Was McNelly really a friend of Frank?

[TMA_1]

Well from all that I heard, they seemed to like eachother somewhat, but I have always got this feeling that there was some feeling like frank didnt really care what McNelly thought about Dune. He also looked at the DE as fanwork, but good fanwork nonetheless.

I found something rather amazing to me at least, it is from the first of two (rare) books called "The best of Frank Herbert". The first volume deals with his short stories and little snipits from larger books from 1952 to 1964. He has a wonderful foreword where he talks about what he thinks is a good writer, and how to improve on your writing, also talking about his growth as a writer.

anyways he talks about McNelly with some bitterness almost, well at least in a feeling that he doesnt care much about what McNelly thinks. here is a quote from the book.

"It has been educational for me to apply the analyitical tool to my own work; I couldnt possibly set down here everything I've derived from that effort. And Certainly you must detect the ambivalence with which I view this. The Discovery of science fiction by colleges and universities, a move led by such academics as Willis E. McNelly at the University of California, Fullerton, and Berkly Dreissel at Stanford, raises such ambivalence. We've seen analysis take the fun and the life out of other literary genre. Rest assured then that whatever comments I make hereafter I am attempting to maintain the fun and the life."

I dont know, but I have always had that feeling, almost like McNelly was just dupped by Frank in a sense that McNelly took it all so darn seriously, as you can tell from his writing, but that frank was just having fun with it. You could even almost get a feeling that Frank was letting out a secret chuckle every time somebody did take his literary works as something more than they should be taken.

Frank constantly talks about this kind of thing. In many of his forewords and so on he says that he is just doing this for fun, and to make the reader happy. It has really no higher meaning than this. He wasent trying to raise political or religious questions (though obviously he did, and that is apart of the fun of it, not to be taken too seriously) for some froo-froo artsy purpose, but simply to have fun, for discussion with friends and for individual reading.

what do you guys think?

[Andrew]

Maybe Frank didnt think of McNelly as a great Friend, but McNelly thought of Frank as a great friend. He did his eulogy. :)

You may also get more of a feeling from this interview:

http://www.sinanvural.com/seksek/inien/tvd/tvd2.htm

[Inoculator9]

McNelly seems kind of pushy in that interview :D

[Andrew]

He is the interviewer. :P

They are usually pushy to get the answers out of people. :)

[nemafakei]

Hmm. Perhaps FH was saying that there is a danger that trying to read too much into an analysis loses sight of the point of the books. I think he may have accepted the DE as mostly an interesting bit of background not necessarily correct, but some ideas to set your mind straight - a bit of fun in of itself. That's not to say he didn't think it was liable to be taken too seriously.

[driftingcloud]

The reality is that DE  was taken seriously, as we literally had over a decade when that was the only thing other than Frank's six Dune novels, that was every created in the Dune universe. I would guess that many, like myself, never expected any more Dune novels, ever, and as such, for the fan, the DE becomes canon through association, and nothing that the two prequel authors can say will change the fact that we have history with DE. The longtime fan has a relationship with six dune novels and the Dune Encyclopedia. to deny that relationship or pretend it should be ignored is like learning that your sister was only a half-sister, and as such should be ousted from the family.

As to Frank's forward talking about academics, it sounds more like modesty than the whole truth. He had to have been aware of what he was writing, what he excluded, and the state of world events that reflected in his work. Of course he was trying to have fun with it, rather than trying to change the world. We should all strive to do so in our work, but the best work can be fun and impact the lives of others as well. In fact it should impact our lives if it strives to be great.

[TMA_1]

hmm I think that Frank saw McNelly as kinda silly at times, and took things too seriously. Still though the DE has a better "dune feeling" than the prequels to me, they just dont compare. I would rathertake the DE any day. So what I do is take those things that I see that fit without any confrontation with Franks true universe, and discount the rest. Suprisingly from what I have read, there is a lot less mistakes in the DE compared to the prequels which is kinda sad. This is all my opinion though. There are mistakes in the DE, largely because the last two books hadent been written yet and did create confusion and problems. I just discount those things that contridict the true universe. I just like the DE better, a better feeling and a lot more interesting and more "intellectual" if you can say that.

[Andrew]

And the DE comes with many images! That's always a plus for me.

[driftingcloud]

Any history is bound to have interpretaion factored into it and yes the DE was written in a timeline such that the date of publication would have been some centuries after the death of the God Emperor Leto. As historical interpretion it is bound to have mistakes and mis-interpretation, and I do the same as some of you: discount the stuff that doesn't fit with the continuity. I think most fans are capable of sifting through the details and knowing what fits and what doesn't.

As for the prequels, I see them as yet another interpretation of the history, written sometime after Chapterhouse in the linear timeline, and perhaps not by the best educatedof persons. I think it is obvious (if we can assume that some individual or individuals in far future are writing an account of the Butlerian Jihad or the Pre-Dune series of events as ancient history) that the writer is not allied with the Bene Gesserit, with the Guild, with the Tleilaxu, but are instead the distant and stubborn, mis-informed descendents of the coalition of Landsraad. As such, they are bound to lace the books with a bias toward their point-of-view and with their prejudices about what life was like whay back then. They just happen to have many of their facts wrong and have misinterpreted the historical evidence they had to work with. In fact the prequels are such loose interpretations that I tend to think of them as a future-written, historical fiction of the ancient Duniverse history. Much in the way many authors today will write fictions that take place in Victorian times, in the Aztec empire, in ancient Greece, etc. There are only so many reliable facts, and the rest is interpretation.

If only we could find a new and exciting interpretation of the same events from a different faction or group, with their perspective...now that would be fascinating...

There are many subjects in the DE that would make good stories, but only a fool would try to take the DE and condense the entire gamut into one novel or even a trilogy. (Which is why the DE format worked so well.) Each of the worthy stories should be appraoched as an entity in and of itself. Like the life and times of Holtzman, how he made his discoveries, who his teammates were,etc. That would make a great novel. It loses its value as a one-tenth storyline in a larger BJ based history, or historical fiction.