DUNE, the classic novel made into a bad movie, a good miniseries, and now...?

DUNE
FRANK HERBERT (Dune #1)
Penguin Books
$18 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family--and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.
A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what it undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

My Review: I first read this novel in 1975. It seems impossible that it was over 40 years ago, but the math is inescapable and time inexorable. My teenaged brain was rewired by the read. I had a standard by which to judge all future SFnal reads, and it was a high one. I was transported into a future I was utterly convinced would be the the one I'd have descendants to live in. I suppose that could yet happen. I'm a lot less convinced now that the human race's future is that long. Age might bring wisdom, I wouldn't know about that, but it sure brought me a booster shot of cynicism.

The Orange Catholic Bible, the books of the Empress Irulan, they all seemed to me so real...the cry "never to forgive, never to forget" rings louder today than it did in 1975 because I've lived through so many iterations of it by now. Us people, we love the shit out of our vicious vengeful vendettas, don't we. Frank Herbert got that right as all hell.

Trouble is, ol' Frank wasn't any kind of a writer, was he? He had flashes of good phrasemaking, he had long stretches of competent prosemongering, and then there was the rest of the ninety jillion words in the novel. Serviceable is le mot juste. And TBH I feel pretty generous putting it that way.

But then came David Lynch. Oh dear, oh dear. I'm not a worshipper of Lynch's at the best of times. I thought Blue Velvet was brummagem and boring; Twin Peaks was portentous twaddle. So the Kool-Aid passed my seat, I fear. His 1984 adaptation of Dune was downright laughable. I left the theater torn between gales of laughter and gusts of grief-stricken tears. Sting in that stupid winged underwear! KYLE MacLACHLAN as Paul Atreides!! Ludicrous, all of it, and the problems started with the butchery of so much of the novel that even the bones were scattered in no sensible pattern. Inevitable, really, as the runtime of the film was a paltry two hours and seventeen minutes. Imagine trying to wedge a 600-page magnum opus dense with world-building and replete with internal ironies and levels of meaning into the length of a good winter's nap. Didn't work so good.

SciFi Channel, gods please bless their collective hides, approved a mini-series written and directed by John Harrison in 2000. It was 4:17:07 in total. That was *almost* enough to do justice to the story. The result was infinitely superior to the Lynch version. It was a joy to watch for me, a forty-year-old cruelly wounded mess of a man, and felt like a balm to my fanboy memory of the novel. Perfect? No. Great? Yep!

Then I found it on YouTube and thought I'd take a respite from reality by giving it a rewatch.

You know what? Special effects age badly. Mid-budget TV ones age really, really, really badly. The screenplay clunked a good deal. The story, however, was all there and was well done, with the prunings and bonsai sculptings well chosen and well shaped. And the story was just about as timely as anything I could've hoped to avoid!

Dune bashed me upside the temples with its portrayal of the collapse of Empire and revolution of the have-nots in a way it couldn't have 17 or 42 years ago. It felt more timely, it packed more wallop than it possibly could have in fatter times. This is my idea of good myth-making: A story that isn't finished telling us the truth yet, and doing so in a way that compels, impels, propels us to go on the journey ready or not. The idea of a Savior come to rescue us is eternally appealing, the sight of the unworthy getting their comeuppance is evergreen. It wasn't what I was seeking, wasn't escapist boom-bang-blowwie, but it was what I needed. A bit of heartening to fight again, odds be buggered.

And now I'm told that there's a new version on the way, possibly to be directed by Denis Villeneuve of Arrival fame. That's some fire-power there. A director with clout and access to Hollywood's cash box could do something special with this epic...though I'm still very concerned with the issues inevitable in adapting the story to movie length.

Isn't it interesting how every decade seems to call for a new version of the story? The 1960s had the novel; the 1970s the unmade Alejandro Jodorowsky adaptation, a perfect reflection of the decade's malaise/limitation mentality; the 1980s cheesy, overblown one-note-and-it's-the-wrong-one ethos; the 1990s void, again perfectly in keeping with the culture; the 2000s TV version, as everything shrunk in the aftermath of the floodwaters of Bush's election stealing; and now a big-budget, major-talent remake! That hasn't happened yet! And bids fair not to, in the parlous economic times ahead!

Frank Herbert's Dune is a great rewatch. The novel hasn't finished with us yet. I hope it won't any time soon.

LEVIATHAN'S WAKE, first book in a busy series whose Syfy adaptation is better

LEVIATHAN WAKES
JAMES S.A. COREY (The Expanse, #1)
Orbit Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

**UPDATE 22 December 2016** This is a mea-culpa of epic proportions. Syfy did a stellar job of making this series. I couldn't have been more wrong about the series, though I still don't like the books. This YouTube video of a Google Talk from 2014 is a terrific proof of why the series works so well. Excellent television! Binge on the series at Prime for the holidays.

**UPDATE 6 September 2013** More Suckass News Dept, from SFSignal: "Variety is reporting that scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Iron Man and Children of Men) will script the pilot of the how called The Expanse, which is based on the series of novels written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey.

The book series cosnsists of Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, Abaddon’s Gate and the soon-to-be-released Cibola Burn.

The Expanse will be an hour long SciFi drama “with elements of a detective procedural, centring on a cover-up of the discovery of alien life”.

Not much else is known at this point. Stay tuned!"

Yuck. Couldn't pick a GOOD series. No no no.

The Publisher Says: Humanity has colonized the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond - but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations - and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

My Review: Exactly half-way to a five-star world-beating yodel-worthy space opera. An extremely interesting choice of time to explore, sort of late Red Mars-to-early-Green Mars time. A choice group of characters, the standard Hero's Journey plot, and away we go!

Only we don't so much. We stall out on characterization...flat-ish, unsurprising...we hop around in PoV terms until I feel like a flea on a chihuahua that ate some coffee beans and is more manic than usual. We keep events hurtling along, far too many of them in fact, and we mangle our hands in the machinery of alienness.

We did too much, ate too much, played too rough. Our tummy hurts now, and we need a nap.

Plus? I hate the ending so much I want to send the editor a nastygram. THIS COULD HAVE AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIXED. It's not for the author to do, this is a collaboration and that means sometimes a referee is needed. This was one of them. No way would I read the next book! And that's sad, because I really really like The Expanse and its cool politics and people.

One thing the show does brilliantly is make the stark divide between haves and have-nots graphic and inescapable. The Economic Royalists of The Expanse are made plain, their motives are plain, and their corruption is inescapable. This series, filmed for me but certainly the books are a great option for others, is must-see, must-read, must-absorb for the world of 2017.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, a classic SF novel coming to a TV near you

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Penguin Galaxy
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A human raised on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith has just arrived on planet Earth. Among his people for the first time, he struggles to understand the social mores and prejudices of human nature that are so alien to him, while his own “psi” powers—including telepathy, clairvoyance, telekenesis, and teleportation—make him a type of messiah figure among humans. "Stranger in a Strange Land" grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a classic in a few short years. The story of the man from Mars who taught humankind grokking and water-sharing—and love—it is Robert A. Heinlein’s masterpiece.

My Review: I gave it 4 stars for memory's sake. Now the folks at Syfy are adapting it for TV! Amazing to me that, once considered too racy for publication unexpurgated, it's now a TV-able property. For all its many faults, I'm glad Society has caught up with Heinlein's libertarian 'tude towards sex.

I read this as a preteen SF hound. It wasn't a favorite of my older sister's, so she tossed her copy at me one day while I was hanging around her place with an airy "if you're bored, read this" and two days later I came up for air. I think the primary appeal for me was the unapologetic therefore un-prurient sexuality of it. I wasn't taken with the philosophical bits at that point.

I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they don’t give kissing their whole attention. They can’t. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else. Missing the last bus—or their chances of making the gal—or their own techniques in kissing—or maybe worry about jobs, or money, or will husband or papa or the neighbors catch on. Mike doesn’t have technique . . . but when Mike kisses you he isn’t doing anything else. You’re his whole universe . . . and the moment is eternal because he doesn’t have any plans and isn’t going anywhere. Just kissing you.

That makes a person's interest in intimacy make sense. It's not cheesy hyperbolic overwrought smutty silliness. It's direct and clear and a darn good roadmap for an innocent to follow when sex finally stops being theoretical.

But time marches on. By age 17 or so, I was a theatre fag and ever so impressed with Theories of Beauty and Paradigms of Truth. I loved this:

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.

Now, see? This is meat and drink to a kid in search of a way to integrate Art into his or her thoughtscape. It's both explanation and challenge, it takes aim at Artyness and fires bullets of Art to smash the Artful. Me likee.

But years have a bad habit of marching ever onward. Events occur that alter an individual's take on self, world, art; that also shatter Society's old consensus on ideas, attitudes, conventions:

Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s at least partly her own fault.

Uh. NO. And there's no room for argument. That's a categorical NO. As in not ever, in no way, at no time. That shit still flies around, as the Stanford Rapist case demonstrates. The little shit was laughing, LAUGHING, about what he'd done when he was caught; he got out of jail, not prison, in record time because "good behavior" somehow mattered; and he's had to register as a sex offender but still manages to live a full social life. Would you be seen dead near his morally degenerate, aesthetically repellent carcass? I know I wouldn't. And that is a very common attitude, I'm extremely happy to say, it's not as if there is no consequence to his action. Not enough by any means, don't get me wrong. He deserves to be under the prison for what he did to Amber Heard. But we're openly talking about it and many, many more people think my way than Heinlein's or the Stanford Rapist's about it.

I won't even go into Heinlein's anti-gay nature. It's not worth my time.

But can I dismiss the young boy's many positive take-aways because the old man sees what was once invisible to his youthful self? On balance, and after thinking about it for a few years, I conclude that I can't simply erase the good and useful lessons I myownself got from several readings of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. If I'd read it for the first time this year, I wouldn't even have finished it. I'd be furious at any number of things. But I didn't, and that balances out my modern sensibility's outrage.

Penguin, that stodgy old house of classics sheathed in orange, includes this book in a six-volume set of modern classics of SF. Their sales pitch is very effective:

Six of our greatest masterworks of science fiction and fantasy, in dazzling collector-worthy hardcover editions, and featuring a series introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, Penguin Galaxy represents a constellation of achievement in visionary fiction, lighting the way toward our knowledge of the universe, and of ourselves. From historical legends to mythic futures, monuments of world-building to mind-bending dystopias, these touchstones of human invention and storytelling ingenuity have transported millions of readers to distant realms, and will continue for generations to chart the frontiers of the imagination.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Dune by Frank Herbert
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer by William Gibson

All titles I'd agree are seminal in SF, and are well worth celebrating with handsome editions.