Notices by 獣耳会社ｗａｎ (wan@poa.st)

@wgiwf @soravu These creatures are so beset by their own survival hinging on hiding how creepy they really are that they can't experience anything without also seeing themselves experiencing it through an imaginary hostile other's eyes, constantly checking to see if the mask's slipping.

We don't look creepy when we like attractive women – after all, everyone likes attractive women – but they do, because they are, and they assume everyone else must be foul to the core too.

Herbert suffers from an under-recognized problem when historically-ignorant readers read “science fiction” decades or centuries after it was written: they mistake science for fiction—where it was simply forgotten science.

When the science in SF survives the passage of time, we regard it as simply ordinary science or as an insightful prediction of the future; when it turns out to be wrong, we may write it off as fiction. This leads to a bizarre insistence on treating scientific content as purely literary, shoehorning it into some literary framework like Freudianism or feminism—which is about as likely to yield genuine critical insight into classic SF as a read of Moby-Dick by someone determined to remain ignorant of what a ‘whale’ is. ...
...
Herbert made use of psi (still taken seriously at the time), extrapolation from the use of pheromones in insects to humans (though pheromones don’t even affect sexual behavior), various wooly ideas about transgenerational memory (never passed from woo to reality—sorry, “epigenetics” ain’t it either), Walter’s theory of warfare (crankery), and multilevel group selection (possibly under highly limited circumstances, the extent of which is still debated), Californian Human Potential Movement beliefs about trainability of raw human abilities exemplified by Dianetics etc (a profound disappointment)… As they are presented as part of worldbuilding, it’s easy to simply accept them as fiction, no more intended as science than manticores.

This works fine for Dune 56+ years later, because they are fun, and aren’t the focus. ... In contrast, Herbert’s Destination: Void, which is devoid of interesting plot or characters, and is a long author-tract about his idiosyncratic interpretations of early cybernetics & speculation about AI, is unreadable today.

— https://gwern.net/dune-genetics