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Boy I get so excited talking about Dune I forget what I wanted to say and run over my own ideas.
It’s rare that an art enters your life at a critical period, is in fact widely regarded as great, and then grows with age, so that one doesn’t have to regret the nostalgia tainted love. Like, I was way into Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness: it was my first CD; it got a lot of rotation, but listening back to Billy Corgan’s whines as an adult I cannot but be certain: there is the music of a teenage boy. Sorry Billy.
Not so with Dune. On this last reread I think I have absorbed some of the more structural aspects of the work. Where before the complexity overwhelmed maybe now I see the basic scaffold the sci-fi is clinging to. I use basic here not in the pejorative sense, but more to imply the fundamental Vonnegut-“all stories follow the same basic shape” shape. This isn’t a bad thing, more of a broadening sense of appreciation for the storytelling devices. Like I failed to clearly say in the podcast there’s a core story that’s approachable and recognizable hiding behind the sandworms and witches and time piercing space Jesus. Rare that a book still presents undiscovered country after a half-dozen rereads.
I hope that wasn’t too pretentious.
Anyway, maybe there will come a time when I will look back on the titanic cynicism of the book, the venom directed at the modern institutions of governance (and messiahs!), and remind myself that cynicism is an expression of naivete and I will be past it like the Litany says. Or maybe I’ll actually enjoy the 3rd book?
Probably not on both counts.
The bed music during our advertising is an old loop by Dan of Steel!
The bed music while we explain what the episode is about is Son of a Bit “Chased by a Running Chupacabra” used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Finally, the song we use in the intro is “Shiny Spaceship” by the 8-bit Ninjas. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
