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Frank Herbert always thought Star Wars was a Dune ripoff
(www.polygon.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Just because Herbet ripped off Heinlein's ideas doesn't mean he used the same format or character work. You're taking me to mean "Herbert copied Heinlein in every respect" which I didn't say.
Heinlein was writing about meta humans with psychic based abilities for decades before Herbert wrote about the KH in Dune. Clairvoyance and neutron dampening/excitement, eidetic memory, inherent mathematical ability (mentats, anyone?), control over human physiology, twins having quantum mental bonds which work outside of light speed limitations, the ABILITY TO ASTROGATE AND LITERALLY CAUSE MATTER/ANTIMATTER REACTORS TO FUNCTION WITH YOUR MIND.
Pretty much all of Herbert's ideas about human evolution and the people that make society possible without thinking machines were based in Heinlein's prior novels and short stories.
Heinlein, inventor of the concept of being good at math.
All of those concepts predate Heinlein. You credit him with things Victorians were fantasizing about. The Oracles might take issue with your claims on clairvoyance, and and in some tellings of Ajax, Teucer only shows up to help because he has a premonition of his brother's peril. That's from 500BC.
I don't think that's entirely fair, because Heinlein didn't invent those ideas either. There's a whole library of pulp sci-fi out there that he stole from, not just one person!
It's honestly why I don't care for Dune, he drops these pseudo-technical terms with no context for a reader because his context was a Flash Gordon or whatever comic he read and he just assumes the reader did too, and if they didn't it was 1965 so every book came with a glossary in the back that said things like Personal Shield: A personal shield
Like, yeah, that's great writing, making the reader stop to look something up in the fuckin glossary that still doesn't explain anything.
Well sure, but that specific focus I believe was pioneered by Heinlein in the same way that when you think of Asimov you think "AI and the three laws of robotics." Along with his obsession with free love meta human abilties were his biggest returning concept.
Heinlein's biggest returning concept is that he is completely inconsistent ideologically and based his opinions on whoever he was married to at the time.
He took his big ideas early on from HG Wells, and later Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
The man began his career as an anti-war leftist barred from Naval service, and ended it writing fiction about how we'd all be better off if Nuclear Testing were still allowed.
He praised Rand, said both political parties had moved too far left, and lived his entire life on disability checks provided by tax-payers.
Heinlein was a turd of a man. His literature is so maleable and devoid of obvious truth that anyone can claim he supports their politcal views.
Even Asmiov turned against him in the end.
It's almost like an author can write about different societies and not just one that they specifically agree with, but I guess that makes them "ideologically inconsistent."
Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far right conservative immediately afterward. This happened at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia.
He always pictured himself a libertarian, which to my way of thinking means "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve". It's easy to believe that no one should depend on society for help when you yourself happen not to need such help.
That you could read The Space Cadet and Starship Troopers and think they have a consistent message is disheartening to say the least.
His later work was a serious rendition of everything his earlier work mocked.
Something something long enough to become the villain