Dune Club Session 7 Qs

The chapter heading on p. 299 has the Princess Irulan addressing the Arrakeen War College about the formation of sub-languages. With particular reference to economic manipulation I was listening to Fox Business Channel on SiriusXM radio one day and in between segments there was a commercial for some investment scheme -- what struck me was the legal disclaimers at the end. To begin with it's faintly amusing that they sped up the disclaimers to double speed so people couldn't keep up with what they were saying, but at the end, it became even more compressed, because they started rattling off references to, I guess, sections of some state's legal code probably New York's without even stating the contents of the statues, something like "E two-fifty C two-fifty P two-fifty D two-fifty Q" and I said to myself 'hey this sounds exactly like in the 1984 movie when Freddie Jones as Thufir Hawat is in the meeting with Duke Leto and Paul and he's rattling off the Mentat-speak while looking into the shigawire projector" So, anyway, sub-languages. Discuss! Particularly with your experience with contract language.

What do you think about the fact that they have coin purses in the deep, deep future? Pretty amazing that money as a technology of exchange and the aristocracy have persisted. Is it a function of historical trends repeating themselves? Did humanity have a Star Trek Future phase and was their Resource Based Economy scrapped in the Butlerian Jihad?

Lucas Fehr

Ah, let me be the woke troll today, but Herbert clearly has some patterns. On the plus side, women do have some agency in this world, they are not absent, no Smurfette syndrome, not on a pedestal like in Tolkien say. But so many Greta Thunberg style "how dare you" coming exclusively from women it seems, whether Jessica, Alia or Farad'n's mom. Jessica's smart at times but she's both a tool of the sisterhood and outsmarted by her grandkids and Duncan. Farad'n's mom the one who is scheming but Farad'n figures it out and does not become her puppet. Pick any female role, and there's a smarter or wiser or more powerful guy next to them with more agency. Yes, there a plenty of other weaker male characters, but for any important female character, you have a stronger male one. How hard would it have been mix things up on that front? Also, it's been a while, but are there female mentats? I ask because at the time the original Dune novel was written,, "computer" was still a secretarial role usually given to women (inherited from before computers were machines, see things like "Hidden figures"). Essentially, even with machines to do computations, the notion that abstract math was for men but calculations were for women continued to exist, and it is not until the mid-70s and early 80s that computer programming veered into the male dominated "software engineering". All this to say the notion of a human computer, at least in the time of writing the first novel, could very much have reflected the gender divide of that time.

PJ B

Why is Farad'n wearing contacts to hide his spice addiction? Does he not want his mother know he is trying to gain prescience?

GoKate206

Alia's Great Blue Eyes, have we passed the half way point in Children of Dune Club already?! My question / comment is on Alia's meeting with the Preacher, in which he reveals who he is by addressing her as sister. This hit me like a sack of bricks, because it seems to me that he knew everything that was going to happen to her, and not only didn't try to help her, but facilitated it. Do you read it that way as well? More and more a primary focus of this novel for me has become the great screwing over of Alia. When she then stands there alone thinking only that everyone had turned against her I felt worse for her than for anyone else in the series thus far, and that is saying something. Was there ever any hope for poor Alia, or was she always doomed to be a tool to help undo the mistakes of Paul and Jessica? EDIT: While listening to today's stream I realize I may have missed Paul's attempt to help Alia (hey, the whole reason for this club is to learn). Was his statement to release the universe and hold onto humanity actually his attempt to give her a clue that she could be saved? Was he actually trying to help her? That makes it a little easier to take. Final question: how did Jessica know that Leto was going to Jacurutu and wasn't dead? I don't recall him telling her.