AG Monday!
Frank Herbert's classic novel, Dune.
Dune-A-Palooza begins! It’s the first of our three part series covering Dune, on the page and on the screen. In this episode, we discuss the original 1965 novel. If you were a science fiction fan, you read this book. Even if you weren’t a science fiction fan, there’s a good chance someone recommended it to you.
Both Steven and Tom devoured the book in our teens, when it became the touchstone for what truly great science fiction could achieve. Hear us talk about the origins of the novel, our early reactions to it, and our reactions again after re-reading it many years later. Good thing it escaped the obscurity of the auto repair publisher who originally printed it…
A fantastic setting, in every meaning of that word! Great characters! Intrigues! Meditations on political power! High tech that’s also low tech! Tragic fates! It’s all here.
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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I fail to see the attraction.
I confess I never read the book. I tried, it failed to draw me in. I’ve seen both movies, which I’ve posted about here at OTB, and found them ok, but just ok.
I should read the book, but I don’t feel any desire to. I guess I’ll watch any further movies if they are sequels. Any further adaptations of the first novel would be redundant to me. I’ll listen to the whole AG podcast trilogy, too.
@Kathy:
That’s the most important thing!
I read the original novel in 1965. I was 19, naive, and poorly educated in a stereotypical Midwestern way. Everything had one cause, good and evil were sharply delineated, and our society was focused on righteous ways. Dune entranced me. It put me in a trance, and it put me into the entranceway of thinking of complexity. The sequels have been disappointing for me. The movies are very disappointing because a movie always deactivates your brain and replaces your ideas with someone else’s concrete vision. No image evokes the same feeling as a text. OK, I really liked the first book, but the sequels and movies not so much.