I mean they do have universal basic income on earth but apart from that humanity is all kinds of fucked. And it doesn't exactly get better as the story progresses.
The earth is united like the United States is united. The tribes just got bigger is all. Instead of NATO vs BRICS, the Expanse universe has Earthers vs Martians vs Belters. And people are suffering hard on earth as evidenced during Bobby’s trip to the ocean.
Example B of earth being shittastic is the entirety of The Churn novella
The story for The Churn is entirely Earth based and provides a description of what the average life in a crowded, metropolitan city is like in the world of the Expanse. The city of Baltimore has given way to a multitude of crime bosses, and organized black markets. There are multiple bosses who each keep a "family" of personal guards that operate the smuggling of goods, illegal memory implants, weapons smuggling, cybernetic implants, and other illegal goods and services. The story takes place over the course of about two days.
Not at all. It always looked like something in between for me. Humanity is still struggling but moving forward, and most people live under various kind of regimes but no big bad Empire.
Well the belters have it pretty rough and Mars is basically totalitarian. And without spoiling anything I'd suggest you keep reading, it is worth it :).
I have a question for you, fancy pantsy book reader on their own instance: should I watch the show and then read the books, read the books and then watch the show, or read the books and skip the show?
Doesn't really matter as the show ends three books short. You probably want to read them though rather than try and pick up from book 7 after the show as lots of characters were changed a bit in the show and one is killed due to off screen drama who should survive.
Well my pants aren't fancy at all thank you very much :p.
The show is great, and so are the books. Mostly I would start by watching the show which is, for the first season at least, much more polished imho (the writers of the book were also show runners). After that, the show ends at book 6 (there are 9 total) but several character arcs are tweaked so I would recommend reading at least books 3 to 6 before 7.
Watch the show and then read the books. In my opinion the show is fantastic and incredibly enjoyable (except for ending the series in what is obviously the middle of a significant plot thread, which is annoying) but the books are even better and spoiled the show a tinsy bit for me.
We do. In some of the set in the same universe novels but not written by Asimov there are references to Brain Fever. A disease that virtually 100% of humans get at least once that makes them dumb for life. All advancement in galactic culture comes from the like 1 out of a million people who were immune.
That would account for Dune. Dune only makes sense if you assume that everyone is stupid and living in a hazy of drugged religious fantasy. Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one. Thousands of years of eugenics defeated by 30 cents of earplugs. Dune everybody!
It probably is something that freaken dumb as it is Dune. An entire civilization enslaved and broken so inbred monarchy can play with swords. Leave it to those fucking morons to ban gays and women from the military and not discover how to defeat the sexy voice.
Know now that it is the year 18,238 after the great Sunni-Druid Jihad against the water parks. People are enslaved by space-witches that have the power of sexy voice and their halibasters-smegma (ancient swords) are useless.
Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one.
Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.
(In fact, in the later books a "corrupt" version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)
Lord, please deliver us from people with really "clever" hot takes that are horribly reductive and strained through the mesh of whatever synonym for "woke" won't get me downvoted.
Can't hear you. I have earbuds I got from the dollar store. You could try explaining it to me again but you might need a thinking-machine to do it with.
I agree. Some shrill inbred witch being a space-karen is not sexy.
Dune only works if you assume that the characters are idiots in a religious-drug filled haze. Now polish your space-sword we have to go fight the 19th Buddha-Jewish jihad against the Space-mushroom eater people under the rule of Space-Baron Singh of the space house whalefurer. They harvest space-fur from space-whales.
In the non-canon book Psychohistorical Crisis, the Dune universe is part of the past of the Foundation universe. The Fremon are known as the "Frightful People" to historians.
Spice is not a solution in dune in fact the whole 4th book and the end of the third are centered around forcing humanity to wean itself off spice so that it may evolve.
The central concept is that humanity must not depend on machine or drugs or complicated eugenics and must instead look inwards and improve itself by facing hardship.
In foundation (at least the start) the complicated maths is essentially there to prove that all establishments fail and survival requires constant change. Very differently from dune foundation sees technological superiority as key to this and importantly the ability for society to change in order to support the technological progress.
Even if you don't agree with the above neither book aims to "fight imperialist bullshit" if anything they both quite staunchly support the idea of a benevolent dictator controlling all.
Or is Dune about the folly of different types of dictatorship; sadistic, benevolent, religious or machiavellian? Taking only the first book (because that's as far as I've read) every leader is thwarted or confined by the consequences or weakness of their own style of leadership.
I read an interview where frank said that his intention was for Dune to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of charismatic leaders (which is to say, the "classic" hero archetype). Which - for the first book - tracks pretty well. The free are basically just used as cannon fodder for Paul to win back his power (and a lot more), then when he wins, he sets them loose on the universe because he can't control them.
The trouble I have with that though is that he goes on to contradict that point in later books, but I won't get into that because I don't want to spoil anything for you
It's honestly crazy how many people can read Dune and completely misunderstand the themes of the book.
Though to be fair, it sometimes feels like Frank himself didn't fully understand what themes he was going for. Books 1-3 were staunchly "Beware of heroes, charismatic leaders will lead you to evil and despair", then in GEoD, we find that literally the only hope for humanity was millenia of oppression by a totalitarian government.
But either of those two takes is still wildly better than "spice saves the universe" lol
Everyone was out for themselves or their narrow view of what was just and best for humanity from their simplistic and self-centered perspective.
Leto 2 was the exception because he was out for his narrow view of what was best for humanity from his broad, self-centered perspective that still didn't really lead anywhere.
The actual point of the books is that no ideal survives the test of real time, and over time civilization tends to ossify, so we are doomed to catastrophe by our very nature.
I mean, I feel like manipulating a whole culture's established religious beliefs to place themself at the highest seat of power and war a holy war in their name is a pretty poignant display of "religion bad, m'kay"
My partner never read the books and easily caught the massive religious manipulation angle through the film. The even more massive scale of it all was obviously not revealed because of when it takes place, but it's still present
If you haven't read the books the movie makes no sense. It's nothing but a string of half-ass book references and pretty scenery. Even having read the books the movie was still all over the place. It was a string of individual scenes with barely anything to connect them besides having the same characters.
And since I'm finally venting about it, if they were going to just focus on visuals, they could have at least gotten the scale right. They have these giant buildings and ships alluding to a mass of people keeping it operational. Then we never see more than like, 6 people. And the one scene where they pulled out all of the people at the climax, where it makes sense to show every soldier during an all hands emergency, we see, like, 50 people. They're supposed to have thousands of soldiers. Losing a dozen soldiers in the book would have been acceptable losses. The movie force we see, that would cripple them.
Also, it should have ended just after the attack. Use all that extra time to actual get you invested in House Atreides and Paul. In anything really. That movie was so bad. I've always like Lynch's Dune for it's insanity, but compared to the new one, it's a legitimately good movie. At least there's a story.
The original movie was good for the art direction and fantastic acting by supporting characters.
That's kinda where it ends though, comparing the two of them, the new Dune features human emotion which is pretty cool; all the main characters were kind of animatronic feeling in the old one imo.
The source material has limitations. It is difficult to make characters have depth when in the novel they have none. If you sit down and try to describe the characters of Dune you can really only do it by their job or what they did in the novel. You can't describe their personalities. Compare this to Star Wars.
But, the book characters were intentionally written to be pretty emotionally flat? The Gom Jabbar scene... Jessica showing emotion doesn't make it a bad scene, but it kind of undercuts how the Bene Gesserit work. Their whole thing is conquering their emotions and being composed and in control all the time. Jessica's turmoil is internal while her face is stoic. That's her whole character at that point in the book. she's not a very good Bene Gesserit, but she's faked it real well.
Except Duncan and Gurney. They should have had personality. That's Their purpose in the books. To be the ones who show Paul what being a real human is like beyond the Duke (laden with responsibility and the knowledge that his entire house and the thousands of people that rely on it are teetering on a knife's edge) and Jessica (basically a magic robot concubine who was raised from birth with the sole purpose of furthering a generations long genetic project her captors teachers were working toward). They're meant to be a breath of fresh air that give Paul the foundation to be a real boy.
Ok, either the internet can't identify a great joke or... no, I guess the only reasonable explanation is that your comment whooshed over people's heads.
It's all good, I mean I read both of the books like ages ago and those were the only things that bubbled up out of the scary dark corners of my memory when the opportunity presented itself.
Nah, I used that a lot back in the day. It's just crazy that I'm seeing some real trends of interoperability between services. ActivityPub is a dream come true for me.
After his mother's death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that it impacted his performance: "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month."[66] After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.[67]
the "moment of relief when the pain recedes" kind of fun. And then you realize you made a trivial mistake in the beginning and all your conclusions were useless.
Your right about them not necessarily relying on the spice melange, but they do rely on the juice of the sapho root to accelerate their thoughts and increase their processing speed. So yeah, they're still on drugs :)
I find coffee to be up to the task to come up with plans that are better than "let's give my enemy the best thing ever, because he migjt mess it up and to get his guy to betray him we will torture his wife". Yeah real wheels within wheels 4D chess going on right there.
The Culture weren't actually the future of humanity though right? Non-canon stuff has indicated we join eventually in the future but the society formed independent of us and even visit and examine us in one.
Arthur C. Clarke: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from encountering benevolent alien intelligence we haven't discovered yet.
Ray Bradbury: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from rediscovering the beauty of books and humanity's inherent capacity for empathy in a world we're rapidly forgetting.
Robert A. Heinlein: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from pioneering individualism, libertarianism, and multi-planetary colonies we haven't established yet.
William Gibson: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from navigating and subverting the interplay of high technology and low life in a cybernetic reality we're only beginning to understand.
Ursula K. Le Guin: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from understanding and integrating a spectrum of social, psychological, and cultural perspectives we haven't fully considered yet.
Neal Stephenson: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from unprecedented technological and social innovation, often resulting from deep historical and philosophical introspection, in a future we're yet to engineer.
Octavia Butler: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from embracing and adapting to change through the lens of bio-diversity and sociocultural evolution we haven't fully embraced yet.
Douglas Adams: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense and humanity will almost completely be erased, but as a matter of fact, there is much more and weirder nonsense out there, which of course makes the previously mentioned nonsense quite nonsensical and thus the destruction of humanity quite unimportant from a galactic point of view. (Where this point is located, has been a debate for aeons.)
Gene Roddenberry: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from remotely incubating and uplifting improbably humanoid alien species across vast swaths of existence to shore up our defenses against mysterious adversaries that plot our extinction for reasons they've not monologued yet.
Every fantasy author (except Tolkien): We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from an individual or small group who will save the world through the judicious application of violence.
Gene Wolfe: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from traversing complex, labyrinthine narratives and deciphering symbolic, metaphysical riddles we haven't begun to understand yet.
Don't we eventually find out the AIs are oppressing the humans and siphoning off their life-force/brain-power through the use of the portal system and that humanity's actual salvation comes from deeply believing in the power of love to the point of developing the ability to teleport to beloved places and people?
Isaac Asimov: we're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity's salvation will come from using math we haven't discovered yet
Frank Herbert: we're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity's salvation will come from tripping on drugs we haven't discovered yet
I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.
Please provide a link in addition to a screenshot when you are referring to a post in the fediverse. You can easily link to a mastodon post from Lemmy since both are federated, and if you do it, your post will magically appear as a response to the original mastodon post.
Also the spice is never deemed a path to salvation. it is merely an integral ressource that is stabilizing the human order by mutual dependence. In the later books the problem is explored what happens when the ressource becomes less integral/more abundant, removing the mutual dependence.
I don't really agree that the spice wasn't put forward as a way to salvation. I think it clearly was key to finding the golden path.
The spice enabled the Bene Gesserit to see what was needed in their breeding program, and they were trying to breed Kwisatz Haderach who would lead humanity through a dangerous time, avoiding the destruction of the race. (Also the scene in the sietch that I won't go into detail about, becuase spoilers)
Leto II uses the spice to see the golden path and forge humanity into what it needs to be to survive. (Also the other thing which I haven't mentioned due to major spoilers of a cool moment).
The spice is pretty clearly necessary for the path taken to salvation.
While the spice may not have been necessary to avoid the destruction of the human race had another path been found, in the story as it was told it was absolutely central.
But that is less the spice and more the prescience. The prescience that failed Paul. Leto II seemed to be clear for the golden path not from the self fullfilling lock-in that prescience created, but from his ability to mediate the other voices he incurred from the spice agony.
Something the Bene Gesserit thought only women to be capeable off, but never managed to put to the effect like Leto II could.
Also Leto II was the tyrant and very explicit about his choice of tyranny as the mean to create the golden path, so certainly not a salvation from imperial nonsense.
So i'd say the spice to be crucial in fullfilling many purposes, but it was never the path to salvation itself and it created many more problems along the way.
The spice is the source of the prescience, I don't think you can draw a line between them (the Tleilaxu could, but even then I think they used what they called synthetic spice, I don't really recall that very well though).
Aside for that point, yep, I agree with pretty much everything you said!
I was not alive then either and read it decades after it was written. Honestly, I think having to use a spoiler tag for a story written almost 80 years ago is not necessary.
Even if you ignore its inherent worth (and a major theme of the books is the inherent worth of things that don't look or think like you), it was still an amazing discovery with incredible potential. IMO it was less dangerous that the (admittedly much less innately terrifying) sympathetic aliens, who were capable of deep space travel, unpredictable, warlike, and also very difficult to communicate with.
(I was actually asking the opposite question by the end of the book - once it was convinced to play nice, why wasn't everyone signing up for it?)
There's three now. Time, Ruin and Memory. All are very good. Memory maybe a little weaker it might be one of those books that benefits from a second read.
As a physicist psychonaut, I like both ideas. Not Paul's genocide tho or Leto's worm imperium (I'm on God Emperor).
Still reading foundation and it's amazing
While good books in general, I always hated how whiny about the future Paul was when all he could do is say "fuck the people thousands of years in the future, I'm not gonna go on with a genocide."
But wasn't it that he saw the future showing he we embark on a jihad, and he worried that his trying to prevent that would still cause it to happen? I'd say it shows Paul as more complex and far thinking than you'd expect from a 14 year old kid. A kid sees that and says "I just won't do that." Paul said "I need to prevent this, but I'm not sure how, so I must be constantly vigilant of my actions to ensure it doesn't happen."
That was kinda retconned with the Golden path (do they call it that in English version?). Half of what Paul did was retconned though, so it really depends on.which books you're considering when you make a claim.
Peter Watts: We're already deep in some bleak dystopian hellhole which isn't even imperialist. We tried to bring salvation via transhumanism and utilitarianism, but that shit backfired like nothing else ever has. All humans died and vampires (that humans created because why the hell not?) took over.
Oh, there are some alien eldritch horrors lurking in the fringes of the solar system. They present a threat even for the vamps.
Pellegrino & Zebrowski: The story, taking place in some deep dystopian hellhole trying to bring salvation, begins with alien eldritch horrors wiping out 99.99% of humans with r-bombs.
Why not try three fold? Alien A.I technology, psychedelic drugs, and high level mathematical systems all incorporated into painting a potentially very complex future of humanity lol 😉
I've tried to read Dune a few times and quit I have read all of foundation however. Not saying foundation is better but Dune is probably just not for me.
Also, Dune is not about salvation. It's about a horrible monarchic system being overthrown and replaced with a horrible monarchic system because drugs let some kid see the future.
I always read it as like, radical Islamic Star wars.
You have the whole rebellion and the chosen one and the mystical powers and everything but instead of it being a blonde haired blue-eyed white boy it's a dark haired man incorporated into a desert tribe
I haven't watched the show (I heard that it isn't very good) but I loved the books. With that said, Asimov's writing never seems concerned with gender-specific behavior or interactions between men and women. If I recall correctly, every major character in the trilogy is male, but I think that was just the default assumption at the time the books were written and Asimov had no interest in analyzing that assumption. Therefore, simply changing some characters to women can make the story more realistic to a modern audience while preserving everything important in the books (as long as there aren't romance subplots, because Asimov characters are incapable of romantic love).
Let's see. The prequel his bodyguard and later wife is vital, Daneel isn't real male or female being a robot, his granddaughter basically started the Second Foundation and saved Sheldon. I can't remember her name but the leader of the board of the Second Foundation was also a women. Then you add in Bliss plus the two Second Foundation agents, plus the daughter of the resistance.
vs The Expanse: we are headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity's salvation will come from... Nevermind, we're fucked.
Just most of us, except Amos. Amos will be fine.
He is that guy
Nothing this guy can't shrug off. Litterally.
He's got the shotgun, you've got the briefcase. All in the game, though.
[...] humanity's salvation will come from alien technology we haven't discovered yet.
The expense always looked like almost utopic to me.
Truly ? What aspects of it ?
I mean they do have universal basic income on earth but apart from that humanity is all kinds of fucked. And it doesn't exactly get better as the story progresses.
The fact that the earth is even united and not completely screwed is already a great start. It was even recovering from climate change before Inaros.
The earthers are not doing that bad in the beginning that is true. But the rest of the system have it rough.
The earth is united like the United States is united. The tribes just got bigger is all. Instead of NATO vs BRICS, the Expanse universe has Earthers vs Martians vs Belters. And people are suffering hard on earth as evidenced during Bobby’s trip to the ocean.
Bobby's saw a very different earth in the books tho.
People living in UBI weren't really living a paradise but they weren't homeless hobos like in the show.
Example B of earth being shittastic is the entirety of The Churn novella
Everyone starts to come together in the last book though.
They're kind of forced to by an outside context problem, to quote Banks.
In a very... Specific way.
To be fair to Inaros he did end global warming and the overpopulation of earth.
Inaros did nothing wrong.
Chrissie's fabulous saris
Fair enough.
Isn't the UBI on earth literally so poor that people on it are stuck in lives of poverty unless they can get into some kind of training scheme?
Mostly they suffer from extreme boredom and mediocre lives. Nothing drastic but soul suckingly unfulfilling.
Not at all. It always looked like something in between for me. Humanity is still struggling but moving forward, and most people live under various kind of regimes but no big bad Empire.
Well the belters have it pretty rough and Mars is basically totalitarian. And without spoiling anything I'd suggest you keep reading, it is worth it :).
I have a question for you, fancy pantsy book reader on their own instance: should I watch the show and then read the books, read the books and then watch the show, or read the books and skip the show?
Doesn't really matter as the show ends three books short. You probably want to read them though rather than try and pick up from book 7 after the show as lots of characters were changed a bit in the show and one is killed due to off screen drama who should survive.
That character death was so sad. But the reason behind the scenes was absolutely justified
Well my pants aren't fancy at all thank you very much :p.
The show is great, and so are the books. Mostly I would start by watching the show which is, for the first season at least, much more polished imho (the writers of the book were also show runners). After that, the show ends at book 6 (there are 9 total) but several character arcs are tweaked so I would recommend reading at least books 3 to 6 before 7.
Thank you!
"(the writers of the book were also show runners)"
This must be why the books read like a TV or movie script to me.
Watch the show and then read the books. In my opinion the show is fantastic and incredibly enjoyable (except for ending the series in what is obviously the middle of a significant plot thread, which is annoying) but the books are even better and spoiled the show a tinsy bit for me.
Listen to the books, don't care about the show.
Winston Duarte has entered the chat.
The chat has become Winston Duarte.
Belters are a vast minority, though.
The population numbers sort of... even out later in the books.
So?
A dystopia is properly a utopia with one critical flaw.
Thing is, the Asimov Foundation universe could actually fit in the "past" of the Dune universe.
Maybe the robots in Asimov's universe lead to the creation of Erasmus and eventually the Butlerian Jihad.
We do. In some of the set in the same universe novels but not written by Asimov there are references to Brain Fever. A disease that virtually 100% of humans get at least once that makes them dumb for life. All advancement in galactic culture comes from the like 1 out of a million people who were immune.
That would account for Dune. Dune only makes sense if you assume that everyone is stupid and living in a hazy of drugged religious fantasy. Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one. Thousands of years of eugenics defeated by 30 cents of earplugs. Dune everybody!
The witches go around when everyone is still young and tell them to never buy earplugs
It's a forbidden technology, like computers.
It probably is something that freaken dumb as it is Dune. An entire civilization enslaved and broken so inbred monarchy can play with swords. Leave it to those fucking morons to ban gays and women from the military and not discover how to defeat the sexy voice.
Know now that it is the year 18,238 after the great Sunni-Druid Jihad against the water parks. People are enslaved by space-witches that have the power of sexy voice and their halibasters-smegma (ancient swords) are useless.
There. I solved Dune.
You mean the book about a bunch of Muslims who take over the galaxy because they learn Karate?
Whoa,spoilers man!
Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.
(In fact, in the later books a "corrupt" version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)
Lord, please deliver us from people with really "clever" hot takes that are horribly reductive and strained through the mesh of whatever synonym for "woke" won't get me downvoted.
Can't hear you. I have earbuds I got from the dollar store. You could try explaining it to me again but you might need a thinking-machine to do it with.
Actually even thufir, the mentat aka human computer, didn't know about the voice
That's the plot of Idiocracy
Yeah, no, The Voice isn't sexual... like, at all
I agree. Some shrill inbred witch being a space-karen is not sexy.
Dune only works if you assume that the characters are idiots in a religious-drug filled haze. Now polish your space-sword we have to go fight the 19th Buddha-Jewish jihad against the Space-mushroom eater people under the rule of Space-Baron Singh of the space house whalefurer. They harvest space-fur from space-whales.
I think you may have missed my point
It isn't sexual at all and it isn't meant to be
In the non-canon book Psychohistorical Crisis, the Dune universe is part of the past of the Foundation universe. The Fremon are known as the "Frightful People" to historians.
That makes more sense.
I'll let you all guess which one was published in the 50s and which one was published in the 60s.
Both of these are terrible takes on the books.
Spice is not a solution in dune in fact the whole 4th book and the end of the third are centered around forcing humanity to wean itself off spice so that it may evolve.
The central concept is that humanity must not depend on machine or drugs or complicated eugenics and must instead look inwards and improve itself by facing hardship.
In foundation (at least the start) the complicated maths is essentially there to prove that all establishments fail and survival requires constant change. Very differently from dune foundation sees technological superiority as key to this and importantly the ability for society to change in order to support the technological progress.
Even if you don't agree with the above neither book aims to "fight imperialist bullshit" if anything they both quite staunchly support the idea of a benevolent dictator controlling all.
Or is Dune about the folly of different types of dictatorship; sadistic, benevolent, religious or machiavellian? Taking only the first book (because that's as far as I've read) every leader is thwarted or confined by the consequences or weakness of their own style of leadership.
I read an interview where frank said that his intention was for Dune to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of charismatic leaders (which is to say, the "classic" hero archetype). Which - for the first book - tracks pretty well. The free are basically just used as cannon fodder for Paul to win back his power (and a lot more), then when he wins, he sets them loose on the universe because he can't control them.
The trouble I have with that though is that he goes on to contradict that point in later books, but I won't get into that because I don't want to spoil anything for you
bitch better have my giant exo-foreskin
It's honestly crazy how many people can read Dune and completely misunderstand the themes of the book.
Though to be fair, it sometimes feels like Frank himself didn't fully understand what themes he was going for. Books 1-3 were staunchly "Beware of heroes, charismatic leaders will lead you to evil and despair", then in GEoD, we find that literally the only hope for humanity was millenia of oppression by a totalitarian government.
But either of those two takes is still wildly better than "spice saves the universe" lol
Dune has one of the most complex (and necessarily logical) universe in it. I'm not surprised every reader found different themes more fitting.
Dune had no good guys, none at all.
Everyone was out for themselves or their narrow view of what was just and best for humanity from their simplistic and self-centered perspective.
Leto 2 was the exception because he was out for his narrow view of what was best for humanity from his broad, self-centered perspective that still didn't really lead anywhere.
The actual point of the books is that no ideal survives the test of real time, and over time civilization tends to ossify, so we are doomed to catastrophe by our very nature.
It wasn't the qctual only hope, just the only path Paul and Leto could see, and we know they aren't omniscient
Ok but to be fair they were using spice for like 5000 years?
I think Dune has very many themes, but the biggest one is the dangers of religion (which is not really portrayed in the movie I think)
The 2022 movie covers the first half of the first book and that theme only really comes into its own in books 2 and 3.
I mean, I feel like manipulating a whole culture's established religious beliefs to place themself at the highest seat of power and war a holy war in their name is a pretty poignant display of "religion bad, m'kay"
Yeah but if you don't know about the books it doesn't necessarily look like manipulation. That's only made overt when you read the latter books
My partner never read the books and easily caught the massive religious manipulation angle through the film. The even more massive scale of it all was obviously not revealed because of when it takes place, but it's still present
Helps that it's outright stated near the beginning of the movie.
If you haven't read the books the movie makes no sense. It's nothing but a string of half-ass book references and pretty scenery. Even having read the books the movie was still all over the place. It was a string of individual scenes with barely anything to connect them besides having the same characters.
And since I'm finally venting about it, if they were going to just focus on visuals, they could have at least gotten the scale right. They have these giant buildings and ships alluding to a mass of people keeping it operational. Then we never see more than like, 6 people. And the one scene where they pulled out all of the people at the climax, where it makes sense to show every soldier during an all hands emergency, we see, like, 50 people. They're supposed to have thousands of soldiers. Losing a dozen soldiers in the book would have been acceptable losses. The movie force we see, that would cripple them.
Also, it should have ended just after the attack. Use all that extra time to actual get you invested in House Atreides and Paul. In anything really. That movie was so bad. I've always like Lynch's Dune for it's insanity, but compared to the new one, it's a legitimately good movie. At least there's a story.
It was supposed to be a warning against following charismatic leaders
One of the reasons why the original movie was so good. Stripped out all the religious garbage and kept the worms
The original movie was good for the art direction and fantastic acting by supporting characters.
That's kinda where it ends though, comparing the two of them, the new Dune features human emotion which is pretty cool; all the main characters were kind of animatronic feeling in the old one imo.
The source material has limitations. It is difficult to make characters have depth when in the novel they have none. If you sit down and try to describe the characters of Dune you can really only do it by their job or what they did in the novel. You can't describe their personalities. Compare this to Star Wars.
But, the book characters were intentionally written to be pretty emotionally flat? The Gom Jabbar scene... Jessica showing emotion doesn't make it a bad scene, but it kind of undercuts how the Bene Gesserit work. Their whole thing is conquering their emotions and being composed and in control all the time. Jessica's turmoil is internal while her face is stoic. That's her whole character at that point in the book. she's not a very good Bene Gesserit, but she's faked it real well.
Except Duncan and Gurney. They should have had personality. That's Their purpose in the books. To be the ones who show Paul what being a real human is like beyond the Duke (laden with responsibility and the knowledge that his entire house and the thousands of people that rely on it are teetering on a knife's edge) and Jessica (basically a magic robot concubine who was raised from birth with the sole purpose of furthering a generations long genetic project her
captorsteachers were working toward). They're meant to be a breath of fresh air that give Paul the foundation to be a real boy.Ok, either the internet can't identify a great joke or... no, I guess the only reasonable explanation is that your comment whooshed over people's heads.
It's all good, I mean I read both of the books like ages ago and those were the only things that bubbled up out of the scary dark corners of my memory when the opportunity presented itself.
I mean one of the single best sci-fi movies of all time made by Lynch that takes out all the religious garbage and keeps the worms.
I'm still absolutely loving the fact we are on different instances in completely different parts of the world, yet we can still communicate.
Man IRC would blow your mind.
Nah, I used that a lot back in the day. It's just crazy that I'm seeing some real trends of interoperability between services. ActivityPub is a dream come true for me.
This is so much more than IRC ever was.
better do both just in case
edit: guys maths is HARD
I'm sure there are drugs that make math easy. We just need to find them.
From the Wikipedia page for Paul Erdős:
so you're saying I should add benzedrine
Melange, I'm sure. Seeing how it enables you to fold space, I'm assuming it also helps with the math involved.
If it also helps with the math of folding fitted sheets, I'm in!
No form of science or magic can help that. It’s impossible.
They don't make it easy. They make it better. Source: am mathematician.
MATH AND DRUGS ARE THE KEYS TO EVERYTHING
Source: myself, a computer science major
Lmao, good to know CS majors haven't changed.
I'll see you at FurCon in a few, it's just a matter of time now.
Damn... I've already graduated and am back in my country now :(
[Relevant]
https://youtu.be/NO0cvqT1tAE
math is fun!
but I took so many drugs 😭
the "moment of relief when the pain recedes" kind of fun. And then you realize you made a trivial mistake in the beginning and all your conclusions were useless.
The Fun of Grim Determination
Mathochist!
Don’t the Dune universe have Mentats?
So, maths and drugs
But the mentats are also on drugs, aren't they?
Not necessarily, being a mentat doesn't require the use of spice. Many use it because it enhances their thought process
Your right about them not necessarily relying on the spice melange, but they do rely on the juice of the sapho root to accelerate their thoughts and increase their processing speed. So yeah, they're still on drugs :)
I find coffee to be up to the task to come up with plans that are better than "let's give my enemy the best thing ever, because he migjt mess it up and to get his guy to betray him we will torture his wife". Yeah real wheels within wheels 4D chess going on right there.
Sapho juice.
Iain M. Banks: we're living in an AI-regulated Utopia, but the AI that we totally trust might be doing some light imperialism on the side.
Pratchett / Baxter: we're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, and another one, and another one, and another one, and oops, a blank...
Edit: added the Long Earth one.
Maybe sometimes there are special circumstances?
Fuck I love the Culture series. Such a good read.
The Culture is so incredibly fascinating. Banks' death was a loss to science fiction.
The Culture stuff is great but nothing tops The Algebraist. A near-perfect standalone sf doorstop imo.
Big ideas, some laughs, a mystery that you can solve if you're paying attention, strong characters, interesting aliens...
The last one that hit that sweet spot for me was Mother of Storms by John Barnes.
Hadn't read The Algebraist yet, so there's a new one on my list. Thanks! I'll make sure to check out Barnes, too.
The Culture weren't actually the future of humanity though right? Non-canon stuff has indicated we join eventually in the future but the society formed independent of us and even visit and examine us in one.
Actually, you're right.
Oh well, a humanity, then, just not ours.
Arthur C. Clarke: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from encountering benevolent alien intelligence we haven't discovered yet.
Ray Bradbury: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from rediscovering the beauty of books and humanity's inherent capacity for empathy in a world we're rapidly forgetting.
Robert A. Heinlein: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from pioneering individualism, libertarianism, and multi-planetary colonies we haven't established yet.
William Gibson: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from navigating and subverting the interplay of high technology and low life in a cybernetic reality we're only beginning to understand.
Ursula K. Le Guin: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from understanding and integrating a spectrum of social, psychological, and cultural perspectives we haven't fully considered yet.
Neal Stephenson: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from unprecedented technological and social innovation, often resulting from deep historical and philosophical introspection, in a future we're yet to engineer.
Octavia Butler: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from embracing and adapting to change through the lens of bio-diversity and sociocultural evolution we haven't fully embraced yet.
Ayn Rand: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense 😃
Exactly what I thought for Heinlein. All aboard! 🚂
Liu Cixin: We're headed to being fucked.
Douglas Adams: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense and humanity will almost completely be erased, but as a matter of fact, there is much more and weirder nonsense out there, which of course makes the previously mentioned nonsense quite nonsensical and thus the destruction of humanity quite unimportant from a galactic point of view. (Where this point is located, has been a debate for aeons.)
Gene Roddenberry: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from remotely incubating and uplifting improbably humanoid alien species across vast swaths of existence to shore up our defenses against mysterious adversaries that plot our extinction for reasons they've not monologued yet.
That sounds more like post-post-post-Roddenberry Trek.
Gene Roddenberry: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but don't worry, it'll get better.
Every fantasy author (except Tolkien): We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from an individual or small group who will save the world through the judicious application of violence.
Do Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe: We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from traversing complex, labyrinthine narratives and deciphering symbolic, metaphysical riddles we haven't begun to understand yet.
Asimov: weird mutants capable of overthrowing the universe should be put down with prejudice.
Frank Herbert: weird mutants capable of overthrowing the universe should be made emperor.
the mule did nothing wrong!
If you read Foundation til the end (Foundation and Earth), you'd see that it's the other way around.
vs Hyperion:
Don't we eventually find out the AIs are oppressing the humans and siphoning off their life-force/brain-power through the use of the portal system and that humanity's actual salvation comes from deeply believing in the power of love to the point of developing the ability to teleport to beloved places and people?
yeah IIRC that power of love thing was the way our fleshbag brains could deal with the same stuff that the AIs interacted with directly
I really did not like Hyperion as much as I wanted to. Too many r/thisisdeep moments.
Neither of the stories present salvation, merely survival.
Warhammer 40k:
we're headed for some bleak imperial nonsense butBY THE GOD EMPEROR SUCH HERESY IS INTOLERABLE.Bringing Warhammer 40k mythos into this isn't fair. That is like bringing a gun to a kid's thumb war.
One two three four I declare EXTERMINATUS
They shoulda brought a gun
It's kids' problem now.
But guns are inferior to melee combat in the 40k universe so the kids would win.
Image Transcription: Mastodon Post
Peter Cohen, @[email protected]...
"Foundation" vs "Dune"
Isaac Asimov: we're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity's salvation will come from using math we haven't discovered yet
Frank Herbert: we're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity's salvation will come from tripping on drugs we haven't discovered yet
I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.
Please provide a link in addition to a screenshot when you are referring to a post in the fediverse. You can easily link to a mastodon post from Lemmy since both are federated, and if you do it, your post will magically appear as a response to the original mastodon post.
https://mastodon.social/@flargh/110821695878847573
Too late but here it is
In Dune, the imperialist "nonsense" was the path to salvation. Genocide by machines was what we were saved from.
yeah, they went well past the Asimov case.
Also the spice is never deemed a path to salvation. it is merely an integral ressource that is stabilizing the human order by mutual dependence. In the later books the problem is explored what happens when the ressource becomes less integral/more abundant, removing the mutual dependence.
I don't really agree that the spice wasn't put forward as a way to salvation. I think it clearly was key to finding the golden path.
The spice enabled the Bene Gesserit to see what was needed in their breeding program, and they were trying to breed Kwisatz Haderach who would lead humanity through a dangerous time, avoiding the destruction of the race. (Also the scene in the sietch that I won't go into detail about, becuase spoilers)
Leto II uses the spice to see the golden path and forge humanity into what it needs to be to survive. (Also the other thing which I haven't mentioned due to major spoilers of a cool moment).
The spice is pretty clearly necessary for the path taken to salvation.
While the spice may not have been necessary to avoid the destruction of the human race had another path been found, in the story as it was told it was absolutely central.
But that is less the spice and more the prescience. The prescience that failed Paul. Leto II seemed to be clear for the golden path not from the self fullfilling lock-in that prescience created, but from his ability to mediate the other voices he incurred from the spice agony. Something the Bene Gesserit thought only women to be capeable off, but never managed to put to the effect like Leto II could.
Also Leto II was the tyrant and very explicit about his choice of tyranny as the mean to create the golden path, so certainly not a salvation from imperial nonsense.
So i'd say the spice to be crucial in fullfilling many purposes, but it was never the path to salvation itself and it created many more problems along the way.
The spice is the source of the prescience, I don't think you can draw a line between them (the Tleilaxu could, but even then I think they used what they called synthetic spice, I don't really recall that very well though).
Aside for that point, yep, I agree with pretty much everything you said!
Unless I'm missing something?
You are not missing something and i agree with your points. I was happy to discuss dune with you, as i get the chance way to seldom. Thank you :)
Have a good day :)
I started reading Foundation (the first one) just yesterday. So far I love it!
Lucky you, I wish I could experience it fresh again!
Just wait 50 years like I did to reread the trilogy and it will almost seem like you've never read it before.
Nice, just another 30 years to go I guess!
Don't forget prelude!
I envy people who can do that, I can't hardly start a new series without rereading my favorite series again.
Believe me, i'd rather be 34 than 64. There also are not that many trilogies that I've re-read, Probably just Dune, Foundation and LOTR.
Not totally true, like Asimov's math wanted to reinstate the Imperium, so is kinda the other way arround.
Yes, it was The Mule that introduced the anomaly.
Hey, for spoilers do:
::: spoiler [visible text]] [spoiler text] :::
Thanks. After 50+ years I did not think it would be a spoiler.
Yeah because all people who want to read said book where alive back then /s smh.
and really, is super easy to just put it as a spoiler.
I was not alive then either and read it decades after it was written. Honestly, I think having to use a spoiler tag for a story written almost 80 years ago is not necessary.
I disagree, Stories doesn't have an expiration date, you can read today The fundation Unspoiled ADM we should try to keep it that way.
vs. Children of Time: Fuck humans, spiders are way cooler.
They were going on an adventure
Even if you ignore its inherent worth (and a major theme of the books is the inherent worth of things that don't look or think like you), it was still an amazing discovery with incredible potential. IMO it was less dangerous that the (admittedly much less innately terrifying) sympathetic aliens, who were capable of deep space travel, unpredictable, warlike, and also very difficult to communicate with.
(I was actually asking the opposite question by the end of the book - once it was convinced to play nice, why wasn't everyone signing up for it?)
Some people like adventures.
Oh, I haven't read the second one yet. o_O
I will, as soon as I finish Prelude to Foundation. :)
There's three now. Time, Ruin and Memory. All are very good. Memory maybe a little weaker it might be one of those books that benefits from a second read.
Not comparable works.
Let's just find a drugged out mathematician in the future and our destiny as a race is secured.
Paul Erdos has entered the chat.
As a physicist psychonaut, I like both ideas. Not Paul's genocide tho or Leto's worm imperium (I'm on God Emperor). Still reading foundation and it's amazing
While good books in general, I always hated how whiny about the future Paul was when all he could do is say "fuck the people thousands of years in the future, I'm not gonna go on with a genocide."
But wasn't it that he saw the future showing he we embark on a jihad, and he worried that his trying to prevent that would still cause it to happen? I'd say it shows Paul as more complex and far thinking than you'd expect from a 14 year old kid. A kid sees that and says "I just won't do that." Paul said "I need to prevent this, but I'm not sure how, so I must be constantly vigilant of my actions to ensure it doesn't happen."
That was kinda retconned with the Golden path (do they call it that in English version?). Half of what Paul did was retconned though, so it really depends on.which books you're considering when you make a claim.
Instead of tripping on drugs, he could have gotten the same effect by changing only a single letter
Switching from "a" to "e"
Not entirely accurate, but gets the point across and has a better punchline
Humenity’s selvation will come from tripping on drugs?
Foundetion?
Edit: took me a second. Math -> Meth. Let's hope the field of Methmatics can save us.
Using drugs to solve the problem of institutional memory is my favourite Frank Herbert invention.
Oddly enough, both involve predicting the future.
And the threat of artificial intelligence
Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man.
Dan Simmons: … but humanity‘s salvation will come from the pedophilia love we always had.
Heinlein: that, but pedophilia and incest.
Heinlein is one of the biggest egg_irl cases of all time.
Saberhagen's Berserker: The machines will visit some bleak imperialist nonsense on you a hundred fold before wiping your entire fucking species out.
Just putting this out there for future reference, I am pro Basilisk.
You hear that future A.I. singularity overlord?
Oh fuck don't remind of this
Peter Watts: We're already deep in some bleak dystopian hellhole which isn't even imperialist. We tried to bring salvation via transhumanism and utilitarianism, but that shit backfired like nothing else ever has. All humans died and vampires (that humans created because why the hell not?) took over.
Oh, there are some alien eldritch horrors lurking in the fringes of the solar system. They present a threat even for the vamps.
Pellegrino & Zebrowski: The story, taking place in some deep dystopian hellhole trying to bring salvation, begins with alien eldritch horrors wiping out 99.99% of humans with r-bombs.
And then it gets worse.
The Killing Star? I don't think I've ever met another person that read that book.
Yup, The Killing Star🙃
Gimme some Super God Math
Sorry, we only have God Emperor
SpiceMeth.Why not both?
Why not try three fold? Alien A.I technology, psychedelic drugs, and high level mathematical systems all incorporated into painting a potentially very complex future of humanity lol 😉
And that's why Dune rules.
"from using meth we haven't discovered yet."
Foundation: Space Math Dune: Space Meth
Snow Crash: VR Molly
Spice is more LSD than meth.
I've tried to read Dune a few times and quit I have read all of foundation however. Not saying foundation is better but Dune is probably just not for me.
¿Por que no los dos?
Pretty sure Hunter S. Thompson said that first (unquoted)
Yes I can
Blockchain and endorphins save us!
Dune: “salvation? sure, buddy, sure”
Ackshually... this is a drastic oversimplification for the sake of delivering a joke.
Also, Dune is not about salvation. It's about a horrible monarchic system being overthrown and replaced with a horrible monarchic system because drugs let some kid see the future.
I always read it as like, radical Islamic Star wars.
You have the whole rebellion and the chosen one and the mystical powers and everything but instead of it being a blonde haired blue-eyed white boy it's a dark haired man incorporated into a desert tribe
No, it's annoying because they put all the plot points in a blender and are firing the result at us as fast as they can in the name of "surprise!"
Also gaal is a fundamentally annoying character, omniscient mega-genius who is irrational and never understands what she is doing.
I haven't watched the show (I heard that it isn't very good) but I loved the books. With that said, Asimov's writing never seems concerned with gender-specific behavior or interactions between men and women. If I recall correctly, every major character in the trilogy is male, but I think that was just the default assumption at the time the books were written and Asimov had no interest in analyzing that assumption. Therefore, simply changing some characters to women can make the story more realistic to a modern audience while preserving everything important in the books (as long as there aren't romance subplots, because Asimov characters are incapable of romantic love).
Let's see. The prequel his bodyguard and later wife is vital, Daneel isn't real male or female being a robot, his granddaughter basically started the Second Foundation and saved Sheldon. I can't remember her name but the leader of the board of the Second Foundation was also a women. Then you add in Bliss plus the two Second Foundation agents, plus the daughter of the resistance.
Seems pretty equal to me.
If that's your gripe, you really didn't understand much about the source books.