The casting continues to look pretty pitch perfect the more I see. Timothy Chalmet was so great in The King and I love everyone else for their roles as well.
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The stream must flow.
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Oh, good, I’ll loop this while waiting to see the movie in theaters on Saturday, I guess.
Sandworm incoming:
I expect we’ll review Dune on Thursday 
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Is Caladan Space Scotland in the book? I remembered it as more general Europey, but I only read it once like a decade ago.
I definitely recall Caladan being space anglo-saxony. Scotland didn’t feel out of place as a choice at all.
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IIRC the Atreides trace their lineage back to ancient Greece via Leta II’s ancestor knowledge.
But yeah, Space anglo/saxony/scotland feels right.
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I thought it was a good choice!
Another good one was (if I recall) not keeping it a mystery who did the bad thing at the beginning.
Especially considering that one of the core themes in Dune is humans desperately clinging to the most intimate and “personal” aspects of humanity, in defiance of the evolving and non-human nature of an infinite universe. They fight with knives. They ban all concept of thinking machines. They cling to the appearance of humanity unchanged over all else.
Of course they’d keep ancient human traditions alive and play bagpipes in space wars.
I say appearance because despite their lip service to “humanity” every faction has become distinctly non-human in trying to avoid becoming non-human yet still survive and thrive. Every faction is far from human at this point in the timeline.
From the name on down, the Atreides have very Greek vibes. Leto is a name from Greek Myth (mother to Apollo and Artemis), the menfolk have dark features, and Caladan is a planet where many make their living on the sea.
In expanded Universe stuff, the Atreides Greek origins are explicitly discussed (it’s so Early in the Time-line, Earth still exists!) “Agammemnon” is the name of the father of the “first” Atreides (who then kills his dad, referencing Zeus overthrowing Cronus).
Even when not explicitly Greek, they’re still some generic Mediterranean. “The Old Duke” was named Paulus (Latin… ish) and his (Iberian) Bullfighting hobby was a symbol for imminent danger in the 2021 adaptation.
I think the Butlerian Jihad rejection of AI thing is not supposed to be a point of hypocrisy contrasted against the non-human state of space society. Instead it is shown as a wise move, and effective turning point in the course of civilization. By not offloading the work of the human mind to the machine, it allowed (perhaps forced) the human mind to evolve and advance to do that work on its own. The factions aren’t inhuman, they are transhuman. Even more human than we are here and now.
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Or, by their very nature, less human but a natural expansion of what it means to be human. The Navigators hide their true appearance, but are they not a literal natural evolution of humanity in this context?
Point taken on the Butlerian Jihad however. Even if you pretend not to have read later books to fill in specific knowledge, it’s a more complex situation than simply “AIs bad.” Mentats are distinctly transhuman, but comparable in power to thinking machines.
But from a naive reading of just the first Dune book, one could also argue that there isn’t necessarily a difference between a mentat’s powers and a fully sentient AI except for a semantic argument that centers, as always, on what we mean by “human.”
In my mind, “Expanded Universe” is anything not written by Frank Herbert. I’m wrapping up the 6th book now. Literally everyone I’ve talked to about the Brian Herbert (et al.) books has told me not to bother.
As a Frank Herbert purist, the books reference our real-world Earth quite a bit, including sampling of religions, languages, and yes a reference to Agamemnon as ancestor in God Emperor of Dune.
I could see the Dune books as a humanist tale of transhumanity. But there’s also a lot of dumb shit in there, too. For every interesting bit of transhumanity, there’s what feels like Frank writing himself into a corner and then having to advance time to fix things in order for there to be a plot.
Short interview with Frank Herbert in 1977, starting with how he “came up” with the concept of Dune and quickly covers a lot of ground with the conclusion that we have to move to renewable energy and not tell our grandchildren “sorry, we used the world up and there is none left for you.”
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I have finished the six Frank Herbert Dune books. 6 ends on a cliffhanger of sorts. I guess it would be more of a cliffhanger if I cared about these characters or the one mystery in progress.
Frank’s notes for the seventh book were adapted into two books by his son Brian and an author best known for mediocre Star Wars novels. I read the Wikipedia entries for those two books; I do not need to read them now. I’m pretty sure they fucked up the mystery in order to plug their prequel books.
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TIL that Caledonia is the Latin name for Scotland. Caladan. Caledonia.
Yeah.
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