#dune reread

[uhtreds]

that Mohaim simultaneously affirms Paul's humanity while reminding him that his existence ultimately means nothing to the order of things if he is not the Kwisatz Haderach is. woof. the Bene Gesserit MO

[uhtreds]

anyway "that which submits rules" is one of the rawest lines of all time

[uhtreds]

the Gaius Helen-Jessica relationship is so important to me. motherhood without mothers. "Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings" "you're as dear to me as any of my own daughters"

"You make me feel like I'm a little girl again, reciting the first lesson. 'Humans must never submit to animals'." "I've been so lonely."

"It should be one of the tests. Humans are almost always lonely."

[firespirited]

God emperor of Dune:

Frank needed to stop toying via Leto with the characters and the reader for the page count. It gets so so tedious. Just say what you mean, puhlease. I mean I love Leto the tortured 'god' who's still a kid at heart to bits and the journals aren't bad but the endless talking in circles while his counsellor wonders if he's going to get killed 🙄.

But the bits where Leto isn't attempting to speak in riddles are:

hunky Duncy getting all the ladies (he makes one climax just from watching his climbing skills),

a defence of gayness in the army that takes a U turn right back into hardcore homophobia and gender essentialist ick,

weirdo commentary about people somehow going soft and losing humanity if their life isn't 24/7 struggle?!?

Hate to break it to you Frank but historically those great writers, thinkers and inventors had a bunch of free time because the wife did the chores and they had a wealthy patron or undemanding job or *fake gasp* government grants and basic incomes. I believe you wrote one of these on a beach. Cooome ooon.

I do love Hwi and seeing Leto get some small joys, he even finds amusement in his end.

The tragedy is complete for me. No interest in rereading the sex magic dominatrix follow ups.

Spoilers and monster sex logistics under the cut

The book makes the assumption that he must have been right to make this sacrifice of himself and of mankind because that was the only way to survive but the question remains: are there flaws and biases to long term prescience? Especially by relying so heavily on the past and on your ancestors instead of bringing in imaginative minds, non rulers, people who are just good for the sake of being good...

Who's to say that 3500 years of teaching humanity couldn't be done by actually educating people. It's a patronizing and narrow view of pedagogy and empathy. What wonderful things we accomplish when given a collective problem and enough recourses to solve it.

Absolutely hilarious that the mega threat ends up solved a few books later by making friends with the machine sentience.

Woops. Leto should have watched Sesame Street instead of being tortured with LSD by his grandma.

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I must add some TMI: Leto spends quite a time lamenting not being able to have sex with Hwi so we get a Hwi Duncan sex scene before her wedding to Leto. Why? It's not that he's a giant worm, she's decided to love him anyway: It's no penis.

Now Leto is a gigantic worm who burns in water but his face and hands are still human and he has access to all sorts of ixian tech. His body vibrates naturally. He tells us he's visited all sorts of past orgies in his mind. He has lesbians as his personal guards. We know Hwi doesn't mind getting close to him. There is absolutely no reason why Leto couldn't give Hwi a series of megagasms and tap into her head by giving her some spice like the sietch communal trips.

He could do some internal cell searching, build a pleasure gland somewhere only Hwi would know about if he couldn't tap in to what she was feeling.

Herbert tried to build an impossible sex divide but instead revealed a complete lack of imagination/catholic cowardice so his martyr god could die technically a virgin. Or maybe just to give Duncan the sex scene.

[firespirited]

It's the full-blown flu. bollocks.

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Dune nitpicking again: Children of Dune edition.

+Mr Herbert bled/bilad means village to millions of people not a plain of dunes, it is very weird to keep expecting a place full of people and then be reminded you mean some kind of empty sand space.

+“Lady Jessica ordered you to differentiate between the wolf and the dog, between ze'ed and ke'leb”

This does not apply to the MENA desert people where the difference between dog and wolf is just size and hunting range not tame and wild.

Dogs are for shepherds or as guards and were/are considered unclean to have in the house regardless of whether that's some kind of Arabic or Hebrew reference.

+It was super weird to undermine of the best tragic romances so far with a single line about how Duncan Idaho only wanted a Jessica surrogate. Alia was a mess but it's a dirty move that she wasn't even fully loved by her husband. I'll always think that was overkill.

+Can't wait for tiktok to get read this book after Messiah comes out and make Paul tulpas, shift to the duniverse and Bene Gesserit fictional systems.

[firespirited]

It's probably been said a hundred times before but Frank Herbert really has the most hilarious gaps in his very elaborate worldbuilding... about women.

Paul bargains with the Bene Gesserit offering his sperm but no sex... and they're all up in arms about no technological interference, no lab grown embryos!!! and it's like, dude, you could have run this manuscript by your wife so she could have the talk about turkey basters and why Onan (from whom we get Onanism) threw his seed into the dirt so Tamar couldn't conceive.

Then he's talking about a ritual about retrieving and reclaiming precious amniotic fluid and zero mention of the placenta.

We have talk of unusually fast blood clotting as a genetic trait but not what that would mean for periods or pregnancy in general.

There's a bunch of much bigger ruder things you really have to sort of groan at (mostly cultural/historical mishmashes) and ignore so you don't curse him and drop the book.

[firespirited]

Dune Messiah is the one i read as a teen. Must have been after seeing Dune84 or maybe those memories are blurring together because this time around the descriptions of the guild navigator in his tank don't match my memories.

This time, he's a little more abe sapien but in orange than the fleshy admiral akbar that's mostly head of my recollections.

Oddly enough, Momoa fits as Duncan Idaho - that was inspired casting! He has that chill self confidence bordering on cocky we've seen in other roles.

I don't see any of the current actors who've played him as Paul. I assumed he had pale tan olive skin like his dad or they'd have made a big deal of how pink and pale he was, how he'd get red and blistered in even a small walk in the sun, the way you smell slightly cooked. Yeah, we'd moved to southern climes and I wasn't adapting well.

I remembered the absolute slog through the first chapters then the loneliness and grieving of futures, trying to hold back the inevitable. must have been 15-16 because I thought I had MS but wasn't willing to say it out loud.

No idea what language I read it in, I do remember being annoyed at how pretentious the language was. A lot of talking to say nothing then these inspired little moments when he communicated crystal clear.

At first it made sense to communicate the tediousness of ruling, religious speak, business speak and whatnot then you get to a point where you realize the author's just going to be Like That. LMAO.

The price of getting a great story is sometimes having it delivered by the author's voice.

I actually was relieved that this one was more sympathetic to women (which says a lot about the sci-fi and fantasy I was stuck with) and the breeding programs were treated as something nasty.

I really enjoy having the confrontation between old memories and new reading especially as they're so different and changed this time.

As a counter example: LOTR hasn't changed much, it just gets more textured every time you revisit. The films didn't change the sense of it at all. It's not that I get a detailed image of faces and places, it's more a very vivid sense of emotions and characters. The way i don't see an apple when you say apple, i see the concept of an apple, many types and tastes and textures of apple. Gandalf is not Ian McKellen: he's a mess of actors, animation, wizard and mentor archetypes, like there's more Obi Wan in the original trilogy and snippets of Willem Defoe as Jesus (I haven't even seen the full movie) than Ian McKellen despite him doing a great job.

So having less of an attachment to Dune and only having seen 'the full picture' of the saga a couple of years ago means revisiting the one* read a long time ago is more of a collision of ideas.

*I actually don't know if I read any more at the time, I only know I read this one because it's bringing up familiar images.

Like a lot of you, I devoured books where ever whenever, whatever was available, lots of them half read because of skimming to get to the plot details, lots of meh, lots of blurring together of the same tropes.

I had a particular fondness of novellas and collections of short stories because once in a while there'd be one that really packed a punch or made you imagine something astonishing. The internet regularly coughs up some of those: as fiction, as essays or an interpretation of fiction or an event and that's as exciting as finding that one short story in a book of mostly blarg.

[firespirited]

DUNC Movie vs dune book continued:

Movie was missing Jessica's admiration for the fremen. Not just as a resource but as warriors and so well adapted to a tough environment (lots of weirdo survival of the fittest vibes in Herbert's books)

Her profound respect for Stilgar's intelligence and leadership.

I'd misremembered Paul having a choice to die to save from bloody jihad during his fight with Jamis, he's so overwhelmed by possibilities he can't see any clearly except his death. He sees that directly afterwards as he's asked to choose a name. He thinks he's subverted the prophecy by being paul-muadib not just muadib. oh silly boy

But by the time Jamis is turned into water and given to the cavern. Paul can't see any way out of jihad, even if he died there. He's not fully willing to accept that the prescience is real so he keeps missing the moments where he could possibly turn back and for now since he only knows it'll happen even if he's dead by his mother or sister, he hates Jessica.

The water of life ceremony is beautifully described and probably not easy to convey on camera. A lot more communal than what was shown in dune84 or DUNC2. There's a shifting of power to Jessica over Paul that happens here. Chani has to remove Paul from the group ecstasy because he's beaming psychic visions at everyone. It's adorable.

It adds dimension that the fremen have enraged the sardaukar and they'd be at war risking fremen genocide with or without a messiah.

He's made the skull shrine - idiot.

The minor hive mind properties of the spice would sure dispel a bit of the zombie arab/oriental peril horde trope as would showing the many disagreements.

Very different vibes to the Gurney reunion where Gurney finds Paul cruel and calculating instead of inciting the revenge.

It's as I remembered and felt during the film: Paul is different.

But while I have lots of issues with the films I totally understand why Villeneuve wrote that treatment. DUNC1 was stopped by the pandemic and if DUNC messiah doesn't make it to completion it needs to be clear this is a tragedy. The final ten minutes work at making the spectacular rise and victories feel hollow and lonely if not as foreboding as I'd hoped.

This is an adaptation for the general public with an emphasis on worldbuilding and spectacle, it made sense to make Feyd as grossnasty as the baron and Paul more pathetic, emphasize Chani as the voice of dissent. Make Jessica more villainous as the representative of BG religious control.

I've got 200 pages left.