Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Sorry if I'm LTTP on this in case any of you caught this before but this kind of blew me away when I read it. Ok maybe it's not directed directly at McDune but at the pulp attitude with which BriBri and TheHack have written McDune. It's damn prescient if you ask me in light of what's happened to his Dune Legacy under the stewardship of his "family".

Have you seen the recent science fiction movies? Like Star Wars?
Oh, I saw Star Wars, yes. I saw the rip-offs of Gordy Dickson, Larry
Niven, Jerry Pournelle, myself, everybody (laughter). This is Hollywood,
you know. They practise rip-off down there. They lack imagination
themselves so they dip into the imagination of others and they like to
do it where they don't have to pay for it.

George Lucas claims that he's using some of the best-known images from
science fiction as his tribute to them.
It was a comic book for the screen. And there's a comparison to be
made here, between what happened in science fiction in the early days
of the pulps, creating the cliches of today's science fiction; preparing
an audience so that you don't have to explain a lot of things.

Thanks to those wonderful souls who created: THE (ALMOST) UNDELETED
Source: http://tau.solahpmo.com/assets/Australi ... erview.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

After McDune, TAU (and Jacarutu) is turning into Frank Herbert's Dar-es-Balat for me

preparing an audience so that you don't have to explain a lot of things.

That sounds like something the hack said to justify his simpleton's writing.

lotek wrote:

preparing an audience so that you don't have to explain a lot of things.

That sounds like something the hack said to justify his simpleton's writing.

I think you're misinterpreting Frank Herbert here--he was a direct beneficiary of the pulp sci-fi of the golden age. You'll note that Dune, for example, is not exactly about faster-than-light drive, or lasguns, or force fields. It uses them, but Herberts wasted few words on them. He didn't need to, because he could assume that his audience knew all about them, so he could spend his words on character development and even more esotheric concepts.

So his view of Star Wars sounds like a mildly positive one. He's amused; sure, it's unoriginal and uninspiring, but if it makes Science Fiction more popular and accessible, what's the harm?

In practice, we know it didn't work out that way. If anything, Star Wars marked the end of the era of challenging SF movies, not the beginning.

Going back to the pulp magazines of the golden age; if you read them, even if you restrict yourself to Analog / Astounding (whose editor did more than anyone to push the genre into more interesting directions) you'll find a host of cliches, poor writing, cardboard characters. Read Pack Rat Planet, one of Frank Herbert's stories from that time, and you'll find him sticking to the same form.

Writers like Kevin J. Anderson have always been part of Science Fiction as a genre, and you could argue that they are much more true to it than the Great SF-writers of Frank Herbert's generation, many of whom flocked to Science Fiction because it paid well and it allowed them great creative liberties, not out of love for 1940s pulps.

Of course, nowadays you can't argue that writers like him do much to 'popularize' the genre.

I found another passage which has some interesting qualities when put up against the Hack's writing:

Dune Chapter 1.

Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness . . . focusing the consciousness . . . aortal dilation . . . avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness . . . to be conscious by choice . . . blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions . . . one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone . . . animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct . . . the animal destroys and does not produce . . . animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual . . . the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe . . . focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid . . . bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs . . . all things/cells/beings are impermanent . . . strive for flow-permanence within . . .

Naïve mind wrote:

lotek wrote:

preparing an audience so that you don't have to explain a lot of things.

That sounds like something the hack said to justify his simpleton's writing.

I think you're misinterpreting Frank Herbert here--he was a direct beneficiary of the pulp sci-fi of the golden age.

So am I my friend, so am I

I was just being sarcastic, probably too much for my own good.
tehkja said something about the lowest common denominator being who he catered for, as opposed to those snotty writers trying to show off how smart they were, like if he was doing idiots a favour by deliberately downplaying his genius.

Also, we're not in the 40s anymore, as in fair enough it was pulp at the time, now Science Fiction has outgrown that and has real writers to showcase what it can do.
And then there's keith.