> Catchphrases from the book have not entered the language.
The spice must flow?
Fear is the mind killer?
Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" includes the phrase "Walk without a rhythm, you won't attract the worm". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8
Maybe to a lesser extent, "He who controls the spice controls the universe", "wheels within wheels", and the gom jabbar are all things I've heard people reference.
It's definitely entered the language. Maybe not as deeply as Star Wars, but it's not absent either.
"Fear is the mindkiller" may be super memorable, but the end of the litany (paraphrased): "I will let it pass through me and over me and when it is gone I will look where has been and there only I will remain" - well, applies to just about anything with great success.
Practicing this once saved my life while scuba diving. I was stuck in a cave and I began to panic and hyperventilate.
Having delt with other high stress situations and remembering this full quote prepared me.
Being able to identify my emotion in a high stress moment and knowing that the fear would pass is what calmed me down and think my way out of my problem.
It's not enough to remember the words. You also need to practice.
Dune is old enough to have deeper connections than just catch phrases. It spawned RTS games via the Dune 2 game based on the movie. RTS games then which spawned Moba's like League of Legends via Warcraft III (Defense of the Ancients).
Though as you say “Fear is the mind killer” shows up all over the place.
In 1992, it was one of the first "modern" 4X games (SimCity 1989, Civilization 1991). Even given shorter game development timelines, it deserves more credit than it gets.
I've heard fear is the mind killer used in the skiing in rock climbing scene. It's used as to encourage someone that is nervous about skiing a narrow/steep couloir or climbing a route at their physical limit. That crowd is very bookwormish too.
I would bet you were wrong. These are common memetic phrases and probably exist in the Simpsons. S.F is normal and everyone knows the film. Sting in a metal bikini
This is my favourite film so I'm pretty tuned in to these phrases, and I've never heard anyone use any of them. I'm also pretty sure there's no "wheels within wheels" in it.
You should listen to the audio book of it. I've read the entire series, seen the movie and mini-series and listened to the audio-books... and the audio-book is by far the best. They are the voice acting type, with multiple readers for the different voices and they do a wonderful job. Just talking about it makes me want to listen to it again, such a good rendition.
That's a good call. I have listened to it a couple of times and it is indeed very good. To any Dune fans who are not normally audiobook listeners I would say it would make an excellent use of a free Audible trial.
My dad also liked the movie and I’ve tried to be relatable to people his age, only to notice that I missed 1980s newsgroups and conventions where people dissed the movie adaptation.
I'd like to know, too. I can speculate about people being turned off by the shifting POV, heavy internal thoughts, and dry style of it. But I'd rather here it straight from the horse's mouth.
The author of the article is not very knowledgeable about dune it seems. Dune has quite the fan base it just never had a good commercial success in movies and TV to become mainstream.
I have a tattoo that says Fear is the mind killer because of Dune. But I'm a huge scifi fan and consider stuff like Revelation Space much better than any star wars or treks.
There are some fan edits that improve the movie dramatically. My preference is "Alternative Edition Redux". It used to be available archive.org, though I'm sure it's still floating around the net somewhere.
That was the version that combined the original theatrical release version, the director's cut, and a bunch of other scenes that were cut out.
There's one scene that they put back in, toward the end, where Thufir Hawat pulls out his own heart plug; very emotional scene that IMO they should've kept in the original.
"One winter evening, I heard him read my mother a passage about a young man named Paul Atreides who was forced to place his hand into the blackness of a box while an old woman, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, held a poison needle at his neck, the gom jabbar. Though I didn't realize it at the time, this was the opening chapter of Dune.
Pauls' hand would feel intense pain, the wrinkled crone told him, but if he withdrew it from the box she would kill him with the poison needle. I was transfixed by the drama of the scene and by the strange words... gom jabbar, Maud'Dib, the Gesserit, jihad, kull wahad.. the throaty, mysterious resonance of words and names as they rolled off Dad's tongue, in his powerful voice. I was intrigued by the sounds. And by the way the Reverend Mother used "the Voice" on Paul to control him, similar to methods my father often employed against me.
"The language is beautiful," Mom said, after listening to the chapter. Frequently over the years she spoke of the poetry of his writing, and rarely made suggestions for improvement in that area. Her comments primarily concerned plot when she thought he was getting too convoluted, and characterization, particularly the motivational aspects of female characters.
I heard Dad speak passages aloud in his study as he wrote them, before presenting them to my mother. He understood the psychology of human society, the way stories had been told orally for centuries before anything was ever written down. The way troubadours and jongleurs traveled from castle to castle, telling tales and singing songs. He believed readers subconsciously heard the written text through their ears, receiving them as oral transmissions. As a consequence, he labored long hours to obtain just the right word selection and rhythm. The best writing, he believed, touched the subconscious.
He enjoyed relating his stories to my mother, a process that recalled times as a boy spent around scouting campfires when he captivated the attention of scouts and scoutmasters alike. It brought back as well darkened bedrooms Frank Herbert shared with his cousins, in which they hung on his every word. Mom enjoyed hearing his tales. She was an excellent listener, as she had been in her childhood when her Scottish father told her clever mystery stories about caves and secret panels..."
Why is Brian Herbert as lucid as this talking about his dad, but so terrible when trying to write a book following on from his work? Bit of a puzzle to me.
Money. Kevin J Anderson actually did most of the writing of the Dune Prequels and post-Frank sequels, and is quite possibly the worst SF writer that has ever lived.
(KJA is and was married to the editor-in-chief of Banta mSpectra, the imprint with the book licensing rights to Star Wars and Dune. This is the only reason he was allowed anywhere near these series.)
No book with an Iron Maiden song made in its tribute qualifies as "not having penetrated the popular culture." It's merely taken a path through the culture more befitting its challenging material.
It is not a book for tawdry conventions and endless merchandising. It is a book for parents to introduce to their children, with a sly smile, on a free weekend, when they have come of age.
It's the progressive rock of science fiction novels. ;-)
I am not amused by that song, feels like cheap capitalization on "Dune" popularity at the time. Lyrics are nothing special, sounds are quite ok but I take "Wasted years" over this any time. Sounds like Sabbaton, who is capitalizing on "battle songs" for different countries.
It is not like I don't like Iron Maiden but yeah, there is some metal band somewhere doing "Harry Potter" metal song. Though maybe I am too cynical :)
I've bought every Maiden album released, up until the mid nineties, and I'd rate that particular track as "forgetable" rather than "bad".
It's definitely a track I'd skip more often than not if I'm listening to my Maiden playlist. The addition of a voiceover, which I think I recall they planned, in the intro might have made an interesting difference. Much like the other crossover piece I now remember, The Prisoner.
Interestingly both dune and dune 2 were released around the same time and both are amazing. Dune 2 created the rts genre while Dune was a wonderful combination of adventure and strategy.
While it's true Dune popularized the RTS genre it wasn't close to the first. I'm sure this one is also not the first but here's Combat Leader for the Atari 800 from 1983
The Dune 2 soundtrack is still my favourite video game OST.
Even allowing for the fact that it doesn't faithfully replicate the Dune universe (e.g. House Ordos exists in the game) - some of the music is great for looking at Dune through a different set of eyes. As an example of this, the track "Prophecy part 1" kind of feels like there's a mundane reality that the coming of a saviour inhabits and it doesn't go away as a result of the saviour's presence.[1] Even better, this doesn't have to be the only interpretation of the track or any of the others in the soundtrack. It's wonderful.
it's very good sound track, with some late 80's Tangerine Dream influence.
The game was marvelous. They should do a remake, with some open world sandbox gameplay too, so that fans who already know the story can still quite enjoy it
Author seems overly dismissive of the sequels. While they aren’t as great as the first, many of them are still very good books with interesting ideas. The stuff written by others (not Frank Herbert) on the other hand, does seem to be dreck based on my sampling.
When I first read Dune and sequels in my teens, I too thought that the later books were kind of boring.
I have re-read it in my late 30s and now I actually favor the later novels. I consider all 6 novels as one work.
The deconstruction of a hero (Paul) was in my opinon necessary and logical progression of the story arc. I think Herbert wanted to say that heroes inevitably end up being harmful to the society.
My opinion is that if the sequels were written in the same manner as the first book, we'd end up with an excellent but still run-of-the mill epic saga like Star Wars, LoTR etc. In my view, Herbert's Dune stands above all precisely because it's not just another (great) SF novel.
Herbert said he set out to write a book on philosophy and religion, but didn't want to approach the subject academically since it would probably be only read by scholars. He wanted to reach a broader audience and so he wrapped his ideas into science fiction so it's more easy to swallow for the average bookworm.
No, the main problem with the sequels is that they add nothing to the lore. The first 2 books have a very detailed description of Dune universe and Arrakis and all the political factions. The rest of the saga brings nothing new or really interesting. They feel derivative. Nothing in the sequels have not been said in the first 2 books. So they felt already uninspired. It gets even worse after God Emperor of Dune, Herbert clearly had nothing more tosay after that.
Dune isn't a "geek power fantasy" Isekai style, it's a cautionary tale against blind faith in leaders and religion. It's made clear from the start that the protagonist, Paul, isn't a hero, as him and his mother manipulate the fremens to gain their trust.
The prequels written by his son and Co are not as great but they are easier material to be converted into movie format which will attract more people to the story.
Unfortunately the original books of Frank Herbert are really hard to convert into movie / TV format and that's why Dune never became as popular as star wars. Part of the reason is the inner narrative and attention to details like facial expressions. Actually what makes the books great is what's stopping them from becoming mainstream.
The biggest flaw with the sequels is that they end up not ending- in the same way the Dune Messiah was a setup for Children of Dune, it seems that Heretics and Chapterhouse were leading up to the seventh book that Herbert died before writing.
His son Brian and Kevin J Anderson did write the last installment based on detailed notes from Frank Herbert, so at least the story is complete.
While their writing is not as brilliant as Frank Herbert's, the books they wrote, mainly the prequels, have helped me understand just how big the original vision was and have helped me enjoy the sequels more. God Emperor is truly as masterpiece, but it took a couple of reads, and the sequels, for me to appreciate it more.
Correction: Brian and KJA had access to detailed notes from Frank Herbert, and used none of them in favor of KJA's "improvements" to the Dune mythos.
The same way KJA "improved" Star Wars.
His wife, incidentally the editor-in-chief of the publishing imprint that then owned the publishing rights to the Star Wars and Dune literary universes, is to blame for unleashing his word vomit on mankind.
There seems almost zero chance that the notes will be released. Brian has been increasingly adament about it, largely because a lot of people are vocal about suspecting they don't exist.
(I personally do believe that some notes were left, but I suspect they were not complete, and were utterly ignored by Brian & Kevin. Because they is no explanation which makes more sense. There's no way he would have tied up with series by referencing characters never-before introduced from before the previous books.)
I dunno, when you re-read Heretics and Chapter House after knowing how it ends, you can see some set-ups for the ultimate big-bad. And Sonia's vision in God emperor does also link up.
So, maybe? I lean towards thinking there were notes myself, as I can't see anyone making up that ending de-novo.
I can kinda see the argument, but the fact that the Butlerian Jihad was so rarely referenced in any detail makes me skeptical that the long-overthrown machines could arrive spontaneously and be the big-bad.
It seemed to me that the two figures in Duncans visions were going to become important, but they'd be rogue/evolved/advanced face-dancers rather than representatives of the machine intelligence.
I guess we'll never know for sure unless the notes are published.
Seriously, Sonia's vision in God-Emperor is of humans being hunted down by machines - this is what the Golden Path was to avoid. So, I'm inclined to err on the side of the notes existing and mentioning machines.
Siona's visions were about the danger of presience and the need for mankind to become free from those who would use fate/predestination as a means to control mankind. Avoiding the predestination paradox was literally the reason Leto created her.
Given the lengths that Frank Herbert went to avoid having computers in Dune, it would not make sense for his big bad to be a computer revealed in the last few pages of the series, especially when his big bad was always intended to be Destiny.
The author admits to having given up after the fourth book, God Emporer of Dune, which is, to be fair, a fairly radical shift from the original trilogy. I can see it putting off someone deeply invested in the original.
I read on but for me the story was over at the end of God Emperor, which felt like the end of the core arc of the first four books. The rest gets harder to follow—like other Frank Herbert novels I’ve tried to read—and doesn’t provide the same motivation. The characters especially just do nothing for me, past God Emperor.
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger."
- Leto II (in God-Emperor of Dune)
>As David Itzkoff noted in 2006, what’s curious about “Dune” ’s stature is that it has not penetrated popular culture in the way that “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” have. There are no “Dune” conventions. Catchphrases from the book have not entered the language.
The movie next year oughta do it, if the star-studded cast and acclaimed director are any indication.
I might be in the minority but I liked the Dune movie. It introduced the universe, how it worked, had a solid cast. The movie is clearly one from the 80s with it's dedication to atmosphere.
What you call "dedication to atmosphere" felt just too over the top to many others.
From one other review:
"The second scene depicts the mysterious “Guild Navigator,” a brainiac character Lynch devises as a literal giant talking brain floating in a tank of brine. His mouth is triangular-shaped. There’s really no clean way of saying this, so here goes: It looks like a vagina. And it secretes gas. Lynch likes to shoot this in graphic close-up, and they’re explicit enough that if you see the film cut on TV, the editors completely omit these shots."
I respect your appreciation for the movie, but to most people it's objectively bad.
From Wikipedia:
"In retrospect, Lynch disowned the film and acknowledged he should never have directed Dune:
I started selling out on Dune. Looking back, it's no one's fault but my own. I probably shouldn't have done that picture, but I saw tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved, and this was the structure to do them in. There was so much room to create a world. But I got strong indications from Raffaella and Dino De Laurentiis of what kind of film they expected, and I knew I didn't have final cut."
I loved Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune. It was far, far better than the SciFi channel garbage that came afterwards, and it got me interested in reading the novels, all which I've read multiple times now (something I very rarely do).
> I might be in the minority but I liked the Dune movie.
I liked the aesthetic of the movie (everything was 'old' and worn and staid). I liked the mini-series because it stayed closer to the original story, but (because of budget?) things looked too shiny: things seemed too 'fresh' for a societal structure that had been static for generations and generations.
That was kind of point of the Golden Path: you wanted the Imperium to seem 'static' because of inertia, and humanity needed something to shake them up from stagnation.
I also really enjoyed the movie for the most part.
More than any most movies from a book I read first, it really captured the spirit of the universe to an amazing degree. The just need to get rid of the the added cruft that wasn't in the book.
I also liked it. The navigator really didn’t appear u til the second book, but I still liked it in the movie. The “voice” amplifier weapons were hokey, but the theme of the movie was cool, years before it was termed steampunk.
Honestly, IMO, people weren't as good at this kind of movie back then, and audiences were less informed as to genre elements.
The weirding way, the Voice, even the psychedelic sequences - these had to be explained, or shown, and how? How do you film these things in a way that audiences can understand?
Not saying there's clear answers now, but there's been another thirty years of exploration in how you show weird, hard-to-film genre elements. There's also another entire set of explorations on exactly these things (the Scifi Channel's miniseries) from which to see what works and doesn't.
I loved the movie when it was released, and felt it was true in spirit to the book. Sure, some of the details were missed or altered, but that was to be expected in a movie adaptation of a book with so many details. Herbert was on the set and at least had some input. Baron Harkkonen has to be one of the most memorable movie characters ever.
My summation is that the 1984 movie was both good and original, but the parts that were original were not good, and the parts that were good were not original.
> Catchphrases from the book have not entered the language.
What an odd framing. True, perhaps, but what about from the 1984 movie?
> "The spice must flow!"
> "If you walk without rhythm, you won't attract the worm"
> "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."
Frank Herbert isn't exactly known for succinct, catchy one-liners. Here's at least one I recognize from the book, "Fear is the mind-killer":
> "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
Sure, Dune may not be as big as LOTR or Star Wars, but before the blockbuster films, what catchphrases from LOTR were (are?) remotely commonplace?
> ... what catchphrases from LOTR were (are?) remotely commonplace?
"And my axe!" was common enough for a while. Less so now but it's still around. LOTR memes that rely on single lines with varying popularity are pretty common but that's probably stretching it.
I recently found the Macmillian audiobook of Dune through my local library service and have been listening to it. It's an 'acted' audiobook in that there is a narrator but also different voices for speech by the different characters. It's quite good and has been a nice way to revisit a book that blew my mind as a 12 year old.
IMHO, the works endure in part from the depth and timelessness; the depths with which is explores human fundamentals, and the relative lack of science fiction technologies mean it cannot be dated the same way that, say, Asimov's computers or Star Trek's communicators look odd in light of what is everyday today.
I've always loved the fourth book the most, and I've always felt it was most simply described as "Nietzsche's Gay Science, but to a plot." and I will totally talk about this with anyone who wants to.
It's funny how prescient some of the people in the sixties and seventies were. I'd lump Alvin Toffler alongside Frank Herbertm personally. They both had a somewhat weird point about the future (Herbert was kind of looking at a macro level through Paul, Toffler was kind of thinking about something similar at the individual level), and I think they're both slowly being proven right in a way.
I've finally listened to it when I did a 4K mile road trip last year. I highly recommend the Audible rendition of it. It's amazing, and adds the experience you would not get from the book. There are several well-cast voice actors in it, so it's not just a dude reading the book. I especially recommend listening to it as you drive alone through Wyoming in the dead of the night. Experience I will savor when I'm on my deathbed.
Wow. You, uh, missed, well... a lot. Just on one note, the entire aspect that the prophecies Paul steps into were literally fabricated as sort of sleeper memes for later use? Like, of course that's cringe worthy, of course it reeks of foreign savior complexes, _it was built to be that_.
The next three books get increasingly philosophical and many people don't like them, but I very much do.
Well, yes. I would go so far to say that _usually_, when one doesn't like something that many other people do, it's because they're missing what drew those other people in.
I wouldn't have put it like you, but I too was unimpressed by Dune. All the religious/mystical stuff didn't appeal to me at all. I wonder if it's partly an age thing: I only read Dune in my 30s. The more "typical" nerd journey would have been to read it in my teens. I don't know if I would have liked it back then, but I'm sure I would have viewed it differently, both then and now.
The spice must flow?
Fear is the mind killer?
Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" includes the phrase "Walk without a rhythm, you won't attract the worm". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8
Maybe to a lesser extent, "He who controls the spice controls the universe", "wheels within wheels", and the gom jabbar are all things I've heard people reference.
It's definitely entered the language. Maybe not as deeply as Star Wars, but it's not absent either.