You told me this is good. It seems like an over-written children's book. I got about 170 pages in...

You told me this is good. It seems like an over-written children's book. I got about 170 pages in, and I can't follow it, because I don't care about anything that is going on. Why is this considered a masterpiece?

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That's like asking why Lord of the Rings is considered a masterpiece despite it being about elves and midgets and shit. It's because in 1965 nobody had written books like this before and it changed the soft sci-fi genre. There probably wouldn't have been a Star Wars if there wasn't a Dune.

So did Herbert write poofy hocus pocus because he needed to compensate for his shit prose?

Guy was a political speechwriter at some point, as far as I recall the whole point of the Dune books was that even tens of thousands of years into the future people are still going to be power-hungry bastards fighting each other while putting their faith into leaders who really, REALLY don't deserve to be on a pedestal.

It's the greatest 20th century English prose novel ever written. That's 100 years of being the best. Stop being a pseud caring about plot. You're like one of those that cares about the story behind a painting rather than the technical detail which gave rise to feminist art like in pic where they like to use menstrual blood for some faux feminist statement.

it's good if your like 16. why are you faggots trying to read it at such a late age. I read LOTR as a kid then moved onto Dune.

>Dune
>The greatest 20th century English prose novel ever written
You are out of your damn mind

It's Lawrence of Arabia in space, why do you hate fun?

>your
>lower-case
I guess you are 16 too

>falling for bait
>this obvious
You are out of your damn mind.
I read this when I was fourteen, pleb.

>I don't care about the book
>therefore all positive opinions about it are foolish

I have it, but I haven't read it. I got about thirty pages in and decided the prose was a bit shit and I could be doing other things. I'll give it another go after Lord of the Flies

The prose is absolutely abhorrent. The dialogue is flat and uninspiring, but the themes are somewhat interesting. I dunno, I can't ever get further than a third of the way through the book before tossing it onto the "I liked the idea of the story, but the writing was excruciating drivel" pile.

>has opinion about a book he never finished

>I'll give it another go after Lord of the Flies
This is bait.
The prose wasn't bad. It...wasn't anything special, but it suited the book.

Amazing, aren't I? I can also form opinions on meals I've never finished. I wanted to like Dune but the style was too flat for my tastes.

bait

It's all a matter of taste my dood. Personally I think the worldbuilding is phenomenal.

I got about 300 pages in and stopped. Never looked back.

Who the fuck wants to read a book about some fag teenager that every other male in this book has a fucking "I hate him but god damn it do I respect him" boner that is expressed through some shit grunt phrase of approval.

>an over-written children's book.
How do you guys define this? I know different authors have different styles, but I can never spot what separates childish from adult books.
For example Harry Potter was written for teenagers and LOTR for adults I suppose? But having read both of them I really can't notice much of a difference in terms of how much vocabulary you need to read them.

you're a retard and should kill yourself kiddo

Go ahead and drop it, faggots. Who cares if you miss reading God Emperor.

Is God Emperor worth it? I read Dune, loved it, moved on to Dune Messiah and it's kinda... meh. After delivering the good dick on the Padishah-Emperor and becoming the big boss himself Paul kind of just mopes around feeling like a slave of his fate while a bunch of conspirators try to kill him by, I dunno, hurting his self-esteem or some shit.

>Why is this considered a masterpiece?
Who said it was?

I read both the first Harry Potter book on release and LOTR a few years earlier but if I recall correctly the vocabulary was A LOT richer in LOTR

Caveat: I read translations

...

>Why is this considered a masterpiece?

Aside from being perhaps the first true epic of the post-pulp era of science fiction, it's scale and wordlbuilding were on a level far beyond what was happening in sci-fi literature. Not only did it help herald new wave science fiction but it also set a new precedent in the genre's history.

>every other male in this book has a fucking "I hate him but god damn it do I respect him" boner

That was an era of human interaction before the internet killed the concept of nuance.

What's funny is when the Dune movie came out after the success of Star Wars, it was a critical flop, and deemed a far less superior Star Wars.

That's because the movie was shit. I mean, Lynch was faithful enough to the source material (except everything to do with the Harkonnens, good god) but the problem is that the book is just really difficult to adapt to film since so much of it is the internal thoughts and observations of the characters rather than dialogue or action. Without showing what's going on inside the character's heads everything in the movie just went too fast and feld disconnected.

At the very least the film adaptation of Dune should have been a trilogy, one for each of the 3 parts of the book.

Plus, Lynch was doing this under a studio contract, so he couldn't REALLY do his own thing. After making Dune, he never went back to studio movies. He stayed independent.

God Emperor is worth it. You may hate it though.

I think that God Emperor is to Dune what Dune is to real life.

Could you explain this a little better? I got through Dune and Messiah pretty fast a few months ago, but I couldn't stand Children. Should I work through children to get to God Emperor? What does "God Emperor is to Dune what Dune is to real life." mean?

Jesus

God Emperor sounds fascinating on paper but Messiah was so terrible I just gave up. Someone who writes such a bad book at one point can't make a masterpiece two books later.

Veeky Forums has a very divided opinion on the books, so no, "we" didn't tell you it's good.

>There probably wouldn't have been a Star Wars if there wasn't a Dune.
Fuck, now I'm sad. We could've avoided two shitty works of "art" with one stone.

I didn't think Messiah was that bad. It was a little dry at some points, but I got through it alright. I have yet to read the third book.

idk what he means but god emperor is a great many things. I'll try not to go into too much specific detail.

On one hand, it continues in the theme of being a deconstruction of the hero myth. But it is also a deconstruction of the deconstruction in that we get a picture of Leto's scheme and begin to understand and appreciate why he has consistently been the most horrible tyrant in human history out of love rather than his own greed. He creates the conditions of his own defeat and is not at all upset when the trap of his own making is sprung on him, because the very possibility of a trap being sprung on him means that he has created the conditions under which a new Leto can never emerge.

Very ironically we can see the prescient stripped of his prescience is in some way just as prescient because the entire conspiracy which he sowed the seeds of was also designed to further his agenda in a way that his superhuman prescience couldn't have predicted. And it all would have been for naught, his ENTIRE tyranny would have been utterly pointless barbarism were it not for his decidedly non-superhuman understanding of people.

There's also a lot of other details going on in the background as well, For example the 'improvement' of Arrakis, of the lot of the Fremen, ect feels very similar to the allegory of the last man, when Nietzsche describes a time when the soil will be barren and support only weeds when it was once rich and supported great trees. There's a scene where Idaho berates the Fremen for being inauthentic, sad shadows of their ancestors.

Dune was notable for its focus on planetary ecology which was unique for its time, and God Emperor shows both sides of what greening a desert does. It makes life easier but at the same time destroys the hard, noble culture which rises up from harsh conditions. And if it were not for Leto maintaining a desert reserve for himself, all spice production would fail, the very lifeblood of interstellar commerce, the entire economic system is threatened when the ecosystem is destroyed. We can already see whispers of this theme in Children of Dune. The ecology of Dune follows the same path of the Butlerian Jihad in terms of what Frank is saying about human development on the whole.

Books 5 and 6, while forming part of an unfinished trilogy, do give us some insight into the results of Leto's master plan. Some are horrific, but we also see a new flourishing of mankind under the conditions that Leto purposefully engineered. Crazy new technologies, the noships, the futars, synthetic spice, all of this came out of the scattering that Leto engineered as the destination of his golden path. Man was stuck in first gear before Leto and had colonized only a small corner of the galaxy after their zeal for exploration, their hunger for more, their will to power began to fizzle, but Leto's cruelty inspired them to new heights as well as new depths and sent them skittering across the universe.

Wow, I had no idea the fluff for Warhammer 40k was really this stupid.

It's not stupid, you're stupid. Stupid. Leto drew on history from Babylon to the Third Reich to create a tyranny so horribly perfect that it instilled in people an instinctual, ancestral, almost hereditary fear of the tyrant's state and its promise of security, which he identified as the evolutionary reason that tyrants can inflict themselves on the human race, why all governments inevitably descend into tyranny and why people will simply sit back and accept this.

He makes what is the most perfectly stable and safe empire in history, it lasts 4,000 years virtually unchanged in form due to his suppression of technology to the point where most citizens of his empire live a medieval lifestyle. He essentially creates the last man in order for man to realize exactly how god awful it is to live this way.

>soft sci-fi

Define "hard" sci-fi.

What's the greatest then?!

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Great comparison

Should have let Jodorowsky do his 10 hour space jesus film desu

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction

Thanks

Watch the 2000 mini-series instead of reading this.

It's fucking amazing; highest rated thing on the Sci-fi channel.

That's the point. He's not the good guy. He shouldn't have been respected.
Wow, I had no idea the flames of the sun were really this hot.

Pretty sure nobody outside the sci-fi ghetto would call it a 'masterpiece'.

Nothing funny about that.

God I've had this book on my shelf so long, maybe I'll actually read it someday

You haven't been on Veeky Forums long, then. I admit I'm not sure why, but a lot of people like it. It is good, I just don't know why Veeky Forums likes it that much.