Dune Club 2 Session 6 Qs

Right? I have met multiple people who don't like cats or claim to be allergic... until I catch them giving mine scratches. I walked in on my roommate with my cat snuggled up on him. " He's not so bad."

Jeffrey Robles

Not a real question - Just wanted to thank you for your time in leading Dune Club! Thank you for all your hard work!

Finally finished my homework in the nick of time - rushing into class late, sweating. THis book is so good! I highlighted a bunch of lines in the last two chapters - but the best one, the one that brought tears, was: ‘Love knows love.” So good. THank you!

Lucas Fehr

One of my favorite quotes from Dune Messiah came from Paul on pg. 320. "There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." "Nothing. Nothing can be done." The description continues with "His lost vision became like the wind, blowing where it willed." From the way I understood it, its pretty much Paul having lost his prescience ability, right? I also see it as Paul becoming content with the idea that destiny/fate will ultimately control his life and everything in the universe . Now, he doesn't have any say and control over present and future events. He is now letting it be and experiencing freedom. Finally, I had a great time reading Dune Messiah. Thank you for creating and hosting this book club! It has given me such enjoyment exploring such a interesting world and characters. It made me realize what an amazing and interesting book series Dune really is. Thank you!!!!

How does alia have a little prescient

The way this book ended broke my heart. I know that he was going to die but I wasn't not expecting it the way that he did it. I understand his reasoning for it and which made it even harder. I don't have any questions to ask that won't spoil the rest of the series for me. I will definitely be continuing to read the rest of the series because I have fallen in love with Frank Herbert's writing. I won't be able to be apart of the stream for long but just want to thank you so much for opening my mind to a wonderful series. I can hardly wait to join you on the next book club adventure. Keep up the good work Danika!

Hey CBG and Team 19, I feel a bit like the student who slacked off the whole semester and then crammed all night to get all the assignments in on the last day of class. This is going to be the first session of Dune Club 2 I’m going to be able to watch live and the first one I’m all caught up for. I’m so surprised that this book gets such a bad rep! I enjoyed it at least as much as Dune. I also find Paul to be way more relatable in this book. Maybe it’s just because I’m closer in age to Paul this time around. The following quotes really hit home for me, “His mind carried such a burden of mutilated memories. For every instant of reality there existed countless projections, things fated never to be. An invisible self within him remembered the false pasts, their burden threatening at times to overwhelm the present.” “I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me.” I loved the idea that even someone with prescience at times looked around and thought “how the fuck did I get here?” I for one have spent more time than I should dwelling on my “alternate pasts.” What do you think Frank was trying to teach us with Paul’s sense of ennui and dissatisfaction? Also when Alia is ODing on spice she says, “I sometimes glimpse myself but I get in my own way.” What do you think Frank is saying about Oracular vision and the “self?” Thanks you again for an amazing summer book club! I don’t know if I’ll be able to wait until next summer to pick up Children of Dune. Long live the readers.

I missed last session because I was feeling really down and stressed, stayed in bed almost all day and got behind....BUT I caught up and finished up just a short while ago. Won't be able to catch up on all of last week's video, but some. I wish I had some profound revelations and/or questions. There are some very intriguing quotes and ideas, but I feel like these 2 novels got over my head and I feel like I only grasped a few things. I started Dune last summer but didn’t finish till shortly before Club 2 started. Maybe I didn’t have enough time to process it. With this and the last book I can easily see how repeat readings can bring new discoveries, etc. – it can be very dense and deep with many levels of awareness in them. Have been reading along with audible & looking up words in the dictionary but still can leave feeling like I’m barely comprehending. I’ve been having depression and anxiety clouding my life on and off for the past decade or more (have seen people for it and been on different meds), so its hard to think, learn, and things you thought you liked feel like a chore. Well, here is at least one lingering small curiosity: • Is it ever addressed what Edric is exactly – a mutation or human-hybrid, and why the guild navigators are like this? Is it because of the spice, something else? Sorry if you addressed this in another Q & A Session, haven’t watched them all yet. But to end on a positive note, thank you for doing this - holding our hands and being our mentor on this (and hopefully continued) Dune journey. I wouldn’t have gotten through it without you!

So what can you tell me about the front cover art? I jumped to the conclusion that a bunch of fremen sculptors were going to erect a memorial statue for Paul at the end of the story, that didn't happen. So is that illustration just supposed to symbolize everything that Paul went through or what?

kudos: Team 19 crew and Danika thank you tons, I missed the first Dune book club and regret it, this one's fabu and I look forward to the next. meta: I was so inspired me my gf are gunna do a lil' book club on Brave New World. plea: Please release the stream recordings sooner for those of us that have more restrictive schedules. book: Prescience seems like it could have been a crutch for fake depth of character but Herbert's used it as a painful fulcrum. Also it reminded me of Deadpool's frenzied 4th wall breaking, but only as a smaller species. Paul knows he's in a myth, in a story, but not our world, that he's in Dune books. In my mind they seem related forms of character access to meta-narrative. pg 279: "... the fog spread over the future by that damnable Dune Tarot." The micro forms of prescience extant in the Dune Tarot seem like distributed denial of service attacks inasmuch as they're billions of people pecking away at the certanty of the future from a billion directions at once. Might there be any way to stop it from working? Is there a definitive pronounciation of Hayt? I've been reading it as "Hi-et" even against your perfectly reasonable "Hate". pg 282: "Words are such gross machinery..." and yet they're all we have (other than images) to communicate with others. Alia says this during her overdose, but I think there's other times when words fail or are engineered to fail. What are some good ones? pg 301: "Did any among them see beyond rigid beliefs?" Seems to speak directly to embracing Paradox as you've said repetedly, as I've discovered leads to a kind of tremulous calm. Like pg 295 "... wait witout purpose in the state of highest tension..." pg 319: "I meddled in all possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me." An ouroborus, here a fatal feedback loop because Paul wanted a certain outcome against foes with similar powers who underestimated him. Though, I wonder if that implies there can be open loops that devour other futures in a predatory way. It also seems to resonate with pg 326 "People are subordinate to government, but the ruled influence the rulers." as another feedback loop. There's probably other big ones I missed. pg 323: "There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." The universe of humans? No pleasant answers? Is it more of a rhetorical device?

Clear Menser

on p.284 when Alia is in the throes of her spice trance and Duncan is standing over her, Alia sees Duncan as "child-man-adolescent..." cycling over and over. Is this an anticipation of Duncan's many regenerations as a ghola? We don't really know, do we, if Herbert intended it to be that, or if when he got to the later books, he went back and saw that this passage already fit what he was going to do with Duncan. It does say there that Duncan's features are not exactly the same each time.

The way Paul "wins", by securing Fremen allegiance to his family/children by going off into the desert , seems to tie up everything nicely by book's end. But, as Frank Herbert always does, he complicates this by showing that even though Paul followed the vision to a tee, he did not expect two children. His last conversation with Duncan Idaho shows a completely different Paul: "There are some things no can bear. I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me...There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. Nothing. Nothing can be done" (319-320). Even with following the vision, and "winning", Paul's more lost than before: what's the fate of Arrakis now that he seems out of the picture? Dune Club 2 was great, and I always welcome another book club from your awesome self. Much love, and thanks again.