Dumb Things Everyone Overlooks In Dune

www.sciencing.com ^ | May 04, 2025 | Mina Nakatani

[Skooz]

It’s a good book. It’s a good movie. It’s entertainment. Just chill.

[cgbg]

Yup—using year 2025 science to analyze what is going on eight thousand years later is not going to go well.

Imagine primitive tribes in 6,000 B.C. trying to explain cell phones.

“No animals look like that. Therefore this thing is useless.”

[gundog]

My dad taught English, and there was a good selection of sci-fi in the house. Bradbury may have been as much my mom’s doing.

High school activities included lots of imbibing of spice, and running around in the Oregon dunes.

[telescope115]

Have you read Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains? One of my all-time favorite short stories.

I wish I had such a fertile mind as Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, and the rest. I have been waiting forever for a competent filmmaker to take on Niven’s Ringworld.

[Paal Gulli]

If you can fold space, that speaks to the ability to create infinite power.

If you can produce infinite power, there should be no shortages of anything, least of all water, in the entire universe.

[Red Badger]

There was no shortage of water on Dune. The Fremen had billions of gallons sequestered in Quanats under ground.................

[qam1]

The author also forgets that the novel is set in the year 10,191. A helluva lot of innovation can happen by that time.

Apparently though not in Biochemistry, they got all this tech including FTL travel but somehow they can't synthesize a relatively simple naturally occurring compound.

Star Trek TNG used this trope in The Code of Honor, which is often rated as one of the worst episode of the series. Which yeah it was bad, but it at least it wasn't the snooze fest Dune was.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

There is a bit of a dystopian novel you may enjoy called EARTH ABIDES.

[ifinnegan]

George R. Stewart is great.

He wasn’t a science fiction author.

He was a UC Berkeley professor who studied history and what’s called toponymy, which is how places got their names.

He wrote Names on the land : a historical account of place-naming in the United States, which is fascinating US history.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Have you read Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains? One of my all-time favorite short stories.

I don't remember the name, but one of my favorites of his takes place in an Asian country completely surrounded by a Great Wall.

A young man creates a pair of wings that allow him to fly anywhere, including over the wall, that he demonstrates to the King.

The King has him killed before he can demonstrate it to anyone else, because the technology represents an existential threat to their civilization.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Oddly enough, the name is "The Flying Machine."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Machine_(short_story)

[curious7]

and H. Beam Piper.

[struggle]

Yeah, why is some Japanese woman Neil Degrasse Tysoning at a film? Watch the Lynch one instead.

[Telepathic Intruder]

There is a grey area between science fiction and fantasy, so that it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish them apart. So book stores usually just classify them all as science fiction/fantasy.

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

There is a bit of a dystopian novel you may enjoy called EARTH ABIDES.

One of my favorites. A bit dated now, but absolutely fascinating. Congrats for using it for home schooling - great choice to provoke thought.

[telescope115]

Bradbury was a genius.

As are all good science fiction writers.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells…..

[A Navy Vet]

I've been a fan of Sci-Fi since my early youth. The one novel I never finished was Dune. It had too many characters, odd names, politics with religious overtones, and was just too long.

"Childhood's End" is more what I was looking for.

[Macho MAGA Man]

(Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, all my faves..................)

I liked Alan Dean Foster and James Blush.

[Macho MAGA Man]

Not James Blush. I meant James Blish.

Doggone autocorrect!

[Red Badger]

And Phillip Jose Farmer................