/lit/ - Literature

>>23143963
>The bugs are bad, too. They're literally framed as fascist drones. They are, however, not worse than than Federation
It's visually set up this way too. The subtext behind "to fight the bug we must understand the bug" is that they *become* the bugs. The humans swarm like the bugs. They have no individuality. The bug sucking out human brains is also paralleled at the end with the probe the scientist jams into the brain bug's mouth to "suck its brains out."

>>23146085
Hubba hubba!

>>23148105
>Him and his son save humanity from extinction. That is canonically what the books are about, they're a spin on the ideas in Foundation.
Yes. Or kind of a subversion of the Foundation trilogy. Herbert was deeply skeptical of Asimov's technological optimism. Asimov was a real Atomic Age guy, and Asimov's protagonists of prescient scientists become the antagonists in Herbert's world (the Bene Gesserit). Paul is an inversion of The Mule.

>>23148202
>Dune managed to be the most self reflecting science fiction books while still having an all powerful clairvoyant worm god.
What's also interesting about this is how Herbert seems to have ridden along with the later post-60s zeitgeist and counter-culture that was critical of technological society. The novel was published in 1965 and was extremely weird and had all ecological themes and people high on mind-altering substances. The Foundation novels were written in the 40s and published in the early 50s.

Herbert's politics were also peculiar, hard to pin down. I'd describe him almost like an American individualist anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, which is kind of a lost tradition but there were a lot of people in the 19th century like that. Had a lot of influence in America. Thoreau, Emerson, Josiah Warren, Voltairine de Cleyre. They're obscure now and they weren't communists but would've probably been really hostile to Ayn Rand big capitalism as well (as another form of centralized power).