Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Yes. Maybe more self-consciously literary than Dune or New Sun, kind of reminds me of some of Gene Wolfe's other stuff in that respect, but still rooted in big-world SF with shades of cosmic horror. Very distinctive feeling - generally bleak, sometimes full-on nasty, but also kind of romantic in some sense.
 

version

Well-known member
From an interview with a neo Nazi.

One of the things that I most like about the neo-reactionaries is that they’ve learned a lesson that I learned years ago. For years, the most influential book on me was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the most influential piece of fiction, but that changed, and eventually I realized that the piece of fiction that’s had the most influence on my thinking is Frank Herbert’s Dune.

The thing that fascinates me with Dune is its combination of futurism with archaic values and social forms which is basically what Guillaume Faye talks about in his book Archeofuturism as the way forward. We need to reinfuse modernity with certain things that are treated as archaic, and that means identity politics, an aristocratic ethos, a warrior ethos, and things that have been bred out of us by consumerism and bourgeois modernity.

So, Herbert basically applied himself to this question: what social form is consistent with mankind ascending to the stars and colonizing the galaxy? And it was very obvious to him that that was not consistent with democratic politics which has a very low time horizon. It requires grand politics, grand visions, a grand strategy stretching forward over generations, and we had that briefly under the pressure of the Cold War and because Kennedy was a visionary, but politics as usual took over. Space exploration has faltered, “because democracy.”

What you would need to reignite that is some kind of society like we had pre-modernity where we had aristocracies that thought in dynastic terms, where you had orders like the Catholic Church that thought in very long terms over time and perpetuated themselves over time.
 

version

Well-known member
Reminds me of what you were saying about people on the right basing their politics on character models from fantasy games etc.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I rote a fing about Dune a couple of years back. (Yes, I know, it's craner-level - even luka-level! - spamming.)

 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
i wish i could remember where i got it. my guess is it wasnt a real neo-nazi it was probably someone vim or craner liked and i called him a nazi to try and wind them up. something along those lines
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
anyone who reads Dune and thinks Herbert was arguing for "aristocracy, but in space" has really missed the point
Fascists and others on the far right taking myths, philosophy and classic stories and missing the point of them entirely is a pretty well-established tradition by now, of course.

Edit: just seen your subsequent post - indeed.
 
Top