The thing is, I like the things in DE that BH/KJA *didn't* use
Posted: 22 Feb 2019 23:34
Such as:
1. leaving the chronology stretched out by the extra 2-3,000 years so that we don't get foldspace until 3096 AD, but then we have foldspace without accuracy for 11,000 years until the Jihad.
(So that you could do a 'jump' to roughly the right star system, but maybe you run out of life support before you get to your target planet. It's a crapshoot, or you get lost in foldspace like heighliners now and then were supposed to have gotten lost)
Whereas they develop foldspace right before Jihad in the Brianverse.
The deal with the Guild was the -precision-, not the bare ability to fold space at all. Linear prescience put you -right- on target.
1A. Keeping Irulan's regency intact during 10196 as it's mentioned in the first Dune book's appendix.
There was so much potential there for Gaius Helen, the Tleilaxu, everyone to be screaming 'you're the regent! kill Paul kill him kill him before your term expires'. Much fun to be had there. Also it's consistent with the legal machinery of the Landsraad being super slow that she would be regent for a number of months if not the whole year. And for Shaddam to actually stay de jure emperor for 3 years before that.
1B (these lettered entires being chronology-related things). I think Duncan Prime's birth being depicted as 10158 makes a lot more sense than the prequels idea of him being as old as Duke Leto (being born in 10140 instead). Duncan is supposed to be younger, but -just- old enough to maybe be in his early twenties when he takes Paul to the fish market.
1C. With reference to 2,000 BG - AG 0 : The treatment of the Landsraad as already being around for 2,000 years prior to the Butlerian Jihad with an almost perfect sitting record, thank you very much, instead of the Jihad being the sudden start of Everything. Signs that the communications breakthrough from the 1-D Holtzman Theory etc were causing what-would-be the Imperium to already be coming together quite nicely on its own, with the Battle of Corrin being more of a 'freak accident' that accelerated unification. And the absence of any Cymek Anything, praise be.
2. Holtzman's story is so so much much better as a cyborg that lives as part of a robot ship for 7500 years. With his brain sped up 30:1. Which would actually give you enough -time- to think of the next Einstein-level breakthroughs like relativity, four times over. (Holtzman's theories for each dimension). Tio Holtzman in the Brianverse is in contrast such a little 30 year old snot, like Mozart.
...Ibrahim Vaughan all the way.
3. The list and timing of the emperors of the known universe list, just generally as an outline. (This is akin to Point 1 above because it massively improves the sense of scale).
4. The list of the great houses. The coats are arms are entertaining, at least it was attempted (which is the feeling one gets about the DE as an entirety), clearly a Bull instead of a gryphon for Harkonnen is incorrect, though.
5. The discussion of the monthly Guild cargo 'mail drops' and the way votes were redistributed every 10 years, in the Landsraad article.
I thought the way they discussed how Saudir I wheeled and dealed to get the Great Synod going was pretty well written.
And just generally how the Emperor never directly controlled more than 20% of the shares, and indirectly more than 35% of CHOAM. And then that one of the reasons the Atreides were up in arms was that Shaddam was starting to edge higher than that.
("I just love it when a girl says 'Sysselraad' to me.") But seriously, folks...
6. Some of the more clever Duncan Idaho ghola articles and not the others. I thought the research the one Duncan did into Hardison's disease was a tricky little article. Not so much the female duncan (although the question does arise about the passage in the BG report in God Emperor about the "one attempt to tamper with their creation" does this refer to the female Duncan or to Duncan-10208 being enhanced as a philosopher).
7. I personally enjoy the oxygen saga article. And some of the astronomy of the Canopus system where it doesn't contradict things.
8. The chemistry of melange is cool, it's a huge polymer like lignin in tree sap. (Maybe you have to be a paper science graduate to appreciate that).
9. The article on Ecaz being a plants-planet (Think "Class L planet" in Star Trek) that got nuked. and Fogwood was cool.
10. the No-Room article is Okay as it stands. I am one of those that thinks the no-globe was built more around only a few hundred years before Leto II's death (AG 12900? 13000 dead on?) so that "millennia" is at most Two millennia. That way the Harkonnens could reasonably have stolen some Ixian ideas for it. Otherwise if you put the no-globe farther back then why aren't there 50 no-globes -not- by the Harkonnens and then Leto II's prescient Map of the known universe has holes in it like swiss cheese?...and then why is Hwi's particular birth in just one of those holes all that special.
11. Gunseng Harkonnen. This version of Vladimir's father as sort of a 'good' Harkonnen with above-average smarts, was pretty nice. And it also helps explain where Abulurd and his son Rabban got -their- (underappreciated) smarts.
12. The discussion of how Hwi Noree might have been a doubling of Feyd-Rautha's X chromosome by itself was pretty good. I wonder that BH/KJA didn't steal some of that idea and create 'Marie', the daughter that Margot had with Feyd. There might be some overlap of some kind there.
If we take those few things and toss most of the rest...
People are in here bashing on DE just because it appears KJA/BH employed it. But people that enjoyed DE can virulently disavow -how- they employed it and think of ways the Good Parts of it could have been more strictly adhered to. There's plenty of room for that and I daresay things generally might have gone that way had McNelly and FH lived long enough to collaborate on the Jihad prequel themselves.
1. leaving the chronology stretched out by the extra 2-3,000 years so that we don't get foldspace until 3096 AD, but then we have foldspace without accuracy for 11,000 years until the Jihad.
(So that you could do a 'jump' to roughly the right star system, but maybe you run out of life support before you get to your target planet. It's a crapshoot, or you get lost in foldspace like heighliners now and then were supposed to have gotten lost)
Whereas they develop foldspace right before Jihad in the Brianverse.
The deal with the Guild was the -precision-, not the bare ability to fold space at all. Linear prescience put you -right- on target.
1A. Keeping Irulan's regency intact during 10196 as it's mentioned in the first Dune book's appendix.
There was so much potential there for Gaius Helen, the Tleilaxu, everyone to be screaming 'you're the regent! kill Paul kill him kill him before your term expires'. Much fun to be had there. Also it's consistent with the legal machinery of the Landsraad being super slow that she would be regent for a number of months if not the whole year. And for Shaddam to actually stay de jure emperor for 3 years before that.
1B (these lettered entires being chronology-related things). I think Duncan Prime's birth being depicted as 10158 makes a lot more sense than the prequels idea of him being as old as Duke Leto (being born in 10140 instead). Duncan is supposed to be younger, but -just- old enough to maybe be in his early twenties when he takes Paul to the fish market.
1C. With reference to 2,000 BG - AG 0 : The treatment of the Landsraad as already being around for 2,000 years prior to the Butlerian Jihad with an almost perfect sitting record, thank you very much, instead of the Jihad being the sudden start of Everything. Signs that the communications breakthrough from the 1-D Holtzman Theory etc were causing what-would-be the Imperium to already be coming together quite nicely on its own, with the Battle of Corrin being more of a 'freak accident' that accelerated unification. And the absence of any Cymek Anything, praise be.
2. Holtzman's story is so so much much better as a cyborg that lives as part of a robot ship for 7500 years. With his brain sped up 30:1. Which would actually give you enough -time- to think of the next Einstein-level breakthroughs like relativity, four times over. (Holtzman's theories for each dimension). Tio Holtzman in the Brianverse is in contrast such a little 30 year old snot, like Mozart.
...Ibrahim Vaughan all the way.
3. The list and timing of the emperors of the known universe list, just generally as an outline. (This is akin to Point 1 above because it massively improves the sense of scale).
4. The list of the great houses. The coats are arms are entertaining, at least it was attempted (which is the feeling one gets about the DE as an entirety), clearly a Bull instead of a gryphon for Harkonnen is incorrect, though.
5. The discussion of the monthly Guild cargo 'mail drops' and the way votes were redistributed every 10 years, in the Landsraad article.
I thought the way they discussed how Saudir I wheeled and dealed to get the Great Synod going was pretty well written.
And just generally how the Emperor never directly controlled more than 20% of the shares, and indirectly more than 35% of CHOAM. And then that one of the reasons the Atreides were up in arms was that Shaddam was starting to edge higher than that.
("I just love it when a girl says 'Sysselraad' to me.") But seriously, folks...
6. Some of the more clever Duncan Idaho ghola articles and not the others. I thought the research the one Duncan did into Hardison's disease was a tricky little article. Not so much the female duncan (although the question does arise about the passage in the BG report in God Emperor about the "one attempt to tamper with their creation" does this refer to the female Duncan or to Duncan-10208 being enhanced as a philosopher).
7. I personally enjoy the oxygen saga article. And some of the astronomy of the Canopus system where it doesn't contradict things.
8. The chemistry of melange is cool, it's a huge polymer like lignin in tree sap. (Maybe you have to be a paper science graduate to appreciate that).
9. The article on Ecaz being a plants-planet (Think "Class L planet" in Star Trek) that got nuked. and Fogwood was cool.
10. the No-Room article is Okay as it stands. I am one of those that thinks the no-globe was built more around only a few hundred years before Leto II's death (AG 12900? 13000 dead on?) so that "millennia" is at most Two millennia. That way the Harkonnens could reasonably have stolen some Ixian ideas for it. Otherwise if you put the no-globe farther back then why aren't there 50 no-globes -not- by the Harkonnens and then Leto II's prescient Map of the known universe has holes in it like swiss cheese?...and then why is Hwi's particular birth in just one of those holes all that special.
11. Gunseng Harkonnen. This version of Vladimir's father as sort of a 'good' Harkonnen with above-average smarts, was pretty nice. And it also helps explain where Abulurd and his son Rabban got -their- (underappreciated) smarts.
12. The discussion of how Hwi Noree might have been a doubling of Feyd-Rautha's X chromosome by itself was pretty good. I wonder that BH/KJA didn't steal some of that idea and create 'Marie', the daughter that Margot had with Feyd. There might be some overlap of some kind there.
If we take those few things and toss most of the rest...
People are in here bashing on DE just because it appears KJA/BH employed it. But people that enjoyed DE can virulently disavow -how- they employed it and think of ways the Good Parts of it could have been more strictly adhered to. There's plenty of room for that and I daresay things generally might have gone that way had McNelly and FH lived long enough to collaborate on the Jihad prequel themselves.