First of all any article referencing Brian Herbert as an authority on Dune is suspect as a result. Those atrocious fanfiction additions are best used as cat litter box liner, period.
Secondly, if you read the Appendices of Book I of Frank Herbert's Dune series, you'll see that he more or less invented the concept of 'planetologist', which in the late 1990s became a recognized academic discipline under the umbrellas of 'planetary sciences' and 'earth system sciences'. This was in response to a sense that the academic study of the subject had been too fractured, i.e. disciplines such as oceanography, geology, ecology and atmospheric chemistry and physics were actually highly interrelated, to the point that the historic divisions didn't make as much sense as they once did. This is now seen in, for example, the scientific study of Jupiter's moon Europa.
As far as the current impacts of human civilization on Earth's climate and ecology, see the original Dune book:
> "The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences - Pardot Kynes in "Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune"
Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.
I don't think fiction is Brian Herbert's gift. If you haven't, I encourage you to read Dreamer of Dune. It's his biography of Frank Herbert. While I loathe his contribution to fiction, I found his biography of his dad well done and rather touching.
To be honest, having Kevin J. Anderson as co-writer doesn't help. He wrote some of the worst Star Wars, now Legends, books out there. And given how bad some of those Legends books are that is something.
I loved those books back the day when I was younger, they just don't compare well against Timothy Zahn's books, the original Han Solo series and the short stories about small characters from the original movies.
What is sad so, is that the IMHO brilliant Dune encyclopedia was declared non-canon...
EDIT: The quote from Dune about ecology rings true for all kinds of very complex and large systems. Especially those that are of the self-maintaining kind.
> What is sad so, is that the IMHO brilliant Dune encyclopedia was declared non-canon...
I hold my own counsel on what is canon: Anything explicitly and directly written by Frank Herbert. That excludes The Dune Encyclopedia, but I don't think that diminishes it. We shouldn't pretend that it was declared non-canon for any reason other than Brian Herbert and Anderson selling pablum as Dune universe novels.
My understanding is that he was somewhat involved and also approved of the Encyclopedia. My interpretation is that his objections to it weren't really objections so much as making clear that he wouldn't be bound by anything in it; and that this is being used to re-write history and make it sound like he disliked the Encyclopedia.
> Still damn great content, so.
Exactly. It doesn't really matter what a couple of hacks have to say about it.
> First of all any article referencing Brian Herbert as an authority on Dune is suspect as a result. Those atrocious fanfiction additions are best used as cat litter box liner, period.
Haha. It's nice to see this opinion written out. I read a few of the Herbert/Anderson books (I had a lot of time on my hands) and came to similar conclusions. I was most disappointed with the post-Chapter House stuff they did. It was allegedly based on extensive material left behind by Frank Herbert for the seventh book, but it very quickly tied in material and tropes from the prequels that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson had written, clearly being their creature and not the father's.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Anderson had been a consultant on the new film.
I was pleasantly surprised by the new film, already looking forward to Part two. Even more so now that I know Anderson was a consultant. I made a conscious decision to not read anything from him, or Michael A. Stackpole for that matter, a long time ago.
I do have to read Frank Herbert's Dune series again so.
I think the drama around the pain box and a couple of other moments was not as good as it could have been, IMHO, but it does do a good job of telling the story (so far), and things are on such a huge scale... very worthwhile. I sincerely hope they manage to film the first three books, at least.
I liked the Gom Jabar Scene, the pain box part that is, a little bit better in David Lynch's adoption. Jessica's despair about this whole thing was done better by Villeneuve, if you ask me.
If they pull of at least one more book, or even two, this will be on par with LotR if not a tad better. If the team can keep the level, that is.
I did like the original Dune movie a lot, one of the most under-valued films.
I tell most people to try God Emperor and if they hate it, they might as well be done. In my experience it's a rare breed that enjoys Heretics and Chapterhouse. I'm part of that breed, but I have also read them through many times; and I can't say that I was part of that breed before I had read them through many times. It could also be a rare breed because I don't think most people make it through God Emperor.
Anderson wrote crappy Star Wars books, too. I'm really not sure what the breakdown is of Brian Herbert and Anderson actually doing the writing.
I gave the two of them two or three trilogies, so more than a fair shake. Painfully dull is the first adjective that comes to mind. They really took some of the most interesting places and concepts in sci-fi and made them flat.
Hunters and Sandworms were the least bad books by the pair, and there was certainly some hint of Heretics and Chapterhouse in them, but they were still not well written and the ideas lacked the substance of Frank Herbert's works.
'Heretics' was my favourite book the last time I reread the series, because it finally gave us a glimpse of a large and chaotic civilisation beyond the reach of the stultified empire. I agree that it took many rereadings to get there though.
Interesting. I adore God Emperor, but I feel as if it's lightest on plot of all six books. In any case, I love the plot device of Leto's Stolen Journals as a way for Leto/Frank to expound philosophically on themes of religion, government, and nature. That book is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to stimulating observations.
As far as the Villeneuve films go, my sincerest wish is that we can somehow make it to a God Emperor film. I have no idea what this would look like, or if it would be any good, but I'll keep dreaming.
Now I’m halfway through Heretics and I believe the last 3 books would make an excellent dialogue-heavy anime. Very hard to see them as widely popular films.
> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.
While I agree with this sentiment, I think it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments. The Cahuilla people, who are indigenous to where I live, for example have always had botanical experimentation deeply integrated in their cultures. Some of the most important people in their cultures were botanists. They had many complex rules around patches of certain plants growing and these important people (who I'll just call "doctors" as an insufficient translation) would claim certain patches and study them for years. Some of this knowledge was shared with the rest of the communities, while some was protected and only shared with their close family members or apprentices. Their "folk taxonomy" had names for every single species of oak that is recognized today in the area. An extremely impressive task given how readily many species hybridize
The same can be said of many indigenous peoples around the world. There's an increasing recognition that the Amazon isn't just some pristine wilderness but rather a "manufactured landscape" that has been deeply shaped by the indigenous caretakers of it. In fact there's also an increasing recognition that oftentimes "conservation" ends up hurting the environments it's trying to protect because it kicks out the indigenous people that the landscape relies on. This can also be seen in California where so much of the ecology is dependent on the cultural burn practices of native Californians
> it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments
OP's point is that this is often overblown. Plenty of ancient civilizations ran themselves into the ground through environmental collapse. I'm currently reading The Big Oyster, which documents evidence of the native population over-harvesting the New York harbor.
Almost by definition, a colonist will be part of a more-powerful civilization than the indigenous populations she encounters. Bigger civilizations have bigger footprints. It takes care to disentangle which cultures are inherently more "at balance" with nature, i.e. could scale less destructively, versus those which are scale limited. (For example, Nordic versus Continental culture, for European examples.)
I recently started reading the book titled "Seeing like a state: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed" by James C. Scott [1] which talks about how starting with a simplified idea of how to structure a complex system (i.e. a system with many interdependencies) without taking into account details at the ground level end up in disaster.
Using that idea of "legibility" that Scott proposes, not accounting for indigenous "tribal knowledge" in planning for their "betterment" does not work. Common language that reflects this happening is when such knowledge is trivialized or rejected using words like "unscientific".
There's no inherent reason superior technology would lead to the destabilization of an ecosystem (aka 'harmony with nature'). A good example is the introduction of the hunting rifle to Inuit culture, as I understand it. Prior to this hunting near the Arctic Circle was a far more difficult endeavor, as sneaking up on seals and caribou is not easy even with a high skill level. As a result, famine became much less common and hunting took much less time.
Now, if the Inuit had tried to get extremely wealthy by using their rifles to hunt seals and caribou as the basis of a large and ever-growing export industry, they'd have indeed destabilized the ecosystem and there would have been a collapse in the population of seals and caribou, as seen with European hunters of wildlife in North America with beavers and bison and passenger pigeons. If that had happened, the Inuit themselves would most likely have followed the local animals into extinction.
[edit] Note with bison, there was a deliberate extermination policy pursued by the US government as a means of destroying the food supply of various indigenous tribes that relied on bison for sustenance (aka the genocidal starvation program). This doesn't explain the extermination of beaver and other wildlife populations, however.
> a means of destroying the food supply of various indigenous tribes that relied on bison for sustenance (aka the genocidal starvation program)
Do you have any references about this? It's the first time I heard of it and googling for "the genocidal starvation program" only gets me hits on that other genocidal starvation program, the Holodomor.
The book 'Our History Is the Future' by Nick Estes goes into detail on this.
Specifically:
The US army and settlers moving West executed buffalo because Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains depended on them. 'Every dead buffalo is a dead Indian' is one of the quotes from the time. The army/settlers would also poison the buffalo carcasses so Indigenous people couldn't eat from the dead carcass, and as a consequence, other animals in the environment (e.g. wolves) couldn't eat the meat either and likewise suffered, and further reduced the food supply.
This took place after the 1868 treaty of the Black Hills. So the US signed a treaty acknowledging Indigenous land and sovereignty. And then started a genocidal campaign, against the people they just signed the treaty with -- tresspassing on treaty defined land to do so and kill the buffalo. The Supreme Court acknolwedged the history of these wrongdoings in a ruling in 1980, awarding financial compensation to the Indigenous peoples -- however the Indigenous plaintiffs did not want monetary awards, they sought rematriation of their stolen land and the upholding of their rights under the 1868 treaty. The battles to uphold those treaty rights continue to this day.
(In 2007, the UN ratified the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms Indigeous claim to treaty rights such as the 1868 Black Hills treaty (albeit in a 'non-binding' way). The declaration has now been ratified by all UN member nations -- US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand originally held out for several years -- and many groups are now operating with that document as a legal/political framework and justification to take their treaty and Indigenous rights cases forward.)
It's not inherent, but having a powerful technology you understand may tempt you into applying it to things you don't understand to force them be more understandable. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it does not, and one has to have a measure of humility, so that having a powerful hammer not to start treating everything as a nail. European civilization, unfortunately, fell into this failure mode not once (maybe others too, we just know about European failures the most). We still can observe it in hi-tech where "we just add some ML and big data to it and it's solved" led people astray many times. Sometimes it worked, surely, but sometimes the amount of subject domain knowledge required to deal with the problem was vastly underestimated. One example just from recent days is the Zillow fiasco. It doesn't have to be on the planet Pandora, we can see it everywhere, both in history and around us right now.
I think that with sufficiently advanced technology, there would be immense understanding of nature resulting in elimination of any need to be in conflict with the nature because one would simply solve their needs by enveloping or integrating with nature instead of going against it.
Yes, but 'Enough Tech and Knowledge to do Whatever Whenever at Planetary Sale' ... that's a million years away.
In the meantime, to answer the OP's question, the issue is that there is an inflection point at which man has enough tech to start changing nature, by disrupting parts of those systems.
That's probably huge distinction between most of Europe/Asia and the rest of the world in the Columbian era.
Aboriginals cultures mostly did not have the ability to shape the land (and where they had they tech, they did disrupt). Forget narratives one way or the other - they were by and large 'way behind'. And things took a an even bigger, massive jump when we harnessed fossil fuels.
The glamorization of 'In Concert With Nature' is I think mostly just the fact that they didn't have the power to do anything otherwise.
> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?
It's called the Noble Savage [1] [2] trope. It's at least as old as the Romans. It's also probably the reason so many of our sports teams bear the images of peoples we committed quasi-genocide [3] against.
The last residential school closed in 1996. Forced sterilizations lasted through the 80s in the US. The current US president was alive during the Navajo livestock reduction.
Well maybe I’d say that by “our”, I mean the people who self-describe as “fans” of at least one of those teams, or people who have been to a live match featuring at least one of those teams in the last five years, or something like this.
Go back far enough and pretty much all land is stolen. It's not like the same native American tribes ruled parts of America since the dawn of man, they fought for territory all the time like everyone else.
> Ah, I see you're an adherent of the "finders-genocide, finders'-grandkids'-keepers" sociopolitical philosophy.
Are you saying that I and every other human are owed for any and all unrecompensed wrongs committed against any and all members of our ancestries and that governments should go about facilitating this “business”?
I think it’s more like should be deep consideration on how can the United States of America as a country acknowledge that it committed genocide against several nations and discussion on how to best support the survivors of that genocide. There are living people now who are survivors of genocidal policies like forced sterilization and family separation; how is the United States acknowledging and supporting them?
What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?
And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies? They are in some sense, double harmful?
> What is the test for deciding whether a policy is “genocidal”?
I'm pretty sure "if the policy was driven by a desire for genocide, or results in genocide" would cover it.
> And are “genocidal” policies somehow different from policies that can be shown to have caused harm? And if so are they somehow worse or more deserving of recompense than this category of “harmful” policies?
Some things are worse than other things and we react different accordingly. The justice system of.... well, virtually every society with laws, is based on that idea. You do something bad, you get consequence X. You do something worse, you get consequence Y. The law says specifically what's worse than what other thing and what happens.
The only time that a lot of different things has had the same consequence was the Draconian constitution, which everybody agreed was shit. However, they all liked that it differentiated between different degrees of similar acts, and we still do today.
Right, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the label genocide adds anything to the conversation. We can say there were this many murders and this many sterilizations and this much property damage and then do whatever restitution calculation. It’s being or not being genocide seems irrelevant.
Genocide has a specific meaning of a specific set of policies with the intention of causing a group of people to become utterly extinct. I’m surprised you’re unaware of this technical term?
Another mist opportunity is that in fantasy stories indigenous people always wear drab brown. In the real world indigenous people, like everyone else, do care about fashion and how they look.
In the real world indigenous people often wear colourful clothes with very complex patterns. People's clothes can say a lot about their culture, religion and hierarchical structure. Spending some effort on clothes can add a lot of depth into stories world building.
> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?
This is a valid criticism of the depiction of aboriginal cultures.
But I've come to believe that there is a subtle racism in not accepting that aboriginals intentionally chose to develop cultures which were durable and in 'harmony with nature.'
They are the same homo sapiens with the same intelligence and nature as the homo sapiens of Europe or from other more 'advanced' societies. They could have chosen to develop their culture in such a way that led to being 'out of harmony' just as easily as some other peoples did.
Aboriginals in say, Australia, had plenty of time to develop a more advanced society (some estimates say they've been there 40k years). When western people depict them as living close to the land, I smell a whiff of the subtext 'because they couldn't do any better'. Yeah they could have done otherwise, but they chose not to!
I work with a group of engineers and lately because of attending a conference, we have started to talk a lot about climate change. Some of the ideas our group initially came up with are really ridiculous, like some kind of machine to extract carbon from the atmosphere and to sequester it.
It's called a tree, they are everywhere, and they do it for free. They will propagate by themselves if we just had the patience to let them do so.
Secondly, if you read the Appendices of Book I of Frank Herbert's Dune series, you'll see that he more or less invented the concept of 'planetologist', which in the late 1990s became a recognized academic discipline under the umbrellas of 'planetary sciences' and 'earth system sciences'. This was in response to a sense that the academic study of the subject had been too fractured, i.e. disciplines such as oceanography, geology, ecology and atmospheric chemistry and physics were actually highly interrelated, to the point that the historic divisions didn't make as much sense as they once did. This is now seen in, for example, the scientific study of Jupiter's moon Europa.
As far as the current impacts of human civilization on Earth's climate and ecology, see the original Dune book:
> "The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences - Pardot Kynes in "Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune"
Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.