Pixel Scroll 10/13/20 The Credential’s Door Into Summer

(1) NUANCES ERASED IN MARKETING DUNE. “In Dune, Paul Atreides led a jihad, not a crusade” – why that matters is the focus of Ali Karjoo-Ravary’s opinion piece at Al Jazeera.

….But fans familiar with the books noticed a major omission in its promotional materials: any reference to the Islam-inspired framing of the novel. In fact, the trailer uses the words, “a crusade is coming”, using the Christian term for holy war – something that occurs a mere three times in the six books of the original series. The word they were looking for was “jihad”, a foundational term and an essential concept in the series. But jihad is bad branding, and in Hollywood, Islam does not sell unless it is being shot at.

Dune is the second film adaptation of the popular 1965 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. Set approximately 20,000 years in the future on the desert planet Arrakis, it tells the story of a war for control of its major export: the mind-altering spice melange that allows for instantaneous space travel. The Indigenous people of this planet, the Fremen, are oppressed for access to this spice. The story begins when a new aristocratic house takes over the planet, centring the narrative on the Duke’s son Paul.

The trailer’s use of “crusade” obscures the fact that the series is full of vocabularies of Islam, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Words like “Mahdi”, “Shai-Hulud”, “noukker”, and “ya hya chouhada” are commonly used throughout the story. To quote Herbert himself, from an unpublished 1978 interview with Tim O’Reilly, he used this vocabulary, partly derived from “colloquial Arabic”, to signal to the reader that they are “not here and now, but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and time”. Language, he remarks, “is mind-shaping as well as used by mind”, mediating our experience of place and time. And he uses the language of Dune to show how, 20,000 years in the future, when all religion and language has fundamentally changed, there are still threads of continuity with the Arabic and Islam of our world because they are inextricable from humanity’s past, present, and future….

(2) LEARNING HORROR. Sarah Gailey adds to her Personal Canons “Wayside School”, a tribute to Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series.

…In addition to tapping into the deep, gut-level instability of growing up, Sachar wrote some truly choice moments of horror into these books. It’s horror for children, in that it’s a little gross and a little ridiculous, but that doesn’t make it ineffective. …

These are all presented as genuinely frightening, and they land beautifully. When I read these books as a child, I was aware that they were funny and unrealistic — but I also felt a lingering sense of unease. The school was not a safe place, and the teachers were not safe or trustworthy people. The rules rarely made sense, but the consequences to breaking them were very real. Everything constantly seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

These are the books that taught me to love being unsettled….

(3) STOP AND SMELL THE ROSES. Congratulations to the Strange Horizons’ reviews section which celebrated a milestone anniversary. Their twentieth-anniversary round table of reviewers past and present, featuring Rachel Cordasco, Erin Horáková, ML Kejera, Samira Nadkarni, Abigail Nussbaum, Charles Payseur, Nisi Shawl, Aishwarya Subramanian, and Bogi Takács, discusses “what reviewing is, why it matters—and why they bother with it.”

Abigail Nussbaum: I see my reviewing as an offshoot of fandom. In the late 90s and early 00s I was active in a few fandoms—X-Files and Harry Potter, mostly—but gravitated almost exclusively to what would now be described as “meta,” analysis and reviewing rather than fanfic. Around the mid-00s I was active on a message board called Readerville, dedicated to discussions of books, which helped me both to expand my reading and explore my impulse to talk about the things I’d read. I started a blog in 2005 basically because I had a lot to say and nowhere to say it—certainly not at the length I wanted. A few months later, Niall Harrison got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in writing for Strange Horizons, and the rest is history.

(4) TECH AND MORALITY. “Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’” – a Q&A conducted by The Guardian’s Ian Tucker about Doctorow’s new book, Attack Surface.

The protagonist in your new novel tries to offset her job at a tech company where she is working for a repressive regime by helping some of its targets evade detection. Do you think many Silicon Valley employees feel uneasy about their work?
Anyone who has ever fallen in love with technology knows the amount of control that it gives you. If you can express yourself well to a computer it will do exactly what you tell it to do perfectly, as many times as you want. Across the tech sector, there are a bunch of workers who are waking up and going: “How did I end up rationalising my love for technology and all the power it gives me to take away that power from other people?”

As a society, we have a great fallacy, the fallacy of the ledger, which is that if you do some bad things, and then you do some good things, you can talk them up. And if your balance is positive, then you’re a good person. And if the balance is negative, you’re a bad person. But no amount of goodness cancels out the badness, they coexist – the people you hurt will still be hurt, irrespective of the other things you do to make amends. We’re flawed vessels, and we need a better moral discourse. That’s one of the things this book is trying to establish.

(5) CONSEQUENCES OF IMAGINING THE WORST? Doctorow is also on tap at Future Tense in a first-person piece about “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories”.

When I moved to California from Toronto (by way of London), I was shocked by the prevalence of gun stores and, by their implication, that so many of my reasonable-seeming neighbors were doubtless in possession of lethal weapons. Gradually the shock wore off—until the plague struck. When the lockdown went into effect, the mysterious gun stores on the main street near my house sprouted around-the-block lines of poorly distanced people lining up to buy handguns. I used to joke that they were planning to shoot the virus and that their marksmanship was not likely to be up to the task, but I knew what it was all about. They were buying guns because they’d told themselves a story: As soon as things went wrong, order would collapse, and their neighbors would turn on them.

Somehow, I couldn’t help but feel responsible. I’m a science-fiction writer, and I write a lot of disaster stories. Made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s conception of an intuition pump—“a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem”—suggests that fiction (which is, after all, an elaborate thought experiment) isn’t merely entertainment.*

That’s true. And it’s a problem….

(6) UNFORGOTTEN. Never mentioned by the actress, but Glorious Trash remembers Diana Rigg’s work in “Minikillers (1969)”.

German producers H.G. Lückel and D. Nettemann had an entrepreneurial idea: to provide entertainment for people getting their cars refilled at gas stations in Germany. The idea was to place TV sets by the pumps, so customers could watch a short film while their car was filled (this was before the days of self-service.)  They envisioned an espionage thriller to capitalize on the James Bond/Eurospy genre. Casting about for a famous lead, they eventually settled on Diana Rigg — fresh from her biggest role in the Bond film On Her Majestys Secret Service. After negotiating, Rigg agreed to appear in these films. 

Minikillers is a series of four short films, tied together into a coherent storyline: the idea was that customers would keep coming back to that particular gas station to see the conclusion. The series was shot on 8 millimeter and without dialog; sound effects and music were added later. In a way the project comes off like a silent film; all is relayed via movement, gestures, and facial expressions. 

Rigg apparently did not realize the uber-low budget of these films until the camera(s) started to roll. However true to her contract she shot each of them…and never mentioned them again. 

As they are up on YouTube: 

(7) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

  • 2010 — Terry Pratchett won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement from the Mythopoeic Society. It was his second Award from them as five years earlier he’d won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature for A Hat Full of Sky, the second of the novels involving the young witch Tiffany Aching. That novel would also garner the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. The series as a whole would later be nominated for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature but the Award went to Ursula Vernon’s Castle Hangnail.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 13, 1872 – Boris Zvorykin.  Designer and illustrator; illustrated books, decorated churches, worked for Tsar Nicholas II.  Left at the Revolution, eventually went to Paris, in 1930 translated & illustrated four Russian fairy tales, also did porcelain for Porzella later incorporated in Villeroy & Boch.  In 1978 Jacqueline Onassis found and produced his book, The Firebird (in English).  Here is a print illustrating Boris Godounov.  Here is one for Tsar Saltan.  Here is “The Snow Maiden”.  Here is a set of his V&B plates.  (Died 1942) [JH]
  • Born October 13, 1906 – William Morrison.  Four novels, eighty shorter stories; “The Science Stage” in F&SF; memoir in Greenberg, Olander & Pohl’s 1980 thirty-year Galaxy anthology; posthumous collection The Sly Bungerhop (2017).  Ph.D. research chemist under another name.  Comics, credited with creating J’Onn J’Onzz the Manhunter from Mars.  Wrote about archeology, ballet, opera, theater, Rome.  (Died 1980)  [JH]
  • Born October 13, 1923 – Iona Opie, C.B.E.  Folklorist, anthologist, with her husband Peter; their collection of children’s books and ephemera 16th-20th Centuries is in the Bodleian Lib’y (20,000 pieces; two-year public appeal raised the £500,000 cost); audiotapes of children’s games & songs in the British Lib’y.  Oxford Dictionary of Nursery RhymesLore & Language of Schoolchildren; two dozen stories for us in The Classic Fairy Tales; two dozen more books.  Coote Lake Medal jointly.  Iona made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.  (Died 2017) [JH]
  • Born October 13, 1926 Lenny Bruce. Yes, the foul-mouthed stand-up comic. ISFDB lists him as having co-authored three essays with Harlan Ellison in Rouge magazine in 1959 all called “Bruce Here”. Rogue also printed SF stories as well from Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Mack Reynolds and Harlan Ellison to name some of their writers. It lasted but six issues. (Died 1966.) (CE) 
  • Born October 13, 1956 Chris Carter, 64. Best known for the X-Files and Millennium which I think is far better than X-Files was, but also responsible for Harsh Realm which lasted three episodes before being cancelled. The Lone Gunmen managed to last thirteen episodes before poor ratings made them bite the bullet. (CE) 
  • Born October 13, 1959 Wayne Pygram, 61. His most SFish role was as Scorpius on Farscape and he has a cameo as Grand Moff Tarkin in Revenge of the Sith because he’s a close facial resemblance to Peter Cushing. He’s likely best recognized as himself for his appearance on Lost as a faith healer named Isaac of Uluru. (CE) 
  • Born October 13, 1967 Kate Walsh, 53. She has the recurring role of The Handler in The Umbrella Academy series. Walsh starred as Sandra Anderson in the biblical horror film Legion, and was a sexy waitress in the Bewitched film. She was Amal Colb in Scary Movie 5, the fifth and final installment in the Scary Movie franchise. (CE)
  • Born October 13, 1967 – Petri Hiltunen, 53.  Cartoonist and illustrator.  Puupäähattu award.  His Praedor comics led to a role-playing game of the same name.  In his comic strip The Return of Väinämöinen, the Eternal Sage of Kalevala ends his self-imposed exile to find he might have been gone too long, e.g. these newfangled “potatoes” are now considered a traditional food.  PH contributes to the SF magazine Tähtivaeltaja (“Star Wanderer”); he’s well known in Finnish fandom e.g. at Finncon.  Here is an illustration for Knight of the Cursed Land.  Here is the cover for his graphic-novel version of Macbeth.  Here is an illustration for the board-game Aegemonia.  [JH]
  • Born October 13, 1969 Aaron Rosenberg, 51. He’s written novels for Star Trek, StarCraft, Warcraft, Exalted, Stargate Atlantis, and Warhammer, as well as other franchises. He’s even written a novel set In the Eureka ‘verse, Eureka: Roads Less Traveled, under the house name of Cris Ramsay. Eureka novels sound fascinating but this is the only one that I found so far. (CE)
  • Born October 13, 1975 – Jana Bauer, 45.  Her Witch Vanisher is available in English; the publisher says she has a deviously humorous narrative style.  She edits Exchanges, short prose from different countries, and Forget-me-nots in Slovenian and English for the children of Slovene emigrants (I’ve left out the Slovenian titles because of software character trouble).  In the Land of Gingerbread was the first Forget-me-not (see p. 2 of this newsletter).  For Scary Fairy in the Fearful Forest see here.  A dozen other books.  [JH]
  • Born October 13, 1976 Jennifer Sky, 44. Lead character conveniently named Cleopatra in Sam Raimi’s Cleopatra 2525 series. (Opening theme “In the Year 2525” is performed by Gina Torres who’s also a cast member.) She’s had guest roles on Seaquest DSVXenaCharmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And she was Lola in The Helix…Loaded, a parody of The Matrix which scored 14% at Rotten Tomatoes among audience reviewers. (CE)
  • Born October 12, 1983 – Lesley Nneka Arimah, 37.  Nat’l Magazine Award, O. Henry Award, Commonwealth Short Story Prize.  “Skinned” (Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, Machado ed. 2019) and four more for us in her collection What Does It Mean When a Man Falls from the Sky?, Kirkus Prize and don’t miss its last review at her Website, where also she says she is working on a novel about you.  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) CEL GROWTH. Vulture has “The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation From Bugs Bunny to Spike Spiegel to Miles Morales, the history of an art form that continues to draw us in”, which provides a deep dive into animation history for people who want to know more about animation.

(11) GETTING INTO THE SPIRIT. Cat Rambo reads a story for Halloween.

This short urban fantasy story originally appeared in Stamps, Tramps, and Vamps, edited by Shannon Robinson. It takes place in Durham, North Carolina, and involves a tattoo artist who’s got a different purpose in mind than her latest client does. It seemed like it would be a fun Halloween story to share!

(12) STATE OF THE NATION. There’s a lot more to think about than I expected in Zippia’s “Map Of Each State’s Favorite Halloween Candy (Spoiler: Some States Have Really Bad Taste)”. Here are first three of nine bullet points.

  • Starburst is a favorite with 6 states loving the fruity squares above all else
  • The winner is in, and between chocolate and non-chocolate candy it’s a…toss-up.
  • 25 states prefer chocolates candies while 25 prefer gummies, fruit-flavored candies, and other non-chocolate candies.

(13) TUNING UP. Genre adjacent, at least. “Delia Derbyshire Documentary Gets New Trailer: Watch” at Pitchfork.

…Derbyshire, an early electronic music pioneer, worked at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s, where she composed the theme for the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who. Written and directed by Caroline Catz, the film features archival materials, interviews with Derbyshire’s colleagues and collaborators, and dramatizations starring Catz herself as the composer. Derbyshire’s original compositions are featured alongside a soundtrack by Cosey Fanni Tutti, constructed from samples Derbyshire’s posthumously released “Attic Tapes.”

(14) UNCLE WALT. Defunctland is “the show about the past…of the future!” Here are two of its episodes devoted to Walt Disney’s landmarks Disneyland and EPCOT.

In this episode, Kevin finally reaches the opening of Disneyland, focusing on the development and history of Tomorrowland 1955, the first, hastily-made version of the famous theme park land, including attractions such famous attractions as Rocket to the Moon, Autopia, Space Station X-1, the Matterhorn, the Skyway, Submarine Voyage, and the Monorail.

Walt Disney made ambitious plans for a City of Tomorrow named E.P.C.O.T. just before his death in 1966, but the plans were soon abandoned. What were Walt’s ideas for his city of the future, what happened to the project, and would it have worked?

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Twilight:  Eclipse Pitch Meeting” on ScreenRant, Ryan George says the third Twilight movie has a very strange title, because “Why would you spend two hours looking at an eclipse?”

[Thanks to Daniel Dern, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, JJ, N., Cat Eldridge, Alan Baumler, Will R., John Hertz, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credt goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

43 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/13/20 The Credential’s Door Into Summer

  1. (12) I did my trick-or-treating decades ago in “crunch bar” territory – and I do remember getting a lot of those (the best houses gave me Iron Man and FF comics).

  2. 5) I’ve never read an apocalyptic story in which a large percent of the population react by claiming that nothing is wrong, yet that happened. Authors should be thoughtful about what they write but this article is exaggerating the influence they have I think.

    12) I’ve started buying chocolate I like in case it’s rainy and we have a lot left over. So it’s all KitKat and Twix at our place.

  3. (9) COMICS SECTION.

    I once ordered a Spider-Gwen figure from Hong Kong after watching watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The price was right and she looked well-crated. When she came, she was one and three quarters Inches tall. She is now adorning one of succulent pots In my office. The next one I ordered I checked the size very, very carefully.

    12) I’ve a second floor apartment behind a locked door so I don’t do Halloween. I do buy chocolate however, almost all dark chocolate as I give it out to my NP and osteopathic manipulation therapist when see them. And I post it regularly to folks. My weakness is Reece’s Peanut butter cups — the small ones.

  4. 13) The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is definitely genre adjacent. It was founded in 1958 as a sound effects unit and it was responsible for creating sound effects and incidental music for the BBC’s shows, including Doctor Who. Eventually the unit became renowned for their work with electronic music, especially the work of Derbyshire and Daphne Oram.

    Genre-related trivia: Two members of the influential grindcore band Carcass (be careful on the Google there) backed young Rimmer on a Red Dwarf episode.

  5. The surgery went well and I’m home now. I’ve got for the next two days a bandage and ace wrapping combination that runs from the groin to the toes. No idea why and the surgeon avoided saying why when I asked him.

    Bone had healed well and there was no infection so I should be rid of the immobiliser in a few months. And yes the knee hurts now but that’s not at all surprising. The orders say I can shower on Friday — yea!

  6. [8] Whaddaya mean, six issues? Rogue lasted from 1959 to 1981, a little of six years of it under William Hamling (who provided a venue and employment for Harlan, for Frank M. Robinson, Ajay Budrys, Larry Shaw and others).

  7. @Cat
    maybe to keep fluids moving instead of pooling? (Also a temporary immobilizer of sorts?)
    (I’m guessing from out here in 5782)

  8. Michael J. Lowrey says Whaddaya mean, six issues? Rogue lasted from 1959 to 1981, a little of six years of it under William Hamling (who provided a venue and employment for Harlan, for Frank M. Robinson, Ajay Budrys, Larry Shaw and others).

    ISFDB only listed six issues which is why I said that. Obviously that was wrong.

  9. P J Evans queries maybe to keep fluids moving instead of pooling? (Also a temporary immobilizer of sorts?)
    (I’m guessing from out here in 5782)

    Mostly likely yes but I’m finding it curious as it wasn’t done for the first two surgeries. Like most surgeons, he’s not great on explaining things.

  10. The ISFDB coverage of SF in non-genre publications in general is weak. Men’s magazines like Rogue and others even more obscure were important markets for hungry SF writers. As Earl Kemp, among others, has pointed out, there is almost no information compiled about the content of individual issues of Rogue, unlike Playboy. Compare and contrast the number of magazines who are listed in a random year’s Writer’s Market as buying SF, to the number of those magazines who are mentioned at all in the ISFDB.

  11. I disagree very strongly with the idea that the new Dune movie using “crusade” rather than “jihad” is a bad idea. Contexts change. Our recent history has millions more dead or forced to flee than the stretch right before Dune, and an institutionalization of far more aware, calculated, sadistic (rather than brutally oblivious) anti-Muslim policy. In 1965, “jihad” was a word outside a lot of white American readers’ vocabulary; now it is not, but it is tied to a whole constellation of associations that I think lead away from Herbert’s intent.

  12. Cat Eldridge: It is good that you are out of the hospital.

    THE OBSERVER calls Cory Doctorow “British-Canadian.” Why is he British?

    Michael Lowrey: Have you ever looked at the Fictionmags Index, where you will find a complete index for ROGUE?

  13. Martin Wooster: THE OBSERVER calls Cory Doctorow “British-Canadian.” Why is he British?

    He lived in the UK for a time and married a British citizen. He is a British citizen by naturalization.

  14. 13)

    Pity Pitchfork didn’t know that Ron Grainer composed the Doctor Who theme. Although Grainer did say that Derbyshire’s should receive a co-composer credit because her arrangement transformed it utterly into something he could never have envisaged.

  15. Hoping you continue to heal and recover, Cat

    1) It is a tricky balance-Crusade and Jihad are not synonyms, but I see why the filmmakers use the former, not the latter.

    And both books and movies have to find a balance in putting someone in a different place, but also putting people in a place they are willing to go. If the film was being made in the 90’s, Jihad would be a far easier ask.

    I can imagine that a producer or backer early on in the production process demanding the change–and as always with these things, follow the money.

  16. There are actually 30 issues of Rogue in the ISFDB. The ISFDB is totally volunteer-driven by people who have spent many tens of thousands of hours doing what can only be described as drudge work. I am sure the group would welcome anyone who is willing to acquire the complete run of Rogue and fill in any gaps.

  17. 1) Neither “crusade” nor “jihad” reflect Herbert’s original intent. Is there a term taken from Hindu or another religion of similar meaning that would be sufficiently obscure to a western audience that would work?
    8) First occurrence of Rogue is misspelt as Rouge. I hope someone has a red face.

  18. (7) I still miss Pterry.

    (9) Saw it on the tube
    Bought it on the phone
    Now you’re home alone
    It’s a piece of cr*p

  19. @Cat Eldridge

    Like most surgeons, he’s not great on explaining things.

    I think the default position of most surgeons is not to explain things. Many patients tend not to seek surgery (why would you want someone to cut you open?), but surgery is often medically indicated, and surgeons get cooperation from some patients by being assertive and godlike (“Do this. I have spoken.”), and not by explaining what is going on and why (or so my son’s thoracic surgeon told me).
    But my experience with several surgeons (abovementioned thoracic surgeon, my own urologist for prostate cancer, my opthalmic surgeon for cataracts) is that if you ask intelligent questions, they will explain it all, at whatever technical level you can handle. You have to draw them out, though.
    In fact, my wife and I gained sort of a reputation with my son’s surgeon in that he always had to code our visits as “level 2” (taking longer, and billing more) with the insurance company because we took so much time getting him to explain what was going on.
    My own background is in optical engineering, so when I had cataract surgery and asked questions, the doctor would start explaining at a basic level. He’d describe something in layman’s language, I’d respond back the appropriate technical term (accommodation, focal length, chromatic aberration, etc.), and he realized he could be more specific and accurate in what he was saying. He ended up referring me to some technical papers in the literature about various types of replacement lenses that helped me decide what kind I wanted.

    (8) Lenny Bruce — Rouge or Rogue? two easy ones to mix up, and I always have to double-check myself when writing one of them.

  20. 15) I, for one, have probably spent hours looking at eclipses, but not looking directly at the sun or moon for all of that time. And with everything going on, I just remembered there will be a total solar eclipse this December, but it’s just as well I wasn’t planning to go to Argentina or Chile to see it.

  21. @Michael J. Lowrey

    As Earl Kemp, among others, has pointed out, there is almost no information compiled about the content of individual issues of Rogue, unlike Playboy.

    Rogue may be better indexed than you realize. (Click issue numbers for content).

    (edited to add that now I see that Martin Wooster has already addressed this)

  22. Stuart Hall on October 14, 2020 at 8:06 am said:
    1) Neither “crusade” nor “jihad” reflect Herbert’s original intent

    Then why did Herbert use “jihad” profusely, ubiquitously and adamantly?

  23. @Brown Robin
    Possibly because it was the closest word to what he wanted, for that world.

  24. @ Brown Robin:

    Then why did Herbert use “jihad” profusely, ubiquitously and adamantly?

    I think “jihad” did work for Herbert. But like it or not, the Western meaning of “jihad” has changed between 1965 (when it was published) and 2020, and probably the producers were trying to get away from the Al Qaeda connotations that the word has acquired over time.

  25. Brown Robin says Then why did Herbert use “jihad” profusely, ubiquitously and adamantly?

    Good question. It should be noted that this Jihad lasted but a short period:

    Then came the Butlerian Jihad—two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:
    “Man may not be replaced.”

    I think he used it because it sounded exotic, classic Orientalist thinking.

  26. I have to demur. I think “jihad” is exactly the word he wanted, in any sense you care to specify. It’s been a while since I read the books, but I know what he was about.

    In order to adapt the works, there’s stuff that should be jettisoned because, well, we’ve been through all this…but it somehow doesn’t surprise me that the wrong stuff will get jettisoned. The Fremen are an oppressed, indentured minority in their own home, which is being exploited by parties far more powerful and wealthy, and they use a TE lawrence stand-in provided by an occult NGO to enact their revenge on their oppressors, and spread their religious beliefs throughout the human galaxy, even if that religion is largely a concoction contrived largely by outsiders, a further colonizing insult to the Fremen, who are not even indigenous to the planet they fiercely defend, and, yes, wage jihad over.

    Christian Americans, and Chinese bourgeoisie are not the heroes of this story, and the studio wants their folding money. I get it, I’m hip. But jihad is the right word.

    Maybe “intifada” would be more apt.

    Given what I know, “crusade” is not even close, unless exploitation capitalism is now considered a religious tenet.

    If you are uncomfortable will this material, you should not undertake a film adaptation of it. It’s not like it has proven a lucrative franchise. The world doesn’t need another Dune, certainly not one that can’t carry its water.

  27. @Cat: Two generations is a pretty long time for a war. Not a record, of course, but worse than anything recent – if WWI and WWII had no hiatus in between, it would have been a two-generation war, and the level of destruction would have been immense. It’s not for nothing that generations after the Butlerian Jihad, Herbert has society profoundly shaped by it.

  28. @Andrew
    In our world, there’s the Hundred Years’ War and the 17th-century wars of religion. Two examples of how wars leave lasting scars and memories.

  29. @P J Evans: Agreed (though the Hundred Years War and the Forty Years War had hiatuses). Cat suggested that the two generations of Butlerian Jihad was “a short period.”

  30. @Andrew
    Then there’s the US Civil War. nearly 160 years, and we’re still not past it.

  31. @PJ Evans: Absolutely. And a four year war is much shorter than a two generation one.

  32. Andrew (not Werdna) says Agreed (though the Hundred Years War and the Forty Years War had hiatuses). Cat suggested that the two generations of Butlerian Jihad was “a short period.”

    I did, particularly given how long the time span of the chronology in the back story. The jihad label might be something applied after the War (and even that word might imply something inaccurate) by groups using it for their own means. Frankly the jihad sounds more like an ongoing riot organised around a common cause that something with a religious reason.

  33. The Thirty-Years-War left lasting scars for centuries afterwards. Up until the early 20th century, it was still the epitome of the horror of war, before WWI and WWII eclipsed it. And you can still see the impact of the Thirty-Year-War today in religious demographics, where one area is almost entirely Protestant and thirty kilometres away you have an area that’s just as completely Catholic. You can also see it in voting patterns 400 years later.

    The Eighty-Years-War to kick the Spanish out of the Netherlands also left lasting scars, including the fact that Flanders is part of Belgium and not the Netherlands.

    And in general, the religious wars of the 17th century often left a lingering anti-Catholic prejudice in Protestant regions that lingered well into the 20th century.

  34. @Cat: Thanks. That makes sense (and sorry about my adding 10 years to the Thirty Years War by accident in my post above).

    I, too, send condolences to Chris Meadow’s family.

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