From high school till now, my literary horizons have stayed pretty narrow. Almost all of my brain food falls into three categories:
- School literature
- Technical and professional literature
- Science fiction.
And out of science fiction, 85% of the books were about space. This fascination inevitably got me excited for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, even though I wasn’t a huge movie buff. I even went to the cinema myself. A first for me.
I caught Dune twice on its opening day. It was awesome. The idea to read the original book popped up. I debated for a while whether I wanted to, and in the end, instead of Dune, I decided to read other sci-fi books. But why? As I delved into the marvelous new world of yet another planet, full of landscape descriptions, flora, and fauna, I began to understand.
The typical brain struggles with images we’ve never encountered in real life. Realistic dreams—vivid and easily remembered, but the bizarre and unfamiliar remain in the fog of memory. Gloomy London from Sherlock is easy to picture in the mind, even historically. But with Asimov’s or Bradbury’s worlds, it’s already more challenging.
Kir Bulychev in “The Settlement” writes about jackals, and immediately, a small laughing dog pops into your head, but the thought persists: this isn’t Earth, so they must be something else. The brain finds it hard to imagine exactly what.
And then the author specifies that they have white fur made of long needles. Then he writes about red eyes and poison. Then about them being reptiles. The brain adapts and tries to figure out the rest of the characteristics: how many legs? tall? long tail? crawl or gallop? Holding all the described and imagined characteristics in mind is difficult. The image of the jackal is there, but very amorphous.
But oh, how lucky are the screen adapters of science fiction! They can imagine these characteristics themselves, create cool and unusual character and environment designs. They can tailor them to the desired style: techno, cyber, bio. They can demonstrate wonders of color work, make cool costumes, showcase successful computer graphics. And most importantly— all of this becomes a concrete image in the viewer’s head.
Immersing oneself in the atmosphere of a new planet is easier with direct visualization— it’s a winning point compared to a book. Visualization can turn out to be unsuccessful, uninteresting, stagey, or even push out the plot.
But the creators of Dune did something completely different.