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
He’s got the shotgun, you’ve got the briefcase. All in the game, though.
Nothing this guy can’t shrug off. Litterally.
[…] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chrissie’s fabulous saris
Fair enough.
You mean dystopic right … right?
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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.
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 :).
I have a question for you, fancy pantsy book reader on their own instance: should I watch the show and then read the books, read the books and then watch the show, or read the books and skip the show?
Doesn’t really matter as the show ends three books short. You probably want to read them though rather than try and pick up from book 7 after the show as lots of characters were changed a bit in the show and one is killed due to off screen drama who should survive.
That character death was so sad. But the reason behind the scenes was absolutely justified
Watch the show and then read the books. In my opinion the show is fantastic and incredibly enjoyable (except for ending the series in what is obviously the middle of a significant plot thread, which is annoying) but the books are even better and spoiled the show a tinsy bit for me.
Listen to the books, don’t care about the show.
Well my pants aren’t fancy at all thank you very much :p.
The show is great, and so are the books. Mostly I would start by watching the show which is, for the first season at least, much more polished imho (the writers of the book were also show runners). After that, the show ends at book 6 (there are 9 total) but several character arcs are tweaked so I would recommend reading at least books 3 to 6 before 7.
“(the writers of the book were also show runners)”
This must be why the books read like a TV or movie script to me.
Thank you!
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.
The population numbers sort of… even out later in the books.
So?
I’ll let you all guess which one was published in the 50s and which one was published in the 60s.
Thing is, the Asimov Foundation universe could actually fit in the “past” of the Dune universe.
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.
That makes more sense.
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!
That’s the plot of Idiocracy
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’s a forbidden technology, like computers.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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
Actually even thufir, the mentat aka human computer, didn’t know about the voice
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.
Ok but to be fair they were using spice for like 5000 years?
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
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
It wasn’t the qctual only hope, just the only path Paul and Leto could see, and we know they aren’t omniscient
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.
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.
It was supposed to be a warning against following charismatic leaders
One of the reasons why the original movie was so good. Stripped out all the religious garbage and kept the worms
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.
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.
The source material has limitations. It is difficult to make characters have depth when in the novel they have none. If you sit down and try to describe the characters of Dune you can really only do it by their job or what they did in the novel. You can’t describe their personalities. Compare this to Star Wars.
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.
Ok, either the internet can’t identify a great joke or… no, I guess the only reasonable explanation is that your comment whooshed over people’s heads.
It’s all good, I mean I read both of the books like ages ago and those were the only things that bubbled up out of the scary dark corners of my memory when the opportunity presented itself.
Dune: “salvation? sure, buddy, sure”
Yes I can
“from using meth we haven’t discovered yet.”
Spice is more LSD than meth.
Foundation: Space Math Dune: Space Meth
Snow Crash: VR Molly
better do both just in case
edit: guys maths is HARD
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.
Damn… I’ve already graduated and am back in my country now :(
I’m sure there are drugs that make math easy. We just need to find them.
They don’t make it easy. They make it better. Source: am mathematician.
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!
No form of science or magic can help that. It’s impossible.
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
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]
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.
Ackshually… this is a drastic oversimplification for the sake of delivering a joke.
Seriously? I always thought jokes were supposed to be … you know … funny?!
Also, Dune is not about salvation. It’s about a horrible monarchic system being overthrown and replaced with a horrible monarchic system because drugs let some kid see the future.
I always read it as like, radical Islamic Star wars.
You have the whole rebellion and the chosen one and the mystical powers and everything but instead of it being a blonde haired blue-eyed white boy it’s a dark haired man incorporated into a desert tribe
Not totally true, like Asimov’s math wanted to reinstate the Imperium, so is kinda the other way arround.
Yes, it was The Mule that introduced the anomaly.
Hey, for spoilers do:
::: spoiler [visible text]] [spoiler text] :::
Thanks. After 50+ years I did not think it would be a spoiler.
Yeah because all people who want to read said book where alive back then /s smh.
and really, is super easy to just put it as a spoiler.
I was not alive then either and read it decades after it was written. Honestly, I think having to use a spoiler tag for a story written almost 80 years ago is not necessary.
I disagree, Stories doesn’t have an expiration date, you can read today The fundation Unspoiled ADM we should try to keep it that way.
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.
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.
Nice, just another 30 years to go I guess!
Don’t forget prelude!
vs. Children of Time: Fuck humans, spiders are way cooler.
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They were going on an adventure
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Oh, I haven’t read the second one yet. o_O
There’s three now. Time, Ruin and Memory. All are very good. Memory maybe a little weaker it might be one of those books that benefits from a second read.
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I will, as soon as I finish Prelude to Foundation. :)
Some people like adventures.
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?)
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Not comparable works.
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
While good books in general, I always hated how whiny about the future Paul was when all he could do is say “fuck the people thousands of years in the future, I’m not gonna go on with a genocide.”
But wasn’t it that he saw the future showing he we embark on a jihad, and he worried that his trying to prevent that would still cause it to happen? I’d say it shows Paul as more complex and far thinking than you’d expect from a 14 year old kid. A kid sees that and says “I just won’t do that.” Paul said “I need to prevent this, but I’m not sure how, so I must be constantly vigilant of my actions to ensure it doesn’t happen.”
That was kinda retconned with the Golden path (do they call it that in English version?). Half of what Paul did was retconned though, so it really depends on.which books you’re considering when you make a claim.
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.
