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Since this is the Dune thread I'll post my thoughts on my recent readthrough of the first four books. I just read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune in a row. I wanted to catch up on them in time to see the movie in theaters. A lot of people keep telling me God Emperor is where they get good so maybe I’ll muscle through one more yet. Thoughts:
— Holy shit I feel like I’m stumbling across a conspiracy as I realize that half the fantasy and scifi since Dune was a ripoff of Dune. Star Wars? Just Dune if it was more fun. 40k? Just Dune if you put Leto II to sleep and make the humans fight various Aliens, while really grappling with the scale of a galaxy. It almost feels like a book of memes, a book of tropes that other writers would mix and match and remix into new forms. A Song of Ice and Fire is the worst though. It lines up near character for character, and it amazes me that I didn’t hear about it before. GRRM just took Paul and split him into three Stark sons: Jon Snow is Paul among the Fremen, Rob is Paul the Atreides duke seeking righteous revenge, Bran is Paul(/Leto II) transcending humanity and time itself. We’ve got the murderous young girl, we’ve got the scheming mother, we’ve got the thousands of years of dynasties that don’t go anywhere…on the other hand by comparison to Westeros:
— Why is the world of Dune so tiny and empty? The whole universe seems to consist of like, a few dozen people. The immense human suffering hand-waved off camera never matters, because we never get to know anyone at all. GRRM or Watchmen did a great job with this, Herbert doesn’t even try. The first group of Fremen that Paul and Jessica meet are of course perfectly suited to be Paul’s lieutenant’s to run the galaxy, none of them turn out to be greedy or lazy or incompetent, it’s a sort of galactic scale version of the star Basketball player putting his buddies from high school in charge of his money, except it all works out just fine. Out of all the other billions of people in the galaxy, none of them manage to work their way up to the inner circle. This is, to a certain extent, the core fantasy conceit of Dune: a fantasy of human genetics by which supermen can be bred, individually for Paul and en masse for the Fremen. The fantastical idea that Fremen were super soldiers and that it mattered that they were super soldiers, that living in the desert and fighting your mates a lot would make you ready to take on the Marines, and then if you got enough desert dudes who fought their mates a lot they’d take over the galaxy. History does not back up this idea. But that would have required creating new characters, and we can’t do that. Alia is inhabited by thousands of ancestral memories, souls of the powerful and legendary teeming for attention across centuries, as she loses control of them she is possessed by a nigh-impossible-to-understand terror from deep time…oh wait, no, it’s just the fat guy from the last book. This reaches its parodical pinnacle in Duncan Idaho, a pretty flat stock fantasy character who they physically keep recycling, bringing him back to life so he can sacrifice his life in ever more baroque ways. There are a decent number of named characters, but they’re generally all cardboard cutouts with motivations like “Duty” “Tradition” “Service to the Atreides” “idk I’m evil and want power” or the ever popular “confusing clusterfuck of past lives.” Which brings me to…
— None of the characters do normal things, ever. I understand that Paul, Leto II, Ghanema, Alia, and to a lesser extent Jessica are all supposed to be impossible to understand, they’re supposed to be beyond human comprehension, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes Human. But they never do things for fun. Paul doesn’t like anything, fine, sure, something something expanded consciousness he’s not really human. But no one likes anything. The only people who like anything at all are the villains: Vlad likes murder-fucking boys, Farad’n likes history, Piter wants to fuck Jessica. I guess I’ll spot you Gurney, he likes music, on occasion. None of the named Fremen like anything, except disapproving of other unnamed Fremen liking things. It’s a flat, empty, unpopulated universe. Compare to ASoIAF: Westeros is crammed too full of people who like too many things. They are constantly pinging off each other’s desires, even at times when it doesn’t make any sense. Dune only discusses sex at a disgusted remove, sexuality is unhinged rape, or it is dutiful bonds of marriage, or it is a man being seduced to have his vital fluids drained by a Bene Gesserit. Nobody ever has sex just for fun, the closest we get is some weirdness around Alia in Messiah, but everyone gets together and says “Lets just marry her off to the much older zombie, that will shut her up.” The next time she has sex for pleasure, it’s a sure sign that she’s been inhabited by a Demon (uh, the fat guy from the last book). Nobody ever does anything just for fun. Tolkien’s characters are so much deeper and more human, Sam falls in love with a pretty girl and likes gardening, Bilbo writes up his adventures in a book, Legolas and Gimli compete over how they’ll improve Minas Tirith with their own special skills after the war is over, even Gandalf has his little pleasures of a smoke and telling stories.
— Kudos to Herbert though: he could write a good novel. What’s impressive about Dune is that each of the first four novels stand alone. If Herbert had died or quit writing in the universe after any of the four, the saga is perfectly well concluded. Dune could end with “Paul won, but he sees the Jihad coming” and it’s a satisfying conclusion. Dune Messiah could conclude with the twins born and we just imagine what happens next. Children of Dune could end with Leto II becoming snek and just leave it to the imagination. In the modern world of the obligatory trilogy, or of GRRM failing to ever finish his sprawling series at all, the stands out. At the same time each novel begins naturally, there’s no sense of “hey I thought we settled all that in the last book” or “where the fuck did [new galactic threat] come from?” that ruins so many sequels. Herbert deserves a ton of credit for plotting his novels so that each one is satisfying as a novel in and of itself. That requires a kind of discipline that is so often lacking.
So, anyone else have thoughts on “What if the sand had Cocaine in it and the weirdly Aryan Arabs all got so high they became invincible?"
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