Dune Done
CHOAM poster by Giant Ideas
I just finished reading Dune. It’s pretty good. Very good actually. I’m coming off of Ender’s Game (all tension and build-up) and the constant violence and suspense of Dune was a thrill. Dune is also a very deep book, drawing on a holy book that combines the three monotheistic faiths plus plus. It also plays like a modern political parable, what with the people addicted to a natural resource and being dicks about it. I won’t review the book, it’s worth a read, I think it’s the best selling sci-fi, so just give it a read if you so interest [sic]. These are a few thoughts I had.
Why Swords?
Seriously, why swords? It’s like every future fiction wants to go back to sword fighting. It is somehow the most elegant form of fighting, even though it gets quite bloody and stabby and mess. The idea of stabbing someone I find shockingly inelegant, but maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s a phallic thing.
Why Killing?
Paul Atriedes sees a looming global jihad in the religion that builds up around him. But he does nothing to really stop it. Everyone accepts violence as a way of sorting things and right is seen just as the most might. While it makes for a compelling tale, there are no valuable life lessons there. Paul does a lot of bad shit on the way to overthrowing a bad guy. The people he has around him are quite murderous and dubious. At no point does he use his power for compassion or non-violent resistance, and at no point does he change a fucked up system. He just fucks with everybody else harder.
Book, fine, but I can just imagine the intergalactic presses spinning him as a terrorist. Which he kinda was. He used nuclear weapons (not on humans) and threatened to blow up all the spice (equivalent to torching the world’s oil). Sounds pretty terroristy. And it’s not like he replaced the earlier, shitty order. He just married into it, in the end.
Why Are We Always Addicted To Stuff?
At various points, some random substance has roiled the world. Be it salt or gold or opium or oil, some natural element tends guide our history. Right now economic growth basically is oil, in the sense that no oil = no growth. Growth is obviously more complex and flowery, but no oil, no vine. At other times England was fucking up the orient via the Opium Wars, or stretching themselves for tea, or the Romans were paying people in salt.
Dune is cool because they make that substance the melange spice, some hallucinogenic thing that makes your eyes go all blue and enables certain well bred individuals to see through space and time to guide interstellar navigation. But they’re addicted to it. The spice leads to all manner of unsavory alliances and bullshit, lessons very relevant to today.
What Happened To Drugs?
I think that drugs are good but drug culture is bad. Throughout history, every major religion and many major ideas involved some altered state – from Hindu Soma to Native American Shaman (plural?). Drugs can be very, very good. It’s just that the culture is very bad.
Because they’ve become illegal, people have to associate with criminals to get them. They’ve also been co-opted by people just trying to have sex and being popped and snorted with no reverence by idiots without adult guidance.
A friend recently said that drugs should be only accessible through certain religions. Which I think is an interesting idea. In Dune drug use is basically the backbone of their information economy, since they got rid of computers. Everything from the priesthood (feminine) to space travel to communion is based on ritualized drug use.
And that’s pretty much all I learned, or all I feel like writing about.
Today on the 
Janith has updated 
This is highly dubious. Miss Travel is a travel/social networking site that connects ‘Generous’ and ‘Attractive’ travelers. To, like, travel together, I guess. It all seems a bit like arranged prostitution and trafficking. This is part of a broader online trend to connect rich men to younger, attractive women. Sites like 
Sri Lankan domestics never say anything, they just stop coming. My maid just stopped coming and when I finally pressed her she said I needed to get a washing machine. I was hoping to ride this one out, but I’ve run out of underwear and I have no choice. I finally caved and bought a washing machine, from 
actually i have never read dune. i’ve watched the movie though. are the books that much better.
I’m reading the hobbit right now, i guess i’ll read dune after i finish that.
All thoughts concurred with, although I think one of Herbert’s points was meant to be that true political federation was impossible across interstellar distances because of the lightspeed barrier, and that feudalism was the only possible system of government. At any rate, democracy is not really on the table as a political option in Dune.
The book has a fatal flaw, which perhaps you noticed: Paul Atreides’s implausible composure, indeed, near lack of interest, when he hears that his son and heir (the first Leto II) has been killed. His behaviour in that scene is most unpatriarchal. Herbert gets so caught up in the action of the story he’s telling, he forgets to make his hero behave like a real father. That’s not good.
Apart from this, of course, it’s brilliant, and the concerns with ecology and genetic engineering were way ahead of their time.
Yeah, Paul completely didn’t give a shit when his son died, and then completely shanked his child’s mother by making her a concubine. And then he married his enemies daughter for political reasons. He reminds me of Obama a bit.
It is a brilliant book, though. The violence is always surprising and it’s well spaced. I thought the annexes at the end were a bit unnecessary tho. I preferred learning about the planet through the story.
What a coincidence! I too just finished Enders Game (I have red Speaker for the Dead earlier, probably as good as or better than the first) but then I just went on and finished Ender’s Shadow, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of Hegomon (to make it complete)
Havn’t red Dune yet but I was going to. I have played the game though…
Have you red the Foundation Series and Robot Series from Asimov ?
Interestingly you mentioned about our why we get addicted to Stuff… I have attempted to give a generalized answer and how to come out of it in here and here.
interesting posts on quality of life and stuff Ashoka. I basically agree. As emerging nations ‘emerge’ we’ll have to define that as something besides consuming more meat and cars. The earth can’t sustain it and neither can the human body or mind.
I also just went through the Ender’s Game series. I wish I hadn’t read the postquels thought, Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets kinda ruined the elegance of the first novel.
Was thinking about your comment on drugs. It would be interesting if at some point in the future we started using “drugs” to enhance “human potential”. We could even end up using them on a regular basis just to feel good and fight off anxiety and mild depression etc. Pumping ourselves with seratonin. Getting high on dopamine. Taking HGH everyday, new drugs that enhance our physical/mental capabilities etc. Athletes could be allowed to take them so that the competition will now focus on not only on the physical capabilities of the athlete but also on the skill of his…um pusher/chemist? :)
This a bit like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World minus the authoritarian conformity, but no less creepy. We could also have biological tinkering/enhancements (like in Neuromancer) and it could be a really interesting future to live in?
Also Dune is awesome! Have not read Enders
Interesting, about legalising performance enhancing drugs. But what about increasing tolerance levels, addiction, mood swings and overdosing? In addition to chemist/pushers we’d need personal physicians to design and manage our cocktail, and they’d be so much in demand that we’d have to pay them even more than Heshan’s economists.
Not to mention geneticists who might help with a little biological tweaking.
To hell with all that. LETS DO IT :D throw caution to the wind. If I had the know how I would. Was never big on caution.
Biologists/doctors and such would be in demand but then again we would have to adapt to a whole new type of global economy which would push the demand for economists and analysts even higher !
Pissuda? The supply of the substances would be under the control of a ruthless mafia. The political leaders would be on their payroll. So would be those misfits who resulted from human guinea pigs used in the lab experiments that misfired, terrorising the people and taking out the economists who dared to open their mouths about equitable distribution of resources. Scientists would be in great demand, working both for and against the mafia. Then from among the ranks of the good guy scientists will emerge one nerdy fellow who makes a breakthrough, some kind of vapour that nullifies the effect of the drugs and the synthetic enhancements. He will use his discovery to disarm the bad guys, etc. etc…. until he is in turn is corrupted by power, that’s how it’ll be.
I’d rather go for some kind of virtual ecstasy, that could be switched on and off at will, some computer software that could be copied; limitless supply, goodbye scarcity, goodbye economist.
The Rajapaksa’s have put out a performance enhancing drug. It’s called “Ego.” Available in pharmacies islandwide.
Goodbye scarcity? hardly. The availability virtual “stuff” is limited by the availability of physical stuff namely energy so the extent to which we are allowed to be immersed in cyberspace, the amount of time we spend etc is ultimately dependent the amount of energy available to us.
*The availability of the virtual stuff , *ultimately dependent upon the energy available to us
sorry about the typos. I’m really sleepy right now :)
Also your scenario sounds AWESOME! :D all the more reason to do it
People thought that this vapour was a gift of God, a gift to conquer evil, to vanquish debauchery, to blow up despotism to pieces. But alas, they were gravely mistaken. The vapour had deceived them, as it had deceived its creator, Shammilan the brilliant good-guy-scientist, for this vapour was no vapour but something very much alive; a sentient being with a hidden agenda so evil that evil itself coils in terror. So evil that words cannot describe it because they can help running in fear. The so-called vapour, though it nullifies the effects of the drug on humans, enhances the the effect of the drug on the Old One himself, who in addition to being the creator of everything including the space-time continuum, has been an degenerate drug addict since the day he got nailed to a cross by self hating Jews. The Old One, having inhaled the evil of the vapour pondered upon the greatest question of all: why does he have a depression in the centre surface of his belly when he himself made sure that he never had a mother? He then pondered upon why he had a belly since he doesn’t eat, and then the purpose of the appendix. He then pondered upon the great mystery of the existence of the appendage between his legs. It had no purpose since he had never gone to a cosmic toilet to urinate, and the one time he deflowered a woman he did so without using it. He then proceeded to ponder upon why he ponders upon these things. He concluded that he ponders upon things because he was curious, and realised that he came to this conclusion through reasoning, which was something he despised. He then pondered upon why he had created reason in the first place. Upon realising he wasn’t smart enough to answer this, he pondered upon why, if he was capable of reasoning, he created the universe, rape, murder, pogroms, genocides, science, and atheism, and realised it was because he was in his nature a homicidal maniac. He felt so depressed, which was another thing he had created, and felt suicidal, and committed suicide. Upon killing god, the vapour announced itself to be the supreme being in the universe, and promised eternal fires in inferno to those who don’t worship itself.
Paul Atreides was like, what the fuck?
You may also want to read Harlan Ellison’s works as well. Specially the short story Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman
I loved this story when I read it as a teenager, and the sentence “”‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” has been in my head ever since.
The story is a satirical look at a dystopian future where time is strictly regulated. In this future, being late is not merely an inconvenience, but a crime. The crime carries a hefty penalty in that a proportionate amount of time is “revoked” from one’s life. The ultimate consequence is to run out of time and be “turned off”. The story focuses on a man who, as the anarchical Harlequin, engages in whimsical rebellion against the schedule kept by the Master Timekeeper, or “ticktockman”.
Ahead of its times. Think credit and credit reporting in the US.