zenlogic

Hah! you think human ingenuity couldn't solve such elementary problems within a generation? you sorely underestimate human potential.

Ahh, i see.

All five chapters are pretty short and....nothing really happens.....there doesn't seem to be much continuity, other than the recap of what happened in the "previous" book....except that now the "Ones Of Many Faces" are just called "The Enemy" and there is some all-seeing all powerful benevolent "oracle of Time" that is guiding duncan away from the "net", which has suddenly taken on physical proportions and can seemingly "trap" you if you don't run away. And yeah, BG being tortured? They'd just kill themselves instantly. That's exactly what frustrated the HM so much in heretics and chapterhouse. What a load.

No, it definitely doesn't, and anyone who honestly believes they can even pump out a quality SHORT STORY in just under a year of thinking and conceptualizing and characterization and plot development etc. is just fooling themselves. See, the problem is that the prequels, even the house series, read like dry textbooks for a grade 9 history class. Too much narration Not enough DESCRIPTION Too much talking Not enough DIALOGUE Any decent writer or someone who really appreciates literature can tell the difference between such things. one actually engages the reader on a visceral level....the other just takes up space and fills in the blanks, instead of letting the reader do that themselves. The best part of herbert's writing was the way that he would force you to figure out for yourself some sly plan of the tleilaxu or BG over the course of 5 or 10 chapters, without ever actually telling you full out what said plan is, but instead, making you pick up the clues from human reactions and clever dialogue between intelligent characters that all seem to have their own agendas. brian and kja are quite the vice-versa opposite of that.

I love the hardcore prequel defenders. The best part is that you never see the majority of them in the "classics only" forum. Not to mention, what the point of having a "classics only" AND a "calssics and prequels" forum? an almost perfectly even 50% of the topics on the "both" forum are about the classics, and of course, ALL the topics in the "classics only" forum are as such......sooo......what? The number of people who not only prefer, but are moved to make interesting conversation about the classics outnumber the people who prefer the prequels by a full 4 to 1? not to mention that if you want to discuss the failings of the prequels, you can't talk about the terrible, pre-teen demographic writing/marketing style employed by brian and KJA. I mean come on, are they seriously asking for PAYPAL DONATIONS on the official website? The DUNE 7 BLOG is full of ADVERTISING!!!!!! *sigh*.

Where does it say that Paul doesn't see the golden path? If anything, the plotline and events that unravel in messiah and CoD point to the fact that paul could indeed see the golden path, but couldn't bring himself to make that ultimate sacrifice, and become something other than human. As scytale says in the beginning of DM, the kwisatz haderach that the tleilaxu made killed himself when they forced him to become something other than the selfdom he had created for himself already. Paul was, if anything, the ultimate human. like that quote from dune, at the beginning of one of the chapters, "the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, more than a man, less than a god." Paul ended up embodying everything about the pinnacle of human development and so, could not make the ultimate decision - to abandon his humanity, not only his emotional but his GENETIC humanity, and literally turn himself into an alien being for the sake of humankind. he had become too bitter with his own godhead by that point to make the choice anyways. What in humanity was worth saving? not even himself, and thus, he walked into the desert, only to survive and finally be forced to accept his fate through his son. perhaps allowing the fremen jihad was his way of attempting the same thing that his son achieved, but without the symbiosis with the sandtrout. of course it failed, but paul had few options at that point....he knew how chani would die, he even thanked irulan at the end for prolonging her life, since he saw her death in the childbirth, and he had already decided not to merge with the sandtrout....even though he knows it's inevitable, he is still shocked when leto explains the process to him....he even asks if it can be somehow undone, knowing the whole tme that humanities fate rests with the golden path. Shows you how truly bitter he became, how much his powers of presience really destroyed his soul. I really think the jihad was just a half-assed attempt at the kind of government and control system that leto ended up achieveing. Paul allowed it to happen because, as the kwisatz haderach, he could not become his "anti" without killing himself, and since he was the ultimate human.......but of course a "normal" emperor, or even a mentat emperor, or even a prescient mentat emperor, is still bound by the limits of a human lifetime, thus the jihad and resulting religious government would never last long enough to enforce the kind of stagnation required over thousands of years to build up a strong urge for expansion and travel in the human psyche. I also think that the final point herbert tries to drive home is that it is only our senses and our perceptions that order the chaos around us, and through this, we are all gods unto ourselves, able to create anything. and "selective breeding means improving the race"? since when? selective breeding is just that - selective for certain attributes. race has nothing to do with it, or it might have everythign to do with it, depending on what you may be looking for in a certain breeding pair. it's all arbitrary, based on the needs of a genetic projection that often went 300-400 generations into the future. And let's not forget, the bene gesserit truly lived to serve. they meddled in politics only so far as they needed to serve their breeding purposes, they never actualized or lusted for power for the sake of it. THAT is the true measure of fascism - the TAKING of power, often through violent means, by one person. the only true goal of the sisterhood in the latter-half of the series was to ensure the survival of the species. Sounds pretty beneficient to me. The real fascist of the series was leto of course, and as he proves many times throughout GeoD, he's the only one qualified to be the ultimate tyrant.