The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use


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istaivan
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The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by istaivan »

Such as:
1. leaving the chronology stretched out by the extra 2-3,000 years so that we don't get foldspace until 3096 AD, but then we have foldspace without accuracy for 11,000 years until the Jihad.
(So that you could do a 'jump' to roughly the right star system, but maybe you run out of life support before you get to your target planet. It's a crapshoot, or you get lost in foldspace like heighliners now and then were supposed to have gotten lost)
Whereas they develop foldspace right before Jihad in the Brianverse.
The deal with the Guild was the -precision-, not the bare ability to fold space at all. Linear prescience put you -right- on target.

1A. Keeping Irulan's regency intact during 10196 as it's mentioned in the first Dune book's appendix.
There was so much potential there for Gaius Helen, the Tleilaxu, everyone to be screaming 'you're the regent! kill Paul kill him kill him before your term expires'. Much fun to be had there. Also it's consistent with the legal machinery of the Landsraad being super slow that she would be regent for a number of months if not the whole year. And for Shaddam to actually stay de jure emperor for 3 years before that.

1B (these lettered entires being chronology-related things). I think Duncan Prime's birth being depicted as 10158 makes a lot more sense than the prequels idea of him being as old as Duke Leto (being born in 10140 instead). Duncan is supposed to be younger, but -just- old enough to maybe be in his early twenties when he takes Paul to the fish market.

1C. With reference to 2,000 BG - AG 0 : The treatment of the Landsraad as already being around for 2,000 years prior to the Butlerian Jihad with an almost perfect sitting record, thank you very much, instead of the Jihad being the sudden start of Everything. Signs that the communications breakthrough from the 1-D Holtzman Theory etc were causing what-would-be the Imperium to already be coming together quite nicely on its own, with the Battle of Corrin being more of a 'freak accident' that accelerated unification. And the absence of any Cymek Anything, praise be.

2. Holtzman's story is so so much much better as a cyborg that lives as part of a robot ship for 7500 years. With his brain sped up 30:1. Which would actually give you enough -time- to think of the next Einstein-level breakthroughs like relativity, four times over. (Holtzman's theories for each dimension). Tio Holtzman in the Brianverse is in contrast such a little 30 year old snot, like Mozart.
...Ibrahim Vaughan all the way.

3. The list and timing of the emperors of the known universe list, just generally as an outline. (This is akin to Point 1 above because it massively improves the sense of scale).
4. The list of the great houses. The coats are arms are entertaining, at least it was attempted (which is the feeling one gets about the DE as an entirety), clearly a Bull instead of a gryphon for Harkonnen is incorrect, though.
5. The discussion of the monthly Guild cargo 'mail drops' and the way votes were redistributed every 10 years, in the Landsraad article.
I thought the way they discussed how Saudir I wheeled and dealed to get the Great Synod going was pretty well written.
And just generally how the Emperor never directly controlled more than 20% of the shares, and indirectly more than 35% of CHOAM. And then that one of the reasons the Atreides were up in arms was that Shaddam was starting to edge higher than that.
("I just love it when a girl says 'Sysselraad' to me.") But seriously, folks...

6. Some of the more clever Duncan Idaho ghola articles and not the others. I thought the research the one Duncan did into Hardison's disease was a tricky little article. Not so much the female duncan (although the question does arise about the passage in the BG report in God Emperor about the "one attempt to tamper with their creation" does this refer to the female Duncan or to Duncan-10208 being enhanced as a philosopher).
7. I personally enjoy the oxygen saga article. And some of the astronomy of the Canopus system where it doesn't contradict things.
8. The chemistry of melange is cool, it's a huge polymer like lignin in tree sap. (Maybe you have to be a paper science graduate to appreciate that).
9. The article on Ecaz being a plants-planet (Think "Class L planet" in Star Trek) that got nuked. and Fogwood was cool.
10. the No-Room article is Okay as it stands. I am one of those that thinks the no-globe was built more around only a few hundred years before Leto II's death (AG 12900? 13000 dead on?) so that "millennia" is at most Two millennia. That way the Harkonnens could reasonably have stolen some Ixian ideas for it. Otherwise if you put the no-globe farther back then why aren't there 50 no-globes -not- by the Harkonnens and then Leto II's prescient Map of the known universe has holes in it like swiss cheese?...and then why is Hwi's particular birth in just one of those holes all that special.

11. Gunseng Harkonnen. This version of Vladimir's father as sort of a 'good' Harkonnen with above-average smarts, was pretty nice. And it also helps explain where Abulurd and his son Rabban got -their- (underappreciated) smarts.

12. The discussion of how Hwi Noree might have been a doubling of Feyd-Rautha's X chromosome by itself was pretty good. I wonder that BH/KJA didn't steal some of that idea and create 'Marie', the daughter that Margot had with Feyd. There might be some overlap of some kind there.

If we take those few things and toss most of the rest...

People are in here bashing on DE just because it appears KJA/BH employed it. But people that enjoyed DE can virulently disavow -how- they employed it and think of ways the Good Parts of it could have been more strictly adhered to. There's plenty of room for that and I daresay things generally might have gone that way had McNelly and FH lived long enough to collaborate on the Jihad prequel themselves.
Last edited by istaivan on 23 Feb 2019 03:45, edited 11 times in total.
istaivan
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by istaivan »

Things i didn't like (or I still like them but i have to truthfully admit I'm in the minority almost certainly), to be fair:
1. Most of the articles about the main characters, where they deviated. I mean i think they were put in there more because they were expected to be in there, where as more fun was had with more peripheral topics. The al-Harba question is a weird article.
It took some guts to write an article refuting Paul's existence but it was kind of painful to read.

2. Mohiam as Tanidia Nerus is a real problem. I don't dislike the idea but what's required is a (good, as only Frank could himself have done) rewrite of the first 3 books to accomodate it. And the man just didn't have time to do that, he was dying of whatever he was dying of.

3. I personally have fun with the Gamont article but I have to place it in this list because it's not a strong article.
4. The Crompton Ruins article doesn't go anywhere, but perhaps that's the whole point and maybe it was the replacement article for the one the publisher didn't like about the no-Room in another galaxy by aliens.

5. Similar to 3. above I have fun with the early Bene Gesserit history article but other people might not dig it. Particularly had fun with the north-south split between the 'Daughters' etc. since i am related to a D.A.R. person. The point about possible prehistoric Kwisatz Haderachs who had OM on both sides but not prescience was interesting, tying it to sterility would explain why it wasn't directly heritable. Making Merlin one of them was a bit much. (Leto refers to the choices Baptist John had to face, in Children of Dune..might he be another one of these fellows?) One of the big problems with BG history is just exactly when did Other Memory become operable. The preborn seem to be able to access memories all the way back to apes ("I'm millions of years old. That requires adjustments that humans have never before been called upon to make."--Leto II, Children of Dune). Perhaps we were storing them longer ago than we were able to actively retrieve them. It's another of these things where locating the beginning of the ability right at the Butlerian Jihad along with the founding of the Guild and the Imperium seems a gross oversimplification of things (by they who wrote the prequels). I'm inclined to think the BG's got the ability between Now and Then, perhaps around halfway. It's sufficient to have the Financial Synod and the government/economy apparatus start at After Guild zero without shoehorning the rest of all-factions-in-Dune to 'begin' all at that point as well.

5A. The Bene Gesserit Governance article? I don't know. Certainly we very shortly after the Encyclopedia in the last two books got more Bene Gesserit Governance than we could shake a stick at. This article would have to be rewritten to come into line with that.

6. The Otto Aramsham thing (which goes hand in hand with Duncan-11099(?) ) would be okay except it's implausible that such a revolt would get very far by that point, Leto II pretty much had the upper hand by then.

7. The Cheops article is weak without some kind of fun drawings like the Tri-D chess in the Star Fleet Technical Manual (although that's kind of unfair the 3D chess board was actually on-screen in the original series). And some serious working out of the rules. But then i'm one of the weird people who felt let down when Solo came out and the cards Lando had when playing Sabacc weren't spiffy CGI cards that changed their faces every 15 seconds. Because i'm one of the geeks that read the Lando books back in the day.

8. The Farad'n article has surname Kenola. But that's just one of those straight-up booboos. They just didn't realize Dalak's surname was Fenring.
9. The inconsistent use of 10205 as 12 years into Paul's imperium versus 10208. This goes back and forth a bit in different articles. 10205 is cited in one spot as being the year of the stoneburner attack, when in fact it was only months before Paul walks into the desert. Hence "Duncan-Idaho-10208" is correct and they at least didn't say "Duncan-Idaho-10205" for Hayt's transformed name. BH/KJA seem to have gone with 10205 in a way (since Paul of Dune starts his reign right at 10193), before settling upon 10207 as the date when the twins are born.

10. They messed up DI-10208's death at the hands of Stilgar as occurring in 10231 and not during the same year Alia died. This i think has to do with trying to flange up the next ghola entry as DI-10231 so that there was only a gap of a few months before the 2nd ghola.

11. References here and there in the DE to the Infinity Calculus as something post-Scattering or post-Heretics that was an improvement on theories about prescience, when it was already around when Palimbasha was employing it. This would need to be fleshed out better. On the other hand, it's one of these "at least it was attempted" things where they tried to directly get a grip on how a Kwisatz Haderach's Mentat ability meshed with the spice. The 'calculus' could be part of the mathematical framework where the rubber hits the road, as it were. Such seemed to be Palimbasha's 'heresy' at any rate.
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by Serkanner »

istaivan wrote:People are in here bashing on DE just because it appears KJA/BH employed it.
First time I hear this. As far as I know people here do not bash the DE at all. Most don't consider it canon, but see it as a very nice fanfic, as I do.

We do bash the two idiots in regadrs to the DE though because they obviously used parts of the DE even if the deny it.
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istaivan
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by istaivan »

I did wonder if I should walk that statement back (I've done a fair number of edits to my posts all on the same day here).
Much apologizings, it did somehow seem though like there was some animus toward DE as I scanned over things. Glad to hear it's not strictly so.
There, i even looked up how to do a strikethrough in HTML. 8-)
--D
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Naib
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by Naib »

I consider the DE to be canon-ish. Anything to do with characters or events I pretty much discount, although they can be entertaining. The articles about technology and things of that nature I can accept as being part of the Dune Universe as they are far better than anything Bobo and the Hack could manage.
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by georgiedenbro »

The problem with the DE isn't that parts of it aren't cool, but that they sort of contravene Frank's desire that the reader fill in all the gaps using their own imagination. Spelling out all the chronology stuff isn't really helpful IMO to the Dune story, but as the others mention, it can be neat fanfic. The worst sin the hacks are guilty of isn't stealing material, or lying about it, but being crappy writers. They could have stolen all they wanted if they had also written awesome books as a result.
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xcalibur
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by xcalibur »

Naib wrote:I consider the DE to be canon-ish.
I used to see it this way, as deuterocanonical or apocryphal, but I've had to revise this view. it has its strong points, but it's nothing more than decent fanfic, not to be confused with proper canon. this is further supported by the fact that Frank Herbert disregarded it in Heretics and Chapterhouse.
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Naib
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by Naib »

xcalibur wrote:
Naib wrote:I consider the DE to be canon-ish.
I used to see it this way, as deuterocanonical or apocryphal, but I've had to revise this view. it has its strong points, but it's nothing more than decent fanfic, not to be confused with proper canon. this is further supported by the fact that Frank Herbert disregarded it in Heretics and Chapterhouse.
Fair enough.
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Re: The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use

Post by DrunkenIdaho »

istaivan wrote: 22 Feb 2019 23:34 1B (these lettered entires being chronology-related things). I think Duncan Prime's birth being depicted as 10158 makes a lot more sense than the prequels idea of him being as old as Duke Leto (being born in 10140 instead). Duncan is supposed to be younger, but -just- old enough to maybe be in his early twenties when he takes Paul to the fish market.
Duncan wasn't born in 10140 (the same year as Leto) in McDune. He was born six years after in 10146. But you're right, the birth of 10158 in the DE still makes more sense.
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