[homo] 870 Kaneda! Tetsuo!

Omdat ik de H niet kan vinden, is er bij deze voor het volk een ellenlange review over het boek Dune, omdat ik geen goede review kon vinden over Ghost in the Shell en Akira.

Over Ghost in the Shell, de nieuwste twee afleveringen kunnen door geintereseerden worden gedownload, drop me a line and I'll give you the link.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Review by Nicholas Whyte

This is the tenth in a series of reviews of those pieces of written science fiction and fantasy which have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Dune won the very first Nebula award for Best Novel 1965 and shared the Hugo for Best Novel 1966 with Roger Zelazny's ...And Call Me Conrad (better known now as This Immortal). Among sf fans it must be one of the best known books of the genre. With its successors, it has inspired several screen adaptations, a board game, computer games, many tribute websites and even has a relatively vigorous newsgroup. Readers of Locus have three times voted Dune as the best sf novel of all time.
I considered writing a joint review of Dune and the next book on my list, Ender's Game. Both are coming-of-age stories of a Messiah figure, who turns out to be the end product of a carefully engineered breeding programme. Both deal heavily with war; both feature apparently incomprehensible and terrifying alien life-forms. Both novels pretty much established their author's reputation, and built a cult of fans who eagerly bought the many sequels (though in both cases the later volumes are generally agreed to be inferior). Both, indeed, are novelisations of stories originally published in Analog. However the two novels are so powerful individually that they deserve separate treatment.

Dune is much the better of the two. It must have surely been at least partially an sf response to the challenge of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (to which Arthur C. Clarke compared it on first publication). Apart from anything else, it is a big fat book (longer, I suspect, than any other two of the Nebula or Hugo nominees for its year put together). The human environment of Dune is rather closely related to that of a medieval fantasy, with a feudal system involving Barons, Dukes, and the Emperor who bestows entire planets as fiefs on his followers. Every ruler has a genetically and mentally enhanced Mentat adviser, who fulfills the role of court wizard à la Merlin; the sect of Bene Gesserit are actually described as witches; the giant worms of Dune guard the immense riches of the planet's spice.

Herbert did not stretch himself linguistically as Tolkien had - the languages of his Fremen and Bene Gesserit are much more closely based on Arabic and Hebrew than Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin on any real language. On the other hand Dune is the more daring work in its vision of a whole new planetary ecology: the desert, the spice (essential to space travel), the sandworms, and the adaptations made by the people living there to their environment, while Middle Earth is rarely far from pastoral England or chivalric Europe. The only recent sf that I know attempting anything as ambitious as the Dune project are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss. Wisely, each stopped after the third full novel (with a few spin-offs).

After 11 September 2001, Dune once again makes interesting reading. The tough, fanatical, yet noble Arabic-speaking sons of the desert clash with the corrupt leaders of an imperialist civilisation, who find that they have much underestimated their foe. However direct parallels with the present day soon run into the, er, sand. The hero who leads the Fremen to victory is himself a child of the evil Empire; and the main goal of the Fremen - to make their planet a garden rather than a desert - is not obviously incompatible with Paul Atreides' plans for political power as Emperor, whereas al-Qaeda want to destroy western civilisation, not rule it. And of course in our time line in 2001, at the time of writing anyway, it seems that the sons of the desert were overrated as fighters.

Herbert's portrayal of the difficult encounter between the two cultures is particularly convincing. Most readers will vividly remember the scene early in the book where Stilgar, a Fremen leader, spits on the table before Paul's father, Duke Leto, as a mark of respect, to the consternation of the Duke's men who have not taken in how significant a tribute of water is on this desert world. Equally effective though more subtle (and lengthy) is a passage describing a dinner party hosted by the Atreides family shortly after, in which various local dignitaries give away more than they intend to about the actual political constellation on the planet. The dual role of the Imperial planetologist who is also the Fremen's overall leader, and the careful manoeuvring of the spice smugglers in and out of the two cultural worlds, reflect this encounter and are also a part of the political intrigues which enrich the book - the Byzantine manoeuvring for power between Duke Atreides, Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor; the treachery of Dr Yueh; the ultimately unsuccessful plots of the Bene Gesserit, who as a female class of political advisers in an otherwise male-dominated society, have a better position than most women got in Tolkien.

If the portrayal of culture clash and Machiavellian politics are part of the book's success, its biggest weakness is the handling of Paul Atreides' prophetic mission. The philosophical foundations of his role as Kwisatz Haderach must surely smack rather too much of the Übermensch for today's audience; the rather nasty distinction between "humans" and "animals" made in the first chapter by the Reverend Mother is if anything reinforced by the book's ending. While for most of the book one can feel sympathy for the young man born for leadership trying to get to grips with his fate, once he has got into the stage where his plans are coming to fruition, he stops being interesting; even the villainous Baron Harkonnen expires not with a bang but a whimper.

There are a few niggling details that never quite gelled for me. I never quite grokked the impunity of the Harkonnen attack on the Atreides in the first place; does the kanly blood feud overwhelm all prospect of punishment for mass murder and invasion of someone else's imperial fief? This galactic empire doesn't seem to be all it is cracked up to be, with Dr Yueh's imperial conditioning apparently broken down by simple blackmail, and the imperial troops regularly whopped by the Fremen. On a more ecological point, one has to question whether the sandworms really have enough food to satisfy their enormous energy needs. I suppose that if spice can get spaceships across gaps of light-years it can fuel a planetary population of sandworms. (I'll add also James Schellenberg's point that the Fremen seem a little too violent among themselves for viability.) However such minutiae can be ignored in the wealth of detail that is Dune.

[HOMO] 869 - They only want you when you're seventeen.....

en dat is de link naar het vorige topic...

Waarom kan ik trouwens niet mijn berichten editten?

quote:

Op donderdag 22 april 2004 12:02 schreef xman het volgende:
Keneda en tetsuo zijn toch van Akira?

edit: ow wacht het staat er

yep

Ik heb gisteren de eerste drie delen uit de bieb kunnen halen. Opmerkelijk is dat ze niet bij de stripboeken stonden, maar gewoon tussen de andere volwassen literatuur. Eindelijk respect voor het medium?

ik ben in ieder geval in mijn nopjes met deze vondst.

ik ga denk ik vandaag het laatste deel van 1602 ophalen, maar ik moet wel zeggen dat de serie eigenlijk maar wat tegenviel.