Dune Messiah
I read things and I think things and I feel things, and then since my memory is garbage and nobody reads the same things I do I can't discuss them and I begin to doubt what the fucking point of fiction even is.
So, casually, I'm gonna talk about some things I read in the last year that I can remember and that I have opinions on.
First up:
_First_edition.jpg/220px-Dune_Messiah-Frank_Herbert_(1969)_First_edition.jpg "this is what mt copy looks like, but i stole this image from wikipedia because fuck you im not taking a phone pic of the one i own")
Dune Messiah
So here's the 2nd Dune book. Herbert spent like 10 years writing Dune—that book's like 700 pages, a slow burn, a batshit exercise in world-building and Shakespearean drama, a fictional, internally-consistent space that iteratively opens up and explains itself to the viewer.
Then it sold like a zillion copies and Herbert said "word, gimme a couple years, I'mma write a sequel."
Okay, that's pretty dismissive. Once you lay the groundwork of a fictional space, you can focus on telling stories in that space, so it makes sense that it would take less long to write further installments. But then again, that's the point of my critique—the groundwork has already been laid. Dune's whole appeal is in its world-building, so once the world is already built, what we have here rests very much on Herbert's skill in character-driven narrative. Which is, uh, not great, to be honest.
Characters just kinda... do things. They're not very consistent. They are here to drive forward the plot, even if it betrays their raison-d'etre. Herbert introduces a romance subplot out of the blue, forgets about it for 60 pages, and then remembers it just in time for it to matter, even though holy fuck why would this Bene Gesserit religious leader galaxy-brain despot woman fall for the revived corpse of her brother's middle-aged mentor? In fiction, I don't care if characters feel realistic or not. But I care about them feeling human, and Herbert does a pretty poor job of that.
Dune Messiah is pretty obviously about power: what it means to hold power, what it means to be deified and to lose control of your own deification. Paul Atreides, the person on whom this analysis of power falls, mainly deals with it through protracted monologue and philosophical rambling. His thoughts and doubts about the position of power he holds don't really translate much to his actions as a character until the book's conclusion. Is this a symbolic choice, or just bad writing? I'm not quite sure, to be honest.
Okay. What's good here? Again, the world-building here isn't as dense. But there is still a wealth of, ahem, "cool shit"—images and ideas which are evocative and interesting and that I wish Herbert would have explored further, yet are still valuable in and of themselves. For example, Herbert goes into more detail on how the oracular vision works in this universe, including the idea that one person's prescience has a ripple effect in physical space, such that if two people who can see into the future live in proximity, their oracular visions will interfere with each other. Naturally, everyone on Arrakis has started doing tarot readings while under the influence of space drugs, so Paul's oracular vision gets clouded the fuck up and he starts consuming more and more amounts of space drugs in order to still catch some glimpse of the future. That sort of establishment of a weird, fictional, system which is then made to interact with other existing systems is what I'm here for, baby.
Conclusion:
So, casually, I'm gonna talk about some things I read in the last year that I can remember and that I have opinions on.
First up:
Dune Messiah
So here's the 2nd Dune book. Herbert spent like 10 years writing Dune—that book's like 700 pages, a slow burn, a batshit exercise in world-building and Shakespearean drama, a fictional, internally-consistent space that iteratively opens up and explains itself to the viewer.
Then it sold like a zillion copies and Herbert said "word, gimme a couple years, I'mma write a sequel."
Okay, that's pretty dismissive. Once you lay the groundwork of a fictional space, you can focus on telling stories in that space, so it makes sense that it would take less long to write further installments. But then again, that's the point of my critique—the groundwork has already been laid. Dune's whole appeal is in its world-building, so once the world is already built, what we have here rests very much on Herbert's skill in character-driven narrative. Which is, uh, not great, to be honest.
Characters just kinda... do things. They're not very consistent. They are here to drive forward the plot, even if it betrays their raison-d'etre. Herbert introduces a romance subplot out of the blue, forgets about it for 60 pages, and then remembers it just in time for it to matter, even though holy fuck why would this Bene Gesserit religious leader galaxy-brain despot woman fall for the revived corpse of her brother's middle-aged mentor? In fiction, I don't care if characters feel realistic or not. But I care about them feeling human, and Herbert does a pretty poor job of that.
Dune Messiah is pretty obviously about power: what it means to hold power, what it means to be deified and to lose control of your own deification. Paul Atreides, the person on whom this analysis of power falls, mainly deals with it through protracted monologue and philosophical rambling. His thoughts and doubts about the position of power he holds don't really translate much to his actions as a character until the book's conclusion. Is this a symbolic choice, or just bad writing? I'm not quite sure, to be honest.
Okay. What's good here? Again, the world-building here isn't as dense. But there is still a wealth of, ahem, "cool shit"—images and ideas which are evocative and interesting and that I wish Herbert would have explored further, yet are still valuable in and of themselves. For example, Herbert goes into more detail on how the oracular vision works in this universe, including the idea that one person's prescience has a ripple effect in physical space, such that if two people who can see into the future live in proximity, their oracular visions will interfere with each other. Naturally, everyone on Arrakis has started doing tarot readings while under the influence of space drugs, so Paul's oracular vision gets clouded the fuck up and he starts consuming more and more amounts of space drugs in order to still catch some glimpse of the future. That sort of establishment of a weird, fictional, system which is then made to interact with other existing systems is what I'm here for, baby.
Conclusion:
- Very much not as good as Dune, but still worth reading/skimming if you like weird fictional systems/images
- If you like characters that matter, or more specifically women characters who don't have a contractual obligation to become inexplicably weak and male-dependent at some point in the story, then you've got an "uh oh stinky" coming
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