Dune
2010 12 22
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I have many times heard people say how they think Frank Herbert was a lousy writer. I really can't opine on that in any sort of critically sensible fashion, because I have never actually critically assessed his work. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is just as uninteresting as I always found Tolkien. Yes, that's right. It's one of those conversations: the Dune/LOTR kind. I am not a fan of LOTR. The movies were lovely, but I could never get into the books. Tolkien put me to sleep. Herbert, on the other hand sucked me into the Dune universe fully and completely.
I look back on the mountains of sci-fi and fantasy I've read over the years, and all the other fictions, and it is with this as it is with many other things which tantalise and tease at what might be termed otherkin relations: I am human. I relate to humans. I do not have animal totems that connect with me with any animal but the longpig. I do not now, nor have I ever, except when very young, identified with stories where something other than a human was in central focus. I don't identify with animals, elves, robots, or otherwise. I have tried to read stories where other creatures had sway or appearance, and I just can't quite get there - everything from Tolkien to Elf Sternberg's crazy pornography - and none of it truly clicked for me. I guess that's why very little of the sword and sorcery genre appealed. There was too much involvement from the animally furry or elfin pointy-eared.
I have been reading this article about Dune, wherein I came upon this gem of a quotation: "David Lynch was brought in to make it more sane," in reference, of course, to the film adaptation he created in the '80s. I would dearly love to lay my hands on what he was brought in to "make more sane", because "make more sane" and David Lynch just don't jive in the same cognitive category for me. What is so insane that he of all people could make it less nuts?
One criticism the author mentions in that article is that people have found the Dune universe to be too complex; too many relationships to follow and too many non-English words to recall. I think those two things, amongst so many others, are what sucked me in so deeply. Being human, after all, is largely grey areas. Some things are simple, but most of it is complex and braided and so intermingled we couldn't unravel it in our wildest attempts.
Dune was a universe where even the "magic" was man-made. No one was hurling fireballs down the main street unless those fireballs came out of something other than fingertips. This is a universe where Ludditeism (or, at least, the appearance of it) was rampant, an entire war having been fought due to the prevalence of machinery. What you do in this universe, what you accomplished that to others might appear magical, was accomplished because of study and practice and monstrous effort.
Thinking about that now, about the general distaste for anyting that might appear too AI-like, one wonders if Herbert himself didn't have a little prescience of his own happening. Was he, like other sci-fi writers before and after him, merely dreaming out loud (on paper); or, was he a visioniary, seeing a future not too far from now perhaps, where machines of all kinds were terrifyingly ubiquitous? Perhaps, he was also warning us to be careful, to be mindful, that we didn't succumb to something so totally so as to lose us our humanity. The article also makes mention of Herbert's lessons on resource addiction. I don't know that any of us truly gives thought to how much we depend on things like filtered and treated water, gasoline, et cetera, nor what we'd do if the well (so to speak) suddenly ran dry. We are a ghastly un-self-sufficient lot.
It's true, though, what he mentions about the Litany Against Fear. People do say it to calm themselves: I've said it many times. Believe it or not, it helps.