. And on such a relatively low budget, it was a real wonder.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/26/2011 7:51:46 PM

erieangel

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It's been years since I read the books (don't know if I even have them anymore) or watched the movie (I do that have that). I remember being totally disappointed with the movie it was so badly done.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 7:04:25 AM

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quote:

Really, can I take that as an endorsement? Since we're in the same ballpark on the follow-ups and I've been wondering if his kid's were any good. I may just pick the first one up ... thanks

Get them from the library.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 7:09:04 AM

kalikshama

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Here's some fun Dune > Star Wars notes. (The TE Lawrence influence is more than 1/2 way down.)

http://moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

Frank Herbert's 1963 Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of The Rings is to fantasy: the most popular, most influential and most critically-acclaimed novel in the genre. Herbert's novel was a revelation: before Dune, even the most well-written science fiction had been mostly "wonderful gadget" stories, or political commentary expressed through exaggeration. It had never occurred to anyone that science fiction could offer the literary depth of Dostoevsky, the intricate "wheels within wheels" intrigues of Shakespeare or so deeply fulfill the heroic epic form behind Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Mahabharata, and Beowulf.

Lucas has often acknowledged Dune as an inspiration. In early drafts of the Star Wars script the influence was much more obvious - the story was full of feudalistic Houses and dictums, and the treasure the Princess was guarding wasn't the Death Star plans, but a shipment of "aura spice." The final version of Star Wars is related to Dune mostly in spirit: a science fiction heroic fantasy treated seriously. Of all the ideas George Lucas inherited from Frank Herbert, the subtle lesson was how to use science fiction to create myth. His lesser borrowings might include:

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 7:39:13 AM

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Thank You

But from the same page..............

Herbert devoted the next 5-7 years to researching and writing "the desert novel." He had two primary starting points: first, his life-long misgivings about what he called the "messianic impulse in human society." That is, he observed that people seem to have an inbuilt hunger for a powerful, charismatic leader to whom we can surrender our responsibility for making difficult decisions.

Hebert observed that even the best leaders are humans, those humans have flaws, and elevating any man to a position of god-like power tends to magnify those human flaws to dangerous proportions. Worse, even if the original leader resists the temptation to abuse power, the bureaucracy which springs up around him will outlive him, and over time a bureaucracy becomes more and more incented to prioritize its own needs over the needs of people.

Now the last two sentences, a very worthy observation, and an observation many others have also noticed if not commented on, because, guess what; doesn't that sound all too familiar with what we are coming to know about our lives in this modern world ?

In other words, it is not the figurehead you elect that controls, but the machine behind, with the UK, it is the civil servants that stay in power no matter who sits at the big table every four year or so, and with the US you also have your equivalent i.e. non elected entities who are really in control to keep the machine working.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 7:43:50 AM

Aneirin

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Is anyone understanding what I am trying to get at when I start all these threads on how what could be called artists are trying to educate us to what we are perhaps not seeing in the humdrum of our complicated lives ?

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 8:23:48 AM

Moonhead

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quote:

ORIGINAL: kalikshama

Here's some fun Dune > Star Wars notes. (The TE Lawrence influence is more than 1/2 way down.)

http://moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

Frank Herbert's 1963 Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of The Rings is to fantasy: the most popular, most influential and most critically-acclaimed novel in the genre. Herbert's novel was a revelation: before Dune, even the most well-written science fiction had been mostly "wonderful gadget" stories, or political commentary expressed through exaggeration. It had never occurred to anyone that science fiction could offer the literary depth of Dostoevsky, the intricate "wheels within wheels" intrigues of Shakespeare or so deeply fulfill the heroic epic form behind Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Mahabharata, and Beowulf.

I'd question that: there was plenty of literary SF before '63. The pulps were dominated by the "hearty philistine" school that reached it's height (or nadir, depending on whom you ask) with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, but at the same time it was publishing stuff like Alfred Bester's extraordinary retreads of Dumas, and David Bunch's robot fairytales. There was an even wider breadth of stuff outside of the pulps: Vonnegut's early nihilistic rants, Ray Bradbury's single science fiction novel, Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, strange European novels like Capek's War With The Newts and John Christopher's various ends of the world.

It is nice to see Lucas admitting that something other than Kurosawa films were an influence for a change, though. Now if he'd just 'fess up how much of his plot he nicked from Jack Kirby as well...

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 10:14:10 AM

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Moonhead

Now if he'd just 'fess up how much of his plot he nicked from Jack Kirby as well...

Damn. Does there exist another "New Gods" fan in the house?

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 12:38:24 PM

Moonhead

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It isn't just the New Gods: Darth Vader is as much Doctor Doom as he's Darkseid.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 1:03:55 PM

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Any other DUNE fans have the misfortune of attempting to read the various DUNE prequel books?

They started out very meh, and only got worse. I read the sequel books to the original hexology (following Chapterhouse: Dune), because I just had to know where Frank Herbert was intending on taking the series, and god did his son and Kevin J. Anderson fuck that up. I much prefer the mystery we were left with in the last chapter of Chapterhouse.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 1:05:16 PM

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I read them all. They were mediocre compared to the original but they did help fill in a lot of blanks as to "Why the fuck do these people believe this and that" in the original series.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 1:07:57 PM

lazarus1983

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True, but in comparison to the originals, they were just very...pedestrian? They tried so hard to simulate the depth and knowledge of Frank Herbert.

Hell, they even messed up the biography they wrote of Frank Herbert.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/27/2011 1:34:42 PM

FirmhandKY

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quote:

ORIGINAL: lazarus1983

Any other DUNE fans have the misfortune of attempting to read the various DUNE prequel books?

They started out very meh, and only got worse. I read the sequel books to the original hexology (following Chapterhouse: Dune), because I just had to know where Frank Herbert was intending on taking the series, and god did his son and Kevin J. Anderson fuck that up. I much prefer the mystery we were left with in the last chapter of Chapterhouse.

Well, if you had actually read the thread, you'd see that they were discussed.

And some of us simply disagree with your assessment.

I found the later, original books pedantic, obtuse and boring as hell.

The new prequel books I found interesting enough to keep my attention without resort to mind-altering substances or an iron-will to finish what I started.

YMMV.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/28/2011 4:47:07 AM

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It seems everybody's milage has varied: apart from Children Of Dune and the slightly dull God Emperor Of Dune most of the original sequels are no worse than the first novel, with the last two coming across as a real return to form. The prequels, on the other hand, are nitpicky wallows in irrelevant trivia that isn't needed to follow the first book.

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/28/2011 6:14:14 AM

Aneirin

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I intended this thread to be about what Herbert could have been saying in his epic; Dune, but most on here appear to have missed that, and wibbled off into how good one book is compared to another, if I wanted a thread on the merits of that, I would have posted in the off topic section, but this thread is posted in the politics and religion forum because I was intending a conversation on the politics and religion in the story and how that might compare to our world of reality, seeing as desert people and jihad's are very much in our modern world this last decade.

So what is going on, are people incapable of understanding a simple question, or is it you don't want to analyse something you enjoyed as entertainment?

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RE: Dune by David Lynch - 9/28/2011 6:57:48 AM

Moonhead

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I'd suspect it's more likely the latter: dissecting a piece of fiction you dislike to show that it's nothing more than a framework for a ludicrously oversimplified political argument is a lot more common in criticism than doing the same to a work that the critic actually enjoyed.

Surely the point about Maudib's career in the first novel (and film) being largely based on TE Lawrence pretty much covers the metaphors underpinning Herbert's series, though? Once you've got the Fremen=Arabs and Spice= oil thing straight, that's most of the subtext dealt with, sadly.
The only points that really need adding to that are that Herbert was keenly interested in ecology (Dune isn't the first SF novel to concern itself with that by any stretch of the imagination, but remains one of the most successful), and didn't appear to think that the return to Feudalism that a lot of SF writers still see as the only way to run an interstellar civilisation even now* would be a good thing.

*(Some of the nonsense Jerry Pournelle has published since Larry Niven gave his career a leg up in the mid '70s is a case in point...)

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