/lit/ - Literature

Ok, ok, I'll read it.

>Paul
>Jessica
>Iraqis
>Duncan Idaho
*sigh*

I always see people do the whole "if you think Paul is the good guy you didn't understand the books" and I don't know if I'm retarded because it seems like he is canonically a good guy insofar as he starts the jihad, and only a bad guy for not completing it. Like, I can't tell if Frank Herbert was just retarded or if the fans are. I've heard the theory that Paul and Leto III are unreliable, but by all indications prescience is real and they are actually witnessing the path to saving humanity form extinction. This path just so happens to involve galactic genocide. Paul and Leto III are only "bad guys" insofar as they have to take actions that are beyond the moral comprehension of people without the prescience to see their necessity. If Frank Herbert's point was to not trust leaders or whatever, it isn't played out directly through the Atreides but rather it is only the Atreides who understand this critical weakness in humanity and understand that the path to avoid annihilation is to basically drive everyone away from the central state through terror. They aren't villains, and ironically they are essentially prophets, just not the ones their followers expected them to be. They're the heroes humanity needed because it didnt understand the ones it wanted were actually the false prophets.

Which I guess has the same message that Herbert wanted, it's just a bit more contrived than a lot of the fans seem to present it as. It's basically "I was only pretending to do galactic genocide sincerely, I hope you learned your lesson that if space Hitler was sincere then you'd be in a lot of trouble".

Why are powerful people so reclusive?

This book sucks.
The idea was appealing but the plot is terribly boring.
Characters are empty.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, and I’m wondering about how it’s possible to make a movie with such an empty plot.

Should I read the rest of the saga ?

based. but. once in a while comes a hardcover edition that compels me.

Does it get better? Am I ruined by tiktok or is this just genuinely slow book, I'm almost half way through

Why do some people consider Dune a classic and not simply genre fiction? Usually, a work can be considered a classic if it fulfills one (or both) of these requirements:
-Aesthetic superiority through its own medium: In this case, the use of language (see most canonical poets)
-Transcendence of its context of production by appealing to the human condition.
Or you can be Shakespeare and fulfill both, of course.
Having stated that, Dune prose isn't that good to be honest, I mean, it isn't BAD, but it isn't beautiful either, it's just there. About the second requirement, I guess you could argue that Dune talks about how our thrive for technological advances as a species has serious consequences in our planet? Or about the nature of our spiritual necessities, but... The same can be said about a lot of genre fiction books, maybe you could say the Frank Herbert was the first one to talk about these themes with such profundity, maybe... But I don't know, what do you think?
As a side point, I've seen lots of lists here with Dune in it, so I was also curious about this, as Frank Herbert doesn't get so much shit as someone like Gene Wolfe on this board, and I don't really know why.

feels like an important story.
idk I haven't read the book yet.