Dune

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DannyL

Wild Horses
I'm sure I have droney shit not a million miles from bagpipes on some field recordings.

I thought the film was great, really well done adaptation though if anything veered a bit too Hollywood towards the end where it all got a bit "action sequence". I think the thing that struck me most was the design. The way the ships looked like worms, the monumentality of the ships when on the ground. It seems to stick close to the book for me, but it's been two decades or more since I read it.

Was having a bit of a hmmmm moment about a white guy going in and uniting the desert tribes but I guess that's what's in the source text, and according to some Herbert's intention was to critique this. I didn't get this when I read the books but fuck knows what else I missed.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
@DannyL Yeah, on the surface there's a "white saviour" theme, but really the book is a warning against the dangers of saviours, heros, and Great Men in general. In fact it ends on a downer note, as Paul realizes that the jihad in his name is going to sweep across the galaxy and there's nothing he can do to stop it.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
Mr. Tea said:
@DannyL Yeah, on the surface there's a "white saviour" theme, but really the book is a warning against the dangers of saviours, heros, and Great Men in general. In fact it ends on a downer note, as Paul realizes that the jihad in his name is going to sweep across the galaxy and there's nothing he can do to stop it.
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That is interesting. I should go back and read the book now my brain has grown a bit. I think I got a copy from one of those sci-fi bookclubs that used to be on the back of Sunday supplement magazines. So probably would've been 14 or so, so a ton flew over my head I'm sure. Think I re-read it a few years later though.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
I know v little about Lawrence of Arabia so that allusion flew over my head (my knowledge of him is basically "there was a bloke called that"). It struck me watching it - as it did when reading the book - how much of it is basically classical court intrigue stuff transposed into space. It seems so hard to imagine something genuinely new and alien but the purpose of SF is normally to rethink what we know, not imagine the new.

Anyway, this is an interesting thread from a nerd:
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think that recognising that AI would be a crucial issue and coming up with a way to basically delete it from the future was extremely prescient in 1965 or whatever it was.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
DannyL said:
Was having a bit of a hmmmm moment about a white guy going in and uniting the desert tribes but I guess that's what's in the source text, and according to some Herbert's intention was to critique this. I didn't get this when I read the books but fuck knows what else I missed.
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The whole idea of "hard, manly men from hard, manly places vs decadent effeminate empire corrupted by too much luxury" is pretty dubious as well. Very little basis in actual history, quite a lot of connections to 19th century racist nationalism not to mention modern far-right thinking. I recently read a whole series of big blog posts about it from a history guy, dubbing it "the Fremen mirage":

acoup.blog

Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization

This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
acoup.blog acoup.blog
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
Idk what a Funko Pop is? So that whole Tweet is lost on me. I liked the main thread because she slags off Firefly which is not shite but kinda ... boring.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
DannyL said:
Idk what a Funko Pop is? So that whole Tweet is lost on me. I liked the main thread because she slags off Firefly which is not shite but kinda ... boring.
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Those stupid ugly huge-headed cartoon figurines of characters from Marvel and Game Of Thrones and Star Wars and Harry P... - um, you get the idea - that some adults feel compelled to collect, for some reason.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slothrop said:
The whole idea of "hard, manly men from hard, manly places vs decadent effeminate empire corrupted by too much luxury" is pretty dubious as well. Very little basis in actual history, quite a lot of connections to 19th century racist nationalism not to mention modern far-right thinking. I recently read a whole series of big blog posts about it from a history guy, dubbing it "the Fremen mirage":

acoup.blog

Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization

This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
acoup.blog acoup.blog
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Yes, it probably is a bit dubious, but it's also not really what happens in Dune. The Fremen, unarguably, are hard people (women as well as men) from a hard place, but Paul, who ends up leading them, comes originally from a fairly hospitable and civilized planet, I think. And the Imperium may be 'corrupt', for a given value of corrupt - OK, the Emperor breaks galactic law by secretly siding with one House against another in order to destroy a perceived threat, which is pretty corrupt - but the Emperor's own army is anything but effeminate, and is universally regarded as invincible until it comes up against the Fremen.
 
Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Mr. Tea said:
Yes, it probably is a bit dubious, but it's also not really what happens in Dune. The Fremen, unarguably, are hard people (women as well as men) from a hard place, but Paul, who ends up leading them, comes originally from a fairly hospitable and civilized planet, I think. And the Imperium may be 'corrupt', for a given value of corrupt - OK, the Emperor breaks galactic law by secretly siding with one House against another in order to destroy a perceived threat, which is pretty corrupt - but the Emperor's own army is anything but effeminate, and is universally regarded as invincible until it comes up against the Fremen.
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But the Sardaukar are more of the same - they're hard because they survived Salusa Secondis. The comparison is hammered home repeatedly in the novel. IIRC the only other people who are really in the same league as the Fremen are the relatively small number of Atreides troops that Team Atreides had trained intensively and Paul himself, who's the product of a centuries long process of selective breeding and knows Magic Bene Gesserit Combat Yoga.
 
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linebaugh

linebaugh

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