I tend to see the Dune saga as a Monkey's Paw cautionary tale on some of the basic desires in many stories:
* You want to a messiah to lead you to freedom? You get a messianic vision and at the end you conquered a galaxy, lost your culture, and gained nothing.
* You want to leverage an highly-capable oppressed people and a well-engineered prophecy into revenge against your enemies? Be careful you don't burn the galaxy.
* You want to use thousands of years of eugenics, religious engineering, and careful training to create somebody with the powers of a prophet? Well, great news...
* You want prophecy? You get prophecy, and prophecy gets you.
In my reading Dune is not just a personal tragedy but also a tragedy of the hyper-competent: there's plenty of highly intelligent people and organizations in that universe, all of them with skills and planning horizons dwarfing ours, and not a single one of them gets anything remotely close to what they wanted, not because they failed to achieve their desires but because they failed to consider what winning would mean.
(Leto II does "succeed" ---if you take at face value his understanding of history and the alternate paths--- but most of "God Emperor" and much of what follows is about the personal cost of it.)
Bret Devereaux just about convinced me to like Dune I (I watched it twice in theatre and a couple more times at home.) But Dune II undid that good work. In my opinion, Villeneuve's reach has exceeded his grasp; he is aiming at a subtlety that he is unable to achieve. Although I am not a religious person, I grew up among religious people, and I have seen first hand that it is simply not true that the devout are all, or even mostly, either fools or charlatans. "Fundamentalist" is not a synonym for "devout"; it is closer to an antonym.
In Herbert's telling, the attempted manipulation of Fremen belief by the Bene Gesserit was turned back against the manipulators. He had an explanation for that too: the high level of Spice in their environment made them a little bit prescient; they foresaw for themselves the coming of their Mahdi. Now, it is one thing for Villeneuve to consciously reject that story line and create another. But is that truly what he did? Did he even understand Herbert's meaning? I am skeptical. The closest hint that he might is when he has Stilgar say "I don't care what you believe, I believe". But that scene is not treated especially sympathetically and the point of view is immediately dropped for more disparagement of the southern fundamentalists.
I do agree that Dune the book is problematic; I would call it a guilty pleasure. I also see a tension, or incoherence, but it is not the same as the one you see. Herbert thinks that "the race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity. It’s in the bloodstream—the urge to mingle genetic strains without plan." OK, that is not a thing, that is just an aspect of Herbert's weirdness, and one that is not very healthy. The story that Herbert is telling is that the Jihad is terrible for its victims, terrible for Paul Atreides who feels guilty for being the proximate cause of the Jihad, and in later books, maybe even terrible for its perpetrators, but that it is necessary for the health of "the race". That is some grade A bullshit right there.
I haven't read the Dune novels (just the Frank Herbert ones, not his son's) in many decades. I have seen the Lynch movie, the 2 SySy tv versions, and Dune Part 1. IIRC, the "universe" ruled by the emperor in this static feudal society has been going on for as long as our human history, and ever since the Butlerian Jihad eliminated AI's and robots. Spice is needed to maintain the ability to travel between worlds and was an obvious analogy to oil, but here restricted to Arrakis and was renewable.
Is the jihad that Paul Atreides, as Muad'dib really that bad in teh very long term? The Butlerian Jihad was presented as a "good thing" (very Romantic era thinking, not unlike the "back to nature" movement after WWII) as it upset the society of the time. Getting rid of a feudalistic society by industrialization (Slouching...), revolution (1917), or the Islamic Caliphate (post Mohammed), and even Nazism, all changed teh world ultimately for the better. This is "Creative destruction" by other means that can everntually lead to a better world/universe.
Of course one's POV depends on which side of the change you inhabit. Is the change really worse than teh prior situation - well that depends on one's position before and after the change. Despite Paul's visions of the future, which really end after his death in the desert, the future is unknowable. This is very different in reality to Asimov's pychohistory. [P K Dick explored the future of a dictator with a limited life in "The World Jones Made".] The horrors of the US Civil War, WW1 and WWII all ended up with better conditions for the peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. The Russian Revolution... not so much. Cherry-picking, perhaps. However, I see the overthrowing of the Padishah Emperor and teh subjucation of the Great Houses as an optimistic ending, even at the cost of the Jihad, which is not likely to be permanent, any more than the Roman Empire, the Mongols under Ghengis Khan, or the Islamic Caliphate.
If the control of Spice by the Fremen on Arrakis is analogous to the nationalization of ME oil and the "oil crisis" then it stimulated more efficient (or less profligate) oil use, and started the renewable energy transition. The Oil and gas majors are like the Great Houses controlling the Spice, while the "Green Energy Revolution" will eventually end that dominance and improve the biosphere. As we know from the Dune Books, Paul's son, Leto Atreidies eventually changes the climate on Arrakis, turning it green, and presumably ends most of the spice production. I can't recall how that affects teh Spacing Guild and interstellar travel.
Let me throw some more pieces of history and lore that may have influenced Herbert.
1. The Great Powers and their "Great Game". This is the Landsratt composed of the Great Houses.
2. The carving up of the ME after WWI. This is the control of ME oil to keep the Western Powers industrial growth continuing.
3. Dune was published in 1965, 3 years after David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" about the attempt to liberate the various arab tribes by having them join to defeat the Ottomans.
4. Paul Atreides from Caladan (green, wet, oceanic) = T. E. Lawrence (English)
5. The Pain test of Paul = Lawrence tolerating the pain of a flame on his hand.
6. The successful arab revolt that helps push the Ottomans out of the ME.
7. Now mix in later history: The Suez Crisis with Israel, France and England trying to control the canal that has been blocked by Egypt. "Let the spice flow!"
8. Post the novel, the nationalization of oil assets in the ME and the creation of OPEC. This is the result of failed Great Powers control of the oil which is analogous to the Fremen taking control of the spice from the Landsratt. Paul's visions of Jihad might be Herbert's thoughts of what might happen if Egypt and the other ME nations get control of the oil. At the time he would not have known about the shift in wealth to the ME nations and how it disrupted and influenced the West, especially in the 1970s.
9. Paul Atreidies' planning to overthrow the Harkonnen (Ottoman) control of Arrakis is perhaps not unlike Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom". And both are "white saviors".
Other elements of the novel I do not know where they came from. The female Bene Gesserit religious order and their breeding program for a Kwisatz Haderach. The Mentats seem to have no analogy unless it is the drug cults of the time with claims of extraordinary powers.. The Tleilaxu I thought of as the Japanese as they were the post-war rising nation with technical skills, but their dominance did not appear until the 1980s, although the US with its superior technologies could be the model for Tleilax in the 1960s. I recall popular books on the use of hallucinogenc mushrooms that claimed "mind expansion" and even "astral traveling". Are these the influences that herbert used to have spice both open Paul's mind to the future and the Spacing Guild to fold space for interstellar travel?
IIRC, Dune was the first "doorstop" of a novel, and in Britain, at least, far more influential than Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961).
I'm pleased to see someone else picked up on the Mideast oil thing. I probably read Dune in '73, so Mideast oil was on everyone's mind. I wasn't particularly impressed with the book. It was full of logical holes, but it was evocative as well as irritating. I read Dune Messiah a few years later, but I found it so bad that I couldn't finish it.
It has been a while since I've reread "Dune", but I recall there was also a thread of how The Force of Evolution* or the Unconscious Overmind of Humanity or something *wanted* the jihad for the genetic recombination it would bring about.** And was going to get it one way or another, regardless of what Paul or anyone else wanted.
* Yes, I know that's not how evolution works.
** Which brings up another nasty subtext to go with the genocide.
The appearance of the Jihad of Muhammed's followers and their conquest of Persian and Byzantine territories isn't a religious anti-colonial revolt? I mean, after the fact, we see the Caliphate as a repressive empire, but of course, like the Romans, the Muslims saw and presented themselves as liberators, yes?
Herbert is giving us the story of Muhammed for good or ill. The entire argument about futures is whether a controlled breeding program designed to produced a messiah to service the needs of an repressive empire has a worse eventual outcome than an uncontrolled breeding program effected by the jihad of a new religion. Which produces an even more repressive empire.
I don't think there's an answer to know there that Herbert coild give you because he was copying off history's homework. What I think Burke is actually opposing is the lack of democracy, which ok, fine, but Herbert was working off the history of the appearance of a new religion in a wholly undemocratic era.
Come to think the underlying theme, besides 'I'm churning out books for money' is that 'civilization is brutally trapped in history's coils and even an all-powerful prophet can't fix that.'
Kinda pessimistic really.
elm
it's a story - i read it so long ago and i don't feel the need to return to that particularly claustrophobic tale
"What I think Burke is actually opposing is the lack of democracy, which ok, fine, but Herbert was working off the history of the appearance of a new religion in a wholly undemocratic era..."—well, yes; the inherited narrative tropes and historical models that mean that a bildungsroman of a young human acquiring mastery in the sense of expertise (and the prestige and the ability to solve problems that gains) must also acquire mastery in the sense of domination.
The question is why Burke thinks that this is "imperial" and "colonial" logic—and that the story is one that forces the reader to approve of this. That, in my view, is the interesting story...
I read some Sci-Fi when I was a lot younger, mostly Heinlein. Once I read Raymond Chandler and then Ross McDonald, the Noir world was mine. I don't think I've read a Sci-Fi book other than William Gibson and some of Philip K. Dick. Obviously, I'm not at all interested in the Dune movie.
Despite all the bad behavior in “Dune” this would be an amazing universe to actually live in. First of all, they have spaceships that can travel faster than light (with none of the real world problems that stem from general relativity.) You also get the impression that in this universe the cost of travel is cheap; that even a poor person could afford a third class ticket to travel to some distant planet. And there are millions, maybe billions of planets to choose from. So who cares if there are jihads, and empires, and greedy guilds? We have all that right here on Earth, and in the real world, we’re not going anywhere.
" ...and watch out that long-outdated and, even, evil ways of thinking about other human beings do not leak over from the stories we tell into your own wetware."
Lol! And definitely don't use them as an operations manual.
The thing about Dune is that you need to read the 5 novels that Frank Herbert wrote and consider the 6th volume that was unwritten at the time of his death. One should ignore the novels written by his son. From my perspective a key theme is the danger of charismatic leaders because everyone makes mistakes and when they do they move massive numbers of people with them. A second question I have always wondered about -- did the Emperor Leto fail to maintain his sanity. I suspect that bringing back Duncan over and over and over again was an attempt to maintain his sanity by giving him a fixed point but I have doubts that it succeeded.
The protagonist will kill billions. That's more troubling than a tragedy and worse than morally ambiguous. Can the author / director still make us root for the protagonist? That's a fun challenge for a story teller. How do you do it? With religion and revenge, of course.
I tend to see the Dune saga as a Monkey's Paw cautionary tale on some of the basic desires in many stories:
* You want to a messiah to lead you to freedom? You get a messianic vision and at the end you conquered a galaxy, lost your culture, and gained nothing.
* You want to leverage an highly-capable oppressed people and a well-engineered prophecy into revenge against your enemies? Be careful you don't burn the galaxy.
* You want to use thousands of years of eugenics, religious engineering, and careful training to create somebody with the powers of a prophet? Well, great news...
* You want prophecy? You get prophecy, and prophecy gets you.
In my reading Dune is not just a personal tragedy but also a tragedy of the hyper-competent: there's plenty of highly intelligent people and organizations in that universe, all of them with skills and planning horizons dwarfing ours, and not a single one of them gets anything remotely close to what they wanted, not because they failed to achieve their desires but because they failed to consider what winning would mean.
(Leto II does "succeed" ---if you take at face value his understanding of history and the alternate paths--- but most of "God Emperor" and much of what follows is about the personal cost of it.)
Bret Devereaux just about convinced me to like Dune I (I watched it twice in theatre and a couple more times at home.) But Dune II undid that good work. In my opinion, Villeneuve's reach has exceeded his grasp; he is aiming at a subtlety that he is unable to achieve. Although I am not a religious person, I grew up among religious people, and I have seen first hand that it is simply not true that the devout are all, or even mostly, either fools or charlatans. "Fundamentalist" is not a synonym for "devout"; it is closer to an antonym.
In Herbert's telling, the attempted manipulation of Fremen belief by the Bene Gesserit was turned back against the manipulators. He had an explanation for that too: the high level of Spice in their environment made them a little bit prescient; they foresaw for themselves the coming of their Mahdi. Now, it is one thing for Villeneuve to consciously reject that story line and create another. But is that truly what he did? Did he even understand Herbert's meaning? I am skeptical. The closest hint that he might is when he has Stilgar say "I don't care what you believe, I believe". But that scene is not treated especially sympathetically and the point of view is immediately dropped for more disparagement of the southern fundamentalists.
I do agree that Dune the book is problematic; I would call it a guilty pleasure. I also see a tension, or incoherence, but it is not the same as the one you see. Herbert thinks that "the race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity. It’s in the bloodstream—the urge to mingle genetic strains without plan." OK, that is not a thing, that is just an aspect of Herbert's weirdness, and one that is not very healthy. The story that Herbert is telling is that the Jihad is terrible for its victims, terrible for Paul Atreides who feels guilty for being the proximate cause of the Jihad, and in later books, maybe even terrible for its perpetrators, but that it is necessary for the health of "the race". That is some grade A bullshit right there.
:-)
I haven't read the Dune novels (just the Frank Herbert ones, not his son's) in many decades. I have seen the Lynch movie, the 2 SySy tv versions, and Dune Part 1. IIRC, the "universe" ruled by the emperor in this static feudal society has been going on for as long as our human history, and ever since the Butlerian Jihad eliminated AI's and robots. Spice is needed to maintain the ability to travel between worlds and was an obvious analogy to oil, but here restricted to Arrakis and was renewable.
Is the jihad that Paul Atreides, as Muad'dib really that bad in teh very long term? The Butlerian Jihad was presented as a "good thing" (very Romantic era thinking, not unlike the "back to nature" movement after WWII) as it upset the society of the time. Getting rid of a feudalistic society by industrialization (Slouching...), revolution (1917), or the Islamic Caliphate (post Mohammed), and even Nazism, all changed teh world ultimately for the better. This is "Creative destruction" by other means that can everntually lead to a better world/universe.
Of course one's POV depends on which side of the change you inhabit. Is the change really worse than teh prior situation - well that depends on one's position before and after the change. Despite Paul's visions of the future, which really end after his death in the desert, the future is unknowable. This is very different in reality to Asimov's pychohistory. [P K Dick explored the future of a dictator with a limited life in "The World Jones Made".] The horrors of the US Civil War, WW1 and WWII all ended up with better conditions for the peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. The Russian Revolution... not so much. Cherry-picking, perhaps. However, I see the overthrowing of the Padishah Emperor and teh subjucation of the Great Houses as an optimistic ending, even at the cost of the Jihad, which is not likely to be permanent, any more than the Roman Empire, the Mongols under Ghengis Khan, or the Islamic Caliphate.
If the control of Spice by the Fremen on Arrakis is analogous to the nationalization of ME oil and the "oil crisis" then it stimulated more efficient (or less profligate) oil use, and started the renewable energy transition. The Oil and gas majors are like the Great Houses controlling the Spice, while the "Green Energy Revolution" will eventually end that dominance and improve the biosphere. As we know from the Dune Books, Paul's son, Leto Atreidies eventually changes the climate on Arrakis, turning it green, and presumably ends most of the spice production. I can't recall how that affects teh Spacing Guild and interstellar travel.
Let me throw some more pieces of history and lore that may have influenced Herbert.
1. The Great Powers and their "Great Game". This is the Landsratt composed of the Great Houses.
2. The carving up of the ME after WWI. This is the control of ME oil to keep the Western Powers industrial growth continuing.
3. Dune was published in 1965, 3 years after David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" about the attempt to liberate the various arab tribes by having them join to defeat the Ottomans.
4. Paul Atreides from Caladan (green, wet, oceanic) = T. E. Lawrence (English)
5. The Pain test of Paul = Lawrence tolerating the pain of a flame on his hand.
6. The successful arab revolt that helps push the Ottomans out of the ME.
7. Now mix in later history: The Suez Crisis with Israel, France and England trying to control the canal that has been blocked by Egypt. "Let the spice flow!"
8. Post the novel, the nationalization of oil assets in the ME and the creation of OPEC. This is the result of failed Great Powers control of the oil which is analogous to the Fremen taking control of the spice from the Landsratt. Paul's visions of Jihad might be Herbert's thoughts of what might happen if Egypt and the other ME nations get control of the oil. At the time he would not have known about the shift in wealth to the ME nations and how it disrupted and influenced the West, especially in the 1970s.
9. Paul Atreidies' planning to overthrow the Harkonnen (Ottoman) control of Arrakis is perhaps not unlike Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom". And both are "white saviors".
Other elements of the novel I do not know where they came from. The female Bene Gesserit religious order and their breeding program for a Kwisatz Haderach. The Mentats seem to have no analogy unless it is the drug cults of the time with claims of extraordinary powers.. The Tleilaxu I thought of as the Japanese as they were the post-war rising nation with technical skills, but their dominance did not appear until the 1980s, although the US with its superior technologies could be the model for Tleilax in the 1960s. I recall popular books on the use of hallucinogenc mushrooms that claimed "mind expansion" and even "astral traveling". Are these the influences that herbert used to have spice both open Paul's mind to the future and the Spacing Guild to fold space for interstellar travel?
IIRC, Dune was the first "doorstop" of a novel, and in Britain, at least, far more influential than Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961).
I'm pleased to see someone else picked up on the Mideast oil thing. I probably read Dune in '73, so Mideast oil was on everyone's mind. I wasn't particularly impressed with the book. It was full of logical holes, but it was evocative as well as irritating. I read Dune Messiah a few years later, but I found it so bad that I couldn't finish it.
Did Jesus or Muhammad tussle with these thoughts. Did they forsee the blood dimmed tide they let loose on the world???
A lot of people don't have any problems with a "blood dimmed tide" if they are at the cutting edge of it.
It has been a while since I've reread "Dune", but I recall there was also a thread of how The Force of Evolution* or the Unconscious Overmind of Humanity or something *wanted* the jihad for the genetic recombination it would bring about.** And was going to get it one way or another, regardless of what Paul or anyone else wanted.
* Yes, I know that's not how evolution works.
** Which brings up another nasty subtext to go with the genocide.
well, yes... :-)
The appearance of the Jihad of Muhammed's followers and their conquest of Persian and Byzantine territories isn't a religious anti-colonial revolt? I mean, after the fact, we see the Caliphate as a repressive empire, but of course, like the Romans, the Muslims saw and presented themselves as liberators, yes?
Herbert is giving us the story of Muhammed for good or ill. The entire argument about futures is whether a controlled breeding program designed to produced a messiah to service the needs of an repressive empire has a worse eventual outcome than an uncontrolled breeding program effected by the jihad of a new religion. Which produces an even more repressive empire.
I don't think there's an answer to know there that Herbert coild give you because he was copying off history's homework. What I think Burke is actually opposing is the lack of democracy, which ok, fine, but Herbert was working off the history of the appearance of a new religion in a wholly undemocratic era.
Come to think the underlying theme, besides 'I'm churning out books for money' is that 'civilization is brutally trapped in history's coils and even an all-powerful prophet can't fix that.'
Kinda pessimistic really.
elm
it's a story - i read it so long ago and i don't feel the need to return to that particularly claustrophobic tale
"What I think Burke is actually opposing is the lack of democracy, which ok, fine, but Herbert was working off the history of the appearance of a new religion in a wholly undemocratic era..."—well, yes; the inherited narrative tropes and historical models that mean that a bildungsroman of a young human acquiring mastery in the sense of expertise (and the prestige and the ability to solve problems that gains) must also acquire mastery in the sense of domination.
The question is why Burke thinks that this is "imperial" and "colonial" logic—and that the story is one that forces the reader to approve of this. That, in my view, is the interesting story...
I read some Sci-Fi when I was a lot younger, mostly Heinlein. Once I read Raymond Chandler and then Ross McDonald, the Noir world was mine. I don't think I've read a Sci-Fi book other than William Gibson and some of Philip K. Dick. Obviously, I'm not at all interested in the Dune movie.
It is a good movie. Stirring spectacle. Lots of anticolonialist guerrilla warfare. Cool giant worms...
Despite all the bad behavior in “Dune” this would be an amazing universe to actually live in. First of all, they have spaceships that can travel faster than light (with none of the real world problems that stem from general relativity.) You also get the impression that in this universe the cost of travel is cheap; that even a poor person could afford a third class ticket to travel to some distant planet. And there are millions, maybe billions of planets to choose from. So who cares if there are jihads, and empires, and greedy guilds? We have all that right here on Earth, and in the real world, we’re not going anywhere.
" ...and watch out that long-outdated and, even, evil ways of thinking about other human beings do not leak over from the stories we tell into your own wetware."
Lol! And definitely don't use them as an operations manual.
The thing about Dune is that you need to read the 5 novels that Frank Herbert wrote and consider the 6th volume that was unwritten at the time of his death. One should ignore the novels written by his son. From my perspective a key theme is the danger of charismatic leaders because everyone makes mistakes and when they do they move massive numbers of people with them. A second question I have always wondered about -- did the Emperor Leto fail to maintain his sanity. I suspect that bringing back Duncan over and over and over again was an attempt to maintain his sanity by giving him a fixed point but I have doubts that it succeeded.
The protagonist will kill billions. That's more troubling than a tragedy and worse than morally ambiguous. Can the author / director still make us root for the protagonist? That's a fun challenge for a story teller. How do you do it? With religion and revenge, of course.