4 ms·

But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. The people who read it as kids and found its word-building novel either never watc

But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. The people who read it as kids and found its word-building novel either never watched Lawrence of Arabia or know nothing about the history of the Middle East. That's not to say the book isn't enjoyable, or even great. It's just that it mashes together various real people and historical incidents and draws much of its power from them. If you know the real story, it's impossible not to notice the parallels. If you remove the parallels, you lose the story's power.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mr_toad 3y ago
> But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. Hydraulic despotism. The pitfalls of manipulating religion. The trap that both present to those who use them. That’s what most of the book is about. If you just focus on historical analogies you’re missing some major themes of the book. And that’s ignoring the thematic exploration of precognition and omniscience, the ecological themes etc.
vkou 3y ago
If you remove the window dressing, the rest of the story stays. 1. Colonisation and the relationship of colonisers and colonized. 2. Great leaders and what happens to them (explored further in Messiah and Children, with some really horrible consequences) 3. Environmentalism, feudalism, social stagnation, power structures, mutually assured destruction... 4. Exploration of a society that explicitly rejects thinking machines, in favor of using people as machines.
- throw4847285 3y ago
  Sure, but those themes are drawn out via the facts of the story which have direct historical parallels. It seems like the Arabic elements are just window dressing and you could swap them out without affecting the story. But because it is drawing on real world events, even if you aren't aware of the history, you lose something if you try to make it more generic. The proof is the movie version (at least Part I). The fremen feel less like an actual society with a coherent culture because they removed anything that tied them to the Middle Eastern. I think this is true of fantasy in general, because the progenitor of the modern genre was Tolkien, a huge history/linguistics/mythology nerd. And one can easily argue that he set the precedent of taking history (often the middle ages) and imbuing it with the mythic/religious elements that people told stories about. Look at GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of the subplots is basically, "What if Chinggis Khan was a chump who died but he had a blonde child bride that accomplished all the shit that he did in real life." Again, I don't think that makes his books bad, but in my experience, the more you study history, the more you realize how the real creativity of fantasy writers is what pieces of history and mythology they crib and recombine.
  - vkou 3y ago
    All stories of note have historical parallels, but I think it's fair to say that there have been new bits of history since then, that would heavily distract from the meaning of the work, if the window dressing stayed the same. AGOT would hit a little differently if it just so happened that there was a horrifying civil war caused by a poorly planned incestuous relationship sometime in the 2010s. I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument. But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mr_toad 3y ago

> But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. Hydraulic despotism. The pitfalls of manipulating religion. The trap that both present to those who use them. That’s what most of the book is about. If you just focus on historical analogies you’re missing some major themes of the book. And that’s ignoring the thematic exploration of precognition and omniscience, the ecological themes etc.

vkou 3y ago

If you remove the window dressing, the rest of the story stays. 1. Colonisation and the relationship of colonisers and colonized. 2. Great leaders and what happens to them (explored further in Messiah and Children, with some really horrible consequences) 3. Environmentalism, feudalism, social stagnation, power structures, mutually assured destruction... 4. Exploration of a society that explicitly rejects thinking machines, in favor of using people as machines.

throw4847285 3y ago
Sure, but those themes are drawn out via the facts of the story which have direct historical parallels. It seems like the Arabic elements are just window dressing and you could swap them out without affecting the story. But because it is drawing on real world events, even if you aren't aware of the history, you lose something if you try to make it more generic. The proof is the movie version (at least Part I). The fremen feel less like an actual society with a coherent culture because they removed anything that tied them to the Middle Eastern. I think this is true of fantasy in general, because the progenitor of the modern genre was Tolkien, a huge history/linguistics/mythology nerd. And one can easily argue that he set the precedent of taking history (often the middle ages) and imbuing it with the mythic/religious elements that people told stories about. Look at GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of the subplots is basically, "What if Chinggis Khan was a chump who died but he had a blonde child bride that accomplished all the shit that he did in real life." Again, I don't think that makes his books bad, but in my experience, the more you study history, the more you realize how the real creativity of fantasy writers is what pieces of history and mythology they crib and recombine.
- vkou 3y ago
  All stories of note have historical parallels, but I think it's fair to say that there have been new bits of history since then, that would heavily distract from the meaning of the work, if the window dressing stayed the same. AGOT would hit a little differently if it just so happened that there was a horrifying civil war caused by a poorly planned incestuous relationship sometime in the 2010s. I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument. But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.