Month: January 2022

I’ve been a fan of Dune through David Lynch’s 1984 movie; the miniseries in 2000; and, mostly, through the 2001 game Emperor Battle for Dune. It was one of the first games I played over the internet with my friends and I have a great deal of nostalgic fondness for the story, the world, and its characters. I decided to finally read the book last year before the release of the new movie.

Dune has built up a massive following since its release in 1965. Before Star Wars and Star Trek, Frank Herbert had built a universe set in the future based on a feudal system. It’s an imaginative science fiction novel with elements of kings and queens, battles and alliances, and loyalty and treachery common to the fantasy genre. The Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, the Spacing Guild, the Imperial Sardaukar, and the Bene Geserit are all separate factions with separate designs on power. That power comes from control of the desert planet Arrakis – the only source of the spice Melange in the known universe. The spice is used for space travel and also acts a psychoactive drug that amplifies awareness and prolongs life. Also, giant sandworms guard this spice! It’s an absorbing universe and everything I had seen so far had led me to believe I would like this book.

50 years on, Dune is still very impressive in scale. Although the world is complex, the story is a simple one. The protagonist of the story, Paul Atreides, is stranded on the desert planet of Arrakis when his family is betrayed and killed by a rival family. From here it feels like a coming of age story. Through exposure to the spice, Paul realizes that the world around him is not the world he thought it was and from here he grows into a leader like his father. Eventually, he evolves into the prophetic Muad’Dib destined to rule the universe before embarking on his revenge in the book’s climax. It’s a very by-the-numbers story with everything after the opening betrayal going off without a hitch.

Paul’s mother, Jessica, acts a secondary protagonist and her thoughts, concerns, decisions and self doubting are all laid out for us to see. For political reasons, she’s the Duke Atreides’ concubine as opposed to his wife. Although she does love the duke, her situation seems precarious. Through the events of the story, and her interactions with the Fremen, and her relationship with her son, she ends up coming to terms with her role in the story and recognizes her own importance. I ended up enjoying this part of the story more than the main plot. As a framing device, Dune is interspersed with quotes from the world’s historical texts collected by the Emperor’s mostly unseen daughter and the relevance of these quotes is tied off in the book’s haunting conclusion. While Jessica is a character living a story, characters like the Emperor’s daughter are only going to be wistfully studying and compiling the feats of the main characters. Let us hope she finds solace in her books because she won’t be doing much else – a rather poignant way of ending of a 600 page story!

I walked out of the Dune 2021 movie before it finished. Right at the point where Paul and his mother are stranded in the desert. In the movie, Paul doesn’t undergo any brutal change in awareness because of the spice and instead teaches his mother “the sandwalk” he learned earlier in the movie to avoid attracting the attention of sandworms. This point in the book was very much a slog anyway and nothing I had seen up till that point led me to believe that it would be any better in the movie. It might have been a mistake to read the book just before the movie – certain ambiguous parts of the book don’t translate well to the silver screen and the massive scale of the book with all its characters is difficult to capture cinematically. Some of my favorite parts in the book are completely omitted in the movie. Doctor Yueh isn’t a fully fleshed out character and the main villain Feyd (played by Sting in the 1984 movie) is completely omitted. I also wasn’t really enamoured with the casting choices in the new movie either or the changes in the story.

The novel Dune offers a visionary glimpse of a bleak future with themes of environmentalism and globalism as relevant today as they were in 1965. The book does do these themes a lot more justice than the recent movie (or the previous movies for that matter). However, my expectations were quite high for this book and while reading it, I felt like I was rereading a story I had already read a hundred times. In some ways, this is true – I did already know the plot – but the problem is that the characters also seem to know what the plot is. Paul’s revenge seems inevitable – the historical quotes, the Bene Geserit prophecy, and the prescient knowledge conferred by the spice makes the outcome seem entirely expected. There’s no real surprises for anyone involved. As an exercise in worldbuilding, Dune is amazing and definitely on par with other renowned fictional worlds. But if you focus on the main story, it feels like it’s just going through the motions.

After reading “Three Body Problem” last year, I started thinking back on my lectures in my first year of college. Our physics lectures were extraordinarily boring and mostly comprised a lecturer who solved problem sets in front us in an illegible scrawl on a projected screen. However, the early chemistry lectures were great and some of the best lectures I think I had in my 6ish years of university. The lecturer, Professor Paul Brint, who would often diverge into lengthy chemistry-related anecdotes, recommended a book called “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” which has now been on my to read list for about 15 years. I decided to finally pick up a copy and go through it. I wasn’t disappointed.

Like Professor Brint, Richard Feynman was a master storyteller. The book is a collection of his stories, written in a quirky and energetic writing style, that describe his academic career, his work on the Manhattan Project, his dabbles in different disciplines, and his many esoteric hobbies. At the heart of each story is his childlike curiosity, his amazing problem solving ability, and his mischievous sense of humor. More than a few of his quips had me laughing out loud. His compulsive need to question order and rules lead to many tussles with bureaucracy during his career including several attempts to circumvent secrecy measures in place during his time on the Manhattan project.

Although most of the book is funny, there is a real humanity to it as well. In each instance, these human moments are succinctly captured in a short few sentences. The death of his first wife from tuberculosis and his method of coping by submerging himself into his work is described in a few sentences. The aftermath of working on the atomic bomb clearly left an imprint on him for the rest of his life and his thoughts on the matter are summarized quite concisely. He doesn’t delve into these subjects but he does tie them off in a hopeful tone. Feynman kept going after his wife died and the world kept going after the bomb.

Feynman’s grit saw him learn the bongos in Brazil, launch a side gig as an artist, and travel to many different countries. I especially enjoyed reading about how he visited Japan and his attempts to engage with the culture. It reminded me a lot of my own experiences when i first arrived in Tokyo. There are things I never thought I could ever eat before coming here such as fish. Like myself, Feynman went through a culinary catharsis. His enthusiasm for Japan led to him attempting to learn the language with this particular endeavor ending with frustration with the different levels of politeness and deciding that it wasn’t the language for him.

To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have selected physics after first year in college regardless of whether I had read Feynman’s book or not. However, I did and do find it captivating to be able to see physics from the perspective of someone passionate about finding practical solutions to everyday problems. Feynman’s physics seems very different from physics as we learned it in college. Rote learning of formulas, boring problem sets solved in front of us by someone else without interaction, and computerized formulaic experiments with subsequent report write ups seem antithetical to the physics of Feynman. Schools that trained students to pass exams rather than imbue students with any practical knowledge and books designed to be sold rather than cover any meaningful problems are vehemently opposed by Feynman in a number of his anecdotes.

I try to read at least one autobiography every year – in 2020, Phil Knight’s Shoedog book about the founding of Nike proved to be so good that it was awarded a permanent place on my minimalist Tokyo apartment bookshelf. As I think it will also prove reread-able, Feynman’s book has earned a place alongside it. Somewhat unexpectedly, Feynman’s patchwork of memoirs, equal parts intriguing and amusing, is the best book I read in 2021.