The Ultimate Guide to Dune


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Freakzilla
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The Ultimate Guide to Dune

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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by georgiedenbro »

I'll have to check that out later. Thanks, Freak.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by georgiedenbro »

I took a look at it last night. The first video seems to be a redux of the entire six books, while the next three videos feature 1 hour synopses of Dune until Children of Dune. The nice thing about them is there seems to be some illustrations that I haven't seen before showing during the reading of some text bits. Maybe that was taken from somewhere else, but if it was original then it's neat. Some of the images shown are from Lynch's movie and from the miniseries. I like that someone took the time to make these, although I've got to say that the voice of the narrator is so offputting and hard to listen to that I really couldn't bring myself to sit back and listen to them all. I sort of scanned through them quickly to see what they would cover and left it at that.

Slight sidebar, but I'm also irked whenever I hear the families and terms pronounced in weird ways, including how they were pronounced in the miniseries. Does anyone else default automatically to the pronunciations in Lynch's film? It seems to accord most with how Frank pronounced things in the times I heard him speak about it.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

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Ever since the first time I listened to Frank read Dune, I changed my pronunciation of Dune names to his.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by Omphalos »

Serkanner wrote:Ever since the first time I listened to Frank read Dune, I changed my pronunciation of Dune names to his.
yep. though I still have some problems with secher nbiw.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

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Omphalos wrote:
Serkanner wrote:Ever since the first time I listened to Frank read Dune, I changed my pronunciation of Dune names to his.
yep. though I still have some problems with secher nbiw.
Same here. My tongue gets in a twist every time I try.
"... the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve but a reality to experience."

“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”

Sandrider: "Keith went to Bobo's for a weekend of drinking, watched some DVDs,
and wrote a Dune Novel."
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by Redstar »

I've listened to several of these videos. They're expansive, accurate, and do not use information from the expanded series!
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by Freakzilla »

Redstar wrote:I've listened to several of these videos. They're expansive, accurate, and do not use information from the expanded series!
Whoa, where have you been?

The only thing I've found that I disagree with in these is that they somehow think the threat to humanity which Leto II prevented was possibly related to the Enemy of Many Faces. I don't think there's any text to support that at all.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by georgiedenbro »

Freakzilla wrote: The only thing I've found that I disagree with in these is that they somehow think the threat to humanity which Leto II prevented was possibly related to the Enemy of Many Faces. I don't think there's any text to support that at all.
I suppose we could make an argument for it if we wanted to infer things that are never stated directly. For instance if we accept that by the end of GEoD the Tleilaxu have taken over Ix, the question then is exactly when that happened. And it may have occurred slowly over time, with a few "imposters" long ago until it grew in scope until they effectively controlled the planet. If we then take "Enemy of Many Faces" to just mean Tleilaxu, then we *might* suggest that the Ixians themselves would never have unleashed such a destructive weapon on the universe - because why would they? But maybe the Tleilaxu would have corrupted an otherwise 'safe' hunter-seeker AI program to eliminate all non-Tleilaxu life in the universe. It would actually fit with their M.O. to do such a thing, and it would be additionally reasonable to suppose that, being a non-electronics specialized race, they may not have realized the implications on how dangerous such a weapon would be, even to them. Babylon 5 had an episode just on this topic, where a race unleashed a super-weapon to destroy all "impure" beings, and the weapon of course turned on them as well because they themselves weren't as pure as they thought. So by corrupting the Ixians they may have additionally corrupted what would otherwise have been sound safety protocols.

Again, it never says any of this in the books, and this theory does require us to accept that the Enemy of Many Face simply refers to Face Dancers, and not to any specific group of FD's; so obviously it would mean the type of FD's seen thus far in the series, and not the "new and improved" ones in Heretics, or the type from the Scattering like M&D. But I guess this could make sense, and in fact almost makes more sense than to merely suppose that the Ixians were going to randomly mess up one day. One thing I'll have to take note of next time I read GEod is how much at all is said about the BT on Ix, because it's a major plot development that I feel gets almost no coverage in the book. But perhaps a lot of inferences can be made about it.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

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You're right, as most things in Dune, this is not spoon fed to us.

Leto tells Hwi about the self-improving hunter-seekers the Ixians contemplated making, the vision Siona has seems to fit this description, then Leto tells her and Duncan as he dies that the Ixian's can no longer create Arafel. I think that's the simplest explanation from what we ARE told. How any of this relates to a future threat is beyond me. Humanity is practically infinite and any future threat is just local. But jumping to then, it seems plain to see that the EoMF are Marty and Daniel or other Advanced Face Dancers like them. But I recall nothing tying the two together.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by georgiedenbro »

Right, I agree the EoMF wasn't a term used before for ordinary FD's. However if we consider how that term comes to be used, all it really means is that the enemy can have many faces, which fits what they were before as well. So whoever gave them that nickname might well have used the same term to denote the older versions of FD's as well, if they had met them. If we're going to narrow down exactly what separated the earlier ones from the later ones (like M&D) it would seem like the most notable differences aren't in the ability to take on different faces, but different personas or even to *be* different personas. So the term EoMF could apply to even Scytale from Messiah, I guess, and have a valid meaning. I guess the link, if there is one, may be that the HM's call them the EoMF because those had been at that point the only FD's they had seen; so maybe the term doesn't refer to any specific 'model' of FD, but just to the basic fact that they can change shape.

I agree with you that if the video meant to imply that the threat Leto mentioned was specifically that of M&D then that isn't supported in the books. I'm just trying to make a case that *perhaps* the FD's (and Tleilaxu) were actually involved in the threat that Leto II did see, which I agree seems to be the hunter-seekers (or any similar "blow up the basket while all the eggs are in it" tech). I guess in an effort to see how it might connect it occurred to me to question why the Ixians would ever unleash such a thing, which now that I reflect on it seems weird. Are we to conclude that any tech will eventually get out of control? Or did the Ixians secretly have some agenda? Since we don't know any of this, but do know (especially later in more detail) that the BT do have an agenda, and that it involves their degradation of non-BT life, perhaps it makes more sense to suppose they would have had a hand in it. They always were more dangerous than they often seemed.
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by Freakzilla »

The EoMF actually referred to whatever the BT FDs had evolved into in The Scattering, IMO.

The Ixian S-I H-S would only have existed in a universe without Leto's existence. So there's no telling what the Ixian motivation might have been. Maybe it was meant as a weapon against Leto? But that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and we didn't really need the GP in the first place.

:think:
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Re: The Ultimate Guide to Dune

Post by georgiedenbro »

Freakzilla wrote:The EoMF actually referred to whatever the BT FDs had evolved into in The Scattering, IMO.
No, I agree. But my point was just that even if the FD's in the Scattering hadn't become more advanced than the Empire ones, they might well have been given that monicker anyhow, because it fits.
The Ixian S-I H-S would only have existed in a universe without Leto's existence. So there's no telling what the Ixian motivation might have been. Maybe it was meant as a weapon against Leto? But that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and we didn't really need the GP in the first place.

:think:
Yeah. One of my lines of thought is that perhaps the reason Paul didn't see the need was because he couldn't see Leto II either (cloaked); and that the need arises out of Leto's existence and wouldn't exist if he didn't exist. But we can also suppose that even if Leto II hadn't become a tyrant and done what he did, perhaps someone else with less foresight would have, and despite having the 'hydraulic control' wouldn't be able to prevent the extinction. I guess it's pretty hard to refute the idea that humanity needed to spread out to avoid even the possibility of extinction. In a way it mirrors what some sci-fi authors have said in more contemporary terms, which is that humanity has got to spread to other planets/moons so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket here. It seems to me like a pretty inescapable argument.

So perhaps Leto II *did* create the problem in the first place, but maybe that's not the point. Maybe that someone would have motivated an extinction-weapon eventually, even if not him, so better he be the one to motivate it since he also had a solution to it at the same time. Kind of like forcing an inevitable issue that may not have naturally occurred this quickly, but better to face it on your terms when you can handle it than have it come out of left field.
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