Two Romance Readers and One Sci-Fi Nerd read Dune

I thought the idea of the box to be silly. What kind of group goes around killing anyone that doesn't pass their insane pain test? I suspect a lot of dead little girls in this world ... and plenty of pissed off parents that would object to their child undergoing such a test.

 

It's made known in the text of the first epigraph that most Bene Gesserit acolytes don't know their parents. From this I would surmise that they are raised in some sort of creche or similar dynamic. Sounds to me like there aren't many parents present to be pissed off about this admittedly severe sort of indoctrination.

 

That is exactly what it is like for me. I feel like I am basking in the world. Only it's not really that slow because for me it's only two epigraphs and already you feel there is a rich world being hinted and a lot of things happening that we don't understand. But I'd say that it's the islamic cultural influence and the world building that's is holding my interest mostly about Dune, that makes me want to keep turning the pages and see how it all plays out.

Going a bit off topic because I always do, but I was talking to my husband the other night and I threw out there, "You know, I wonder how well this book would have been received if Herbert had a man leading the Bene Gressit?"

Hubby seemed to think Herbert was quite clever.

Was it deliberate because he thought the idea of women leading the breeding program would make it more tolerable somehow?

But anyway, random thoughts as always, doesn't need an answer.

 

@doggiedude I agree with you - I found the concept of "If you can override human reflexes to pain, that means you're human" to be rather ridiculous. Just an in-world piece of logic you gotta accept I suppose if you wanna keep reading though. I just finished reading the bit where the witch woman had a go at Lady Jessica for bearing a son instead of a daughter, how she was supposed to bear only daughters and how selfish of her to do otherwise!

It's like, seriously, WTF?

Ok so maybe in this world, Bene Gesserits can choose which gender their baby end up being or something - but once again, it's not been established or explained how that's possible to me as a reader. Tell me "this is an epic and you're expected to put the pieces together yourself and that's half the fun" all you like, but that's just frustrating because it immediately pulls me out of the story. It immediately extinguishes any empathy I could have had for the characters and their plight because well, it hardly makes any sense!

That Jessica would let Paul go through the test must mean they're very heavily indoctrinated.

I wonder why Paul has been allowed to stay with his parents?

I don't honestly like the witch woman one little bit. She reminds me of a certain member who was once on this forum...

A note on the Baron being gay and a paedophile - interesting the references were completely lost on me... I neither made the connection of him being gay nor that he's a pedobear. Remind me what makes him gay...? Because he finds Paul's body sexually attractive and they're both male? Really the only description I took from the Baron was that he's very, very fat

 

I didn't want to restart the whole issue again on this thread but I'll do it anyway since I didn't comment on it.
I needed to go back and find the line you were all talking about it. It was something like
.. He's a sweet young thing.
The only thing I took away from that was ... creepy guy with pedophile issues. I'm not even sure I thought of him as a true pedophile. Homosexuality never crossed my mind until I started reading everyone else's discussion.

However, I can see how someone young, dealing with their own puberty, and feeling they might be gay could be sensitive to the line. It makes me think about a time when I was talking with some friends of mine and one of my best friends (someone I had known since I was 13)
said, "Yeah ... I Jewed him down."
I was probably in my early 20's at the time and had never heard the term before. Everyone else just continued along in the conversation without taking any special note. I was upset over it. It took me a long time to just accept it as a word some people used without it meaning any intentional insult.

Back to the book. I see the insinuation of Herbert's pedophile line as just an author seeking to make a character more evil and creepy. From today's standards he would need to make pedophile more clear to get away with it.

 

Yep. And Jessica more than most given that she had been the Proctor's "serving wench". Just as a side note, Frank evolves his image of the Bene Gesserit and other institutional groups through the course of the 6 original books, which would only seem natural from a writer's POV. These terms like "serving wench" and "witch", which seem plucked straight out of high fantasy, start to fade away as you go along. The general aura of the Bene Gesserit changes as well across the course of the books. It's important to note, too, that the 6 books cover a HUGE span in internal timeline. Anyway, there is a scene in one of the later books where a B.G. acolyte brings a message to a Reverend Mother, and as the acolyte is awaiting the R.M.'s response to the message, the poor young woman makes the mistake of licking her lips, just once, out of nervousness. The R.M.'s withering internal comment is that the girl needs to be sent back for remedial training for what is to her mind an unacceptable lack of control. Contrast this stoic, spartan persona and representation of Sisterhood with the R.M. we first meet who is, by comparison, a lively, animated and emotional being.

Again, just an incidental observation from a long-time fan.

You know, I never really thought about this particular bit until now that you asked. It's made clear in the first epigraph that the daughter Jessica was ordered to have was meant to be wed to a Harkonnen heir to "seal the breach", so, yeah... Paul himself would not be seen as a Bene Gesserit by simple dint of being a boy. Bene Gesserits are all women, only women. But the importance that is implied on the should-have-been daughter would mean that someone would have been keeping tabs on Jessica and her baby bump. It's already clear that the Sisterhood is pretty ruthless, so yeah, why did she get to keep Paul?

 

This is a fair critique, @Mckk, and all I can say is that a lot of Science Fiction is this way, but, admittedly, Herbert's writing is this way more than most. I can only offer the following explanation: As a Sci-Fi writer you have two routes you can take as regards the way you build your world and present the things within it that fall outside of the reality of the reader's real-life now. You can either infodump at regular intervals to lay things out explicitly, or you can allow the reader to infer. Herbert clearly takes the latter route. And I think he does this very purposefully. A lot of the story is built on the idea of the characters piecing together the things happening out of sight and behind their backs, so Frank gives you the same experience. When one is a fan of the genre, one knows and gets a feel for this. You even start to get annoyed at the writers who feel they need to explain to you how a ship can possibly travel faster than light. You're like, yes, yes, FTL Drive, I'm not a dummy. I understand that ships have to go faster than light or there's no interstellar travel. Stop holding my hand and get on with the story.

But I can understand your consternation. A while back I dipped my toe into what is a regarded as a classic of Fantasy, Lord Foul's Bane. The pace of the book was torturous. It was like a flipping nature documentary showing me the marvels of The Land, and the storyline was just this incidental afterthought that I felt was atrociously written. It's been explained to me that Fantasy of the era in which this book was written tends to be like that. The readers of that genre are accustomed to a heavy immersion of detail as regards drawing the landscape, the terrain, the look and feel of the world, oh, and yeah, maybe some people do some stuff in this world. For me, unpalatable.

 

It's not so much that you're expected to put the pieces together, but in my experience, stuff like this is the central question that keeps readers interested in the story - you'll be given the answer but not until Herbert is ready, probably because the answer isn't exactly what you think it is. Asimov's Foundation trilogy didn't answer the single biggest question until the last page of the last book.

 

@Mckk that wouldn't be unclear to a reader of SF/F. It was immediately apparent to me that the Bene Gesserit must be able to control gender, and I think the vast majority of SF/F readers would feel the same. There was a book on writing, I can't remember by whom, that made this very point in the context that a writer has to know her audience. He pointed out that the exact same passage that mystifies a non-SF/F reader will be understood implicitly by a reader of the genre. He also pointed out that the same passage could be understood one way by those familiar with a genre and another way by those who aren't. His advice was to write for your target audience.

When you look at books or talks on how to write SF/F, there is often an admonition against over-explaining. Genre readers are used to certain ways of thinking about a work, certain conventions, etc. and feel condescended to (rightly within the context of genre) if you explain everything without letting the reader infer instead. But it certainly can present a challenge in terms of bringing in readers new to a genre.

 

This^^^

Also, one of the big things in SF and Fantasy is that you need to be conscious of what the characters think of their world and how they would refer to it. If, for instance, the streets of the world are canals of pink gelatin, the reader is going to think this is extremely weird. The POV character, however, has likely sailed neon jelly-canals their entire life and will treat them flippantly. But you still have to explain them to the reader without breaking viewpoint. This is the great struggle of the SciFi writer, it's the easiest thing to mess up, and there are a bunch of hacks that people use to get around it (the scientist character, the "Watson" character, breaking the technology so that someone has to fix it, etc.)

 

Yes.

Consider this - if we had the technology, currently, to make gender-selection of children commonplace, and you read a romance or lit fiction in a contemporary setting, and one person admonished another over the choice of gender for her child, you wouldn't think anything of the technological aspect of it, and neither would the characters.

The sequence in Dune shows that the Bene Gesserit must have this ability in two ways: 1) the woman berates Jessica for it, which should immediately throw up an antenna in your mind; and then 2), which is the clincher because at this point it is possible the old woman is crazy - Jessica doesn't come back with "What are you talking about? How am I supposed to control the gender of my baby" etc. It's the setup by the old women and then, importantly, Jessica's reaction, that tells the reader yes Bene Gesserit woman (at least; perhaps others) can control the gender of their child. For a habitual reader of SF/F those two things will click subconsciously without even thinking about it, and what you'll get in the reader is just an acceptance that this can be done.

 

Yep, and yep. I think we are all in agreement here though we've chosen different ways to express it. Frank is a good writer and he knows his audience very, very well. At no point will he pause the drama to infodump in narrative and he uses the voices of the characters at a bare minimum to accomplish the same. He never hand-holds, which for someone already familiar with the language and atmosphere if the genre, is a good thing.

 

This brings up another good point about READING SciFi, which is that there's no such thing as a throwaway comment. The action and dialogue is usually carefully engineered to give you information about the society you're dealing with. The assumptions the characters make almost always tell you something about the larger moral system in which they exist. It's not there to tick you off, it's there to tell you that people in this world are socialized with norms that may be quite different from our own...and not always for the better.

 

Yes, yes! Well put. Earlier in the read we get an opinion of the Spacing Guild from the Reverend Mother. This is no small thing. It holds portent.

 

I hadn't even considered the line about the sex selection. It may come from reading lots of Sci-fi which has used the concept. If I had been reading something historical and someone was blaming the Queen for not producing a male heir I would assume that she was referring to one of the thousands of myths in regards to sex selection. In Sci-fi it's almost a given that science will address the issue.
In fact they already have
http://chooseagender.com/methods-of-gender-selection.aspx

 

It's been rather insightful reading all your comments and it does make me a little more forgiving towards Dune so thanks all!

I did click that it must simply be possible for Bene Gesserits to choose the gender of their babies, but I find it hard to accept. I guess I find the whole idea of berating someone for having a son, for not bearing children according to what is approved by political reasons and your community, or whatever group controls you, is just all ridiculous to me. It offends me, I think, because I feel the injustice and find it morally wrong. How dare you belittle someone for not submitting herself as your lowly tool and slave! I want Jessica to frigging punch that witch's lights out

Ultimately perhaps I am struggling to empathise because I just can't agree with the way things are done and want the characters to knock some sense into each other rather than act all sorry and helpless. And Jessica is being all sorry and helpless, standing there just being bullied by that old bitch!

Someone tell me our honoured Reverend Mother dies?

 

Ha ha Yeah, she's kinda' easy not to like. This is true. I'm not going to give spoilers, but I will quote the Baron when he says:

"Listen carefully, Feyd," the Baron said. "Observe the plans within plans within plans."​

The phrase plans within plans within plans is used a number of times in the novel. Oddly, the phrase also makes its way into the original film version of the book, but the one time it is used, it is uttered by someone who never says it in the book: the Third Stage Guild Navigator who comes to grill the Emperor in an upcoming epigraph.

 

For what it's worth, as the SciFi guy here who DOESN'T know what's going to happen, it's not hard to guess that the Bene Gesserit are going to be shown to be right in a lot of things, but horribly wrong on something crucial. This is a SciFi trope...the well meaning secret society seeking to maintain a benevolent order through larger plans beyond the conceptual reach of the peasants. They're always the good guys at some level, but they're never 100% likeable and there's usually one catastrophic error ticking at the heart of their worldview. This is not only the Bene Gesserit, but also the Jedi in "Star Wars" and the First Foundation in Asimov's "Foundation" Trilogy.

 

@Commandante Lemming - what was wrong with the Jedi ideology? (I've seen some of the films but not a huge fan so don't know much about it)

@Wreybies - I don't think I got what or who the Spacing Guild is. And I assume the third stage gold navigator is related to them?

 

They've only been mentioned in passing thus far. You will meet them soon in fuller detail. They are also of homo sapiens stock, just like everyone else you'll meet, but for reasons you'll come to know, individual navigators mutate over time until reaching the third stage. They control all space travel; thus, they control large scale commerce as well.

 

The Jedi discounted the role of love in human affairs and denied their knights the right to love. This was what pushed Anakin Skywalker to to Dark Side. Also they misinterpreted their own prophesy about the one who would bring balance to the Force - the balance was between Light and Dark, sacrifice and passion. Since the force was unbalanced in favor of the Light Side, balance meant the fall of the Jedi Order at the hands of Vader.

The Jedi were well meaning but not perfect.

 

I just reached this epigraph:

And it is generally accepted now that the Lady Jessica's latent abilities were grossly underestimated.​

But I have lost count of whether that is the 6th or 7th one. Someone tell me if I am supposed to read one more?

 

So I finally finished reading the first and second epigraph portions--how far am I supposed to have read at this point?

As for these two parts, the first part was pretty interesting. I don't hate the "witch" person as much as everyone else seems to. I'm not sure why, I just don't. Part of it is perhaps because I feel that Paul's perception of everything is not necessarily accurate. He obviously has no clue what's going on, so I don't believe everything that his POV thinks is true.

As for the second part, I found the conversations between the villains pretty dull. I appreciate the characterization but some of it was just so long and tedious that I got pretty bored. However, there were some interesting parts, trying to figure out the relationships and attitudes between the three characters. The author also seems to be giving us pieces of the "world" as we go on. However I thought there would be a lot more science-y stuff and right now it's feeling more like fantasy, so hopefully that will change.

That's my two cents so far. Although we've barely scratched the surface of the book with the first two epigraphs so I'm not quite sure what to think overall yet. When do we need the next part read by, @LinnyV?

 

I'm really not sure. There was a post about doing 3-6

This link has them all listed
http://www.nightsolo.net/dune/dune.html

 

@KokoN @doggiedude @Mckk @Commandante Lemming @Wreybies
Doggiedude was happy to go with 3-6 and Commandante Lemming was happy to go with 4.

So let's go with 4 more chapters. For this week's reports let's focus on:

Epigraph 3 = Chapter 3

Thus spoke St. Alia-of-the-Knife: "The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness."
-from "Muad'Dib, Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan

Epigraph 4 = Chapter 4

You have read that Muad'Dib had no playmates his own age on Caladan. The dangers were too great. But Muad'Dib did have wonderful companion-teachers. There was Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of Gurney's songs, as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Hawat, the old Mentat Master of Assassins, who struck fear even into the heart of the Padishah Emperor. There were Duncan Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Ginaz; Dr. Wellington Yueh, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Jessica, who guided her son in the Bene Gesserit Way, and -- of course -- the Duke Leto, whose qualities as
a father have long been overlooked.
-from "A Child's History of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

Epigraph 5 = Chapter 5

YUEH (yu'e), Wellington (weling-tun), Stdrd 10,082-10,191; medical doctor of the Suk School (grd Stdrd 10,112); md: Wanna Marcus, B.G. (Stdrd 10,092-10,186?); chiefly noted as betrayer of Duke Leto Atreides. (Cf: Bibliography, Appendix VII [Imperial Conditioning] and Betrayal, The.)
-from "Dictionary of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

Epigraph 6 = Chapter 6

How do we approach the study of Muad'Dib's father? A man of surpassing warmth and surprising coldness was the Duke Leto Atreides. Yet, many facts open the way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. You see him there -- a man
snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?
-from "Muad'Dib, Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan