I always recite a slightly modified Litany against Fear when I go visit my in-laws.
It starts: “My in-laws are the mind-killer…”
And we used to have a giant beanbag chair we called “Leto.”
Difficult? Really? Every Dune novel has a beginning, middle, and end. Well, most of them. LotR is one huge tl;dr. You can read Dune without being forced to read Dune Messiah - it’s not like The Two Towers.
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Really?How about the Bene Gesserit & Jessica?
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Perhaps you didn’t notice the Bene Gesserit?
EDIT: Ninja’d by seconds, you jerk.
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“The sanctuary of a thousand testicles” …now that was a movie!
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LoTR isn’t three books, it was just published in three volumes.
It’s certainly a simple book to read, even if it is quite long, but it doesn’t turn into an idiotic stretching out of a story like The Wheel of Time.
I agree with everything you said here. My point was, describing both Earthsea movies as “recasting Ged as a white dude” is an inaccurate description of the problem. Studio Ghibli didn’t “recast Ged as a white dude.”
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Clearly, YTMND loves Dune:
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There WERE some cool toys released to coincide with the first movie. Action figures, a Spice Navigator Time Warp Trainer kit that came with this blue powder that let you see through time, and, damn, I have a LOT of fond childhood memories of using the official Paul Atriedes Thumper in hide-and-seek games.
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I think Dune hasn’t been the breakthrough it could/should have been simply because Dune fans had their hopes dashed. We never got the Dune we were promised: http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/
“Dune” movies in alternate universes, part II
(part I was Jodorowsky’s attempt: http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/):
Ridley Scott makes “Dune” instead of “Alien”; 34 years of science-fiction movie history changes in strange ways. (A timeline with no/altered “Aliens” & James Cameron, “Alien^3” & David Fincher, “Blade Runner” & Ridley Scott, “Prometheus” & Ridley Scott.) Guillermo del Toro manages to make “At The Mountains of Madness” (or maybe not, if producer James Cameron’s career was altered).
Physique courtesy of the Madeleine Drug Cartel
Highly unlikely. Star Trek and even Star Wars have tons of books and that really hasn’t diluted anything.
Seemingly impoverished natives in the desert fighting off an invading population that seeks to abuse local resources and destroy the native religion-based way of life. Oh, and the protagonist changes his name from Paul to Muad’Dib.
Weird, I wonder why Hollywood hasn’t picked up on that in the past few decades.
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'Failing to [E]nder the public consciousness." I see what you did there.
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Plus the average quality of the Star Wars books that I’ve read is better than the average quality of Episodes 1-3.
I notice no one has mentioned the Scifi miniseries of Dune and Children of Dune. Those two helped me grasp more of what happened in the books. David Lynch’s version made me think I was having a fever dream.
Perhaps it is due to the divided nature of the fandom itself.
You get people who like all the books, people who like the first book, people who like the film and the books, people who thought the series tailed off after a while, and all possible combinations within. The only thing that just about everyone can agree on is that the prequels were a horrible mistake.
I dunno - you can find popular culture references to Dune. Rare - but out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ7z57qrZU8
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I wonder. The name Gollum might have gotten blank stares from some, but I can be sure it shows up in a Led Zeppelin song, and they’re not the only well-known band with such references. To go from them to fantasy authors inspired by its world and sysadmins quoting “do not meddle in the affairs of wizards” feels like it should cover a good swathe of society, doesn’t it?
I think the reason Dune hasn’t caught on is pretty simple really. There are no easy answers in Dune. You can’t just throw the ring of all evil into a volcano. You can’t just toss the Emperor into a bottomless hole. Herbert’s vision of a solution to mankind’s problems takes six novels and tens of thousands of years to reach its conclusion, and all along the way it’s complicated by messy human nature.
LoTR and Star Wars are pure escapism. Dune is truly speculative fiction.
One wonders, however, if the current obsession with Game of Thrones might shift public tastes to the more complicated and messy away from the fantasy escapism. How well that goes in the long run probably depends on how Martin decides to end it. If the last book doesn’t satisfy audiences, it could push them further toward the escapist fantasy in the end.
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