Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on April 13, 2022, 07:35:26 AMQuote from: Ián S.G. Txaglh on April 13, 2022, 05:48:00 AM
ok, yes, fremen were excited up to the level they waged the total war (jihad) in a name of their prophet, paul muad'dib. they were from the desert. they weren't brown-skinned, as herbert was not talking about the colour of skin at all (afaik and from what i found in commentaries). honestly, i did not see there a particular muslim stereotype, rather a religious fanaticism stereotype (jihading, crusading, pogroming...). all the arabic (and not necessarily muslim) connotations to fremen are stereotypical, as it is the closest to any desert civilisation ordinary westerners can imagine. but even using arabic, herbert used concepts from different religions, like in the case of shai-hulúd, grandfather of the desert, with hidden meaning "thing of immortality", high proly from some far eastern religion.
It is a sci-fi book, it's true, and so it's not literally a white Christian saving brown Muslims. But we might not be able to come to an agreement if you can't imagine that the Arabic-speaking Quran-quoting desert-dwelling pseudo-Sunni jihadis were largely intended to represent our world's Muslims. I mean, really everyone is mostly Muslim, but the Fremen are very obviously an allegory for a certain current stereotype.
Either way, I don't think that specifically is the problem. It's probably good that an author isn't just doing another pseudo-Rome in the future, but instead representing the possible future of other cultures (like Firefly's Chinese). It's just problematic when combined with the white/foreign/aristocratic savior narrative, and the recent film was significantly more problematic in the same way.
We can certainly agree that it's a great book, at least :)
definitely, we can very much agree that dune is a fascinating and interesting book/series. i've read the first book when i was 17 (1988), and i was totally consumed by it. it was a rare occasion of a big english written SF being translated and published during the commie regime. in that time, LOTR was only circulating as samizdat, and only very few english writing SF authors had their books published here (mostly bradbury and clarke).
btw, how do you like the following books (by frank h.)? i see a peak in god emperor of dune, the idea of the golden path is simply super cool. i have to admit, that books by the son are far worse imho. i was able to go through the first trilogy, prelude to dune, as they say today "not great, not terrible" (poor dyatlov, could have never thought to become a meme-maker for westerners), but i was so angry and frustrated reading the first book of butlerian jihad, that i resigned and do not have guts to continue.
and i see, we share also affection for firefly, which i like a lot (even the movie ;) ). the use of chinese language and cultural stereotypes in it was quite good and on spot.
so, cheers, or "na zdraví", as it is also a whisky society :)