Dune 2 sci fi or fantasy?

Not sure if this belongs here or in fantasy, so Ill ask here; which one is it?

I read this book when I was 14, and several times after, imagining picture of the story in my head. Gotta say that Dune1 and 2 match those images almost verbatim. There are things that are left out or changed but not enough for me to to be bothered by it. If you read the book,you must see this movie. Now to wait to wait for part 3 which is going to include Dune Messiah.....

Dune is similar to Star Wars -- Science Fantasy. It straddles the lines enough to blur them.

There's a reason the two genres are often shelved together in bookstores & libraries.

And of course, almost all SF is fantasy in one sense. In our current knowledge, FTL space travel is just as inexplicable as precognition (spice) or The Force (Star Wars).

Herbert wrote "Dune" at a time when psychic forces seemed like a perfectly acceptable thing to be in a science fiction novel, particularly if you wanted to get published in John Campbell's "Astounding/Analog."

I would call it SF, because, in theory at least, there is a scientific explanation for how we got from where we are to where they are. We often associate tropes such as messiahs with fantasy, because it uses them so much, but using them does not make a book a fantasy.

I am rereading the entirety of the Dune Chronicles. Right now I am finishing up Heretics of Dune. On this reread I would categorize Dune as Science Fantasy. Our current understanding of DNA in no way supports Herbert’s ideas of ancient memories being encoded in our DNA. It makes no sense. So, gotta suspend my disbelief to enjoy the book. A little difficult for me being a biologist. But I suspect physicists have the same difficulty when it comes to FTL drives.

I have not yet seen the new Dune 2 movie but I sure hope they follow the lead of 2001 and Silent Running rather than Star Wars and make space silent. That always drives me nuts when SciFi movies make it seem like you can hear spaceships fly by or laser beams make a sound in space. It’s space! There is no air to make sound.

Drives me nuts…

I for one don't think that science fiction needs to be bound by mechanistic materialism.

But I agree that loud noises "in space" are silly. I excuse them only as a sort of signification. But it is eerier and more dramatic when the realistic silence is represented.

>7 paradoxosalpha: hmmm… does science fiction need to be bound by mechanistic materialism… I think you are correct that it doesn’t in the context of our current understanding of how the universe works. But for me the difference between science fiction and fantasy is that SF at least tries to ground the fiction part in science. For me, good SF tries to extend current knowledge to what might be. Sometimes that leap to the unknown is more difficult for some than others depending upon what they already know. I think it is easier to suspend disbelief if your knowledge of how something is understood is limited. Whereas the more you know about a knowledge area the more difficult it becomes.

Fantasy, in contrast, makes no effort to embed the fiction in current knowledge simply stating that it is magic. And I am ok with that as long as the narrative keeps to the rules established by the structure of the magic laid down in the story. Otherwise anything can happen and then it becomes less interesting for me. The story is interesting when it requires the protagonists to figure out a way to solve what ever problem is the crux of the narrative by working within the constraints of the fantasy structure.

I like structure, rules and then reading about how people have to be clever to solve an issue by working within the constraints that bind the world together.

Whoa! That was a longer response than I anticipated. 😀 Thanks for the prompt.

>8 Neil_Luvs_Books:

Sure thing! My remark about mechanistic materialism was specifically a reaction to your statement: Our current understanding of DNA in no way supports Herbert’s ideas of ancient memories being encoded in our DNA. It makes no sense.

Now I haven't read Dune in a long time, and I've never read Heretics of Dune, so maybe that's a fair ding on Herbert's actual language. But if his notions of race memory didn't use "DNA" as such (or even if they just used a now-outmoded but then-feasible understanding of what could possibly be involved with "DNA"), I'm willing to credit him with an attempt to extend current knowledge to what might be.

Physical heredity might be far better understood today than it was in the 1960s, but even morphogenesis is still rather murky, and consciousness is as big a mystery as ever.

I think SCI/FI. I read a definition somewhere that said Fantasy has to have some element of magic in it. Not a perfect delineator, but better than nothing. So, if you use that premise Dune has to be SCI/FI as it has no magic of any sort in it.

>6 Neil_Luvs_Books: I read them all a long time ago, and I thought it started getting weird after book 2. I found Chapterhouse Dune to be excellent. It really felt, to me, that he was getting back to the original Dune (which of course was phenomenal). Give the new stuff a whirl that his son wrote. It's excellent if you enjoy the original series.
I saw Dune part 2 comes to Max soon, Can't wait. First movie was great, but there were a couple of terrible casting choices. Don't get me started on that!

I think and teach a lot about genre in general and sf in particular, I love this kind of stuff.

>10 Authjgab: To me, this just punts the issue. Now instead of having to define "sf" or "fantasy," we have to define "magic." What is magic?

>12 Stevil2001:
“Magic” = “Any sufficiently advanced technology”

Credit: A. C. Clarke

>13 pgmcc: One of my students almost always brings that up!

To be fair, Clarke wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology" would be indistinguishable from magic, which does not exactly make it identical with magic. It invokes a frame of reference, from which the technology is "advanced" and for which it may be considered magic and treated as such.

The implicit definition of magic in this discussion of fantasy v. sf almost certainly needs the qualification supernatural. I don't suppose that anyone considers prestidigitation or legerdemain to be a paradigmatic ingredient of fantasy. Nor does the naturalistic definition of magick from Aleister Crowley ("the art and science of causing change in conformity with will") help to circumscribe either genre.

Frankly I think Dune is chock full of virtually supernatural business. Superluminal interstellar travel would have to be at the top of the list, just as much as mystically-grounded precognitions. And these two things might share a common basis in violating our understanding of time. Now, I do consider Dune to be sf, both because it is putatively formulated as a far-future extension of our actual history, and because of the accommodation that Clarke's maxim permits: It is possible that what looks supernatural to us simply relies on knowledge and techniques too far beyond our current ken.

FTL, time travel, telepathy, precognition -- there are many common SF tropes that are magic, but they don't make stories that use them fantasy, as long as they are "our universe + standard SF magic trope". Borderline is when a non-standard bit of magic is invoked, like D G Compton's Ascendancies where manna falls from the skies and people randomly disappear. Whether this is SF or magical realism is not clear to me. I felt it was not SF because no one had any interest in studying causes and properties of the phenomenon.

Dune broke so many boundaries. It was one of the first, if not the first major SCI FI release to completely disconnect humans from any attachment to Earth. Herbert shattered that idea and took it to the bank. So in that aspect it leans towards True Blue Science Fiction and Fantasy. But it broke ground with the Religious, sexual and multitudes of other themes. The lack of computers and reliance on mousetrap mechanics says a lot. Since Dune there have been a zillion books and franchises that have copied it and used those ideas for inspiration. From Star Wars, Game of Thrones, to The Wheel of Time. Dune was far ahead of its time in the genre just like Burroughs was with the John Carter stories.

Having now watched the second part of the Villeneuve film, I was struck by how much he downplayed one of the key spiritual issues of the story, the role of the Kwisatz Haderach. Unless my attention wandered at some point in the whole 165 minutes, or there was a consequence to my failing to put the subtitles on, there was no attempt to show Paul Atreides being able to look deep into the Bene Gesserit collective psyche and access their collective memories. The role of the spice in enabling Guild Navigators to do their stuff also seems to have been glossed over. This was either Villeneuve turning away from some of the more mystical themes in the book, or it was dumbing down the film for a particular audience segment.

>18 RobertDay:

I felt like the Kwisatz Haderach powers were given more at secondhand by focusing on Jessica's accession to Reverend Mother, requiring the audience to infer the consequences for Paul.

I agree that the Guild Navigators appear to have been given short shrift overall.

>18 RobertDay: As much as I love the movies...the more I watch them the more I see just how thin the screenwriters stretched the premise and just how much was really left out. I was disappointed that Thufur just up and disappeared. Plus there were of course the more adult and disturbing aspects of the Harkonnens left out so a broader and younger audience could be reached.

>17 Joligula:

Not sure what you mean there’s no attachment to Earth? The Earthbound part of humanity’s history is recalled, if imperfectly.

>20 Joligula: I'd forgotten about Thufir Hawat, which given his removal from Part 2, isn't surprising.

>21 AndreasJ: I had to think about this, but on reflection I think I agree with JHemlock. The "distant/forgotten Earth" theme is reasonably common in written sf, though not encountered all that frequently - perhaps the best example I can think of is Jack McDevitt's A Talent for War which took me rather aback (pleasantly) with its sense of a humanity-filled galaxy with a distant, insignificant Earth that people don't believe in any more. Of course, this is also present in Asimov's original Foundation trilogy. But it's far less common with films/media, where audiences are assumed to need some sort of obvious link back to Earth. Even in Alien, Earth is the destinati0n of the Nostromo, though we don't get to see it until the next film. Avatar has its prologue set on Earth; and most other films with alien planet settings (Enemy Mine, Forbidden Planet) start with the premise that the spaceships set out from Earth and we are still only at the beginning of our expansion across the galaxy.

And then there's the whole Star Wars franchise.....

>22 RobertDay: In the 1978 version of TV's "Battlestar Galactica," the "ragtag fugitive fleet" of humans was in search of the legendary planet Earth, upon which it was said the lost 13th tribe of humanity had long ago settled.

>23 Betelgeuse: Indeed. Certainly a "forgotten Earth", though as the point of the show was the characters' quest for Us, the Earth focus was strong enough for me to discount it in my initial round-up.

The more recent reboot continued the theme, though their world-building (especially in the spin-off, Caprica) never struck me as being sufficiently different from human societies (I mean, how likely is it that two separate human societies would each independently decide that taxis should be painted yellow? I mean, there's only an ocean separating the UK and the USA, and our taxis are black.). (Usually.)

>24 RobertDay: Good point! I'm the guy who hasn't seen the recent reboot.

>22 RobertDay:

But Earth isn't forgotten in Dune. We don't get any indication what if any role it plays at the time the story takes place, but the time when humanity lived only there is remembered, if imperfectly (we're told, frex, that the first use of atomic weapons was in a conflict between House Washington and House Tokyo).

>26 AndreasJ: Well I guess I need to go back and reread it. It has been about ten years.