[najajomo]

@BeetleB: "I remember as a teenager eagerly anticipating reading Dune. And was totally disappointed. There's nothing SF about it."

To whomever modded down the above, care to offer a reason as to what you find objectionable in that statement. Personally I don't need other people to censor posts on this here forum. I am quite capable of making up my own mind as to the veracity of such statements.

edit: Censorship practised on Hacker News

I'm sick of the censorship practised here through the use of the modding system to render certain comments invisible. Yet another self confirming echo chamber on the Intertubes. So long and thanks for all the fish :)

[pjc50]

I didn't bother to downvote it, but it's obviously wrong and probably trolling?

Not to mention that "is this SF" is a bad question, like "is this Art": it tends to produce gatekeepering flamewars rather than an interesting discussion on genre boundaries.

[BeetleB]

As the original commenter, I feel I should at least somewhat explain.

The article is about how Lynch's movie "has no interest in science fiction". And why? It lists qualities that are true for many, if not most, SF movies.

Essentially, the author of the article may have made good arguments on why Dune is not a good movie compared to the novel, but did not make any good arguments on why it is not SF.

So, I can make the exact same silly comment in response. Yes, it's true that Dune did not fit my liking for SF, and when I read it, it was just a fantasy with some whizbang stuff thrown in.

>Not to mention that "is this SF" is a bad question, like "is this Art": it tends to produce gatekeepering flamewars rather than an interesting discussion on genre boundaries.

Is that not what the article does? Why is my comment so irritating to others when the article isn't?

Ultimately, I think I'm downvoted because people liked the book and I didn't - the same reason the article is being upvoted.

[nikdaheratik]

I upvoted the article because I like Dune and think that discussion of the books/movies is interesting.

I disagree with your take on the original article in that the point is that Dune fails as a sci-fi movie partially because Lynch didn't get the genre and didn't understand the original novel all that well.

IMO, Lynch had the deck stacked against him from the start as the studio didn't know what kind of budget and planning it would take to get everything right in the movie and both the studio and Lynch learned some expensive lessons from this. So the movie was a failure, but an interesting one.

[pjc50]

Well, thanks for the explanation. Context is a hard problem in text.