Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="briggart" data-source="post: 9380472" data-attributes="member: 6805135">No problem. Actually, thanks for taking the time to reply.Let me start by addressing this, because I think this a broader point than some of the specific aspect you mentioned.I agree that books and movies are different media, with different tools at their disposal to convey a given message, with some tools working for one medium and not the other.But I understood the discussion here to be also about how effective book and movie were in delivering their message, regardless of the restrictions imposed by the different media. My replies to you and other poster here was that comparison was not well posed because I think Herbert was making a different point in the first place.I disagree on skin colors, or more in general physical traits, not being useful coding in books. Think of Martin's Game of  Throne with all the clues (both within and outside the fiction) tied to physical traits like hair and eye colors. Or all the discussions on Tolkien's description of orcs. It's possible that Herbert did not emphasize skin colors because he felt it was not useful to convey his messages, but another possibility is that it had little to do with his messages.I agree that the Empire reads more US/European while the Fremen are explicitly Muslim* (but so is, e.g, a large fraction of Caladan population), but I believe that to be sort of incidental in the sense that while a fictionalized retelling of the Europe/Middle East interactions is useful way to get readers to understand that was not just a work of fiction but there were direct connections with the dynamics of our world, at the same time those ideas have a broader relevance than that specific instance. The geopolitics of resource acquisition and control, the impact of environment on culture, the effect of religion/ideology on the masses all transcend the specifics of the West/Middle East dynamics in the '60s-'70s, and I don't think that Herbert was unaware of this. He's not concerned only with specific historic events, but with human nature itself.     *Technically they follow a fictional future merging of Islam and Buddhism, so they are not Muslims in the currently accepted sense.I agree. But my point is that book Liet-Kynes is not the Fremenest Fremen who Fremens, he is the beta version of Paul (and his father was the alpha-version). Pardot became enamored with the idea of using humans to positively affect an ecosystem for the first time in history, and the Fremens were a useful tool. The dream of transforming Arrakis in a lush planet was originally Pardot's, not the Fremens'. Pardot's issue was how to convince the Fremens, who lived in a perennial day-to-day survival mode, to embark in a collective effort spanning several centuries. The answer? Religion. Before Paul, and maybe even Leto, was born, Pardot was already exploiting religion to turn Fremens into his puppets. And when Pardot died, Liet picked up his work. This is not subtle in the book. When Liet is delirious after being abandoned without water in the desert by the Harkonnens, he has visions of his father repeating his ideasThe appendixes are even more explicitThis doesn't mean that the Kyneses' goal won't benefit the Fremens, that Liet does not feel one of and care for them. But the same is true for Paul. He uses the Fremens, but at the same time he cares for them, longes of being one of them, and getting rid of Harkonnens is something everyone on Arrakis (barring some of their sycophants) wants.So to me, Herbert's message was not (or, not only) "Beware the Greeks" like in Villeneuve's films, rather "Religion makes you suckers".And, ... I should stop here. Apologies for the rant <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😅" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f605.png" title="Grinning face with sweat    :sweat_smile:" data-shortname=":sweat_smile:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

Verification