Don’t get me wrong, a reader can work the way toward an analogous context–instead of spice, oil; instead of the Bene Gesserit, Islam; instead of the Lansraad or CHOAM, the United Nations and OPEC–but it becomes a forced analogy without the added context of the future born of the changes Herbert assumed. Remove the quest for the Quisatz Haderach, it becomes a poorly constructed (maybe not so poorly) fable about modern day Middle East rivalries.

My point being that the Context is as much a character in this instance as Paul or the Baron or Chayni, and to suggest that because that Context is equally important to the humans in the narrative somehow lessens the work (in terms of genre vs mainstream) is missing the point of genre entirely.

Whereas the original exists no matter what its context.

I dunno. It’s cold, cold, cold and the brain feels like street slush — dirty, ugly and more than a little inconvenient.

Love, C.

IIRC, this was the most heavily edited of his novels as well.

But this context makes his work more substantial as time goes on, while the prequel novels written by his son and ? — I forget who — are what are insubstantial for they are not born of Herbert’s real experience in the real world context. These are the books that make no sense at all outside of their context.

Dune is the orginal, the pattern, and it makes its own sense, standing alone, even outside genre. Just as Tolkien’s LoTR does, but the umpteenth generation imitation, like Eregon, for instance, cannot.

Love, C.

Without its context, “Dune� becomes meaningless.

That isn’t absolute. The more you know of Sahellian, Islamic Africa, and Saudi, while Herbert was stationed there, and traveled all through the region and the Middle East, the more of it you recognize in Dune, including names and geography, and even customs and beliefs and languages.

Even more so now, since we’ve had our own, current “information revolution.”

OTOH, maybe I am missing what you are saying.

I’m so busy — just got back home, and am leaving again tomorrow.

Love, C.

I think the best example I can give of this is the character of the moneylender. I’ve yet to see one in any work of fiction successfully forclose on a mortgage. Either the widow somehow comes up with the money with solutions ranging from resourceful children to improbably rich kindly suitors or else the miser chooses that day for a nervous breakdown, usually brought on by ghosts, winsome children and/or improbable cheeriness.

Basically I’d say a conceit is a trope that you need to suspend disbelief for.

A formula is necessarily restrictive. “Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.” If you don’t follow the recipe precisely, the Holy Hand-Grenade will not explode.

But the root meaning of paradigm is “example” and I really think that’s how our sense of genre is formed. “This book has spaceships and multicolored rays, like Doc Smith; I’ll put it in the box with the Lensman series. This one has elves; I’ll put it in the same box with The Lord of the Rings.” Eventually the boxes get tags (”space opera”; “high fantasy”; “mysteries where the murderer sings ‘Banana Phone’”, etc. But these are really just abstractions from a set of specific examples. If the set of accepted examples grows, the borders of the genre can expand. (Likewise they can contract if the set of defining examples shrinks.)

It also makes worldbuilding understandable. In a way, all of these different genres, even ones set in the ‘real world,’ are engaged in worldbuilding or at least world-defining what is worth examining and what isn’t.

But how does that related to the recent discussion of worldbuilding as the province of nerds?