If it’s only a cover story, and the racism that motivations all writings on eugenics can be seen clearly by all who read, then why give Herbert a pass? Why is Dune treated as though it’s more than the Turner Diaries in space?
It’s only “Turner Diaries in Space” if you think Herbert was trying to present the Bene Gesserit breeding program or the idea of a “master race” as a GOOD thing.
In the end of the Emperor Leto II story arc, humanity’s future is saved not by uniting the species under a single master race but by scattering humanity so broadly across the stars that no single culture, empire or ideology can hope to dominate the others.
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Wait, is that what you think it is?
My impression of the Dune series-- and I’ve only read up to four–is that it that it’s about the conflict between various factions, none of which come off particularly well.
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Well there you go—if it was a celebration of racial superiority like The Turner Diaries then there would be very little ambiguity about which group you were supposed to be rooting for. At one point Paul Atreides even compares himself unfavorably to Hitler.
In the end it’s humanity’s forced diversity through the Great Scattering that gives the species hope for survival, not the presence of a single master race.
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I am seeing a lot of talk about eugenics and the like, all important in Dune. No one is talking about how this article calls the baron “queer” I don’t know any gay people who molest children and continues to do so into their older age. The baron is a fat man to show his willingness to give in to hedonism, however he is a pedophile who molests his own nephew, Fayd, because hes a disgusting person.
I dunno. Psychic Decolonization in 1960s Science Fiction seemed to be pretty harsh towards Frank Herbert.
My personal opinion? Dune and perhaps its sequels, is a good book. It’s a complex book. It contains some strange ideas, and the act of reading entails grappling with those strange ideas. Deleting or editing those ideas for the sake of a movie adaptation risks meddling with the meaning of the book.
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Slightly OT… for people who dislike Neal Stephenson’s work, please move on.
Thank you.
This ground is covered amply by Neal Stephenson in Seveneves and to his great credit, one segment of humanity is saved by seven women. Yep. Wimmin. Cisgender female people. Multiple races, ages, levels of education, nationalities.
In the book, we see many human breeding programs (described or implied) run for several millennia, and the results. I took it as a thought-experiment Stephenson uses to get us questioning assumptions and examining biases.
And yeah, there are several efforts to breed Übermenschen as well as the nearly opposite of those.
The first time I read Dune I too felt the story’s ending was a weird and artless, as if Herbert was saying “this far and no farther” with a slam-shut of his notebook. Maybe he just didn’t know how to craft a good ending? To Book One?
I had some issues with that book because it seemed to lean in on the “ancestry is destiny” angle quite a bit. Thousands of years later, the genetic descendants of thinly-disguised-version-of-Hillary-Clinton are all still ambitious and duplicitous, the genetic descendants of thinly-disguised-version-of-Malala-Yousafzai are all still pacifists, etc. And we’re supposed to believe that hardly anybody in this society chose to hook up outside their own family groups, even though that would clearly be the best way to ensure genetic diversity?
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There are huge problems with ignoring our ability to think and be creative as an, if not THE, central aspect of our humanity. It’s the same problem with things like assuming capitalism is “natural” instead of a human construct, or that race, gender, ethnicity, etc are “natural” instead of a human construct. But you see these sorts of themes over and over in a lot of sci-fi/fantasy written in the 20th century by cisgendered white dudes, and I think that’s because they overwhelmingly benefit from the status quo, so why try and change it via imagining something new or different, or challenging to the ideology of biology as destiny? Same with time travel that says we must preserve the “rightful” historical narrative rather than challenge it.
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