I hate novels that describe people trying to fit into stultifying social convention and prefer ones where they choose to rebel. Oftentimes it doesn't end well, of course.
Dune 2018 (19,20,21...)
- Thread starter wayoung
- Start date
I think high school did a lot to ruin quite a few books I have enjoyed later in life but loathed at the time. That said, nothing can save Silas Marner. Never have I experienced a book so short to feel so long. College was equally good at making one hesitate to ever look at classic literature. Thomas Mann comes quite close on the scale, though, Buddenbrooks was one long reliving just such stultifying social convention.
For me it was Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I'm pretty sure being forced to read that in school actually set my reading ability back a few years.
Nothing has done more to discourage reading for me than To Kill a Mockingbird. The main character has no flaws and is the best at every single thing he does. How can you really care about him? It's like watching a Superman movie...you know he's going to kick everyone's ass.
Yet Atticus doesn't win, does he?
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Atticus wasn't the main character, Scout was and (even as a kid myself) I always took her account of her father as an idealised one from the POV of a child. Context is everything
What Hardy did that set me back wasn't a matter of story, but the style of prose. Endless florid descriptions of the scenery and barely a paragraph spared for the characters' internal lives.
It may have been skilfully written literature, but that's something more much more advanced readers and other writers. It's like trying to get someone who barely cares about music to listen to fusion jazz.
Same.
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Alia was 16 when she married Duncan, and while their physical age gap is creepy, remember that she had millennia of Other Memories to draw on before the Baron managed to take over. Alia was never a normal human child, any more than Leto II was. That's why both of them were so screwed up. Ghanima survived with a relatively intact psyche because Chani's Other Memory guarded her from her other ancestral memories so none of them could take over.
Where it gets creepier is in later books (Farad'n being an adult while Ghanima was only NINE - the miniseries aged the twins to their late teens because nobody would stand for 9-year-olds in adult sexual situations, even for just discussing it, not to mention they needed older actors to do the material justice).
Fast-forward to Heretics, and you get adult Lucilla and Murbella trying to seduce 15-year-old Duncan, and later on, you get an attempted seduction of a child-aged Teg ghola by an adult in order to awaken the memories of the adult Teg.
It's disturbing in the way that in Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset has Maureen obsessing about having sex with both her son and father (and ends up marrying both in a group ceremony)... but nuDune has even Duncan getting in on the inappropriate stuff as he finds a strand of Murbella's hair and ponders having a Murbella ghola created for him (because he misses all the great sex they had)... but it made me wonder if Duncan would be willing to wait a couple of decades for infant-ghola Murbella to grow up.
One of the major themes of Dune is "beware the charismatic leader." That applies to the benevolent ones as well, since they are also corruptible.
They should stop with Chapterhouse. We don't know for sure where Frank was going with the story other than some new advances in Face Dancer genetics. The nuDune crap is not where Dune 7 was heading.
You know Kevin J. "I write perfect prose" Anderson would never consent to any changes to make it mesh with Frank's work. They deliberately went out of their way to spit on the original six novels.
The only stuff that makes sense to do in movie form would be their version of the Butlerian Jihad. All those robots and blood/guts/gore would surely please today's audiences, since it requires so little thinking to enjoy. And I could happily skip it and miss nothing.
What would be the point of doing a movie that directly contradicts so much of the movie that would be done first?
Filming has started. Hans Zimmer is doing the score, Chang Chen of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is close to joining as Dr. Yueh.
I'm very happy Hans Zimmer will be scoring the film(s)! 
Yep - he CAN do it justice. It's just a question of whether the script/sets/props/costumes/cast/crew..... Oh, never mind...
Money.
It's premature to assume that anything's going to contradict anything.
That's a given, but what other reasons might there be (other than KJA's ego)?
Many years back, a group of Spanish Dune fans posted a trailer of their fan film adaptation of Dune. I never got to see it because they got a C&D letter from the Herbert Limited Partnership - basically consisting of KJA, BH, and Frank Herbert's grandchildren including Byron Merritt who ran the dunenovels.com forum and was a member of the Dune forum I was running - and had to take it down and stop production. Some of the cast were part of my forum for awhile. They were very friendly people who wanted to do their film as a labor of love and absolutely were not out to make money from it. It's a shame because they had some really creative ideas and showed us their costume sketches, sets, and photos of some of the other cast (they cast all the characters, including Irulan's sisters who weren't seen in any other Dune film or TV adaptation).
The HLP went nuts around that time, stomping on anything they could find online that they considered infringement. So the Spanish fan film had to be permanently canceled, and the Second Life Dune group had to basically gut their area of that site and change the names of characters, terminology, and some of the plot elements so it couldn't be connected with Dune.
Thank goodness they didn't go after the forums, but someone probably pointed out that even though most forums were run by those horrible Orthodox Herbertarians (the term we coined for people who are only fans of Frank Herbert's original six novels and loathe the nuDune stuff), at least the post-FH books were being discussed. And while a lot of OH'ers were content to go along and say "I've never read the nuDune books but I hate them because _____ read them and said they're awful" there were some of us who did buy the nuDune books and read them because for one thing (speaking for myself here) I wanted to be able to say I knew what I was talking about when criticizing them; and for two things, I was prepared to hope that they might improve. They never did (other than creating a character I liked in one of their books but they promptly killed him off, so that was that).
They also didn't go after the fanfic sites, but I suspect they might not have known about those. They were so determined that nothing would get in the way of their Glorious Movie that was supposedly going to happen 10 years ago or thereabouts. So if they have any part of their fingers in this current project, you can bet that they would insist that their own interpretation take precedence over Frank Herbert's.
