Before ‘Dune,’ Frank Herbert learned from native Americans

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/opinion/culture/dune-frank-herbert-native-americans.html

by Thevet • 5 years ago

115 102 5 years ago

nytimes.com

brodouevencode• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/kaCjc

EarlKing2• 5 years ago

How Is ‘Dune’ So Prescient About Climate Change?

It isn't. Arrakis suffered desertification before humans ever arrived, before the book even began. The only climate change that occurred thereafter was a direct result of Pardot Kynes convincing the Fremen they could terraform Arrakis and, after Paul Atreides defeated the Emperor Shaddam IV Corrino and seized control of the Imperium, and subsequently began a deliberate effort to accelerate the terraforming effort until, by the time of God Emperor of Dune, the desert has been pushed back to just a tiny portion of the planet.

TL;DR The entire article is someone with an axe to grind trying to use Dune to do it. Scroll on.

Barrin922• 5 years ago

The prescience of the book in regards to climate change doesn't lie in the fact that it's some sort of literal retelling of the climate science of earth (hint, it's an allergorical piece of fiction) it lies in the fact that the book recognizes three key aspects.

Firstly, the immense influence of humanity on climate and the ecology of a planet and the intertwined nature between social activity and ecology, the motivation for negative impacts on the ecology lying in the exploitation and overuse of the planets resources, and third the disproportionate impact of this on native populations, and the inability of people to understand the consequences of disturbing complex systems. (no surprise given that Herbert was intellectually close to systems thinkers from Santa Fe)

You think Dune does not address climate change because in the story the planet was already deserted? Do you think Animal Farm is a book about pigs?

mr_toad2• 5 years ago

lies in the fact that the book recognizes three key aspects.

They weren’t central to the story. FH didn’t waste a lot of ink on them. They formed a backdrop to the story because they should be uncontroversial ideas to anyone with an understanding of ecology.

If FH really wanted to write about ecology he could have spend a much greater proportion of the brook talking about it, when all we have on Sandworm ecology from FH himself is a handful of paragraphs spread across six novels.

As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin - people who swept to power seemingly out of nowhere and established their own sprawling Empire.

Lastly, if we’re looking at FH books on the human impact on ecology, we should start with The Green Brain which was explicitly about ecology.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

Do you think Animal Farm is a book about pigs?

I read many books in the "Freddy the Pig" series, and picked up Animal Farm when I was 8. I thought it, too, was a book about pigs and read it as a book about pigs. I can vouch that it works as a story about pigs. I didn't realize it was an allegory until maybe a decade later.

I also read Dune as a teen, and took it at face value, too. It was a moderately good scifi book, but not good enough to tempt me to read the sequels. I didn't really think much more about it. I've read a lot of scifi books.

It also seemed to be much more based on Saharan desert culture than Native American culture.

I confess to being out of step in not seeing it as a great story :-/ I've seen all 3 movie versions, thinking "what am I missing" and not finding it.

Karishma1234fff• 5 years ago

Well, all civilizations are full of stories of men waging war on oceans, burning down forests to reclaim lands, breaking mountains and all the wageries of such things.

Dune was neither the first nor is the last and linking it with climate change is purely some kind of bias.

Amezarak• 5 years ago

The desertification of Dune was caused by ancient settlers introducing the sandtrout.

"The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase."

This is from Children of Dune.

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

So Dune itself was not prescient but Children of Dune was, however that was probably written at nearly the same time.

That said, what purpose did the sandtrout serve in that other place it was introduced from, I guess the early settlers weren't looking at the planet and thinking "nice place, but too wet."

EarlKing2• 5 years ago

It's been some time since I've read Children of Dune, but the author was expressly referring to Dune, not Children of Dune.

esturk• 5 years ago

Does HackerNews have any rules against Spoilers? This message will spoil a lot of fans who just started the series after watching the movie.

vmception6• 5 years ago

and Mr. Herbert had close contacts among the Quileute and Hoh peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State

I think headlines and articles should refer to the specific peoples, I'm of the view that we need to normalize mentioning the specific people/tribes/collectives because its overinclusive since all them are separate. Its not really weighed by a random indigenous person saying "I'm fine with Indian" or "I'm fine with First Nations" etc, its more about how it doesn't provide any context for people with 100s of years of shared history, many of which have semi-sovereignty and autonomy.

imapeopleperson• 5 years ago

We all need this. I did a DNA test and found I’m mixed European from at least 15 different backgrounds..tired of just being called ‘white’.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

Well, back in Europe we don’t call ourselves “white” :]

smegger001• 5 years ago

yet there are so many Hispanic/Latin subdivision get listed on every form.

Why not the same for 'Asian'. its not like that is a useful demographic label as it including everyone from the arabian penisula to the Urals to Korea to Indonesia, essentially half world population

vmception6• 5 years ago

I agree with this as well, I hate how comedians perpetuate this invalidation when someone is trying to tell you their background and the comedian is like “so white, white and white, you mean ‘white’”

In my experience you can learn a lot about someone’s likely customs, dating expectations, traditions, religious upbringing just by knowing what kind of european they have in them.

The 1880s German immigrants to the US completely missed slavery and the Nazis so its tragic for some kid of that heritage to be grouped into the generic white guilt idea if they accidentally walked into a segregated space at Berkeley, for example. Its just not nuanced enough.

wrp• 5 years ago

Yes. It's like always saying "Europeans," when the subject may specifically involve Greeks, Swedes, Celts, etc.

photochemsyn2• 5 years ago

First of all any article referencing Brian Herbert as an authority on Dune is suspect as a result. Those atrocious fanfiction additions are best used as cat litter box liner, period.

Secondly, if you read the Appendices of Book I of Frank Herbert's Dune series, you'll see that he more or less invented the concept of 'planetologist', which in the late 1990s became a recognized academic discipline under the umbrellas of 'planetary sciences' and 'earth system sciences'. This was in response to a sense that the academic study of the subject had been too fractured, i.e. disciplines such as oceanography, geology, ecology and atmospheric chemistry and physics were actually highly interrelated, to the point that the historic divisions didn't make as much sense as they once did. This is now seen in, for example, the scientific study of Jupiter's moon Europa.

As far as the current impacts of human civilization on Earth's climate and ecology, see the original Dune book:

"The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences - Pardot Kynes in "Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune"

Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.

rgrieselhuber• 5 years ago

One question I’d ask is why there would be an inherent conflict between superior technology and harmony with nature?

noisy_boy• 5 years ago

I think that with sufficiently advanced technology, there would be immense understanding of nature resulting in elimination of any need to be in conflict with the nature because one would simply solve their needs by enveloping or integrating with nature instead of going against it.

smsm42• 5 years ago

It's not inherent, but having a powerful technology you understand may tempt you into applying it to things you don't understand to force them be more understandable. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it does not, and one has to have a measure of humility, so that having a powerful hammer not to start treating everything as a nail. European civilization, unfortunately, fell into this failure mode not once (maybe others too, we just know about European failures the most). We still can observe it in hi-tech where "we just add some ML and big data to it and it's solved" led people astray many times. Sometimes it worked, surely, but sometimes the amount of subject domain knowledge required to deal with the problem was vastly underestimated. One example just from recent days is the Zillow fiasco. It doesn't have to be on the planet Pandora, we can see it everywhere, both in history and around us right now.

photochemsyn2• 5 years ago

There's no inherent reason superior technology would lead to the destabilization of an ecosystem (aka 'harmony with nature'). A good example is the introduction of the hunting rifle to Inuit culture, as I understand it. Prior to this hunting near the Arctic Circle was a far more difficult endeavor, as sneaking up on seals and caribou is not easy even with a high skill level. As a result, famine became much less common and hunting took much less time.

Now, if the Inuit had tried to get extremely wealthy by using their rifles to hunt seals and caribou as the basis of a large and ever-growing export industry, they'd have indeed destabilized the ecosystem and there would have been a collapse in the population of seals and caribou, as seen with European hunters of wildlife in North America with beavers and bison and passenger pigeons. If that had happened, the Inuit themselves would most likely have followed the local animals into extinction.

[edit] Note with bison, there was a deliberate extermination policy pursued by the US government as a means of destroying the food supply of various indigenous tribes that relied on bison for sustenance (aka the genocidal starvation program). This doesn't explain the extermination of beaver and other wildlife populations, however.

throwaway9843933• 5 years ago

Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?

It's called the Noble Savage [1] [2] trope. It's at least as old as the Romans. It's also probably the reason so many of our sports teams bear the images of peoples we committed quasi-genocide [3] against.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NobleSavage [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2016/08/24/real-histor...

burrows7• 5 years ago

It's also probably the reason so many of our sports teams bear the images of peoples we committed quasi-genocide [3] against.

Who is “we”? You weren’t alive for the so-called genocide and neither was I nor anyone else on hn for that matter.

Nursie3• 5 years ago

First of all any article referencing Brian Herbert as an authority on Dune is suspect as a result. Those atrocious fanfiction additions are best used as cat litter box liner, period.

Haha. It's nice to see this opinion written out. I read a few of the Herbert/Anderson books (I had a lot of time on my hands) and came to similar conclusions. I was most disappointed with the post-Chapter House stuff they did. It was allegedly based on extensive material left behind by Frank Herbert for the seventh book, but it very quickly tied in material and tropes from the prequels that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson had written, clearly being their creature and not the father's.

I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Anderson had been a consultant on the new film.

bllguo• 5 years ago

as much as I love the series, to me everything post god-emperor was terrible.. it's actually a bit hard for me to blame Brian with that in mind

hef198984• 5 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised by the new film, already looking forward to Part two. Even more so now that I know Anderson was a consultant. I made a conscious decision to not read anything from him, or Michael A. Stackpole for that matter, a long time ago.

I do have to read Frank Herbert's Dune series again so.

madrox• 5 years ago

I don't think fiction is Brian Herbert's gift. If you haven't, I encourage you to read Dreamer of Dune. It's his biography of Frank Herbert. While I loathe his contribution to fiction, I found his biography of his dad well done and rather touching.

hef198984• 5 years ago

To be honest, having Kevin J. Anderson as co-writer doesn't help. He wrote some of the worst Star Wars, now Legends, books out there. And given how bad some of those Legends books are that is something.

I loved those books back the day when I was younger, they just don't compare well against Timothy Zahn's books, the original Han Solo series and the short stories about small characters from the original movies.

What is sad so, is that the IMHO brilliant Dune encyclopedia was declared non-canon...

EDIT: The quote from Dune about ecology rings true for all kinds of very complex and large systems. Especially those that are of the self-maintaining kind.

culi• 5 years ago

Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar? One real refreshing aspect of the film and the book is that the Fremen were often more technologically advanced than offworlders, having superior stillsuits and so on, and they had their own long-term agenda - i.e. slowly terraforming the planet to make it more suitable for human life. Note also that the infantilization of native cultures was often used as a justification for enforcing 'civilization' on them, as well. Enough already, they were people with goals just like all other peoples.

While I agree with this sentiment, I think it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments. The Cahuilla people, who are indigenous to where I live, for example have always had botanical experimentation deeply integrated in their cultures. Some of the most important people in their cultures were botanists. They had many complex rules around patches of certain plants growing and these important people (who I'll just call "doctors" as an insufficient translation) would claim certain patches and study them for years. Some of this knowledge was shared with the rest of the communities, while some was protected and only shared with their close family members or apprentices. Their "folk taxonomy" had names for every single species of oak that is recognized today in the area. An extremely impressive task given how readily many species hybridize

The same can be said of many indigenous peoples around the world. There's an increasing recognition that the Amazon isn't just some pristine wilderness but rather a "manufactured landscape" that has been deeply shaped by the indigenous caretakers of it. In fact there's also an increasing recognition that oftentimes "conservation" ends up hurting the environments it's trying to protect because it kicks out the indigenous people that the landscape relies on. This can also be seen in California where so much of the ecology is dependent on the cultural burn practices of native Californians

sriku• 5 years ago

I recently started reading the book titled "Seeing like a state: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed" by James C. Scott [1] which talks about how starting with a simplified idea of how to structure a complex system (i.e. a system with many interdependencies) without taking into account details at the ground level end up in disaster.

Using that idea of "legibility" that Scott proposes, not accounting for indigenous "tribal knowledge" in planning for their "betterment" does not work. Common language that reflects this happening is when such knowledge is trivialized or rejected using words like "unscientific".

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

it's still really important to recognize the deep ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have of their environments

OP's point is that this is often overblown. Plenty of ancient civilizations ran themselves into the ground through environmental collapse. I'm currently reading The Big Oyster, which documents evidence of the native population over-harvesting the New York harbor.

Almost by definition, a colonist will be part of a more-powerful civilization than the indigenous populations she encounters. Bigger civilizations have bigger footprints. It takes care to disentangle which cultures are inherently more "at balance" with nature, i.e. could scale less destructively, versus those which are scale limited. (For example, Nordic versus Continental culture, for European examples.)

enaaem• 5 years ago

Another mist opportunity is that in fantasy stories indigenous people always wear drab brown. In the real world indigenous people, like everyone else, do care about fashion and how they look.

In the real world indigenous people often wear colourful clothes with very complex patterns. People's clothes can say a lot about their culture, religion and hierarchical structure. Spending some effort on clothes can add a lot of depth into stories world building.

https://www.jenmansafaris.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ang... https://vietnam.travel/sites/default/files/inline-images/vie...

gerbilly• 5 years ago

Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?

This is a valid criticism of the depiction of aboriginal cultures.

But I've come to believe that there is a subtle racism in not accepting that aboriginals intentionally chose to develop cultures which were durable and in 'harmony with nature.'

They are the same homo sapiens with the same intelligence and nature as the homo sapiens of Europe or from other more 'advanced' societies. They could have chosen to develop their culture in such a way that led to being 'out of harmony' just as easily as some other peoples did.

Aboriginals in say, Australia, had plenty of time to develop a more advanced society (some estimates say they've been there 40k years). When western people depict them as living close to the land, I smell a whiff of the subtext 'because they couldn't do any better'. Yeah they could have done otherwise, but they chose not to!

I work with a group of engineers and lately because of attending a conference, we have started to talk a lot about climate change. Some of the ideas our group initially came up with are really ridiculous, like some kind of machine to extract carbon from the atmosphere and to sequester it.

It's called a tree, they are everywhere, and they do it for free. They will propagate by themselves if we just had the patience to let them do so.

IgorPartola• 5 years ago

Dune is the most confusing book series I have ever read. My introduction to Dune was via Dune II and eventually Dune 1 video games, and I thought the setting was amazing and very well thought out. Then I read the first book and was thoroughly confused: Paul is a Superman, but supermen are bad? Except nowhere in the book does it imply that. It reads like a teenager’a superhero fantasy novel.

And the world building that is lauded for being so sophisticated? It just feels off. For one, there are tens of thousands of habitable planets but all the action takes place on only four. Second, there is the Landsraad but we focus on just three factions. Third, the entire empire relies on spice, yet spice comes from a single planet and they never bothered to figure out why or how it’s made? Moreover instead of the emperor directly controlling spice production (the most valuable substance in the galaxy and the source of ultimate control) he outsources the job to a noble house that is sure to betray him sooner or later. Paul is of course considered a genius for figuring this out, but like how could you not see this coming from page 1?

And then there are the sequels. The second book is confusing as all hell because suddenly there is the great Jihad except we don’t really know why it’s happening, to whom, and who is winning. And Paul is now an emo kid who is both too wise and not wise enough. He can’t stop the Jihad so he does some stuff that he foresaw but makes no sense.

The Children of Dune at least brings things back out of the abstract “you are too dumb to understand just how vast the world is so I won’t bother describing it to you”. But it’s a story with a middle and not really a beginning or an end. I didn’t manage to get further than this book.

I really wanted to like Dune. But I have no idea what I am missing. Did I have to read it as a 15 year old to really get into it? Is there some cultural thing I’m missing? Is it just overhyped?

int_19h2• 5 years ago

The narrow locality is intentional. Remember, this is "feudalism in space", with many things - like shields - deliberately contrived to make it somewhat plausible. A very important part of the resulting arrangement of society is how static it is, not just in abstract matters like social structure, but also very literally in movement of people. The vast majority in this universe never leave their own planets, simply because they don't have access to space travel at all.

Regarding the Emperor not controlling the spice production directly - that's because it's part of their customary power balancing arrangement. If the Emperor controlled the spice directly, it would give him the ability to control space travel for all the Landsraad Great Houses, upsetting the balance of power between the two. The Houses can overpower the Emperor with military force, but only if they all join forces - and this is exactly the action that would trigger such an alliance. The other aspect is access to profits: the whole point of CHOAM is to distribute wealth from interplanetary trade to the Emperor and the Houses, which is why it has a monopoly on trade. Again, the Houses simply cannot afford to lose that much profit while having the Emperor gain it (and use it to increase his military strength).

I agree that it's very strange how origin of spice is such a mystery, given that every Fremen knows about it.

Slow_Hand2• 5 years ago

I thought it was well understood where spice comes from: The worms. The issue is that they would not survive off Arrakis and that people are unable to synthesize a replacement.

zwkrt• 5 years ago

Well you can’t create a whole universe in a book, only the faintest facsimile. And you have to understand Dune in the contest of history, the only comprable world in modern history at the time was LOTR, which was far less alien than Dune.

That being said, I agree with everything you say. Dune is so frustrating because the prose and perspectives jump from being incredibly wise to totally inane.

edgyquant6• 5 years ago

Maybe it’s one of my mental illnesses, but I really hate the way Herbert uses the word “thing.” Maybe it’s reminiscent of the time but I never saw another old scifi book use it in that way.

mhh__4• 5 years ago

To a certain extent it's supposed to be a a little bit teen superhero-y, so you get dragged along with the myth of Paul Adreides too i.e. he wants you too like Paul, so you get dragged along by/with him.

For what it's worth I see Dune as much more of a space opera than a avant-garde sci-fi book. For me I basically view it as star wars but as if George Lucas wasn't a hack. When I saw the new movie open with "dreams are just messages from the deep", I was just totally in love with the iconography of dune and was genuinely kind of miffed we don't get this kind of film more often versus whatever star wars is.

The thing with Dune's world building isn't that it's realistic, it's not very realistic, but rather that it's still blindingly original, to my western eyes at least - the way Herbert approaches religion and culture is a really good balance between wow-factor, critique, and avoiding pretense.

All in all I guess it's in the eye of the beholder so my comment contains no insight ;)

edgyquant6• 5 years ago

I really didn’t like Dune at all either. I was so excited to read it as it was highly recommended but before I got half way through I knew I hated it. It was boring and a bit pretentious to boot. I also don’t tend to like settings that just project some past era unto a far future as I feel it’s a bit lame and uncreative. I originally planned to read all three just to be sure until I found out it ends with his son as a giant worm.

I’ll stick with the Culture series where even if it’s crazy it seems like how a truly futuristic society would govern themselves.

That said there are things I like about the setting and I applaud Herbert for trying to deconstruct the whole great man schtick.

MichaelMoser123• 5 years ago

suddenly there is the great Jihad except we don’t really know why it’s happening, to whom, and who is winning

i think that is the essence of a Jihad, the followers are not allowed to question it.

burntoutfire2• 5 years ago

Dune was fresh for its time because it introduced some ecological thinking into pop culture. Reading it in 2021, none of it is fresh anymore, so we're left with a generic SF story.

5tefan• 5 years ago

I liked 'Dune' and read it as a teen. Haven't managed to read all the rest. The last book still missing. Also 'Dune' but much more so the others are choke full of religious stuff. A difficult read and the reason I shy away from the last book. But I liked 'Dune' a lot.

Before ‘Dune,’ Frank Herbert learned from native Americans

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