Controversial opinion: the worldbuilding is by far the best part of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The story itself is kind of bland; but you want to tell me about how all of these nobles trace their lineage back to a hilariously misremembered version Alexander the Great, I’m all for that.
“oh yeah, we got so tired of computers we fought a war over it and decided to get rid of them all, if we need to calculate something we’ve got this dude who we trained from birth to think really hard.”
the way the Butlerian Jihad gets developed in the sequels is dumb, but the original idea of a religious objection to humanlike AI is actually fairly interesting. It’s civilization having a panic attack about what it means to be human, which is – the main theme of the series, really. The worldbuilding is also my favorite thing about Dune, and admittedly I’m a sucker for Space Holy Roman Empire, but a lot of what makes it new and fun and weird is the sincere effort to depict human cognition pushed to increasingly bizarre and specialized extremes as a necessary feature of the setting.
@relfanalae this isn’t a meme but now I feel compelled to alert you whenever I post or reblog something Dune-related
Published
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