When I finally got around to reading Seven Pillars, I wasn't too far in before I was convinced Herbert had the book on his desk the whole time he was writing Dune. So many minor similarities, little scenes that don't quite match up but if you squint they do. Even the arc toward eventually committing war crimes, while seeking some great end for the people he's leading, feels like a connection. But also little stuff like the early travel scenes in Pillars reminded me of early scenes among the Caladanians(?) in Dune.
I think the part where I went "OK yeah this was the reference when he was coming up with the core plot and character of Paul" was when I came across the part where Lawrence comes up with his novel guerrilla war strategy: he's sick, feverish, possibly dying, in a tent in the desert, tended by a few companions. When he comes out of it, he's got his Path. It's too perfect.
[edit] Incidentally, it's not clear to me this author has a good picture of Lawrence's background. Lines like this:
> In terms of clothing, Lawrence comes to accept the Arab dress as “convenient in such a climate” and blends in with his Arab companions by wearing it instead of the British officer uniform.
make me think the author isn't aware that Lawrence had already spent a lot of time in the Middle East (especially, IIRC, modern Syria—so, near Damascus) very shortly before the war broke out, and that was a big part of why he was recruited by British intelligence for the mission(s) in Seven Pillars. It was on an earlier, pre-war trip that he'd adopted Arab dress—unlike what's suggested (if not quite stated) in the film Lawrence of Arabia, he was already quite familiar with and comfortable in it.
The discrepancy is easy to explain; Frank Herbert never owned a copy of Seven Pillars but was instead inspired by a manuscript of desert adventures that he’d found on a train as a boy whilst holidaying in the UK.
What's ironic is how people often point to plot points in many franchises (Star Wars, GoT, etc) as being derivative of Dune... Yet Dune itself is fairly derivative of other works
It’s even more stark the further back you go. When the printing press was invented, it didn’t usher in a new era of creativity but instead the first few centuries resembled modern Hollywood: shameless sequels and reboots. By far the most popular books were translations of Greek classics and rote derivatives of the Arthurian legends. It wasn’t until the first iterations of copyright and a few other cultural shifts that a “professional” writer class was born and started to expand on the creativity of our stories. Until then publishing wasn’t profitable enough to support a real creative process, so they cribbed as much from existing canon as they could to make ends meet. See how long it took science fiction to properly develop into a literary form, for example.
On Star Wars and derivations... Bertram Thomas' Arabia Felix, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, listed some names of stars, transliterated from the arabic.
The north star, was written as Al Jedi... the Jedi. It goes a step further, in that it's arabic which translates as the kid (as in a goat, but the same way Hans refers to Luke).
I'm not sure how much is coincidence, but reading about Thomas preparing to travel by starlight, it struck me as being remarkably reminiscent. I guess there are no original stories.
The first book I concur but the series goes in directions I would never have predicted in multiple places in later books, off the top of my head - books four and five stand out in memory, though he laid the groundwork in the first book.
This has relatively little relevance to Dune, which is basically the story of how the worse dictator in history rose to power (only to be surpassed by his son's 1200 year reign of tyranny).
Very interesting point of view, considering how Baron Harkonnen was depicted in Dune. I mean, was the life in Empire better or worse after he took power? Did life of common citizen changed much?
My view was that he basically just replaced Emperor by himself and most of things was still the same. He even married the princess just for pretence.
My view was that Herbert was trying to show how we could try to direct human progress and evolution if we would have ability to see the future. Both Paul and Leto II have such ability and they tried to do it with mediocre success. Tides of history were largely operating by forces they could not change but slightly skew.
My though was that they were both just trying to do good for the mankind, kind of succeeded, but not much - Leto was by intention so bad that when he finally fall - people scattered through galaxy with those new ships that did not need spice.
Was not this the real moral of the story? Resist stagnant empire and explore the universe? Basically the same as Foundation that is book from the same era?
The fremen jihad killed 61 billion people across the empire, including the sterilization of 90 whole planets, per details in Dune Messiah (quoting from a wiki, I don't have this kind of memory). It may be that life in the empire after this was over returned more or less to the same as what was there before, for those that survived - though I don't think the books go into any significant detail. Life on Dune was definitely better than it had been under the Harkonnens, but this is not necessarily true across the empire.
> Was not this the real moral of the story? Resist stagnant empire and explore the universe?
I think this is somewhat the general idea, but more specific. His main message is that charismatic leaders, even the ones with the best of intentions as Paul certainly was (and Leto II, though in a more complex way), are extremely dangerous and should not be trusted or followed. The empire overall would have been an unquestionably better place if Paul had been killed in the desert (except that perhaps the Bene Gesserit would have led people in an even worse direction if their plans had succeeded at the time). Arrakis itself would have been in a better shape if the fremen had risen up and overthrown their oppressors, but had otherwise stopped at that.
True, but the references in Star Wars to spice (spice mines of Kessel in the original, a reference to striking spice miners in Attack of the Clones) is pretty much only from Dune. Unless they were mining oregano or something.
The Dutch East Indies was literally "mining" spice ( cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, star anise, clove, and turmeric ) from SE Asia for European consumption and packing ship with gold bullion in exchange.
There were many actual "spice wars" fought in the region to wipe out competing crops, to build alliances, and later betray those local allies, etc.
The wildest thing about European colonialism is that it was kicked off to get more spices for European food. Then in the worlds most bizarre twist European food gave up all spices a few centuries later and colonies had to invent something else to sell back to the colonial centre.
The airquotes on "mining" would signify to some that literal mining with excavators, screens, crushers, etc was not intended rather an operation that was literally on the scale of mining with an economic return on par with gold mining a rich vein.
Others might disagree. English is a fun language.
What cannot be disputed is the significant increase in national wealth brought home by the Dutch operations in what was known as the Dutch East Indies.
Batavia ( now Jakarta) was the capital of the VOC's lucrative spice trade for 3½ centuries.
Ships laden with tamarind, mace, cloves and nutmeg – at that time worth more, gram for gram, than gold - sailed from there to the Netherlands and often wrecked on the Western Australian coast returning with gold.
It's the value per weight part that merits comparison with Spanish aquisition of gold in the new world.
However, using the word "literally" is a poor choice. "Figuratively" would be better, or even just leave out "literally" and allow "mining" to be interpreted by the reader.
It was deliberate choice in a sub thread that's literally about literary metaphors.
As a native english reader, writer and speaker of some six decades I grasp the tension in the use of ' literally "airquoted" ' and embrace it.
I also enjoy Riddley Walker, the first edition of Clockwork Orange (sans lexicographic annexure), and the outrageously provocative shock value of the opening sentence of Burgess's panoramic saga Earthly Powers.
nowadays (past few decades) 'mine' (and farm) are often used in place of gather, esp. when it comes to game communities, e.g. 'mine' wood in 'warcraft III'. Farm any sort of materials, equipment, reputation, etc. So I suppose it's not that far fetched.
FH: Well, one of the threads in the story is to trace a possible way a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in making it believable. Here we have the entire process, or at least the large and some of the subtle elements of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint, and from the way society demands this of you. It’s the references in there, you know, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in, because the creation of an avatar is a mythmaking process. We’ve done it in our…in recent times. Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy.
WM: O, sure.
FH: Who was a very earthy, real, and not totally holy man…so here we have a likeable person, now, you see…
WM: Yes.
FH: But real in the flesh and blood sense who by the process of emulation becomes something larger than life, far larger than life, and I’ve just explored all of as many permutations as I could recognize in the process.
WM: Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.
FH: He could very well become an avatar for the…for the Arabs.
WM: Right.
FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British…
WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.
FH: Yes. If he had died…if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed…
WM: He’d have been deified.
FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we’ve done in our society is exploited this power…Western man has exploited this avatar power.
If you really wanted to you could say even George RR Martin was influenced by it.
(Game of Thrones spoilers below)
Look at the character arc of Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. You will find some similarities there too both with Dune and with Lawrence of Arabia. But with a female character rather than a male.
> make me think the author isn't aware that Lawrence had already spent a lot of time in the Middle East
it is actually mentioned in the article. you misread here, with the point being that knowing how to do something is not the same as accepting it for a normal activity.
I saw "Lawrence of Arabia" at the Riverside Theatre on Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee in 70mm in the summer of 1962, the year it was released. I was overwhelmed ("blown away" as a term of art didn't exist back then but would be an apt description). I was SO thrilled when, after nearly two hours, the screen said "There will now be an intermission." Never heard of such a thing back then for a movie!
I note that the film is now available for rent in 4k. I'm gonna take a flutter and watch it on Vision Pro.
A friend raving about it got me to go see the 1989 reissue, and I was similarly overwhelmed/blown-away. The intermission only added to the sense of it being an event.
Last year, I dragged friends of mine to see it in the theater. They, too, were amazed. Now, we've been reading up on those times.
The reading list, so far:
'Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East', Soctt Anderson
20 years ago when I was living in Shanghai, my girlfriend was a member of the communist party (meritocratic she was enrolled because she had great grades). She had regular meetings with a small group of members of the party and they had regular discussions after being told to watch certain movies.
Lawrence of Arabia was one of those movies she had to watch to later discuss with other members... So we watched it together, had great discussion about it. Later when she went to meet with the other party members, they discussed the cult of personality surrounding the character and the use of guerrilla tactics.
(Another movie they all watched like this was 7 years in Tibet)
The parallels with Lawrence are obvious, but I find that the character of Paul Atreides follows some older models as well.
Towards the end of the first book of Dune he has become an almost mythical figure, a Moses using his divine insight to lead his people to freedom, or a Mohammed throwing them into a global war of conquest.
That ambiguity is perhaps the book's greatest achievement: Paul's actions are only justifiable if the reader believes in him completely (he has really seen all possible futures and picked the best one) or not at all (he just wanted revenge and could not have foreseen the consequences).
Interesting to note that the recent Villeneuve adaptation seems to lean heavily into the latter interpretation (Paul and Jessica especially are ruthless and want revenge/power) while the Lynch adaptation was probably more of the former (Paul really wants to do good).
I'm convinced Herbert had some deep knowledge of psi phenomena. His descriptions of truthsayers reading people, timelines, race consciousness, and prescience are very similar to real experiences. His emphasis that it emerges through a combination of genetics and training of subtle awareness, plus the suggestion compounds could provide access to a state that could be sustained without them - also ring very true. The exploration of its paradoxes (destructiveness and utility of prophecy), and the contrast of those intuitive skills with the pure analytical ones of the mentat (or even of thinking machines) are also very deep. I think the idea that humanity's future involves a deeper engagement with and interplay of all these forces is also super likely. Perhaps he was friends, through his naval service, with people in the UK's version of Stargate (US psi and remote viewing programs). Surely there was such a program, tho I'm not aware of any releases of information about it.
Frank Herbert said him self in an interview that Dune was inspired from Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch and that book is the story of Imam Shamil of the north caucasus.
Was looking for this comment, thanks. There was also a very lengthy article by s.o. about the fact which traces the origins of many details.
The presently discussed article ‘Paul Lawrence of Dune’ sound as if written for political goals, rather than actual understanding of the origins of Dune.
The article makes reference to Tim O'Reilly's excellent Frank Herbert.
That book is well worth reading by anybody who wants to better understand Frank Herbert, and is available for free at https://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/.
A comment mentions it, but Sabres of Paradise is another key component to understanding Dune as a referential text as it pertains to imperialism and religious fervor as an insurrectionist response.
Lol. More like Dune lifts wholesale from Sabres of Paradise, translating the stories about Imam Shamyl into space, only adding some bits of LSD inspired trippiness. If anything, Herbert toned down the historical accounts. On the other hand, Lesley Blanch went for the dramatic over the historical in Sabres. The story about the Sultan that drowned his son's mistress, for example, was from a Greek movie version.
There’s even a part at the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia film where he puts out a match with his fingers, and throughout, Lawrence proves his ability to overcome pain. Very reminiscent of the Gom Jabar.
The ambiguity of such questions drove me up the wall as a child.
My mother has a story about how I would ask about future events as "the day after the day after the day after the day after the day after today", which in my mind was much clearer than "in X days" why it wasn't clear how rounding occurred.
Clearly, this set me up for a career involving off-by-one errors.
> The 1962 film based on a romanticized version of Lawrence’s journey... rested on the idea of the ‘white savior,’ whose role was to lend a sympathetic ear to oppressed peoples and provide assistance to improve their lot in life.
I really think this is the wrong interpretation of the end of that movie.
With recent events I’ve been thinking about Dune lately. Once you start to compare what happens in dune to what is happening now, it's rather unpleasant.
Prescience allows for the complete domination of humanity, but to some degree we already working on pre-prescience. Privatized intelligence companies have grown as part of our corporate surveillance state. These companies, like palantir, act as “truthsayers,” divining the state of reality from incredible amounts of information for those with the money to buy it. America has companies that rival countries in terms of power, and these intelligence companies that service them can act as king maker and influence, subtly or directly, with some very giant levers.
The US government is closer to the Landsraad, each house is a corporation, each CEO a duke or baron.
Peter Thiel is likely the reverend mother architect of a recent messianic rise to power.
I am not 100% sure exactly what the Bene Gesserit were supposed to represent, but on a deep level I think they represent intelligence agencies like the CIA.
Social Media has a lot of overlap with “the voice.” With A/B testing various groups with divisive messages, to see what divides most effectively, it creates a means of control. Nobody was commanded to show up on jan 6, but the “command” to do so was heard. This is very in line with frank Herbert’s idea of what the voice was. A/B testing messages on humans at scale is like learning the voice.
We now have Cameras, RF Receivers (blue tooth/driver's license detection), phone backups, website logs, and a host of other surveillance all centralized, maybe not directly, into the hands of private intelligence. With all these sources of information we are getting closer and closer and closer to prescience. We are still limited by computing power to make sense of all the data, but the god emperor of dune was not. With the rise of AI, we now have the potential for a thinking/processing agent with no sense of morality to be assigned to every single individual, in order to carry out the absolute crushing of any nascent dissent before it can become cohesive enough to threaten those in power.
We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule. When our rulers do something we don't like, they will laugh and say "what are you going to do about it?" Every potential weapon purchased will be fed into their "prescient" machine, so will every communication with another individual, and every use of transportation. When your personal AI agent determines you are at risk of "doing something about it," an example will be made of you.
> We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule.
I'm not sure we need to look to the future for that. North Korea has really shown that modern weapons and 80s era intelligence and propaganda methods, applied brutally enough, are enough to keep ~20 million people under extreme poverty and deep obedience for 80+ years now, with no signs of stopping (at least not from internal pressures) any time soon.
It's not enough, you also have to take into account specific culture and circumstances. The same as in NK could have happened in several other countries in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia), Africa and South America (various communist dictatorships) and Europe (all countries behind the Iron Curtain). So why only North Korea?
And what about the Butlerian Jihad? It was a war against Thinking Machines, devices that would do the thinking for people. People were becoming less critical, they stagnated, left all that thinking work to machines, which meant that the technocratic class that controlled these machines effectively controlled mankind.
I think Frank Herbert would have a field day with our modern era of algorithms.
Other people have documented Herbert's obsession with the californian ecology movement and dune re-establishment. I think he took things happening in small scale and used them as filler/detail to a story he wanted to tell in large scale.
> I think he took things happening in small scale and used them as filler/detail to a story he wanted to tell in large scale.
I think this must be a common thing that good scifi authors do. I saw a talk by William Gibson many years ago where he mentioned something very similar, he called it "part of his science fiction toolkit".
Samuel Butler's 1872 "Erewhon" fiction book which features a society which banned all complex machines because of a prior machine intelligence uprising is the direct, and directly referenced, inspiration for the "Butlerian Jihad" in the Dune book series.
Lawrence of Arabia was also a story about how superpowers abuse people and use them as chess pieces stabbing them in the back. But at least the Saudis had the last laugh.
When I finally got around to reading Seven Pillars, I wasn't too far in before I was convinced Herbert had the book on his desk the whole time he was writing Dune. So many minor similarities, little scenes that don't quite match up but if you squint they do. Even the arc toward eventually committing war crimes, while seeking some great end for the people he's leading, feels like a connection. But also little stuff like the early travel scenes in Pillars reminded me of early scenes among the Caladanians(?) in Dune.
I think the part where I went "OK yeah this was the reference when he was coming up with the core plot and character of Paul" was when I came across the part where Lawrence comes up with his novel guerrilla war strategy: he's sick, feverish, possibly dying, in a tent in the desert, tended by a few companions. When he comes out of it, he's got his Path. It's too perfect.
[edit] Incidentally, it's not clear to me this author has a good picture of Lawrence's background. Lines like this:
> In terms of clothing, Lawrence comes to accept the Arab dress as “convenient in such a climate” and blends in with his Arab companions by wearing it instead of the British officer uniform.
make me think the author isn't aware that Lawrence had already spent a lot of time in the Middle East (especially, IIRC, modern Syria—so, near Damascus) very shortly before the war broke out, and that was a big part of why he was recruited by British intelligence for the mission(s) in Seven Pillars. It was on an earlier, pre-war trip that he'd adopted Arab dress—unlike what's suggested (if not quite stated) in the film Lawrence of Arabia, he was already quite familiar with and comfortable in it.
The discrepancy is easy to explain; Frank Herbert never owned a copy of Seven Pillars but was instead inspired by a manuscript of desert adventures that he’d found on a train as a boy whilst holidaying in the UK.
I see what you did there.
(those who don't follow: you can catch up on the Seven Pillars wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom or like basically any biography of Lawrence, various forwards, et c.)
Clever.
What's ironic is how people often point to plot points in many franchises (Star Wars, GoT, etc) as being derivative of Dune... Yet Dune itself is fairly derivative of other works
It’s even more stark the further back you go. When the printing press was invented, it didn’t usher in a new era of creativity but instead the first few centuries resembled modern Hollywood: shameless sequels and reboots. By far the most popular books were translations of Greek classics and rote derivatives of the Arthurian legends. It wasn’t until the first iterations of copyright and a few other cultural shifts that a “professional” writer class was born and started to expand on the creativity of our stories. Until then publishing wasn’t profitable enough to support a real creative process, so they cribbed as much from existing canon as they could to make ends meet. See how long it took science fiction to properly develop into a literary form, for example.
That's the third major use of the printing press.
The first was for catholic indulgences.
The second was for religious propaganda during the European wars of religion.
On Star Wars and derivations... Bertram Thomas' Arabia Felix, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, listed some names of stars, transliterated from the arabic.
The north star, was written as Al Jedi... the Jedi. It goes a step further, in that it's arabic which translates as the kid (as in a goat, but the same way Hans refers to Luke).
I'm not sure how much is coincidence, but reading about Thomas preparing to travel by starlight, it struck me as being remarkably reminiscent. I guess there are no original stories.
The first book I concur but the series goes in directions I would never have predicted in multiple places in later books, off the top of my head - books four and five stand out in memory, though he laid the groundwork in the first book.
Sure, but when was the last time anyone claimed a major franchise was ripping off God-Emperor?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Fac...
A tale as old as time
This has relatively little relevance to Dune, which is basically the story of how the worse dictator in history rose to power (only to be surpassed by his son's 1200 year reign of tyranny).
Very interesting point of view, considering how Baron Harkonnen was depicted in Dune. I mean, was the life in Empire better or worse after he took power? Did life of common citizen changed much? My view was that he basically just replaced Emperor by himself and most of things was still the same. He even married the princess just for pretence.
My view was that Herbert was trying to show how we could try to direct human progress and evolution if we would have ability to see the future. Both Paul and Leto II have such ability and they tried to do it with mediocre success. Tides of history were largely operating by forces they could not change but slightly skew.
My though was that they were both just trying to do good for the mankind, kind of succeeded, but not much - Leto was by intention so bad that when he finally fall - people scattered through galaxy with those new ships that did not need spice.
Was not this the real moral of the story? Resist stagnant empire and explore the universe? Basically the same as Foundation that is book from the same era?
The fremen jihad killed 61 billion people across the empire, including the sterilization of 90 whole planets, per details in Dune Messiah (quoting from a wiki, I don't have this kind of memory). It may be that life in the empire after this was over returned more or less to the same as what was there before, for those that survived - though I don't think the books go into any significant detail. Life on Dune was definitely better than it had been under the Harkonnens, but this is not necessarily true across the empire.
> Was not this the real moral of the story? Resist stagnant empire and explore the universe?
I think this is somewhat the general idea, but more specific. His main message is that charismatic leaders, even the ones with the best of intentions as Paul certainly was (and Leto II, though in a more complex way), are extremely dangerous and should not be trusted or followed. The empire overall would have been an unquestionably better place if Paul had been killed in the desert (except that perhaps the Bene Gesserit would have led people in an even worse direction if their plans had succeeded at the time). Arrakis itself would have been in a better shape if the fremen had risen up and overthrown their oppressors, but had otherwise stopped at that.
Above your tomb, the stars will belong to us.
This is the final answer.
It's derivation all the way down.
That's what renewed my passion for reading; revisiting texts with contexts in mind, history, intent, etc.
I feel the education system really fails people with these little bits
True, but the references in Star Wars to spice (spice mines of Kessel in the original, a reference to striking spice miners in Attack of the Clones) is pretty much only from Dune. Unless they were mining oregano or something.
The Dutch East Indies was literally "mining" spice ( cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, star anise, clove, and turmeric ) from SE Asia for European consumption and packing ship with gold bullion in exchange.
There were many actual "spice wars" fought in the region to wipe out competing crops, to build alliances, and later betray those local allies, etc.
The wildest thing about European colonialism is that it was kicked off to get more spices for European food. Then in the worlds most bizarre twist European food gave up all spices a few centuries later and colonies had to invent something else to sell back to the colonial centre.
> The Dutch East Indies was literally "mining" spice ( cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, star anise, clove, and turmeric )
Only ginger and turmeric are found below soil, and even then you wouldn't usually describe farmers as "literally mining for potatoes."
The airquotes on "mining" would signify to some that literal mining with excavators, screens, crushers, etc was not intended rather an operation that was literally on the scale of mining with an economic return on par with gold mining a rich vein.
Others might disagree. English is a fun language.
What cannot be disputed is the significant increase in national wealth brought home by the Dutch operations in what was known as the Dutch East Indies.
Batavia ( now Jakarta) was the capital of the VOC's lucrative spice trade for 3½ centuries.
Ships laden with tamarind, mace, cloves and nutmeg – at that time worth more, gram for gram, than gold - sailed from there to the Netherlands and often wrecked on the Western Australian coast returning with gold.
It's the value per weight part that merits comparison with Spanish aquisition of gold in the new world.
However, using the word "literally" is a poor choice. "Figuratively" would be better, or even just leave out "literally" and allow "mining" to be interpreted by the reader.
It was deliberate choice in a sub thread that's literally about literary metaphors.
As a native english reader, writer and speaker of some six decades I grasp the tension in the use of ' literally "airquoted" ' and embrace it.
I also enjoy Riddley Walker, the first edition of Clockwork Orange (sans lexicographic annexure), and the outrageously provocative shock value of the opening sentence of Burgess's panoramic saga Earthly Powers.
Your opinion is noted and respected.
Except that wasn't mining at all, except in a remotely metaphorical sense.
nowadays (past few decades) 'mine' (and farm) are often used in place of gather, esp. when it comes to game communities, e.g. 'mine' wood in 'warcraft III'. Farm any sort of materials, equipment, reputation, etc. So I suppose it's not that far fetched.
Figuratively "mining" spice
Related Herbert audio interview on the origins of Dune. Sorry it’s a YouTube link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mLVVJkH7I
This should be the transcribed copy of that interview http://www.sinanvural.com/seksek/inien/tvd/tvd2.htm
The part relevant to the OP:
FH: Well, one of the threads in the story is to trace a possible way a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in making it believable. Here we have the entire process, or at least the large and some of the subtle elements of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint, and from the way society demands this of you. It’s the references in there, you know, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in, because the creation of an avatar is a mythmaking process. We’ve done it in our…in recent times. Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy.
WM: O, sure.
FH: Who was a very earthy, real, and not totally holy man…so here we have a likeable person, now, you see…
WM: Yes.
FH: But real in the flesh and blood sense who by the process of emulation becomes something larger than life, far larger than life, and I’ve just explored all of as many permutations as I could recognize in the process.
WM: Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.
FH: He could very well become an avatar for the…for the Arabs.
WM: Right.
FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British…
WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.
FH: Yes. If he had died…if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed…
WM: He’d have been deified.
FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we’ve done in our society is exploited this power…Western man has exploited this avatar power.
If you really wanted to you could say even George RR Martin was influenced by it.
(Game of Thrones spoilers below)
Look at the character arc of Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. You will find some similarities there too both with Dune and with Lawrence of Arabia. But with a female character rather than a male.
Alot more parallels than that
Starks = Atreides, Ned = Leto, Catelyn / Sansa = Lady Jessica, Paul = Jon/Robb, Duncan Idaho = Benjen, Gurney = Aemon Targaryen / Jorah Mormont, Chani = Ygritte / Arya, Jamis = Tormund, Dr. Yueh = Littlefinger
Lannisters = Harkonnens, Tywin = Baron Vladimir, Joffrey / Jaime = Feyd / Rabban (to some degree, traits are mixed between these characters)
Are you saying he knew their ways as if he was born to them?
> make me think the author isn't aware that Lawrence had already spent a lot of time in the Middle East
it is actually mentioned in the article. you misread here, with the point being that knowing how to do something is not the same as accepting it for a normal activity.
I saw "Lawrence of Arabia" at the Riverside Theatre on Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee in 70mm in the summer of 1962, the year it was released. I was overwhelmed ("blown away" as a term of art didn't exist back then but would be an apt description). I was SO thrilled when, after nearly two hours, the screen said "There will now be an intermission." Never heard of such a thing back then for a movie!
I note that the film is now available for rent in 4k. I'm gonna take a flutter and watch it on Vision Pro.
A friend raving about it got me to go see the 1989 reissue, and I was similarly overwhelmed/blown-away. The intermission only added to the sense of it being an event.
Last year, I dragged friends of mine to see it in the theater. They, too, were amazed. Now, we've been reading up on those times.
The reading list, so far:
'Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East', Soctt Anderson
'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', T.E. Lawrence
'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin
Too cool. I've always wanted to watch this and you've inspired me.
20 years ago when I was living in Shanghai, my girlfriend was a member of the communist party (meritocratic she was enrolled because she had great grades). She had regular meetings with a small group of members of the party and they had regular discussions after being told to watch certain movies.
Lawrence of Arabia was one of those movies she had to watch to later discuss with other members... So we watched it together, had great discussion about it. Later when she went to meet with the other party members, they discussed the cult of personality surrounding the character and the use of guerrilla tactics.
(Another movie they all watched like this was 7 years in Tibet)
A minor point, but it was hardly the first epic movie to have an intermission. Gone With the Wind has one, for example, and is a similar length.
The parallels with Lawrence are obvious, but I find that the character of Paul Atreides follows some older models as well.
Towards the end of the first book of Dune he has become an almost mythical figure, a Moses using his divine insight to lead his people to freedom, or a Mohammed throwing them into a global war of conquest.
That ambiguity is perhaps the book's greatest achievement: Paul's actions are only justifiable if the reader believes in him completely (he has really seen all possible futures and picked the best one) or not at all (he just wanted revenge and could not have foreseen the consequences).
Interesting to note that the recent Villeneuve adaptation seems to lean heavily into the latter interpretation (Paul and Jessica especially are ruthless and want revenge/power) while the Lynch adaptation was probably more of the former (Paul really wants to do good).
That's what makes the rest of the series so fun!
I'm convinced Herbert had some deep knowledge of psi phenomena. His descriptions of truthsayers reading people, timelines, race consciousness, and prescience are very similar to real experiences. His emphasis that it emerges through a combination of genetics and training of subtle awareness, plus the suggestion compounds could provide access to a state that could be sustained without them - also ring very true. The exploration of its paradoxes (destructiveness and utility of prophecy), and the contrast of those intuitive skills with the pure analytical ones of the mentat (or even of thinking machines) are also very deep. I think the idea that humanity's future involves a deeper engagement with and interplay of all these forces is also super likely. Perhaps he was friends, through his naval service, with people in the UK's version of Stargate (US psi and remote viewing programs). Surely there was such a program, tho I'm not aware of any releases of information about it.
i just got downvoted for saying elsewhere that this "needs an /s" - but this either does, or you need some help.
I was walking by the sea the other day and saw a man drowning.
"You need help," I said helpfully. Mercifully, even!
> you need some help
That seems a bit strong given all the wild stuff believe in a religious context.
Frank Herbert said him self in an interview that Dune was inspired from Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch and that book is the story of Imam Shamil of the north caucasus.
While we're on this subject Imam Shamil had an interesting contemporary counterpart figure that I think deserves more recognition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta-Hajji
Was looking for this comment, thanks. There was also a very lengthy article by s.o. about the fact which traces the origins of many details.
The presently discussed article ‘Paul Lawrence of Dune’ sound as if written for political goals, rather than actual understanding of the origins of Dune.
The article makes reference to Tim O'Reilly's excellent Frank Herbert.
That book is well worth reading by anybody who wants to better understand Frank Herbert, and is available for free at https://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/.
I wish there was some logic to the O'Reilly's website, I occasionally stumble upon great material such as this, thank you.
Thanks for that. Some of Dune books read more like political science really...extraordinary body of work
A comment mentions it, but Sabres of Paradise is another key component to understanding Dune as a referential text as it pertains to imperialism and religious fervor as an insurrectionist response.
Lol. More like Dune lifts wholesale from Sabres of Paradise, translating the stories about Imam Shamyl into space, only adding some bits of LSD inspired trippiness. If anything, Herbert toned down the historical accounts. On the other hand, Lesley Blanch went for the dramatic over the historical in Sabres. The story about the Sultan that drowned his son's mistress, for example, was from a Greek movie version.
There’s even a part at the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia film where he puts out a match with his fingers, and throughout, Lawrence proves his ability to overcome pain. Very reminiscent of the Gom Jabar.
"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts"
The trick, Muad'Dib, is not minding that it hurts.
I have to ask does anyone know why the site asks "Are you between 13 and 15 years old?"
Rather odd both the question and the specificity.. Would this not be the same as asking; "Are you 14 years old?"
Not to mention I almost clicked "Yes" thinking it was asking the more common "Are you at least this many years or older?"
> Would this not be the same as asking; "Are you 14 years old?"
"between x and y" normally includes the endpoints.
For example, if someone asks you to pick a number between 1 and 10, everyone would pretty much agree that 1 and 10 are acceptable choices.
The ambiguity of such questions drove me up the wall as a child.
My mother has a story about how I would ask about future events as "the day after the day after the day after the day after the day after today", which in my mind was much clearer than "in X days" why it wasn't clear how rounding occurred.
Clearly, this set me up for a career involving off-by-one errors.
Norwegian has the phrases "fra og med" and "til og med", where the "og med" means "including". So "from and including Monday" removes the ambiguity.
They would be technically acceptable yet they would feel exceptional
> The 1962 film based on a romanticized version of Lawrence’s journey... rested on the idea of the ‘white savior,’ whose role was to lend a sympathetic ear to oppressed peoples and provide assistance to improve their lot in life.
I really think this is the wrong interpretation of the end of that movie.
It's very much the British Empire view of the world. Read Kipling's India tales.
Done. It's got nothing to do with this movie, though.
With recent events I’ve been thinking about Dune lately. Once you start to compare what happens in dune to what is happening now, it's rather unpleasant.
Prescience allows for the complete domination of humanity, but to some degree we already working on pre-prescience. Privatized intelligence companies have grown as part of our corporate surveillance state. These companies, like palantir, act as “truthsayers,” divining the state of reality from incredible amounts of information for those with the money to buy it. America has companies that rival countries in terms of power, and these intelligence companies that service them can act as king maker and influence, subtly or directly, with some very giant levers.
The US government is closer to the Landsraad, each house is a corporation, each CEO a duke or baron.
Peter Thiel is likely the reverend mother architect of a recent messianic rise to power.
I am not 100% sure exactly what the Bene Gesserit were supposed to represent, but on a deep level I think they represent intelligence agencies like the CIA.
Social Media has a lot of overlap with “the voice.” With A/B testing various groups with divisive messages, to see what divides most effectively, it creates a means of control. Nobody was commanded to show up on jan 6, but the “command” to do so was heard. This is very in line with frank Herbert’s idea of what the voice was. A/B testing messages on humans at scale is like learning the voice.
We now have Cameras, RF Receivers (blue tooth/driver's license detection), phone backups, website logs, and a host of other surveillance all centralized, maybe not directly, into the hands of private intelligence. With all these sources of information we are getting closer and closer and closer to prescience. We are still limited by computing power to make sense of all the data, but the god emperor of dune was not. With the rise of AI, we now have the potential for a thinking/processing agent with no sense of morality to be assigned to every single individual, in order to carry out the absolute crushing of any nascent dissent before it can become cohesive enough to threaten those in power.
We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule. When our rulers do something we don't like, they will laugh and say "what are you going to do about it?" Every potential weapon purchased will be fed into their "prescient" machine, so will every communication with another individual, and every use of transportation. When your personal AI agent determines you are at risk of "doing something about it," an example will be made of you.
> We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule.
I'm not sure we need to look to the future for that. North Korea has really shown that modern weapons and 80s era intelligence and propaganda methods, applied brutally enough, are enough to keep ~20 million people under extreme poverty and deep obedience for 80+ years now, with no signs of stopping (at least not from internal pressures) any time soon.
It's not enough, you also have to take into account specific culture and circumstances. The same as in NK could have happened in several other countries in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia), Africa and South America (various communist dictatorships) and Europe (all countries behind the Iron Curtain). So why only North Korea?
And what about the Butlerian Jihad? It was a war against Thinking Machines, devices that would do the thinking for people. People were becoming less critical, they stagnated, left all that thinking work to machines, which meant that the technocratic class that controlled these machines effectively controlled mankind.
I think Frank Herbert would have a field day with our modern era of algorithms.
Future always seems to flip-flop between utopia and dystopia, but that usually just ends up being myopia.
*as some variant of Paul archetype rises and returns the branch to a coherent timeline.
Other people have documented Herbert's obsession with the californian ecology movement and dune re-establishment. I think he took things happening in small scale and used them as filler/detail to a story he wanted to tell in large scale.
Oregon not California.
https://niche-canada.org/2020/04/24/frank-herberts-ecology-a...
> I think he took things happening in small scale and used them as filler/detail to a story he wanted to tell in large scale.
I think this must be a common thing that good scifi authors do. I saw a talk by William Gibson many years ago where he mentioned something very similar, he called it "part of his science fiction toolkit".
Kim Stanley Robinson is carrying the story forward.
Samuel Butler's 1872 "Erewhon" fiction book which features a society which banned all complex machines because of a prior machine intelligence uprising is the direct, and directly referenced, inspiration for the "Butlerian Jihad" in the Dune book series.
Mostly based on The Sabres of Paradise...
Paul is based on Shamyl 3rd Imam of Dagestan from that book
So 40k is Lawrence of Arabia, neat.
The whole concept of Paul atreides seemed entirely orientalist, in Edward Said's coinage of the term.
This showing up here at the same time articles about the push for tourism in Saudi Arabia showing on major news outlets.
Superficially, there is a sequence in the film where Peter O'Toole's very blue eyes appear to glow: https://youtu.be/nBiZu5C6lCo?t=12219
Insane the full movie is just there on YouTube.
I was surprised how much more subtle in many ways Lawrence of Arabia was compared to dune
Reality is more subtle than fiction.
Dune is desert warfare of the WWI era. Modern desert warfare is rather different.
Robert Evans did an introduction to the life and deeds of Lawrence a while back, which I thought was interesting.
First episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o77rpNge5Uw
Lawrence of Arabia was also a story about how superpowers abuse people and use them as chess pieces stabbing them in the back. But at least the Saudis had the last laugh.