for the record, like almost all big classic sci-fi, these books (dune) are remarkably bigoted and reductive. i still like space stories and political intrigue tho.
alt text: Trade Offer from Sand Worm Leto Atreides. You receive: 4000 years of planet bound subjugation. Spice, eventually. Famine. Sex ninjas from outer space. Golden Path… I recieve: Like 70 something Duncan Idahos. Gentle Hwi.
I haven’t watched it, but I have read the main series and the prequel novel Asimov wrote late in life. I believe that one takes place around the first season of the show (Seldon making his early psychohistory investigations and finding the Empire is doomed). He does start including women there. Second half of the second book also has a prominent female character.
Keep in mind that those early works were done as short stories for Astounding Science Fiction under the guise of John Campbell. He’s responsible for guiding the golden age of SF. Much of it was good in terms of stories and ideas, but he didn’t give two shits about female characters. In fact, he never pressed anyone to have characters of any gender to be thicker than cardboard. Finding an interesting character in that era is rare.
Finding an interesting character in that era is rare.
Tangentially related, but reading some of the more progressive books that contemporary were seen as promoting freedoms sometimes leaves the opposite impression because of how big the difference is between old times and now. But I saw that with the books from the beginning of XX^th century, Asimov is a bit less different if I remember correctly
Interesting, i havent read it yet but i’d read about the plot generally, what people thought about it, and what kind of person the author was. I could definitely see how these would manifest in his writing based on what i’ve read. Im still gonna read it bc the premise is fascinating but im glad im going into it with a more critical mind. Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
Leto II was trying to free humanity from the tyranny of prescience. It took a 4000 year selective breeding program to produce Siona who was invisible to the future. It was the undoing of the Golden Path of Paul Muad’dib.
Absolutely but it still kinda fits with the story.
Mankind, all the eggs in one basket.
Some evil is coming… and mankind just tends to want to congregate
So… what they need is a truly horrible despot whose influence and power is so absolute that once they’re free of him they’ll disperse and never look back.
So… yeah… it makes a kind of odd sense… still bonkers though
Yes, “teach them a lesson they’ll feel in their bones.” Although I thought the focus of being a despot, along with the Scattering, was to teach a humanity a lesson about avoiding the “Pharaonic Disease”; to reject authoritarians.
That was one of the points, yes. The lives of almost all humans in the galaxy were reduced to the same conditions, and put under ever increasing authoritarianism, that they would all break at once and forever have a shared hatred for despots.
Curiously this was an objective of the French Reign of Terror, to create consequences for an oppressive ruling class so dire it would make tyranny unthinkable. It didn’t work in the short term (as demonstrated by the recurring piles of heads when the aristocracy forgot about the last batch.)
Of course, French history doesn’t have oracles, but the Hellenists did, and still nobody listened to Cassandra.
Yeah, later books seem like Frank Herbert was way too obsessed with sex. The idea of Honored Maitres as using sex to control humans seemed pretty misogynistic, even at the time (yes, eventually there was a guy, too). Still, I think the whole “put humanity in a pressure cooker so they explode outwards when the lid is gone” concept was pretty thought-provoking. Also the Siona project; if prescience is a real thing in that universe, it can be studied and understood, then weaponized. How do you defend against an enemy that knows where and when you’ll be?
I’m reading Chapterhouse right now and my God Frank has some real sexual issues doesn’t he? I thought the Idaho gholas in God-Emperor were weird enough.
Still, as a critique on power structures, Dune as a whole is phenomenal
Jesus, i bought one of those from a little book store years ago because “cool cover!”
I remember that I was making small talk with the clerk/owner and said something like “this book looks rad!” And he gave me one of those slightly long “suuurree” replies.
I was maybe 30 pages in later and just put it down. “Really fucked up misogyny as a civilization” aint exactly a great genre.
It gets overlooked today, but Barron Harkonnen is a gay stereotype. Overlooked because gay men being hyperviolent is a stereotype that’s long died out, but it was a thing.
Dune starts in a weird place and it gets weirder as it goes.
IIRC, Frank Herbert very explicitly described how Leto II was applying homosexuality to his Fish Speakers in order to keep control over the violent traits common for any army. Luckily, it was just a few pages of it.
Then in the last book he started writing about Space Jews and I got a little frightened where that might end up…
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