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.
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.
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 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.
Everyone starts to come together in the last book though.
In a very… Specific way.
They’re kind of forced to by an outside context problem, to quote Banks.
The earthers are not doing that bad in the beginning that is true. But the rest of the system have it rough.
To be fair to Inaros he did end global warming and the overpopulation of earth.
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.
Winston Duarte has entered the chat.
I’ll let you all guess which one was published in the 50s and which one was published in the 60s.
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.
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
Yes I can
Dune: “salvation? sure, buddy, sure”
Neither of the stories present salvation, merely survival.
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.
I’ve tried to read Dune a few times and quit I have read all of foundation however. Not saying foundation is better but Dune is probably just not for me.
Did that guy even read the books? Sounds very much like he did not. I will explain on the example of foundation, naturally this contains severe spoilers:
spoiler
In the foundation saga, the interdisciplinary science of psycho-history developed by Seldon is much more than just a new kind of math. It´s actually a complex combination of three sciences, which are history, (mass) psychology and mathematics. However later, when the second foundations existence is revealed it turns out that additionally the solution was also reliant on telepathy and in general mentalism. Later it is then revealed that a major part of the solution has been benevolent robots, secretly protecting humanity from the shadows. Considering all this I say this guy has obviously no idea what he is talking about.
As a physicist psychonaut, I like both ideas. Not Paul’s genocide tho or Leto’s worm imperium (I’m on God Emperor). Still reading foundation and it’s amazing