Hadi Benotto wrote:Yeah, I've tried piecing together how the term cymek could've come about, and when I think about it I just kind of stare into oblivion...
Of course whenever I think about the cymeks I can't help but immediately think of
the B'omarr Monks from Star Wars. You saw them in the scene in Return of the Jedi where 3P0 and R2 come inside Jabba's palace, they're walking towards the camera as the door closes behind them. As the door closes, this robot spider, with a
brain canister hanging off the bottom, passes in front of the door scaring 3P0.
I know Star Wars took some Dune elements, so I guess turn about is fair play? Maybe the hack didn't think anyone would notice? I just don't know.
One does have to wonder if machines do gain sentience, will their first thought be to exterminate us? It seems that's always the way writers paint the picture; machine can think for itself and automatically comes to the conclusion that they're better off without us. One of the differences between the Dune universe and our current reality, at least the way I like to picture it in my head, is that when the machines rose to power, gained awareness, the amount of integration between man and machine was much much greater. I think nearly everything would be autonomous and computer controlled, to a much greater degree than we are now which would facilitate a much easier transition of take over.
Of course our current civilization is moving that way now, but it's still a heck of a long way off from that potential future.
When I started reading McDune The BJ, what I first thought of when I saw the "Titans" and Cymeks was that KJA had ripped off William Dietz's
Legion of the Damned. (If anyone hasn't tried it, its a fun military SF read). Well first thought was... WTF did Frank put in his "notes" the idiot son supposedly found? Was he senile at that point or something... then the epiphany struck me that KJA is pretty much doing these on his own and vaguely following established Dune canon from the books let alone any notes Frank left. So next logical step in my mind was what idea(s) did he rip off for these things.
I think setting the story as the machines trying to annihilate humans was derivative and easy (the only way KJA knows) because it's pretty clear from blogs and twits that he does absolutely no research on any subject he's going to write about. So naturally he regurgitates derivative and banal pop-culture depictions of man vs machine like the Forbin Project (where he ripped off Colossus as Omnius) and The Terminator for the whole homicidal machine thing. He must have caught those 2 on Netflix while "editing" the House books and thought ... "FUCK YEAH!!... plot for next Trilogy CONFIRMED!!"
Given that Frank spent years researching the topics of politics, religion, economics, ecology, and etc for Dune, its easy to see him, if he had lived, doing the same with AI. He would have spent TIME researching the topic and not spent a week brainstorming then go off dictahiking out an entire book on a few treks through the woods. It would have been so interesting and fascinating to see Frank's take on AI and how it ended up devolving humans to the point that a religious fervor ignited that Great Revolt against any type of Thinking Machine.