Overdue Review: Dune

Why This 50-Year-Old Book Can Go Pound Sand

Dune by Frank Herbert. Published by Chilton Books, 1965.

What is the point of reviewing a 50 year old book that is already the world's best-selling science-fiction novel? Why bother putting in my two cents about the winner of the Hugo and the very first Nebula award? What difference does it make if one blogger doesn't like a book that had to get published by a publisher of automotive repair manuals? Who cares?

And that, right there, is my beef with this book. Who. The Hell. Cares.

I have tried to like this book for almost my entire life, but before you can like something, you have to be interested enough to finish it. And while Dune has many cool things in it, those are outweighed by flat characters with lofty goals far beyond us mere mortals, self-important dialogue that sounds like it should be on the title cards of a silent movie, and purposely strange-sounding, impossible-to-pronounce made-up words. With these obstacles in the way, it takes a certain kind of masochistic reader to fight their way through to the end, a feat I attempted at least five times before succeeding. And you know what? Even though I reached the end, I can't for the life of me remember what that ending was, BECAUSE I DON'T FUCKING CARE!

Let's look at a brief synopsis, shall we? Paul Atreides, our hero, is about to go to Arrakis where he might turn out to be Muad'Dib, but before he can do that, the Bene Gesserit want to threaten him with a gom jabbar to see if he's a Kwisatz Haderach and then...blah blah herp derp yakkity smakkity. This is just in the FIRST CHAPTER, mind you; it feels to me like reading a menu at a kosher deli. In Thailand. Sure, there is portent aplenty, freshly trucked in from the foreshadowing department, but why should I care if this rich kid is an Ersatz HaddockRadish or whatever?

So that's the good guy. You know the bad guy, Baron Harkonnen, when you see him, because he's fat and prefers young boys as his sexual partners and spouts lines like "Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?" Come ON! He might as well be saying, "As you know, I am the Baron Harkonnen and I twirl my mustache at you for the sheer evil of it! Mwa ha ha haaaa!" He wants to control something called Spice, because reasons.

Why should I care about these reasons? There are huge lectures on these from different characters, and the lectures read like the title crawl from The Phantom Menace, full of corporations and noble houses and trade disputes and...but it doesn't matter. The real reason I should care is because if I don't, then I won't be able to grasp the IMPORTANT things that happen in the countless sequels to this tome, among them Hairstyles of Dune, Toddlers of Dune and Godawful of Dune.

Yes, I know that Dune is a cultural touchstone, an important influence in science fiction writing and one of those things we nerds are supposed to obsess about. I know it has awesome things like stillsuits and sandworms and "Fear is the mind-killer". I don't care. It's a boring book about people I don't care about, set in a place I don't want to imagine. Hell, I don't even like to vacation at the beach.

Hell's Playroom

Studs kept an office in a Prohibition-era beast of a building down in the Hell's Playroom neighborhood where nobody admitted that things were hopeless. The cop still directed traffic; the flower vendor still cried his wares; the barber still swept up the leaves from the dying tree on the sidewalk. And Studs Fedora still went to work each day.

Next Chapter

#humor #snapjudgment #lego #noir #legotown #studsfedora

What Kind of Online Quiz Are You?

Find out with this online quiz from The Blarg!

By now you know what Avenger you are, what Harry Potter character you are, the city where you should live and even what kind of house you should own--all thanks to the ubiquitous online quiz. You know the ones: your friend's feed says "I am Zeus!! Find out what Greek God you are with this amazing quiz!" and you do it, because you know your friend isn't Zeus--you are! (At most, your friend is Epimetheus, Titan of afterthoughts and excuses.)

Brace yourselves, Blargers, because today we go meta! Take this quiz and find out what kind of quiz you would be, if you were an online quiz! You can click beside the answer that best describes you, but frankly it won't do any good because we don't have the budget or tech chops for that sort of thing. For scoring purposes, write down your response to each question.

Question 1: When you talk with friends, what do you like to ask them about?

A) Their favorite X-Men

B) Their Zodiacal sign

C) Their pets

D) Their preferred passwords

Question 2: When you visit someone's house, what do you bring them as gifts?

A) A nice bottle of wine

B) Artisinal preserves or jellies

C) A plant

D) Spyware, viruses, or cookies (the computer kind, not the home-baked kind)

Question 3: Finish this sentence: I am most interested in_________________:

A) Downton Abbey

B) Taylor Swift

C) Star Wars

D) The web-browsing and spending habits of people in all demographics.

Question 4: Which of these animals would you prefer to be?

A) Cat.

B) Dog.

C) Bird.

D) Online bot that tracks every keystroke of my prey.

Question 5: Which genre of music sucks the most?

A) Country/Western

B) Hip hop/R&B

C) Pop

D) No, I'm not selling this information to iTunes or Amazon, why do you ask?

Scoring: Give yourself 5 points for every D) answer, and 1 point for any other answer.

If your total is:

25 points--you should be a sneaky, intrusive, big-brother-in-a-cute-costume information gathering quiz! You don't really care about the characters in the Lord of the Rings or which version of the Starship Enterprise people most resemble. All you care about is harvesting the data the public blithely hands over to you, data they would hesitate to share with their own families. Best of all, you don't have to worry about spreading yourself to other people--your victims will do it for you!

0-24 points--See above, except you're even sneakier because you actually DO kind of care about the questions themselves. You're also lying to yourself, and worst of all, you're really annoying to see in my Facebook feed.