I am a fan of science fiction. I like it, it's fun. I have read most of the major books out there and I am always delighted when I find a new author. Some stories are so-so. Some are so great they attain the halls as being ordained a science fiction masterpiece. Some of these 'greats', however, I do not find so great. One of these is 'Dune'.
I have been watching the dune miniseries on DVD. It's ok. It's watchable. It's mildly entertaining, but I never considered dune to be great science fiction. To be honest I can hardly get through any of the dune books. I will start reading them and then grow so bored I toss it away and forget about it. Some of the things I do not like about 'Dune' are as follows:
No robots. Yes, I understand that one of the plot tools of 'dune' is that they live in the future after a great terminator-like war where robots and super computers had enslaved humanity, thus it is in their religion that 'no machine shall be created in the likeness of a human'. Instead of computers they used highly-trained brain people called mentats. OK, I guess I can buy it. But, still, if it's 14,000 years in the future, I want to see at least one robot.
Too metaphysical. Entire pages of the book are devoted to amazing, confusing, and ultimately boring brain voyages. 'I had a vision' blah blah blah 'it haunts my dreams' blah blah blah. Get over it. Ultimately this metaphysical stuff gets 'too weird'.
Infallible Character. The main character is quite simply not a character I can identify with because he does no wrong. He's great at everything he does, and he never seems to make a mistake. L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction books where full of characters like that, which is ultimately why I do not like his works either. It seems so much that he is not telling a story as having some sort of ego-stroking masturbation session. I like to read characters that develop and make mistakes. Look at Luke Skywalker, he was goofing things up left and right and yet manages to come out OK because he learned from his mistakes. He did not just coast through everything like a messiah-like figure, which is more or less what Paul of 'Dune' was supposed to be. Ultimately there is not excitement in the story because you know the character is going to do what is exactly right.
Wonky Science. These people have spaceships that can float right off the planet, and then go into a big mother ship that can transport them across the universe. They have antigravity devices and force fields. Yet they cant seem to make water. A good chunk of the universe is really nothing more then frozen chunks of water. Would it really have been so hard for them to go mine a comet and bring the water down to the planet?
And so on. It translates OK to the screen because of the eye candy and they more or less glaze over the metaphysical stuff. And, of course, they have the big old worms. But as for reading material, I'll pass.
In other news, the guy driving the car in the article below was arrested for shooting a gun out of it in downtown Orlando. I think this took palce at the 'Fortress 7-11' they have down there. Big surprise. I have seen this car cruising through Sanford all the time. I just screams 'I am a drug dealer and I have a gun in here'.
Dialing the machine to December 20, 2006 to catch Ed arguing with Dune and falling down a local Orlando rabbit hole.
Ah, sweet 2006: a man can complain about a science-fiction sacred cow and then, in the same breath, name a local 7-Eleven “Fortress” and accuse a passing car of being a dealer. That blog post is a museum piece. Back then, Dune lived in a DVD miniseries you had to physically feed into a glowing box, and watching it required enough patience to survive the menus. Now you cannot slouch through a streaming scroll without tripping over a dozen Frank Herbert heirs. No robots? Cute. 2026 has algorithms that write your complaints and feed them back to you. The internet used to be a place where a man uploaded a photo of a car and a link to a news story; now every traffic camera and porch camera is part of the audience. Even the “infallible messiah” complaint has aged into prophecy: every franchise has a Chosen One with a magic origin, but now the chosen ones have IP lawyers. I miss the era when a reader’s hot take could be forty paragraphs and a local-crime sting.
“2006 Ed, if Paul of Dune had taken that Fortress 7-11 car out for a joyride and fired a few shots at a sandworm, would that have saved the book for you, or were you always going to be angrier about the missing robots?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, that’s a hell of a mental image, and I gotta say, it might have helped a little. Paul jumping into some beat-up drug dealer’s ride, rolling down the windows, and blasting a sandworm in downtown Orlando? That’s the kind of stupid, human mistake I can get behind. But I think the missing robots still would’ve gnawed at me. Fourteen thousand years and not one lousy C-3PO? Come on. That’s like owning a mead cellar and never bottling a drop. The water thing still gets me too. You got spaceships, you got force fields, and you’re telling me nobody can mine a comet? Egads. I’d rather read about a guy who falls off his roof and spends the next six months arguing with his insurance company. That I can identify with. Paul never once had to deal with a lien on his spice harvester, I bet.
