vs The Expanse: we are headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity’s salvation will come from… Nevermind, we’re fucked.
Just most of us, except Amos. Amos will be fine.
He is that guy
Nothing this guy can’t shrug off. Litterally.
He’s got the shotgun, you’ve got the briefcase. All in the game, though.
[…] humanity’s salvation will come from alien technology we haven’t discovered yet.
The expense always looked like almost utopic to me.
Truly ? What aspects of it ?
I mean they do have universal basic income on earth but apart from that humanity is all kinds of fucked. And it doesn’t exactly get better as the story progresses.
Chrissie’s fabulous saris
Fair enough.
The fact that the earth is even united and not completely screwed is already a great start. It was even recovering from climate change before Inaros.
The earthers are not doing that bad in the beginning that is true. But the rest of the system have it rough.
The earth is united like the United States is united. The tribes just got bigger is all. Instead of NATO vs BRICS, the Expanse universe has Earthers vs Martians vs Belters. And people are suffering hard on earth as evidenced during Bobby’s trip to the ocean.
Bobby’s saw a very different earth in the books tho.
People living in UBI weren’t really living a paradise but they weren’t homeless hobos like in the show.
Example B of earth being shittastic is the entirety of The Churn novella
The story for The Churn is entirely Earth based and provides a description of what the average life in a crowded, metropolitan city is like in the world of the Expanse. The city of Baltimore has given way to a multitude of crime bosses, and organized black markets. There are multiple bosses who each keep a “family” of personal guards that operate the smuggling of goods, illegal memory implants, weapons smuggling, cybernetic implants, and other illegal goods and services. The story takes place over the course of about two days.
Everyone starts to come together in the last book though.
They’re kind of forced to by an outside context problem, to quote Banks.
In a very… Specific way.
To be fair to Inaros he did end global warming and the overpopulation of earth.
Inaros did nothing wrong.
Isn’t the UBI on earth literally so poor that people on it are stuck in lives of poverty unless they can get into some kind of training scheme?
Mostly they suffer from extreme boredom and mediocre lives. Nothing drastic but soul suckingly unfulfilling.
You mean dystopic right … right?
Not at all. It always looked like something in between for me. Humanity is still struggling but moving forward, and most people live under various kind of regimes but no big bad Empire.
Well the belters have it pretty rough and Mars is basically totalitarian. And without spoiling anything I’d suggest you keep reading, it is worth it :).
Winston Duarte has entered the chat.
The chat has become Winston Duarte.
So you would enjoy the belter life much?
Belters are a vast minority, though.
So?
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As far as I know utopia and dystopia are like polar opposites. I have never heard the take before that the concept of utopia includes that it´s rotten on the inside and only looks perfect. Where did you get that idea from?
A utopia (/juːˈtoʊpiə/ yoo-TOH-pee-ə) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members.
and
The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia.
A dystopia is properly a utopia with one critical flaw.
Thing is, the Asimov Foundation universe could actually fit in the “past” of the Dune universe.
This idea is oddly fascinating. Now we just need a good sci-fi writer to produce the “missing link”.
Maybe the robots in Asimov’s universe lead to the creation of Erasmus and eventually the Butlerian Jihad.
Yes, that was my idea too :)
We do. In some of the set in the same universe novels but not written by Asimov there are references to Brain Fever. A disease that virtually 100% of humans get at least once that makes them dumb for life. All advancement in galactic culture comes from the like 1 out of a million people who were immune.
That would account for Dune. Dune only makes sense if you assume that everyone is stupid and living in a hazy of drugged religious fantasy. Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one. Thousands of years of eugenics defeated by 30 cents of earplugs. Dune everybody!
Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one.
Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.
(In fact, in the later books a “corrupt” version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)
Lord, please deliver us from people with really “clever” hot takes that are horribly reductive and strained through the mesh of whatever synonym for “woke” won’t get me downvoted.
Can’t hear you. I have earbuds I got from the dollar store. You could try explaining it to me again but you might need a thinking-machine to do it with.
After reading your (imo totally idiotic) thoughts about my beloved Dune, I simply wish to never talk to you again. Bye bye!
The witches go around when everyone is still young and tell them to never buy earplugs
It probably is something that freaken dumb as it is Dune. An entire civilization enslaved and broken so inbred monarchy can play with swords. Leave it to those fucking morons to ban gays and women from the military and not discover how to defeat the sexy voice.
Know now that it is the year 18,238 after the great Sunni-Druid Jihad against the water parks. People are enslaved by space-witches that have the power of sexy voice and their halibasters-smegma (ancient swords) are useless.
There. I solved Dune.
You mean the book about a bunch of Muslims who take over the galaxy because they learn Karate?
Whoa,spoilers man!
That’s the plot of Idiocracy
Yeah, no, The Voice isn’t sexual… like, at all
I agree. Some shrill inbred witch being a space-karen is not sexy.
Dune only works if you assume that the characters are idiots in a religious-drug filled haze. Now polish your space-sword we have to go fight the 19th Buddha-Jewish jihad against the Space-mushroom eater people under the rule of Space-Baron Singh of the space house whalefurer. They harvest space-fur from space-whales.
I think you may have missed my point
It isn’t sexual at all and it isn’t meant to be
In the non-canon book Psychohistorical Crisis, the Dune universe is part of the past of the Foundation universe. The Fremon are known as the “Frightful People” to historians.
I’ll let you all guess which one was published in the 50s and which one was published in the 60s.
Arthur C. Clarke: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from encountering benevolent alien intelligence we haven’t discovered yet.
Ray Bradbury: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from rediscovering the beauty of books and humanity’s inherent capacity for empathy in a world we’re rapidly forgetting.
Robert A. Heinlein: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from pioneering individualism, libertarianism, and multi-planetary colonies we haven’t established yet.
William Gibson: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from navigating and subverting the interplay of high technology and low life in a cybernetic reality we’re only beginning to understand.
Ursula K. Le Guin: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from understanding and integrating a spectrum of social, psychological, and cultural perspectives we haven’t fully considered yet.
Neal Stephenson: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from unprecedented technological and social innovation, often resulting from deep historical and philosophical introspection, in a future we’re yet to engineer.
Octavia Butler: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from embracing and adapting to change through the lens of bio-diversity and sociocultural evolution we haven’t fully embraced yet.
Ayn Rand: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense 😃
Exactly what I thought for Heinlein. All aboard! 🚂
Liu Cixin: We’re headed to being fucked.
Douglas Adams: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense and humanity will almost completely be erased, but as a matter of fact, there is much more and weirder nonsense out there, which of course makes the previously mentioned nonsense quite nonsensical and thus the destruction of humanity quite unimportant from a galactic point of view. (Where this point is located, has been a debate for aeons.)
Gene Roddenberry: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from remotely incubating and uplifting improbably humanoid alien species across vast swaths of existence to shore up our defenses against mysterious adversaries that plot our extinction for reasons they’ve not monologued yet.
That sounds more like post-post-post-Roddenberry Trek.
Gene Roddenberry: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but don’t worry, it’ll get better.
Every fantasy author (except Tolkien): We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from an individual or small group who will save the world through the judicious application of violence.
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Do Gene Wolfe
Gene Wolfe: We’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity’s salvation will come from traversing complex, labyrinthine narratives and deciphering symbolic, metaphysical riddles we haven’t begun to understand yet.
better do both just in case
edit: guys maths is HARD
I’m sure there are drugs that make math easy. We just need to find them.
Melange, I’m sure. Seeing how it enables you to fold space, I’m assuming it also helps with the math involved.
If it also helps with the math of folding fitted sheets, I’m in!
From the Wikipedia page for Paul Erdős:
After his mother’s death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that it impacted his performance: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.”[66] After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.[67]
so you’re saying I should add benzedrine
They don’t make it easy. They make it better. Source: am mathematician.
MATH AND DRUGS ARE THE KEYS TO EVERYTHING
Source: myself, a computer science major
Lmao, good to know CS majors haven’t changed.
I’ll see you at FurCon in a few, it’s just a matter of time now.
math is fun!
but I took so many drugs 😭
the “moment of relief when the pain recedes” kind of fun. And then you realize you made a trivial mistake in the beginning and all your conclusions were useless.
The Fun of Grim Determination
Masochist!
Mathochist!
[Relevant]
I think Dune has very many themes, but the biggest one is the dangers of religion (which is not really portrayed in the movie I think)
The 2022 movie covers the first half of the first book and that theme only really comes into its own in books 2 and 3.
I mean, I feel like manipulating a whole culture’s established religious beliefs to place themself at the highest seat of power and war a holy war in their name is a pretty poignant display of “religion bad, m’kay”
Yeah but if you don’t know about the books it doesn’t necessarily look like manipulation. That’s only made overt when you read the latter books
If you haven’t read the books the movie makes no sense. It’s nothing but a string of half-ass book references and pretty scenery. Even having read the books the movie was still all over the place. It was a string of individual scenes with barely anything to connect them besides having the same characters.
And since I’m finally venting about it, if they were going to just focus on visuals, they could have at least gotten the scale right. They have these giant buildings and ships alluding to a mass of people keeping it operational. Then we never see more than like, 6 people. And the one scene where they pulled out all of the people at the climax, where it makes sense to show every soldier during an all hands emergency, we see, like, 50 people. They’re supposed to have thousands of soldiers. Losing a dozen soldiers in the book would have been acceptable losses. The movie force we see, that would cripple them.
Also, it should have ended just after the attack. Use all that extra time to actual get you invested in House Atreides and Paul. In anything really. That movie was so bad. I’ve always like Lynch’s Dune for it’s insanity, but compared to the new one, it’s a legitimately good movie. At least there’s a story.
My partner never read the books and easily caught the massive religious manipulation angle through the film. The even more massive scale of it all was obviously not revealed because of when it takes place, but it’s still present
Helps that it’s outright stated near the beginning of the movie.
One of the reasons why the original movie was so good. Stripped out all the religious garbage and kept the worms
The original movie was good for the art direction and fantastic acting by supporting characters.
That’s kinda where it ends though, comparing the two of them, the new Dune features human emotion which is pretty cool; all the main characters were kind of animatronic feeling in the old one imo.
But, the book characters were intentionally written to be pretty emotionally flat? The Gom Jabbar scene… Jessica showing emotion doesn’t make it a bad scene, but it kind of undercuts how the Bene Gesserit work. Their whole thing is conquering their emotions and being composed and in control all the time. Jessica’s turmoil is internal while her face is stoic. That’s her whole character at that point in the book. she’s not a very good Bene Gesserit, but she’s faked it real well.
Except Duncan and Gurney. They should have had personality. That’s Their purpose in the books. To be the ones who show Paul what being a real human is like beyond the Duke (laden with responsibility and the knowledge that his entire house and the thousands of people that rely on it are teetering on a knife’s edge) and Jessica (basically a magic robot concubine who was raised from birth with the sole purpose of furthering a generations long genetic project her
captorsteachers were working toward). They’re meant to be a breath of fresh air that give Paul the foundation to be a real boy.
You don´t mean that abomination made by Lynch that shits all over the book do you?!?
I mean one of the single best sci-fi movies of all time made by Lynch that takes out all the religious garbage and keeps the worms.
Both of these are terrible takes on the books.
Spice is not a solution in dune in fact the whole 4th book and the end of the third are centered around forcing humanity to wean itself off spice so that it may evolve.
The central concept is that humanity must not depend on machine or drugs or complicated eugenics and must instead look inwards and improve itself by facing hardship.
In foundation (at least the start) the complicated maths is essentially there to prove that all establishments fail and survival requires constant change. Very differently from dune foundation sees technological superiority as key to this and importantly the ability for society to change in order to support the technological progress.
Even if you don’t agree with the above neither book aims to “fight imperialist bullshit” if anything they both quite staunchly support the idea of a benevolent dictator controlling all.
It’s honestly crazy how many people can read Dune and completely misunderstand the themes of the book.
Though to be fair, it sometimes feels like Frank himself didn’t fully understand what themes he was going for. Books 1-3 were staunchly “Beware of heroes, charismatic leaders will lead you to evil and despair”, then in GEoD, we find that literally the only hope for humanity was millenia of oppression by a totalitarian government.
But either of those two takes is still wildly better than “spice saves the universe” lol
Dune has one of the most complex (and necessarily logical) universe in it. I’m not surprised every reader found different themes more fitting.
Dune had no good guys, none at all.
Everyone was out for themselves or their narrow view of what was just and best for humanity from their simplistic and self-centered perspective.
Leto 2 was the exception because he was out for his narrow view of what was best for humanity from his broad, self-centered perspective that still didn’t really lead anywhere.
The actual point of the books is that no ideal survives the test of real time, and over time civilization tends to ossify, so we are doomed to catastrophe by our very nature.
It wasn’t the qctual only hope, just the only path Paul and Leto could see, and we know they aren’t omniscient
Or is Dune about the folly of different types of dictatorship; sadistic, benevolent, religious or machiavellian? Taking only the first book (because that’s as far as I’ve read) every leader is thwarted or confined by the consequences or weakness of their own style of leadership.
I read an interview where frank said that his intention was for Dune to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of charismatic leaders (which is to say, the “classic” hero archetype). Which - for the first book - tracks pretty well. The free are basically just used as cannon fodder for Paul to win back his power (and a lot more), then when he wins, he sets them loose on the universe because he can’t control them.
The trouble I have with that though is that he goes on to contradict that point in later books, but I won’t get into that because I don’t want to spoil anything for you
bitch better have my giant exo-foreskin
Ok but to be fair they were using spice for like 5000 years?
Don’t the Dune universe have Mentats?
So, maths and drugs
But the mentats are also on drugs, aren’t they?
Not necessarily, being a mentat doesn’t require the use of spice. Many use it because it enhances their thought process
Your right about them not necessarily relying on the spice melange, but they do rely on the juice of the sapho root to accelerate their thoughts and increase their processing speed. So yeah, they’re still on drugs :)
I find coffee to be up to the task to come up with plans that are better than “let’s give my enemy the best thing ever, because he migjt mess it up and to get his guy to betray him we will torture his wife”. Yeah real wheels within wheels 4D chess going on right there.
Sapho juice.
Iain M. Banks: we’re living in an AI-regulated Utopia, but the AI that we totally trust might be doing some light imperialism on the side.
Maybe sometimes there are special circumstances?
Fuck I love the Culture series. Such a good read.
The Culture is so incredibly fascinating. Banks’ death was a loss to science fiction.
The Culture weren’t actually the future of humanity though right? Non-canon stuff has indicated we join eventually in the future but the society formed independent of us and even visit and examine us in one.
Actually, you’re right.
Oh well, a humanity, then, just not ours.
Asimov: weird mutants capable of overthrowing the universe should be put down with prejudice.
Frank Herbert: weird mutants capable of overthrowing the universe should be made emperor.
the mule did nothing wrong!
If you read Foundation til the end (Foundation and Earth), you’d see that it’s the other way around.
I started reading Foundation (the first one) just yesterday. So far I love it!
Lucky you, I wish I could experience it fresh again!
Just wait 50 years like I did to reread the trilogy and it will almost seem like you’ve never read it before.
Nice, just another 30 years to go I guess!
Don’t forget prelude!
I envy people who can do that, I can’t hardly start a new series without rereading my favorite series again.
Believe me, i’d rather be 34 than 64. There also are not that many trilogies that I’ve re-read, Probably just Dune, Foundation and LOTR.
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“Foundation” vs “Dune”
Isaac Asimov: we’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity’s salvation will come from using math we haven’t discovered yet
Frank Herbert: we’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense but humanity’s salvation will come from tripping on drugs we haven’t discovered yet
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vs Hyperion:
Dan Simmons: We’re headed for some bleak imperialism nonsense but humanity’s salvation will come from serving AIs we haven’t discovered yet.
Don’t we eventually find out the AIs are oppressing the humans and siphoning off their life-force/brain-power through the use of the portal system and that humanity’s actual salvation comes from deeply believing in the power of love to the point of developing the ability to teleport to beloved places and people?
yeah IIRC that power of love thing was the way our fleshbag brains could deal with the same stuff that the AIs interacted with directly
vs. Children of Time: Fuck humans, spiders are way cooler.
I hated the central plot point of the second book and I really don’t understand how in the fuck they could keep it around instead of killing it with nuclear fire forever
Even if you ignore its inherent worth (and a major theme of the books is the inherent worth of things that don’t look or think like you), it was still an amazing discovery with incredible potential. IMO it was less dangerous that the (admittedly much less innately terrifying) sympathetic aliens, who were capable of deep space travel, unpredictable, warlike, and also very difficult to communicate with.
(I was actually asking the opposite question by the end of the book - once it was convinced to play nice, why wasn’t everyone signing up for it?)
They were going on an adventure
Oh, I haven’t read the second one yet. o_O
Children of ruin, good book. Read it
I will, as soon as I finish Prelude to Foundation. :)
Not comparable works.
In Dune, the imperialist “nonsense” was the path to salvation. Genocide by machines was what we were saved from.
yeah, they went well past the Asimov case.
Also the spice is never deemed a path to salvation. it is merely an integral ressource that is stabilizing the human order by mutual dependence. In the later books the problem is explored what happens when the ressource becomes less integral/more abundant, removing the mutual dependence.
I don’t really agree that the spice wasn’t put forward as a way to salvation. I think it clearly was key to finding the golden path.
The spice enabled the Bene Gesserit to see what was needed in their breeding program, and they were trying to breed Kwisatz Haderwch who would lead humanity through a dangerous time, avoiding the destruction of the race. (Also the scene in the sietch that I won’t go into detail about, becuase spoilers)
Leto II uses the spice to see the golden path and forge humanity into what it needs to be to survive. (Also the other thing which I haven’t mentioned due to major spoilers of a cool moment).
The spice is pretty clearly necessary for the path taken to salvation.
While the spice may not have been necessary to avoid the destruction of the human race had another path been found, in the story as it was told it was absolutely central.
But that is less the spice and more the prescience. The prescience that failed Paul. Leto II seemed to be clear for the golden path not from the self fullfilling lock-in that prescience created, but from his ability to mediate the other voices he incurred from the spice agony. Something the Bene Gesserit thought only women to be capeable off, but never managed to put to the effect like Leto II could.
Also Leto II was the tyrant and very explicit about his choice of tyranny as the mean to create the golden path, so certainly not a salvation from imperial nonsense.
So i’d say the spice to be crucial in fullfilling many purposes, but it was never the path to salvation itself and it created many more problems along the way.
The spice is the source of the prescience, I don’t think you can draw a line between them (the Tleilaxu could, but even then I think they used what they called synthetic spice, I don’t really recall that very well though).
Aside for that point, yep, I agree with pretty much everything you said!
Unless I’m missing something?
You are not missing something and i agree with your points. I was happy to discuss dune with you, as i get the chance way to seldom. Thank you :)
Without spice they can’t fold space either, meaning the empire would collapse without it.
