Questions for Dune Club

Haha thnkx for answering my nonsensical randomness. I wrote this like 5 minutes after I finished reading right before the live stream and I'm on no sleep right now. I should probably stop waiting until Sunday to start reading eh?

EvilDeadTiM

I forgot to say because they mused that the spice was connected to the sand worms. Is the spice also linked to the conditions of the planet.

On pages 203-204 Kynes notes to himself how Leto was more concerned with the lives of the men on the crawler than the spice. Is he going to become a martyr if Yueh's plan with the tooth is followed through? Also, when flying out to the crawler they muse about how the worms can't be destroyed because it would be too expensive but Paul uses his truthsense to see that wasn't *completely* true (money isn't the only *expense*). Could the arid conditions on Arrakis also be why the spice exists? If that's true it seems there's a theme that they must walk right up to the edge of life and death to get this thing (the spice) that has profound benefits to life. So much is risked to get the spice that the rewards must be Great to make its harvesting worthwhile. And the Fremen must understand the cost/benefit because they've live on Arrakis long enough to evolve to the environment. I suspect there are clues to the Fremen understanding of the cost/benefit of harvesting the spice in their mythology. The mythology that Lady Jessica has dismissed to this point.

lack of cynicism in one's own greatness leads to carelessness and eventual downfall? Too much pride and not enough humility leads to self-destruction?... Yeah, the Fremen are vampires who drink water instead of blood. Everyone else is on some stalemate savagery shit, ready to shank the closest suspect. Lady Jessica is "Simply Irresistible" and is excellent at picking up on micro aggressions. Duke Leto reminds me of a cross between Darth Vader and Prince Humperdinck and Yueh's a dentist. Oh, and do SandWorms ever fight each other? Also is the "shortening of the way" kinda like the "quickening" from HighLander? And what happened with those suspected Harkonnens at dinner, did I miss that part, cuz I was kinda sleepy while I was reading. My favorite character is Gurney b/c he's always talking in quotes and singing songs and has a good eye and is good at dealing with people.😬

EvilDeadTiM

Question more about Jodorowsky: am reading the Metabarons, per your recommendation, and I really love it! I'm interested in the contrast between it and Dune, though; Dune seems very humanistic in its banning of thinking machines, where the Metabaron is all about a family whose main goal is to replace parts of themselves with machinery, something that hardly seems humanistic, in that it says that humans are weak and must evolve through augmentation. Why does Jodorowsky purport both of these concepts when they seem rather contradictory?

With so much to cover, there are tons of questions/comments; here goes: 1. The quote on 171 serves the purpose of giving us more insight into the Emperor's feelings (to make him seem more real)? 2. Ornithopters and carryalls are just like helicopters and heli-carriers? 3. Today's my Birthday! Will you sing us Gurney's song? "Our fathers ate manna in the desert, In the burning places where whirlwinds came. Lord, save us from that horrible land! Save us...oh-h-h-h, save us From the dry and thirsty land For I am like an owl of the desert, o! Aiyah! am like an owl of the des-ert!" 4. just wanted to call attention to the Quote on pg 205 about greatness being a transitory experience! 5. After all the change to customs, why does the duke dump out the water at the dinner and have his guests follow? 6. It appears Herbert took a real botanist and created a fictional scientific theory based on him - the Tansley Effect mentioned by Dr.Kynes on pg.226 - do you know anything more about this? I couldn't find much in my research.

Niko Ketsilis

Teacher! Teacher! What do you think of the literary device of introducing each chapter with a quote from a in-universe future book, telling you that the story you are reading is in-universe in the past and, in a way, spoiling the success of the hero just to give exposition?

PJ B

How do you think food is grown on Arrakis? It seems that some sort of farmland is implied by the reference to the "green plant element" by Dr. Kynes. Is their agriculture similar to places like Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush, e.g. high-altitude, low precipitation?

In our world, the largest animals (apatosaurs and whales) tend to eat very large quantities of small things (leaves and krill, respectively) rather than a small number of large things. How do the even larger sandworms sustain themselves? Are they eating sand?

Stilgar actually goes into that near the end of Book II -- They intend to leave the deep desert as is for the sandworms (it is, after all, the most precious animal in the galaxy), while terraforming the rest of the planet.

Paul notices that, Liet Kynes is now a Fremen and seems to more than he leads on about the worms, the spice, and planetary climate change. Kynes later mentions that he shares the dream, to change the climate of Arrakis. If they were to make it rain on Arrakis wouldn't it kill the worms and destroy the spice? Or is this a worthy trade-off for most Fremen, in order to rid the planet of the off-world invaders and the empire?

The chapter heading/epigraph for the Lady Jessica/Thufir Hawat argument/showdown is interesting, because it doesn't immediately make itself known: "There is no escape-we pay for the violence of our ancestors"(p.237) This is supposedly a saying from "Muad-Dib" years after the events of Dune, but how exactly does this work out for Duncan Idaho, Yueh, Hawat, and Jessica? Duncan Idaho keeps going on, while drunk, about how many men he's killed for the duke, and we know Yueh will betray House Atreides for Wanna's sake under the Harkonnens, but Hawat and Jessica seem at odds on another level: Hawat doesn't trust a "Gesserit Witch" and Jessica has no problem showing how easily she could crush Hawat and the Duke with the power of the Voice. What exactly does this epigraph show about the struggles here? Thanks and you're awesome :)

Unless Paul is named after the worst Beatle, then, if that's the case, why?

PJ B

So, as I am catching up, why name the Christ figure after Paul? Was Jesus or Emmanuel too on the nose? Or is there a deliberate choice in naming him after the main early popularizer and, to a certain extent, true founder of Christianity (as he reframed it from a Jewish sect to its own religion that encouraged conversion rather than be bloodline-based)?

PJ B

Not specifically related to the book, but have you a recommendation on contact lens to make my eyes blue? Cosplay reasons lol Not going to lie, I thought about finding a non toxic glowing fluid to shoot under the outer layer of my eyeball. I popped a blood vessel once and the whites filled in red. T'was neat.