Well, I watched Dune again, this time in my living room instead of a nearly-empty theater. Dune's one of those stories that pervades science fiction - Star Wars might have borrowed the concept of Coruscant (seen only in the prequels directly, not counting the special editions of the original trilogy) from Asimov's Trantor, but the desert world of Tatooine clearly owes a lot of its DNA to Arrakis.
Matt Colville, who mostly does videos about Dungeons & Dragons, did a three-part series talking about Dune and some of the really interesting sci-fi concepts within it. Science fiction is a genre that I think engages the reader/audience from a different angle than other genres, even including fantasy, though those genres exist less as discrete categories and more along a spectrum.
I think the greatest science fiction stories begin with a question: "what if such and such a technology or scientific development came about?" and then attempts to answer that in a way that is dramatic and interesting.
In some ways, I think the primary question Dune asks is "what if humanity survives for tens of thousands more years?"
There's a bit of dark pessimism that has confronted us since the invention of nuclear weapons. While swords, crossbows, guns, and bombs have all escalated the potential for us to kill one another, nuclear weapons have raised the stakes to an absurd degree. Today, we are relying on the sanity of world leaders not to press the button that destroys the world. In some ways, the threat here has preserved peace on a large scale, the logic being that no two nuclear powers can ever afford to get into an armed conflict. Of course, we're seeing the risk of that concept in Ukraine, where a nuclear power is relying on the fear of escalation to prevent direct confrontation with NATO and attack a less powerful country with impunity. None of us today knows how that conflict will end, and I suppose I will just have to hope that this blog post is not some archaeological relic to be found by some distant future historians trying to piece together how the current civilization fell.
Dune isn't exactly optimistic about the future either. In contrast with the Star Trek-like vision of a future built on principles of liberalism, democracy, and the enlightenment, the universe as it is ten thousand years after the foundation of the Spacing Guild (itself ten thousand years from now) has reverted in structure to one of imperialism, aristocracy, and feudalism.
In some ways, I think Frank Herbert dodged some areas of speculation through the use of certain narrative devices. The Butlerian Jihad, in the distant past, saw the erasure of all artificial intelligence and computers. Perhaps Herbert knew that he would never be able to predict how advanced computer technology would get and thus sought to set aside any speculation. Today, thinking about how you could fly a space ship or an ornithopter without a computer seems absurd, but we're also in the thick of a computer-centric world - one that I would bet is far more saturated with computers than Herbert thought it would be even in the distant future.
The needs of the protagonists in the first novel of the Dune series are fairly immediate: their lives and their house is in danger of being wiped out in a feud with the Harkonnens. The plot is full of wheels within wheels - the Emperor fears Leto Atreides because he's a more popular leader who also understands the source of the Imperial House Corrino's power, so he arranges to put the Atreides on the back foot while helping the Harkonnens under the table. Leto knows that Arrakis is a trap, but is plotting to seek out and befriend the indigenous Fremen, who he thinks will be even better than the Emperor's elite Sardaukar. But the Harkonnens have an asset within the Atreides house, and they're able to launch their attack before Leto can reach out to the Fremen. But the Bene Gesserit have also been essentially breeding a messiah for hundreds of years, and Paul Atreides makes use of the abilities that have been bred into him to manipulate/recruit the Fremen to basically do what Leto initially planned.
And so, the first book ends with Paul defeating the Harkonnens and forcing the Emperor to marry him to the princess Irulan and thus make Paul the heir to the throne.
While we get hints of it, it's not until the later books that we see the consequences of all of this. The Fremen inflict the very colonial oppression that they suffered under onto the universe at large, and Paul, with an empire that literally views him as the messiah, has unleashed a fanatical holy war upon the universe - the sort of war where there are no compromises, no peace treaties to sign, and no limit to what your soldiers will do to defeat an enemy they see as definitionally evil.
Thinking about Villeneuve's movie, I wonder how exactly to judge it. On a visceral level, I like it. Visually I think it's fantastic - it looks very much as I imagined the story when reading the book, especially the brutalist enormity of the palace in Arikeen.
Adapting a novel to film is a tough thing to get right, and I think one area the film sort of sidesteps is some of those deeper sci-fi concepts that would be hard to work in. For example, we get some visual clues that Thufir Hawat and Pieter de Vries play a similar role for their respective houses, but the term "Mentat" is never mentioned. We hear about "superstitions" that the Fremen believe, but the source of those traditions and stories is not detailed in any specifics. Of course, the story cuts off before Paul and Jessica make it to Sietch Tabr, so we haven't yet had an opportunity to see how the Bene Gesserit tradition mutated and evolved within Fremen society.
I am still kind of shocked that they didn't just film this as a single production. Warner Bros. must have not had a ton of confidence in it, though I'm happy to hear that part two is going ahead. How sad it would have been to have this part one be the only movie, consigned to the dustbin like, I don't know, the Golden Compass movie. (Come to think of it, did the HBO show also get cancelled?)
I've read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, but I'll confess I got stuck on God Emperor of Dune. My dad had cautioned me to stick to the stories with Paul in them, and God Emperor of course takes place thousands of years after the first three books. I believe Villeneuve expressed a hope to do those first three books in film, though I think we might have to be content with just the first book, unless part two is a much bigger cultural phenomenon.
I do feel like Hollywood needs to grade on a curve in this era of Covid, but I suppose it's still about the money you rake it, regardless of outside circumstances.
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