August 22, 2006
Book Review: Dune’s vision of ecological futility
Dune’s fortieth anniversary was last year. For anyone who’s read it, the resonant central image of the series is the desert of Arrakis—planetwide and populated only by the Fremen, a ferocious tribe that survives by clinging to every drop of water, and by shai-hulud, the great sandworm. The story’s full of political intrigue and an astonishing cast of characters, cultures, and histories rivaled only by The Lord of the Rings. But Dune is also an environmental exploration, and that’s what I want to talk about.
By the way, this posting is full of spoilers, so stop now if you don’t want to see discussion of some major plot points in Dune. It also only covers the first three books of the Dune Chronicles. Frank Herbert wrote three more after this, and his son co-wrote three more after Herbert’s death.
Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), and Children of Dune (1976), by Frank Herbert.
While Tolkien resisted critics’ attempts to find political lessons in Lord of the Rings,1 Frank Herbert hoped that Dune would help develop some planetary consciousness in a public that was (and is) unfamiliar with the idea that human agency has global effects. Actually, in the universe of Dune, the Atreides’ manipulation of Arrakis’s ecosystem affects the whole planet and politically realigns an entire galaxy.
A major plot point in Dune, and here I’m speaking of the first book particularly, was the revelation that the Fremen had a secret 500-year plan to shift Arrakis’s desert ecosystem into something a lot more hospitable to humans, with surface water, green plants, and the like.2 In Dune Messiah, Paul Atriedes’ ascension to the Imperial throne made it possible to vastly accelerate that plan. And in Children of Dune, Leto II, Paul’s heir, came to realize that the unintended consequences of this terraforming would be the extinction of the sandworms and exhaustion of the galaxy’s only source of the vitally-important drug melange (which the sandworms produce).
It’s impossible to read Dune without being impressed that billions of fates turn on the ecological management of Arrakis. But Dune is not Silent Spring (published three years before). There’s no discussion in Dune of non-intentional effects on the planet, through pollution, construction, overharvesting of melange, etc. Herbert’s ideology is that of the steward, not the conservationist. In fact, at the end of Children of Dune, Leto II decided that to save human lives (long-term), it was necessary to radically accelerate the conversion of Arrakis’s environment, driving the sandworm straight into extinction and giving himself a political stranglehold on the only Imperial stockpiles of melange.3
For Frank Herbert, planetary ecology was something to understand, but it was also something to husband, use and, if necessary, destroy. This kind of stewardship ethic is popular in political discourse today, where it is both attractive and extraordinarily dangerous. Pretty much every character in Dune makes management decisions based on a desire to properly steward Arrakis’s primary natural resource, melange, but all except for Leto II make catastrophically wrong choices leading only to violence and destruction. In particular, Alia (sister of Paul and regent during Leto II’s infancy) attempted to irrigate Arrakis, not appreciating the threat to melange production. This ultimately led to political destabilization and contributed to her fall. Alia and others failed because they either couldn’t see or wouldn’t confront the Big Picture—the full environmental and political consequences—implicated in natural resource stewardship. Only Leto could see the Big Picture and properly husband Arrakis’s ecology. But Leto had superhuman prescient powers.
This is the source of Dune’s overall skepticism. The only person who could effectively husband Arrakis’s resources without destroying himself or, worse, the human race, was basically a superhero. Everyone else—even those with the very best intentions—failed.
The real world doesn’t have a kwisatz haderach—a superbeing like Leto II. Thus, Dune can be read as a polemic against interference with planetary systems. In the absence of complete understanding, unintended consequences are rife.
The characters most idolized in Dune are the Fremen, who typify human honor and dignity throughout the series. Fremen accepted the brutal realities of Arrakis and comported their lifestyle to the planet rather than vice versa. As Arrakis transformed, so did the Fremen, becoming soft, avaricious and cowardly. When we transform our environment, what is left of us?
1 Tolkien’s foreword to Lord of the Rings famously denied that LOTR was allegory for World War II or the beginning of the atomic era.
2 This plan was actually developed by an off-world “planetologist” who came to live on Arrakis and became a Fremen himself. I mention this because “planetologist” is a great word and deserves revival.
3 It’s a brutal political calculus; this is the kind of thing Herbert is famous for and to understand it, you’ll have to read the book.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2006
Book review: Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
Ha ha! When the history of U.Id. is written, the team of responsible kindergartners will take great satisfaction in pointing out that the first book review was not a novel or biography, but technical manual that is likely to make most readers sprain their finger clicking the “Back” button. However, this is a genuinely useful book and I wanted to say a quick word about it.
Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (2nd ed., 1999), by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
For starters, Håkon Wium Lie was W3C’s pointman for years on CSS (the book credits him as the original proponent of CSS way back when); Bert Bos is a longtime W3Cer as well. I mention this because when you read this book you are getting CSS from the horse’s mouth. These guys not only know how to practice CSS, they are believers in the theory as well. This book not only teaches you how to use CSS, but why. Just a few days with it brings across CSS’s three goals of (1) enabling very precise control of page display for designers, while also (2) letting users “tweak” display to suit their own needs, and (3) creating clean HTML in which content and presentation are truly distinct. I am the kind of person who is much more comfortable learning a new skill when I understand why, and this book helps confer that.
What the book doesn’t really do is give you design tips. Once you know what you want to do, this book will help you do it, but if you’re directionless then you’re on your own. That’s why U.Id in the last few days has seen a few tweaks around the edges of the default MT format, but it hasn’t gone further. I’m no designer.
If you’re more interested in the How than the Why, there are probably better books out there for you that will get you to functional CSS faster. But I confess—I actually enjoyed reading Wium Lie and Bos’s entire chapter on the many virtues of defining elements using the em unit (which is defined relative to the preferences set by the viewing browser) rather than px or pt (which are defined absolutely). I actually converted U.Id. to use em. Go ahead, try increasing the font size in your browser. Notice how the layout doesn’t break? Eh? EH? (Note: If you hated the previous three sentences, get a different book.)
Up until this point, I had approached web design in two ways. First, I stole a lot of code from Drew. Second, I went to a lot of free resources. But there is no substitute for an integrated paper text in front of you. Wium Lie and Bos’s book serves that purpose for me.
There’s a new edition of this book out now, the third. I assume it’s real nice. I didn’t use it because Stanford’s library didn’t have it yet. And honestly, it’s not like U.Id is using real advanced code here.
I give Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (2nd ed.) four em units (out of five).
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:17 AM