(no subject)

[camwyn]

LA LA LA DUNE ENCYCLOPEDIA ARRIVED LA.

This puts me in a better mood than I would have ordinarily thought. Partly this is because I need the section on Holtzmann tech (okay, Holzman, but Herbert himself spells it a few different ways) and the Ixian no-rooms for stuff at Milliways. However, it is also a mood elevator because I made a terrible mistake this past weekend: I went to Wikipedia and read the summaries of the last two Dune books Frank Herbert published when he was alive* (Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune). Now, I read both those books years ago. I think I may have been in high school at the time. I remember struggling to keep track of the approximately ONE HOJILLION CHARACTERS he threw at the reader, and I remember doing a lot of eye-rolling at the 'Honored Matres' vs. the Bene Gesserit and their Reverend Mothers. I did not, however, remember the gory details of just how screwed up the Matres were, or the distinctly horrible revelations Herbert made regarding the Bene Tleilaxu (honestly, the computers in The Matrix had better ways of reproducing humans than what Herbert said about the axlotl tanks- and DO NOT GET ME STARTED about the religion thing). I reread both the summaries multiple times to be absolutely sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, and came to one conclusion: Frank Herbert had woman issues the way Bruce Wayne has mommy and daddy issues.

Hell, I've read The White Plague, and a little digging on Wiki turned up some downright disturbing references to another Frank Herbert book called Hellstrom's Hive. Ol' Frank seems to have had woman issues the way Oedipus had mommy and daddy issues.

Anyway, the first thing I did when I got the DE was flip to the entry on axlotl tanks. I got a nice sane writeup on 'little better than an artificial womb' and how the real secret was in the solutions used and the DNA work done. The Encyclopedia was written when Herbert was alive, and it was authorized by His Nibs; I will, therefore, gladly fall back on it for references to anything Duniverse, and try really really hard to forget that Books 5 and 6 ever existed.



*According to Wiki, the current Brian Herbert book- Hunters of Dune- is based on a manuscript Frank Herbert wrote but left in a safe deposit box somewhere. Hunters of Dune and one more book, Sandworms of Dune, are supposed to be the two halves of Frank's manuscript. However, since Brian ain't the original author and every reference I have found to stuff he's written in his father's universe has indicated he neither understands how any of it actually WORKS nor is capable of producing any kind of quality- apparently the Bene Gesserit Voice can be used en masse to hypnotize someone into not noticing that he's completely surrounded, in Brian's work, which is SO not how it works at all!- that I feel no obligation to accept anything with Brian's name on it as Duniverse canon. I'll take Dr. MacNelly's authorized work any day of the week over that.

Comments

[quintus.livejournal.com]

"Hellstrom's Hive"

Actually... Yeah. It's a disturbing book, although I'd have to re-read it to check up on any stealth women issues (other than how the Hive reproduce which would probably keep Freud off the coke for a while while he took notes).

[camwyn]

There wasn't much of an entry on the Hive in Wiki. The link text was something on the order of 'the axlotl tanks are very similar to the reproductive stumps in Hellstrom's Hive', so I went to have a look.

Seriously, though, apparently the Honored Matres ruled empires of thousands if not millions of worlds through a combination of WE KEEL JOO NOW and sexual enslavement of men through really really really really intense pleasure which nobody else was able to reproduce until.... I think the Duncan Idaho ghola of book five, or possibly Miles Teg.

[batyatoon]

"...little better than an artificial womb"?

Something wrong with an artificial womb?

[camwyn]

Well, when you're talking about the Bene Tleilaxu, who've produced things like the Face Dancers and gengineered Kwisatz Haderachim, an artificial womb is nothing particularly outstanding.

What gets me is that in books 5 and 6 Herbert went back on this and said "the axlotl tanks aren't artificial at all! They're Tleilaxu women who've been bio-artificed into nothing but brain-dead support systems for gigantic wombs for constant production!" and said this was why no outsider had ever seen a Tleilaxu female- because all the females were either tanks, or going to be made into tanks. Excuse me? You had ten thousand years of scientific development and you couldn't come up with the technology of the Matrix machines to yield a more reliably consistent environment? Bzzt.

[silveraspen]

I read up through Chapterhouse and decided I was much happier stopping with God Emperor of Dune. On particularly bad days, I only count the first two books, which are made of awesome.

Brian Herbert is a figment of someone's imagination. Yes.

[kaikias.livejournal.com]

...Oh boy. While this encyclopedia business is direly neat and all, I'm somehow glad I stopped after the first book. (My inner conlanger wanted to punch Frank Herbert in the face even then for all the LOOKIT ME I CAN BORROW WORDS FROM ARABIC business.)

[camwyn]

There are a few aspects of the Encyclopaedia that make me wish I could punch someone else in the mouth. Most prominently, the part where somebody (I dunno if it's Frank or if it's MacNelly, who compiled the book) placed Arrakis in orbit around Canopus.

[camwyn]

I read God Emperor when I was in... urm, I think fifth grade? It must have been, because I read Dune itself in fifth grade and I remember reading God Emperor in the house I used to live in back in NYC- and we moved before I hit sixth grade. So I think I read the first four books when I was ten. I can remember seeing Heretics of Dune on the shelves in a bookstore at the Livingston Mall, which implies I was probably around twelve when I read Heretics and Chapterhouse- which would go a long way towards explaining my cloudy memories of the Honored Matres and my complete lack of recollection about the axlotl tanks.

First two were made of awesome, yes.

[estherthegb]

Sweetness, didn't realize you were into Dune.

Never picked up on the mommy & daddy issues. Perhaps I need to reread the whole series.

[shellebelle93.livejournal.com]

I adore the Dune series. Except Chapterhouse. I got to within fifty pages of the ending and went, "oh, screw this" and took it back to the library.

But yeah, I loved the first four, especially. They were so great. I loved the first book, so much DETAIL. Such complicated characters! *sigh* It was great.

[camwyn]

Oh, yeah. I got introduced to it when I was ten years old- a Dominican nun who was a friend of the family gave me a paperback copy of the book. Amazing stuff to a geeklet of that age, really. And when I got to college my first real roleplaying game environment online was DuneMUSH, a realtime text-based RPG set shortly after the end of Dune, before Dune Messiah could start. I learned a lot about basic roleplaying expectations and courtesies that way, and I have many fond memories of the game- but Dune was as big of an "OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS UNIVERSE even more than the specific stories being told in it" as I think anyone could ever have given me, at that age.

It's been ages since I read any of it. I acquired the Dune Encyclopedia because one of my characters at Milliways is attempting to build a space in which he'll be absolutely certain of being isolated from psychic influences, and he thinks an Ixian no-room should do the trick. It's just, y'know... that might take a tiny while to develop, all things considered.

Might have to go back and reread the original book at some point to get the taste of "the tanks are WHAT? The Tleilaxu are HOW religious? Brian Herbert did WHAT to a perfectly good universe?" out of my mouth.

[camwyn]

I couldn't keep track of what was going on for the life of me, and I didn't know who I was supposed to be rooting for other than maybe 'Duncan Idaho is good'. I read it for the sake of being able to say I'd read it, but in the end I just sort of went 'um.... okay....' and gave it back to the library.

[milkshake-b.livejournal.com]

Dune prequels? Brian Herbert? Never heard of them. Nope. Never did at all.

>.>
<.<

[milkshake-b.livejournal.com]

Aww, wee!geek solidarity. I was about that age when I first read it, too.

[camwyn]

I was socialized to think that the mark of being Really Smart was the ability to read and enjoy books of that size without getting distracted and giving up on the book. My third and fourth grade classmates and I would regularly compete to see who could plough through the biggest book- I think the winner was probably Michael Medaglia, who read James Michener's The Source and did a book report on it for Mrs. Porter. Then I changed schools for fifth grade. Not so much of the same attitude there, but the other geeklets had a healthy respect for big books anyway, especially when there were knives and swords and worms the size of subway trains involved.

[camwyn]

Unless the book was written with the approval of the original author while the author was still alive (the Dune Encyclopedia), or compiled from his manuscripts and notes after his death to a level of quality and similarity of writing style indistinguishable from the original author's living work (the Silmarillion), it's nobbut fanfic for which someone is being paid, and I do not have to believe in it.

[kaikias.livejournal.com]

Looks like that was dear old Frank, as I see no indications that it was anyone else, and the idea is kind of familiar from reading the first book. Remind me what's wrong with Canopus, again, besides the whole supergiant business?