T/S HERBERT vs. TOLKEIN

I've read The Hobbit, and then again after being recommended the rest of the books I tried and failed less than 100 pages in to Fellowship. I also for some reason recall reading halfway through the excerpt where they visit Thom Bombadil's house which is easily about the dumbest thing I've ever made myself sweat through in a piece of prose.

Anyway, answer the fucking questions.

Plus, I always thought The Weirding Modules were kinda cool.

also, soundtrack by TOTO

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001860/

yeah, as the link shows above. she was the crazy porny redhead in Cecil B. Demented

"I got FUCKED under the christmas tree."

Also, she's Donna's piano-playing younger sister in Twin Peaks.

i think the first dune book can go toe to toe with any of the hobbitses story books, but the rest of the series rides a kind of rickety rollercoaster of quality that is pfftcrash.

again tho, it's hard to compare, because Dune is almost a stand alone... the big triumph occurs right then and there in the first book with the rest of the books left to sort of dull it out and try their best to take it to the next level but more as a cultural anthopology/philosophy/history pitch. lotr from book to book is a ride upwards towards the major plot motivation.

mutant offspring vs. classic story structure.
m.

(DUN-DUN-DUN-DUNHHHHH ... DUN-DUN-DUN-DA-DUN-DA-DUNHHHHH)

and John Facenda.

Something about a football spiralling in slo-mo, or the gag reels that the filmmakers would assemble.

1. full circle from calling out the LOTR filmscore for ripping off a football interstitial to discovering that a Dune soundtrack has been subsequently USED as a football interstitial

2. Dune fans don't get tattoos in the Fremen language and show them off at the fuckin' renfair (I don't think) (though dune fans probably do go to burning man or some other such equally disdainable silliness)

i never got more than 10 pages into dune. the movie's great tho!

Justin, you make an excellent point re: The Hobbit, which I enjoyed in my prepubsecensce but yeah, totally tainted by my later exposure to all the Ring Shit, and the superfans thereof.

Dune the movie wins, I'd watch that again tomorrow.

but i thought the book was more an allegory for western policy in the middle east?

You might be right, kingfish, I was a teenager when I read it and the bad guys were still the Commies.

I'm more than fine with Dune as both book and film. LOTR you all know my feelings about. The winner = me.

And yeah, Dune over Tolkein by several spice-fueled light years.

the richness of his story disappeared.

god, i totally didn't even think of any allegorical connection. i was more just imagining it on it's own.... the hypothetical revolving doors of civilization.

am i the only person on the thread that loved the lotr movies? perhaps i'm a sucker for that... like a cat watching tennis.
m.

Fuck no. And a number of people on this thread might be lying if they say they hate them. ;-)

I read EVERY SINGLE DUNE NOVEL when I was in high school - yes, even Heretics of and Chapterhouse, despite the decreasing returns - but the only thing I really remember was the messiah kid who mutated into a giant worm and was trying to find a wife, but he had no external genitals, and was considering getting false ones made to impress ambassadors and matchmakers.

But I still find LOTR more stirring as a novel. It's that English mythology thing. And Tolkien's prose is sooo very lugubrious.

Did anyone read the parodies? The Dune one had The Voice which basically involved whinging really horribly "Get out of the kitchen... it'll be ready when it's ready" until whoever heard it would run screaming with their ears bleeding.

I mean, Dune vs. Star Wars would be an interesting debate - how much do the Jedi owe to Dune's weird religious cult?

Have you actually read either of them since you were 9?

Nobody has answered my original questions!

Tombot, one of the joys of Tolkien is that it is a series that grows with you. I read The Hobbit when I was very young, perhaps about 7, and thought it was great. I read LoTR, and thought it was rubbish. When I was about 13, I went back and tried LoTR again, and I had grown up enough to understand its complexity, and was utterly entranced. I went on to the Silmarillion, and it went utterly over my head, so I thought it was rubbish. A few years after that, after I'd studied some Jung and some comparitive mythology in high school, I went back and read Silmarillion and thought it was amazing.

"Here I have found what I sought not indeed, but finding I would possess for ever. For it is above all gold and silver, and beyond all jewels. Neither rock, nor steel, nor the fires of Morgoth, nor all the powers of the Elf-kingdoms, shall keep from me the treasure that I desire. For Lúthien your daughter is the fairest of all the Children of the World."

Not to say Herbert doesn't have plenty of his own awesome man-must-have-been-drunk moments:

Let there be no doubts that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My samhadi is their samhadi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is my inheritance. Those billions are my one.

The bottom one, errrrr... what? Hmm, I see your point. That sounds like the sort of thing that really deep after you've been at the bong all nite, duuuuuuuude.

Anyway, re: the prose -- in terms of tics that might become wearying, I'll see the complaints about Tolkien's languages and Tom Bombadil (goofy character aside I think that sequence contains some of his best nature writing) and raise you Herbert's fake quotations starting his chapters and THE ENDLESS INTERNAL MONOLOGUES -- which unsurprisingly couldn't be carried off in the film version very well.

The point about how the ornithopters weren't actually so in the film is very well taken. I wanted actual wing motion dammit.

(Fave cameo in Dune -- that's Lynch running the spice mining factory eaten by the worm.)

I do remember that I loved that movie as a 14 year old, or however young I was when I saw it. Not least because of the nekkid ginger Sting shower scenes. I shudder to think of it now, but it was pretty exciting to my prepubescent brane.

but i never did get to the silmarillion, so hey, maybe it gets good again there!

Which is more ridiculous and possibly addled: the Elf language and script, or the lifecycle of the sand trout and its relationship to the spice melange?
Tough call, I would have said Tolkein but Herbert gets progressively befuddled with each book so might just take it on the home straight.

Which is more trite and poorly explained: a Butlerian Jihad or Elves going on permanent cruise vacation?
Elves.

Lastly, is the film version of Dune really that bad, stacked up against all those simpering hobbit interludes? Honestly, which makes you more queasy?
I'm not leaving you Mister Frodo!
http://hoopla.nu/films/rotk/sam_frodo.jpg

I mean, what kind of character development does Apollo or Neptune get? They're archetypes, not human beings.

What do you suppose DEVO and Danzig-era Misfits would say about this?

TOMBOT, I couldn't finish the Ender series either. Xenocide was horrible. The first two books are pretty great still, though.

Not sure I agree with his taste in SF, though.

And I prefer the work "nerd"

It's a graceless hash, a cluttered and confusing mish-mash of poorly organized complaints about those darned wicked "Darwinists". He lists 7 arguments. Then he repeats his list, expanding on them. Then he goes on and on, hectoring scientists about how they should behave. For a professional writer, it's just plain bad writing—I'm struggling with how to address his arguments, but he's written such a gluey mass of tangled ranty irrationality that it's hard to get a handle on it. Ugly, ugly, ugly…and why do these guys all seem to think the way to defend the ideas of ID is to whine about the perfidy of all those scientists? Not once does he bring up any evidence for ID...

yeah, that's the odd bit. reading along and realizing that "hey, the tone just changed a whole lot in this book." there are hints of the religious conservative shift beginning to take hold.

It reminds me of Larry Niven's Ringworld series; the later books are technically sequels, but wander off and go on about less-interesting things than the initial premise of the first.

Speaking of Niven, did we ever do a thread about '70s sci-fi, and its weird focus on the whole "sex with foxy humanoid aliens" thing?

Can we...NOT?

I know, i know, but it just seems that all the guys back then had the (single-minded?) predilection to include that bit in the stories. It was like, of ALL the things they could have woven in, they always seemed to get 'round to that one.

Your personal history of masturbation

Revive! I want to talk about examples of prewar and postwar examples of fantasy/sci-fi and how they differ etc. Also why is it that lots of prewar material in the sword-and-sorcery vein (robert e howard/tolkein) continues to be incredibly popular while hg wells has a fork stuck in him? Is it because we just don't like hard lessons? Is it because the bomb got boring?

Probably has something to do with 'outdated' futures, as opposed to mysterious and safely distant pasts, losing some of their appeal (not entirely by any means, as Elvis Telecom would be quick to note!) -- but also, Wells never struck me as a unique enough stylist beyond his time and as a result seems not only prewar but preWWI, after all -- something Tolkien was as well but ended up using to his advantage in the end. Howard I'll have to think about a bit.

KIM I'm not just talking about the literature itself but its adaptation/adoption in the mainstream - as we were talking about on some other thread, I forget which one, science fiction movies that aren't basically cheap horror "in space" are almost guaranteed box office bombs while studios seem to be trampling over each other to make wizard adventures

That might also have to do with diminished expectations for the future in general. (Plus, we're increasingly IN the sf universe of decades back, just not as pristene, and with limited availability.)

I don't know about "diminished expectations" per se but there's certainly an attitude that we're not going anywhere good and wherever that no-good place is we seem to be accelerating toward it. An apocalypse of some sort is expected if not required for us to imagine the human race ever participating in the comparative utopia of star trek

the sf universe we live in now can only have a little more sf added to it before the consequences of our own technology become completely inescapable.

that and most people seem to have realized on some level that all the latest machines are just here to distract us from how meaningless our lives have become in the face of our other machines