Frank_herbert

Thoughts Frank ‘Arrakis is a planet with not very much water, seriously its crazy how little water there is, have you considered how much we take water for granted on earth but how difficult it would be to have little water, you know like Arrakis because it’s a desert planet that has almost no water’ Herbert tells a very entertaining story on a very dry planet. Jokes aside this was a very good book with excellent world building. It made me realize how important names are in Sci-fi books. They can make the difference between your sci-fi book just being another run of the mill DnD group meet-up versus a really entertaining novel. Herbert must play the role of Adam in naming things that do not exist, but in a way that elicits the correct conscious and subconscious reactions from his western readers. He does a great job, for example nobody has to tell me that the Harkonnens are evil I can tell by their name. Bene Gesserits are obviously a religious order and Mentats a logistical one. The Fremens are interesting, the name to me conjures images of rats, vermin or rodents. This in part makes sense because the Fremen lived in holes in the ground and were like pests to the Harkonnens. They are also set up to become an invasive species. I’ll be interested to see where that goes. The role religion plays in the book is interesting and tied into Dune’s vision of time and determinism. Religion gives us a potential future, but we have to work to bring that potential future into existence. The warning is also that the vision and process of creation does not bring with it control over that future when it comes. Dune does a great job of maintaining the experienced paradox of self-aware agents in a complex system. In some ways the book could be recast as Paul being some Calvinistic hero attempting to slay the Arminian dragon of predestination. He seeks to control a future that is already cast. Another theme throughout the book is the idea that opulent civilizations grow lazy and soft. They are then replaced by civilizations that are sharpened by adversity. I wonder if we as a species have surpassed this point? The idea that decadence leads to decay which leads to collapse seems more plausible for the Roman empire than for a modern society. It seems hard to imagine what a modern-day Visigoth invasion force would look like, but then again, the average Roman may have felt the same way. The Fremens are also interesting because they are cast as a sort of noble savage, like we think of the Comanche for example, where they are brutal but honorable people. But what sets this apart from other troupes is that they also produce sophisticated technology. This made me wonder if it would be possible for an advanced technological society to adhere to old time-y eye for eye moral codes or if there is requirement that aggression must be repressed in a society to allow sophisticated technology to emerge.