Dune

I finished reading this a couple of days ago. Um. Eh? The worldbuilding was pretty good, but other than that, um... the constant thing of how apparently the space!Arab Fremen are on the verge of breaking into a 'bloody' and 'wild' war, and their entire culture is manipulated by off-planeters as much as they like. (the Missionara Protectiva and the ecology stuff being from father Kynes was a bit much)

Then there's Paul Atreides. Such a Sue. Everyone constantly falling over themselves to say "You did that on remarkably few clues" and "No girl child ever suffered so much" (oh yeah, and what's up with the male seer being able to access both male and female pasts? Why not just male?) and "He's a man not a child" and then he can beat people who've actually fought for their lives when he is trained for shields and he's better than everyone at sensing stuff and he's perfect tactician guy and...

Oh, just shut up.

There's a reason for all that, if you read a bit deeper. Yes, Paul is Crazy Awesome, but it's because he's the product of a centuries-long stock breeding program designed to produce exactly such a person, except that he came one generation too early and as a result fucked up everyone's plans.

He wasn't supposed to rally the Fremen, usurp the Imperial throne, and send them on a galactic pogrom; the intent was for Jessica's daughter to breed with Feyd al-Rautha, with the resultant Kwisatz Haderach becoming the Bene Gesserit's tool to take the throne and weld the warring factions of humanity together. Paul escaped their control and went rogue, but creating that type of person was precisely their intent. If anything, the story is a lesson of what happens when you play around with prescience; it has a habit of outwitting you.

If you want to see just how badly being a Messianic Archetype with the power of precognition sucks, read the next book.

Oh, and if you want to see just how easy it is to whip a survivalist culture into religious fervor, you have only to look at, well, countless examples of that in human history.

edited 18th Feb '14 4:42:19 PM by Fighteer

Desert dwellers invading and smashing everyone is a classic pattern indeed.

And seeing both the male and female pasts isn't actually that strange when you think about it. Why? Well, women only have the X chromosome, while men have both X and Y. Admittedly that doesn't explain it that much, but the Y chromosome is a part of the DNA that is exclusively male. (Genetic illnesses notwithstanding).

edited 18th Feb '14 8:43:29 AM by Zendervai

Ahem. That's not quite right.

Did I get it backwards? Oops.

Fixed it.

edited 18th Feb '14 8:43:38 AM by Zendervai

The reason given in the novels has nothing to do with X-Y chromosomes; the precise mechanism of Genetic Memory is left unexplained, probably on purpose, as it's completely fanciful. We know how much information is stored in genes and it's far too little for even one person's memories, let alone an entire bloodline.

Instead, they talk about differences between the male and female psyche. Female Reverend Mothers can look into the male side of their genetic past but it's utterly terrifying to them. They refer to it as the place they "dare not look". In fact, one of Paul's lines at the end to the Reverend Mother Mohiam is, "Look into that place where you dare not look; you'll find me there staring back at you!" ^note This may be a film-only line; I don't remember offhand and my copies of the books are packed up at the moment.

For some unexplained reason the male half of the genetic memory is so psychologically shattering to a mature female that they simply can't experience it. The counterpart to this is that every male who attempts the spice agony dies from it. Of course, that doesn't apply to the pre-born, like Alia, Leto II, and Ghanima, probably because they are immersed in their genetic past from the beginning of their consciousness and have no opportunity to develop mental blocks.

The agenda of the Bene Gesserit is to breed a male Reverend Mother — a person who can survive the spice agony and incorporate the male and female halves of their genetic memory. They believe that this will create a true prescient, someone able to predict the future out of their perfect knowledge of the past. They want to use this person to give themselves complete political domination of human civilization.

Of course, what they don't anticipate is that their promised messiah will predict their moves as well and might have a different agenda. That's why they are so terrified of losing control of Paul.

One last note: In later novels, the experience of Paul and his son has left the Bene Gesserit so scarred that they utterly disavow the idea of a Kwisatz Haderach and should their breeding program show signs of producing a true prescient, they execute that individual immediately. In fact, this was Leto II's purpose: his "Golden Path" was designed precisely to show humanity the folly of relying on prescience. He wanted to erase the lure of the soothsayer from the human psyche.

edited 18th Feb '14 11:33:52 AM by Fighteer

Foundation-ing, huh?

"How do you get everyone to leave a large building at a set time?" "Set the building on fire." "How very clever and foreseeing of you."

edited 18th Feb '14 10:21:12 AM by TheHandle

Hence why it bugs me to no end that Pokémon X and Y was male and female respectively.

Y indeed...

¬_¬

There's a few interesting things about the Dune series I noticed on a second of third read. Things like the Bene Tleilax off-handedly mentioning "oh, we created a Kwisatch Haderach too. A couple of them, in fact". Or the impressively alien (to me as a 20th century Westerner) mindset of a lot of the characters regarding things like assasination, personal freedom, attitudes to the sanctity of human life, etc. It was also the first sci-fi I remember reading which involved itself deeply with religion, spirituality, mysticism, etc. Before that, I'd mostly read a lot of Asimov and Clarke, both of whom were very rational in their writing.

It also inspired vast swathes of Warhammer 40,000 - perhaps more than any other single source. Some of that was unusual to me, since I was familiar with 40k before reading Dune.

Fighteer:

One of the appendices pretty much spells that out, doesn't it?

So, Early-Installment Weirdness on the prescience? What with the long passages about how even the flicker of a light could change everything in Dune and then apparently after that seeing the future makes it happen... what?

I'm not sure which specific passages you're referring to, but the point is that Dune is a pivot — a key point in time where the slightest shift can send the galaxy tumbling towards a new destiny. Paul is the force that tips the rock off of its perch and sends it rolling. The direction it takes is the choice he makes. Actually, it's implied that he couldn't have stopped it even if he'd tried; he could only influence its path.

We find out later that his act of choosing a destiny out of all the myriad possibilities is what locks that destiny into place, so that even he cannot escape it. To continue the analogy, once the boulder is set in motion, it cannot be stopped until it's come to rest at the bottom. It takes a titanic force to change its path, and that force is provided... not by Paul, but by Leto II.

edited 11th Mar '14 6:52:22 AM by Fighteer

And the reason for that is because of the nature of the prescient visions. Prescients in the Dune universe do not see the future only moment-by-moment, but more often see causality of a set number of choices played out for years or even eons in a more general idea of what the future will be like. Thus, it is difficult to avert the rest of of a vision after parts of it have already been realized in the past and the effects of realizing it are already being felt. The prescient can always change the future, but they can't change the present or the past.

It should also be noted that the reason why Paul failed was not only because he had squandered a good opportunity to choose the right path, but also because he didn't want to. His love for Chani prevented him from following the harder path Leto II took.

edited 11th Mar '14 6:42:10 PM by shiro_okami

Paul choose the women he loved while Leto abandon his humanity in his quest for the golden path. It's not right to say he 'failed' to alter destiny, he realised it's costs and refused to.

Paul was, after all, too human, too tainted by a life as a Muggle to be able to untangle himself from ordinary loves, hopes, and fears.

Leto II, being pre-born, was immersed in genetic memory from the first moment of consciousness, and he could see what needed to be done without the attachment to an "ordinary" life. Even then, he had to struggle with the choice to fully abandon his humanity.

Does anyone know what is "Galactophasic Determinism"? It's mentioned as being the central creed of the Orange Catholic Bible, but I couldn't get anything concrete on what the term actually means for in-universe.

It might be something to do with 'phases' of the galaxy, similar to how Karl Marx believed that history moves in certain phases towards Communism. Presumably, the society we see in Dune is (or at least aspires to be) the end goal of Galactophasic Determinism- given how much Paul borrowed from the O.C.B., it's possible that Leto II's Golden Path was G.D. taken to its logical conclusion.

Legendary Entertainment Acquires Rights To Make ‘Dune’ Movie and TV Series

What, again?

Dune is one of those properties where people can't decide whether it's really unadaptable ... or whether it's just had bad luck. It feels just close enough to adaptable that folks will keep on taking whacks at it.

Also, the famous Giger/Moebius preliminary designs really affected a lot of fans. Now, from what we know of Jodorowsky's plans, I think it's a mercy that his movie didn't get made. However, the artwork was inspiring to a lot of people, and gave them a really strong sense of unrealized potential. After that, someone was bound to want to do the story justice.

The David Lynch version proved that a single movie isn't long enough for even just the first Dune novel.

The Sci-Fi series proved that a mini-series can get some decent depth into the story, but also that it needs a budget.

I guess we'll all see what Legendary can do.

I note that it's a bit silly to call Dune "the science fiction Lord of the Rings." They're not really alike in any way.

At the least, a single movie would have to perform miracles of show-don't-tell wizardry to deliver all the background info the story rests on without using (as de Laurentiis did) painfully dull exposition dumps that the audience won't follow anyway. I think a high-end cable series would be best.