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Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

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Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#161

Post by xxs »

syockit wrote: post #99
xxs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nowadays (past few decades) 'mine' (and farm) are often used in place of gather, esp. when it comes to game communities, e.g. 'mine' wood in 'warcraft III'. Farm any sort of materials, equipment, reputation, etc. So I suppose it's not that far fetched.

But definitely not in the parlance of late 70s when Star Wars premiered.

True, of course, however the spice mining in Star Wars refers to mining minerals and converting them to drugs. And of course, without any doubt both the mining and the spice have influence from Dune.

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#162

Post by kridsdale1 »

foobarchu wrote: post #148
macartain wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus he also had the smarts to use plausible mechanisms to remove advanced computers (the Butlerian Jihad) and nuclear weapons (some sort of extreme taboo based on a historical event IIRC? it's been a while..) from the technologies available to the Dune universe. This allowed the exploration of all sorts of human developmental possibilities - the Bene Gesserit and mentats, advanced schools of martial art and mental d…

Nuclear weapons exist and are used, they call them atomics. I believe they are used to break into the city in the first book. The big taboo seems to be using them against people.

Correct. They nuke the rock wall to let the worms through.

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#163

Post by KineticLensman »

throwup238 wrote: post #20
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's ironic is how people often point to plot points in many franchises (Star Wars, GoT, etc) as being derivative of Dune... Yet Dune itself is fairly derivative of other works

It’s even more stark the further back you go. When the printing press was invented, it didn’t usher in a new era of creativity but instead the first few centuries resembled modern Hollywood: shameless sequels and reboots. By far the most popular books were translations of Greek classics and rote derivatives of the Arthurian legends. It wasn’t until the first iterations of copyright and a few other cultural shifts tha…

> When the printing press was invented, it didn’t usher in a new era of creativity but instead the first few centuries resembled modern Hollywood

It ushered in massive creativity! The early printshops were innovation hot-beds and quickly developed textual things that had never existed at scale before, like dictionaries, newspapers, political cartoons, encyclopaedia, technical drawings / manuals lacking copy errors, local maps, etc.

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#164

Post by danielskogly »

Interesting to see that Isaac Asimov's Foundation isn't mentioned anywhere. The Wikipedia-article says the following[0]

> Tim O'Reilly suggests that Herbert also wrote Dune as a counterpoint to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Asimov's_Foundati...

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#165

Post by andrewflnr »

throwup238 wrote: post #20
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's ironic is how people often point to plot points in many franchises (Star Wars, GoT, etc) as being derivative of Dune... Yet Dune itself is fairly derivative of other works

It’s even more stark the further back you go. When the printing press was invented, it didn’t usher in a new era of creativity but instead the first few centuries resembled modern Hollywood: shameless sequels and reboots. By far the most popular books were translations of Greek classics and rote derivatives of the Arthurian legends. It wasn’t until the first iterations of copyright and a few other cultural shifts tha…

> how long it took science fiction to properly develop into a literary form

How long do you think that took? There's a wide range of possible dates for each endpoint, but I don't think it reaches a century.

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#166

Post by MrMcCall »

Terr_ wrote: post #44
fells wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would this not be the same as asking; "Are you 14 years old?" "between x and y" normally includes the endpoints. For example, if someone asks you to pick a number between 1 and 10, everyone would pretty much agree that 1 and 10 are acceptable choices.

The ambiguity of such questions drove me up the wall as a child. My mother has a story about how I would ask about future events as "the day after the day after the day after the day after the day after today", which in my mind was much clearer than "in X days" why it wasn't clear how rounding occurred. Clearly, this set me up for a career involving off-by-one errors.

Ha! That's truly funny and obeys some kind of comedy rule about taking the story one way and then veering in a different direction. Well done, indeed.

Our daughter used to say "yesterday's yesterday" when she was 4ish and I really liked it.

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#167

Post by MrMcCall »

keepamovin wrote: post #67

I'm convinced Herbert had some deep knowledge of psi phenomena. His descriptions of truthsayers reading people, timelines, race consciousness, and prescience are very similar to real experiences. His emphasis that it emerges through a combination of genetics and training of subtle awareness, plus the suggestion compounds could provide access to a state that could be sustained without them - also ring very true. The e…

Concerning truthsayers:

It is absolutely the truth that a liar will automatically have a difficult time knowing when another person is being truthful. They will both automatically tend to believe the person is lying and not know how to recognize the signs that a person is being completely truthful.

It's the opposite of an honest person being more easily conned. It's not in their expectations, because of their own lack of devious ways.

That's part of the reason that dictators rise to power on the backs of the gullible -- most people are just not that utterly ruthless, dishonest, or mean-spirited. All these GOP folks being fired and deported by Trump are just incapable of comprehending either how vile the man is or how stupid they are (which is why he targeted them with his cons).

And America would be in a better situation right now if more Americans had their heads out of their asses enough to know that that is a bad, bad dude, who cares about one and only one person: himself and those that serve him.

All that said, the first step to recognizing liars is to be brutally truthful, especially with yourself. The worst lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.

[ETA: ps: I love you, my friend. Keep shining your light!]

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#168

Post by isleyaardvark »

dkarl wrote: post #149
karaterobot wrote: post #18

> The 1962 film based on a romanticized version of Lawrence’s journey... rested on the idea of the ‘white savior,’ whose role was to lend a sympathetic ear to oppressed peoples and provide assistance to improve their lot in life. I really think this is the wrong interpretation of the end of that movie.

This didn't sit well with me either. In the movie, Lawrence tries to resolve his apparent split loyalties by bringing the Arab and British interests into alignment and has a couple of initial exhilarating successes, but he ultimately fails, badly. Neither the Arabs nor the British live up to his idealistic expectations. The British use him in ways contrary to his intentions. He also discovers that his own idealism is…

The movie pretty explicitly has Lawrence trying to deal with these split loyalties and has him specifically aware that the result of his actions as a British officer end up screwing over his Arab allies.

Not to mention the scene where he tries to pass as an actual Arab, the results of which aren't those of a stereotypical "white savior" story.

I can't really say it's not a "white savior" story but it's a subversive enough take on it that I'd recommend it to people who are turned off by white savior stories. The movie has much more depth than that.

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#169

Post by zabzonk »

balamatom wrote: post #100
zabzonk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps he was just waving

Might be. That'd certainly explain the ambulance I saw there on my way back, the dripping wet shape on the stretcher, covered with some sort of tarp (which I thought I recognized as torn from a nearby beach bar that'd been closed for the winter, emergency services over here being underfunded as they are.) But idk, they might've been picking up a beached dolphin or something. (With an ambulance?!)

Sorry, I didn't mean to belittle your experience, or the guy's demise.

I was making a bit of a heartless pun of sorts on Stevie Smith's poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46479/not-waving-but-...

Re: Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

#170

Post by pitaj »

lazystar wrote: post #120
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's ironic is how people often point to plot points in many franchises (Star Wars, GoT, etc) as being derivative of Dune... Yet Dune itself is fairly derivative of other works

adding to this... Avatar is often thought of as unique, but it's a blatant copy paste of Timothy Zahn's "Manta's Gift" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216441.Manta_s_Gift

Avatar the movie franchise? The most common thing you'll hear people say about it is that it's "Pocahontas in space".
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