#Skuun talks about Dune

[egregiousderp]

@oraftel Hngh. Okay. See. I have...a lot of...very mixed things to say about Dune. Do I enjoy it as a book? Sure. Even if the first time I tried to read it I was twelve and I got thoroughly bored within the first hundred pages. I didn’t pick it up again until I was twenty-two and sweating and doing missions work in an I air conditioned house on the east coast, surrounded by conservative, Christian white people, at which point I finally had enough social grasp to get the politics and the scope of the thing, and in some cases, see ironies completely related to my own experiences at the time. Does it have a very interesting concept? Sure. Is the sixties-era ecology kind of fascinating? I think so. Is it...basically a white-savior story set in space and dealing with the idea of foresight? Also...yes. Is it kind of shitty to its lady-characters? (Meaning it’s debatable whether the main character is the lady Jessica, or her son, Paul Atreides, and her entire position as a concubine because POLITICS and RELIGION and shit?) Also...yes. Does it have exactly one gay character who is portrayed as extremely morally corrupt, devious, ravenous, and...implied pederastic with off-screen non-con stuff? Yep. (Although it should be noted he is a very intelligent character, of a Villain, which is more forward thinking than many of the depictions of gay people in the sixties and his preferences are just one aspect of the Baron’s overarching theme of Rapacious greed and Hunger extending to all things. His pursuit of those hungers not directly related to politics are usually relegated to offscreen but it’s very very apparent he thinks Paul is pretty and he’d like to...well. Have him.) Is there enough weird bullfighting motif to make Papa Hemingway do a doubletake? Er. Yes. Or...maybe just me. I squinted a little. Is it hard to talk about GIANT WORMS without laughing? Well. Yes. If you’re me, anyway. Are the sequels REALLY WEIRD? (as in “get possessed by the spirit of your dead grandfather/become a homeless prophet/turn into a giant alien worm?”) Shit yes. So weird. Do I find the idea of willingly manipulating and coercing a suffering people using their religion against them really pretty skeezy as a concept? Double shit yes. Should you avoid all the nonsense written by the dude’s son and Kevin J. Anderson? Also Fuck yes. Which was especially upsetting to me because I’d started out reading Anderson’s Star Wars stuff and had high expectations. (And that said, Sand People in Star Wars are bad ripoffs of the Fremen in a lot of ways.) It is...still a considerable epic. And I can’t say content-wise it’s necessarily worse than many of the mythologies or epics it tries to emulate. Or by any means the worst thing I’ve ever read because it’s considered a classic. That and...despite people’s attempts to turn it into a movie or miniseries, I don’t think the style of language or the political maneuvering in the background lends itself to a visual medium very well. It’s a type of thing that works as a book and only a book, I think? The internal thought processes of the characters are extremely important, I mean. And for some reason Sting is in the movie. The old one, I mean. Don’t get me wrong. Sting is good at being...well...Sting. But a curly-haired, Bell-bottomed matador being groomed to be accepted as the savior of a people or a sort of Ur-Protagonist, Sting, in my opinion, is profoundly NOT. I saw the movie very young as well, mind you, but the movie takes great pains to make House Harkonnen very very evil. (Like. Rip out a dude’s still-beating heart level over the top eighties evil) Whereas House Harkonnen is indeed quite evil and bloodthirsty, but committed to the end of creating a false-messiah figure for an oppressed people just as House Atreides is. And I always found that parallel and the ways both houses Lie and Manipulate a people looking to survive and put their hope in something a good deal more chilling. No one comes out looking like a perfect hero when it comes to Dune. Not to mention the idea of the Fremen in general : the concept of an entire system of life. Space travel. Religion. Precognizance. All dependent on the suffering of a people? I don’t find that a thing any less relevant in the current age than it was in the Sixties. So... It’s not BAD. Good and bad points, I mean? Without getting into the exact twists and turns or spoilers for how the book works, I mean. Some of those items are probably more dealbreakers for other people than they are for me. But that’s honestly partially my background. (Ie: My former major in literature didn’t really afford me the luxury of not reading things assigned to me just because they made me uncomfortable, I mean. Focusing on some other detail within the work, or refusing the visualize or linger was something I learned from that because I had to be able to speak and speak rationally about what I’d read. There are parts of Dune even now that I catch myself doing that with, which is...sometimes a tip-off and sometimes not.) The politics in the book are great. And the intrigue is fun to read about—especially when t comes to the idea of precognition and destiny. And it has a built up world that...like with Tolkien, or Martin, you can get lost in if it resonates properly with you. I tend to read it outside during a nice hot summer day, while staring at my glass of water like a freaking weirdo almost every summer, but that’s me. That said, I don’t want to discount the content in it or leave you without a warning that some of these things resonate...differently for those of us in younger generations than they might for someone of our parent’s generation(s). There are plenty of opportunities for Dune to be too problematic or unsettling for people and this is also fine and a perfectly reasonable thing. Don’t for a second think that because of the era it’s written in it’s a “safe” book, I mean. So please if you take that as a recommendation, take it as a very cautious one? I have many other books I recommend with far fewer hesitations, I mean. This just happened to be what I was rereading and packed for the hurricane and most of my bedside stuff is still from that stack. If you’d hit me with this a week ago, you probably would have gotten a quote from the Martian, I mean. (Which has since been passed on to my mom with a warning to the effect of “it has some language.”)