better do both just in case
edit: guys maths is HARD
math is fun!
the “moment of relief when the pain recedes” kind of fun. And then you realize you made a trivial mistake in the beginning and all your conclusions were useless.
The Fun of Grim Determination
but I took so many drugs 😭
Masochist!
Mathochist!
MATH AND DRUGS ARE THE KEYS TO EVERYTHING
Source: myself, a computer science major
Lmao, good to know CS majors haven’t changed.
I’ll see you at FurCon in a few, it’s just a matter of time now.
Damn… I’ve already graduated and am back in my country now :(
I’m sure there are drugs that make math easy. We just need to find them.
They don’t make it easy. They make it better. Source: am mathematician.
Melange, I’m sure. Seeing how it enables you to fold space, I’m assuming it also helps with the math involved.
If it also helps with the math of folding fitted sheets, I’m in!
No form of science or magic can help that. It’s impossible.
From the Wikipedia page for Paul Erdős:
After his mother’s death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that it impacted his performance: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.”[66] After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.[67]
so you’re saying I should add benzedrine
[Relevant]
vs Hyperion:
Dan Simmons: We’re headed for some bleak imperialism nonsense but humanity’s salvation will come from serving AIs we haven’t discovered yet.
I really did not like Hyperion as much as I wanted to. Too many r/thisisdeep moments.
Don’t we eventually find out the AIs are oppressing the humans and siphoning off their life-force/brain-power through the use of the portal system and that humanity’s actual salvation comes from deeply believing in the power of love to the point of developing the ability to teleport to beloved places and people?
yeah IIRC that power of love thing was the way our fleshbag brains could deal with the same stuff that the AIs interacted with directly
Don’t the Dune universe have Mentats?
So, maths and drugs
But the mentats are also on drugs, aren’t they?
Not necessarily, being a mentat doesn’t require the use of spice. Many use it because it enhances their thought process
I find coffee to be up to the task to come up with plans that are better than “let’s give my enemy the best thing ever, because he migjt mess it up and to get his guy to betray him we will torture his wife”. Yeah real wheels within wheels 4D chess going on right there.
Your right about them not necessarily relying on the spice melange, but they do rely on the juice of the sapho root to accelerate their thoughts and increase their processing speed. So yeah, they’re still on drugs :)
Sapho juice.
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If that’s your gripe, you really didn’t understand much about the source books.
No, it’s annoying because they put all the plot points in a blender and are firing the result at us as fast as they can in the name of “surprise!”
Also gaal is a fundamentally annoying character, omniscient mega-genius who is irrational and never understands what she is doing.
I haven’t watched the show (I heard that it isn’t very good) but I loved the books. With that said, Asimov’s writing never seems concerned with gender-specific behavior or interactions between men and women. If I recall correctly, every major character in the trilogy is male, but I think that was just the default assumption at the time the books were written and Asimov had no interest in analyzing that assumption. Therefore, simply changing some characters to women can make the story more realistic to a modern audience while preserving everything important in the books (as long as there aren’t romance subplots, because Asimov characters are incapable of romantic love).
Let’s see. The prequel his bodyguard and later wife is vital, Daneel isn’t real male or female being a robot, his granddaughter basically started the Second Foundation and saved Sheldon. I can’t remember her name but the leader of the board of the Second Foundation was also a women. Then you add in Bliss plus the two Second Foundation agents, plus the daughter of the resistance.
Seems pretty equal to me.
Blockchain and endorphins save us!
Not totally true, like Asimov’s math wanted to reinstate the Imperium, so is kinda the other way arround.
Yes, it was The Mule that introduced the anomaly.
Hey, for spoilers do:
::: spoiler [visible text]] [spoiler text] :::
Thanks. After 50+ years I did not think it would be a spoiler.
Yeah because all people who want to read said book where alive back then /s smh.
and really, is super easy to just put it as a spoiler.
I was not alive then either and read it decades after it was written. Honestly, I think having to use a spoiler tag for a story written almost 80 years ago is not necessary.
I disagree, Stories doesn’t have an expiration date, you can read today The fundation Unspoiled ADM we should try to keep it that way.
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In Dune, the imperialist “nonsense” was the path to salvation. Genocide by machines was what we were saved from.
yeah, they went well past the Asimov case.
Also the spice is never deemed a path to salvation. it is merely an integral ressource that is stabilizing the human order by mutual dependence. In the later books the problem is explored what happens when the ressource becomes less integral/more abundant, removing the mutual dependence.
I don’t really agree that the spice wasn’t put forward as a way to salvation. I think it clearly was key to finding the golden path.
The spice enabled the Bene Gesserit to see what was needed in their breeding program, and they were trying to breed Kwisatz Haderach who would lead humanity through a dangerous time, avoiding the destruction of the race. (Also the scene in the sietch that I won’t go into detail about, becuase spoilers)
Leto II uses the spice to see the golden path and forge humanity into what it needs to be to survive. (Also the other thing which I haven’t mentioned due to major spoilers of a cool moment).
The spice is pretty clearly necessary for the path taken to salvation.
While the spice may not have been necessary to avoid the destruction of the human race had another path been found, in the story as it was told it was absolutely central.
But that is less the spice and more the prescience. The prescience that failed Paul. Leto II seemed to be clear for the golden path not from the self fullfilling lock-in that prescience created, but from his ability to mediate the other voices he incurred from the spice agony. Something the Bene Gesserit thought only women to be capeable off, but never managed to put to the effect like Leto II could.
Also Leto II was the tyrant and very explicit about his choice of tyranny as the mean to create the golden path, so certainly not a salvation from imperial nonsense.
So i’d say the spice to be crucial in fullfilling many purposes, but it was never the path to salvation itself and it created many more problems along the way.
The spice is the source of the prescience, I don’t think you can draw a line between them (the Tleilaxu could, but even then I think they used what they called synthetic spice, I don’t really recall that very well though).
Aside for that point, yep, I agree with pretty much everything you said!
Unless I’m missing something?
You are not missing something and i agree with your points. I was happy to discuss dune with you, as i get the chance way to seldom. Thank you :)
Have a good day :)
Without spice they can’t fold space either, meaning the empire would collapse without it.
Why not both?
Why not try three fold? Alien A.I technology, psychedelic drugs, and high level mathematical systems all incorporated into painting a potentially very complex future of humanity lol 😉
Neither of the stories present salvation, merely survival.
“from using meth we haven’t discovered yet.”
Foundation: Space Math Dune: Space Meth
Snow Crash: VR Molly
Spice is more LSD than meth.
Thing is, the Asimov Foundation universe could actually fit in the “past” of the Dune universe.
In the non-canon book Psychohistorical Crisis, the Dune universe is part of the past of the Foundation universe. The Fremon are known as the “Frightful People” to historians.
That makes more sense.
This idea is oddly fascinating. Now we just need a good sci-fi writer to produce the “missing link”.
Maybe the robots in Asimov’s universe lead to the creation of Erasmus and eventually the Butlerian Jihad.
Yes, that was my idea too :)
We do. In some of the set in the same universe novels but not written by Asimov there are references to Brain Fever. A disease that virtually 100% of humans get at least once that makes them dumb for life. All advancement in galactic culture comes from the like 1 out of a million people who were immune.
That would account for Dune. Dune only makes sense if you assume that everyone is stupid and living in a hazy of drugged religious fantasy. Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one. Thousands of years of eugenics defeated by 30 cents of earplugs. Dune everybody!
Actually even thufir, the mentat aka human computer, didn’t know about the voice
That’s the plot of Idiocracy
The witches go around when everyone is still young and tell them to never buy earplugs
It’s a forbidden technology, like computers.
It probably is something that freaken dumb as it is Dune. An entire civilization enslaved and broken so inbred monarchy can play with swords. Leave it to those fucking morons to ban gays and women from the military and not discover how to defeat the sexy voice.
Know now that it is the year 18,238 after the great Sunni-Druid Jihad against the water parks. People are enslaved by space-witches that have the power of sexy voice and their halibasters-smegma (ancient swords) are useless.
There. I solved Dune.
You mean the book about a bunch of Muslims who take over the galaxy because they learn Karate?
Yeah, no, The Voice isn’t sexual… like, at all
I agree. Some shrill inbred witch being a space-karen is not sexy.
Dune only works if you assume that the characters are idiots in a religious-drug filled haze. Now polish your space-sword we have to go fight the 19th Buddha-Jewish jihad against the Space-mushroom eater people under the rule of Space-Baron Singh of the space house whalefurer. They harvest space-fur from space-whales.
I think you may have missed my point
It isn’t sexual at all and it isn’t meant to be
After reading your (imo totally idiotic) thoughts about my beloved Dune, I simply wish to never talk to you again. Bye bye!
Ffs the main power of their space witches is to use a sexy voice. Which everyone knows about! Just put in earplugs or jerk off prior or get gay guys or use deaf people or get straight women before dealing with one.
Not only is there nothing in any the books to even suggest that this is the mechanism by which the Voice works, there is a very prominent scene where the main male character uses the Voice to compel other male characters to do his bidding.
(In fact, in the later books a “corrupt” version of the Bene Gesserit shows up that does explicitly use their sexuality as the source of their manipulation power, and the Bene Gesserit find this absolutely abhorrent.)
Can’t hear you. I have earbuds I got from the dollar store. You could try explaining it to me again but you might need a thinking-machine to do it with.
Lord, please deliver us from people with really “clever” hot takes that are horribly reductive and strained through the mesh of whatever synonym for “woke” won’t get me downvoted.
Iain M. Banks: we’re living in an AI-regulated Utopia, but the AI that we totally trust might be doing some light imperialism on the side.
Pratchett / Baxter: we’re headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, and another one, and another one, and another one, and oops, a blank…
Edit: added the Long Earth one.
The Culture weren’t actually the future of humanity though right? Non-canon stuff has indicated we join eventually in the future but the society formed independent of us and even visit and examine us in one.
Actually, you’re right.
Oh well, a humanity, then, just not ours.
The Culture stuff is great but nothing tops The Algebraist. A near-perfect standalone sf doorstop imo.
Big ideas, some laughs, a mystery that you can solve if you’re paying attention, strong characters, interesting aliens…
The last one that hit that sweet spot for me was Mother of Storms by John Barnes.
Hadn’t read The Algebraist yet, so there’s a new one on my list. Thanks! I’ll make sure to check out Barnes, too.
Maybe sometimes there are special circumstances?
Fuck I love the Culture series. Such a good read.
The Culture is so incredibly fascinating. Banks’ death was a loss to science fiction.
Dan Simmons: … but humanity‘s salvation will come from the pedophilia love we always had.
Heinlein: that, but pedophilia and incest.
Possibly with oneself from a different timeline and somehow with both genders at the same time
Heinlein is one of the biggest egg_irl cases of all time.
Both of these are terrible takes on the books.
Spice is not a solution in dune in fact the whole 4th book and the end of the third are centered around forcing humanity to wean itself off spice so that it may evolve.
The central concept is that humanity must not depend on machine or drugs or complicated eugenics and must instead look inwards and improve itself by facing hardship.
In foundation (at least the start) the complicated maths is essentially there to prove that all establishments fail and survival requires constant change. Very differently from dune foundation sees technological superiority as key to this and importantly the ability for society to change in order to support the technological progress.
Even if you don’t agree with the above neither book aims to “fight imperialist bullshit” if anything they both quite staunchly support the idea of a benevolent dictator controlling all.
Ok but to be fair they were using spice for like 5000 years?
It’s honestly crazy how many people can read Dune and completely misunderstand the themes of the book.
Though to be fair, it sometimes feels like Frank himself didn’t fully understand what themes he was going for. Books 1-3 were staunchly “Beware of heroes, charismatic leaders will lead you to evil and despair”, then in GEoD, we find that literally the only hope for humanity was millenia of oppression by a totalitarian government.
But either of those two takes is still wildly better than “spice saves the universe” lol
It wasn’t the qctual only hope, just the only path Paul and Leto could see, and we know they aren’t omniscient
Dune has one of the most complex (and necessarily logical) universe in it. I’m not surprised every reader found different themes more fitting.
Dune had no good guys, none at all.
Everyone was out for themselves or their narrow view of what was just and best for humanity from their simplistic and self-centered perspective.
Leto 2 was the exception because he was out for his narrow view of what was best for humanity from his broad, self-centered perspective that still didn’t really lead anywhere.
The actual point of the books is that no ideal survives the test of real time, and over time civilization tends to ossify, so we are doomed to catastrophe by our very nature.
Or is Dune about the folly of different types of dictatorship; sadistic, benevolent, religious or machiavellian? Taking only the first book (because that’s as far as I’ve read) every leader is thwarted or confined by the consequences or weakness of their own style of leadership.
I read an interview where frank said that his intention was for Dune to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of charismatic leaders (which is to say, the “classic” hero archetype). Which - for the first book - tracks pretty well. The free are basically just used as cannon fodder for Paul to win back his power (and a lot more), then when he wins, he sets them loose on the universe because he can’t control them.
The trouble I have with that though is that he goes on to contradict that point in later books, but I won’t get into that because I don’t want to spoil anything for you
bitch better have my giant exo-foreskin
