Headscratchers / Dune

Headscratchers for Dune.

• Dune (2021)
• Dune: Part Two

Why doesn't the Guild rule the Imperium?

• How come the guild has not attempted to seize control of the Empire? They have sole control of all long range travel. If they make an attempt all of the worlds in the Empire will become isolated and nobody will be able to move anything anywhere in any big numbers (the smugglers guild has a far smaller capacity than the spacing guild). If they could establish a base of operations on a previously uncolonized planet or on a ship in deep space then it will be relatively untouchable (only espionage could stand a decent chance of damaging it). If it has enough trusted members guild has the freedom to establish mining and production facilities on previously uninhabited planets or simply position themselves out of weapon range and fire/drop large masses towards inhabited planets that resist. Their Heighliners can carry massive amounts of mass. With enough preparation, establishing isolated staging, production and industrial facilities and moving key personnel aboard ships they could challenge all the houses.
  • Simple. They don't feel the need to. They're already a silent partner and can secretly dictate terms to the Padishah-Emperor. If they actually tried to run the Empire, they would have to actually run it. It's not easy to run thousands of worlds and manage all the Houses. Why bother when you can just have the influence without the responsibility?
  • This is detailed at quite some legnth towards the end of the first book. Any attempt to gain power creates a situation of such complexity that their prescience can't see beyond it to say whether it succeeds or fails so they refuse to risk their current comfortable position. Easier, as Paul notes, to remain a parasite.
  • I would also add, that Mohaim points out the Imperium works as a political tripod. The Emperor and his Sardaukar have the military power to police any individual House. The Landsraad has the ability to combine forces against a tyrannical Emperor, nor does the Emperor have the capability to directly govern all of the various worlds without the Great Houses. The Guild has a monopoly on travel and so must be obeyed, but because the Emperor and his designated Great House control the Spice, attempting to overplay their hand would lead to a stalemate where the Guild would lock off travel, but the Emperor/Great Houses would cut off Spice flow, eventually killing the Navigators. Mohaim notes how unstable this is, and that last scenario does almost play out at the end of the novel until The Guild acquiesces to Paul's demands.
  • Because they already all but do. The only check on them is the secret of spice, and, apparently, in the millenia of its usage someone figured out the connection to sandworms and was killing and/or subverting all the agents and scientists sent to research the source of the substance.

Ownership of Arrakis

• If Arrakis is the only source of the most vital commodity in the universe, why was house Harkonnen allowed to run it like an ordinary fiefdom? You'd think it would be jointly administered by all the major power groups as some kind of neutral ground or similar.
  • All the major power groups keep hands off to prevent a power struggle. The Emperor is forbidden from governing Arrakis, the Guild's prescient navigators know that touching it would be bad in the long run, and the Bene Gesserit prefer to keep in the shadows. Thus, the Emperor gifts it to one of the in-favour Houses, who are charged with keeping Arrakis spice supplies open. CHOAM doesn't care who is in charge, as long as the supply is kept constant, and Harkonnen maintains this by being an influential player in CHOAM dealings.
  • House Harkonnen's control of Dune is described as a 'quasi-fief' under a 'CHOAM company contract'. In other words, they didn't own Arrakis, they were simply hired to administrate its mining operations (and aside from smugglers and the Fremen, there's nothing on Arrakis but spice mining operations and the ancillary local industry to support the miners and their families). Note that Duke Leto's control of Arrakis was described as 'fief-complete', and House Atreides had to give up their control of Caladan to go to Arrakis, while House Harkonnen maintained their family seat on Giedi Prime the whole time and simply sent one of the family heirs and some troops to Arrakis to run the shop.
  • And, of course, the Emperor gave House Atreides the 'fief-complete' of Arrakis for the sole purpose of getting them off their secure base from Caladan and onto ground where he could arrange for their destruction at the apparent hands of House Harkonnen, which explains the violation of normal policy re: not letting any Great House actually own Arrakis.
  • And it's a huge way to exert control over the Great Houses. It's probably the single largest bargaining chip the Emperor has at the start of the series. Look at House Atreides, they knew getting control over Arrakis was a trap, but took it anyways because of the huge boost it gives the House.

Chani's Death

• Paul is grateful to Irulan for spiking Chani's food with contraceptives, because he knows that Chani will die in childbirth, and so feels Irulan has bought them more time together. However, the contraceptives have harmed Chani, and also led her to try the high-spice diet. Isn't it possible that she could have born healthy children if she hadn't spent all those years getting her food spiked? Also, how come this world can travel the stars but can't perform a basic caesarian procedure?
  • We don't know exactly why Chani died since the book never explicitly explains it. Yes, it's probable that she could have lived under different circumstances, and Paul probably knew this, too, but as the books explain, he was reluctant to interfere with his own vision because of the consequences for humanity.

The Baron and Other Memory

• Why was the Baron even within Alia's consciousness? Wasn't Jessica, and therefore Alia only awakened to the female descendants?
  • Alia was an Abomination, and the full blooded sister of Paul Atreides the messiah of the Bene Gesserit, it is perfectly possible for her to have the powers she shows if you don't sink to the level of saying women are incapable of greatness, and assume that if she wasn't a messiah herself, being the sister of the supreme being enables her to show at least similar powers, and abilities. Finally, one could surmise the baron was simply a gestalt of her consciousness turned irrational that was driving her toward more insanity. Did the Harkonnen side of the family ever strike you as stable and well grounded?
  • It's a plot hole. In Dune and Dune Messiah, she has the abilities and limitations of a Reverend Mother. In Children of Dune, she's closer to the twins, who have the abilities and limitations of a Kwisatz Haderach. If a Reverend Mother is able to look back into male ancestral pasts, it means that the ninety generation breeding program of the Bene Gesserit has been a complete and utter wash, as opposed to, y'know, asking a sister "You know that place that frightens you? Try looking into it again real real hard this time."
  • While not explained, it's not necessarily a hole. Alia was able to project thoughts into Paul's consciousness in the first book. She describes it as something "Not even [Paul] can do". She's a bit out there.
  • Alia went through the awakening while in her mother's womb. It wasn't supposed to happen that way. Without any training, she had trouble keeping her own ego above water. Harkonnen offered to shield her from the press of the others when necessary, but that gave him a lot of influence.
  • A fetus's sex isn't physiologically evident early in the pregnancy, so it's possible that Alia was exposed to the Water of Life before she truly had a gender on anything but a genetic level. As an effectively-neuter being, she would therefore have equal claim on male and female memories.
  • Alia hears the voice of her ancestor Agamemnon, as well as that of the Baron. This need not be considered a plot hole, as it's entirely possible that Alia is a girl with a Y chromosome. But this would raise the question of why Jessica would allow such a dangerous anomaly in her daughter's development when the Bene Gesserit are able to manipulate their bodily chemistry with precision.
  • Great theory, and would be perfectly plausible except for one thing — Ghanima. Ghanima also was able to hear the voice of the Baron and if I recall correctly, she also mentioned having Paul's memories of his gom jabbar trial. You could argue that she was also a XY female, but women with that condition are sterile. Now Alia, despite having been married for nine years and carrying on countless affairs, never became pregnant. Ghanima on the other hand without a doubt had children, because the main characters in the subsequent books are her descendants.
  • So maybe the Baron was intersex. There are some intersex conditions in which fertility as a male is possible, and the Baron's lack of a direct heir (that he knew about) could be as much a result of veiled genetic issues as his more obvious mental ones.
  • The issue isn't the sex...it's the age at which the individual receives the Water of Life (in this case, as fetuses). Alia was exposed to it during a ceremony where her mother consumed the Water of Life to become a Reverend Mother, whereas the twins were exposed in a similar manner due to massive spice ingestion by their mother, which created a similar exposure. And the issue is not that woman CAN'T look down male genetic lines...it's that it's TERRIFYING to them. It's never made clear, but it's stated that the women of the Bene Gesserit refuse to follow the rabbit hole of memories down male lines. It's possible that, as it is necessary to undergo a lifetime of severe and extensive training just to prepare for the chance to become a Reverend Mother, it is simply easier to prepare people to receive a chorus of memories and voices from similar voices and mindsets. This would allow them to corral the noise easier and avoid being taken over like Alia. Part of this is simply plot hole, in the sense that Frank Herbert (for writing a very progressive science fiction story) still expressed some 'antiquated' views regarding gender norms (though it must be pointed out this is in light of all the other tropes he avoided). In story, however, I would chalk it up to the Bene Gesserit simply getting lazy (which it's shown they did regarding how to handle Paul). Until Ghanima, they may have assumed (based on a few very bad experiences) that it was something women simply could not do. And, considering how important their secrecy was to them, it was probably not worth the risk to attempt and experiment with looking down 'male lines' if it could produce someone that would expose them.
  • Nerd Cookiees explains it here. Basically, it's not a case of Reverend Mothers being able to look at male memories if they try really hard, or Preborn being able to look. . . it's that Preborn can't look away. They have no consciousness, no will, no personality when those genetic memories come flooding in. No knowledge or training to help them avoid that place they dare not look. Nerd Cookiees describes it less as a Preborn accessing Other Memory, but Other Memory accessing them.
  • Unexplained is why the memory of Baron Harkonnen is the obese monster we know from the books; when he sired Jessica he was a slender, attractive young man.
    • This is explained by the prequels being non-canon fanfic similar in quality to Star Wars novelizations. He was obese because of gluttony in Frank Herbert's books, not a Bene Gesserit venereal disease.
  • Alia actually saw Vladimir herself and, in fact, even killed him - maybe she subconsciously overwrote the Other Memory version of him with his true appearance?

Failed Reverend Mother? How does that work?

• In Heretics, it says that a "failed Reverend Mother", Geasa, took care of ghola-Idaho. If you fail, you die... so?
  • Continuity error probably. Frank made them occasionally. Think of her as more of a failed Sister.
  • Perhaps Failed RM = Wasn't allowed to take the Spice Agony. Not "Tried and Died", but "Your tests show you'd never survive."
  • Canon. One of the Reverend Mothers (Darwi Odrade), recounted that during her training, the Night Watchwoman (don't remember her official position) was prevented from taking the agony due to heart problems, which also kept her awake at night.
  • Hasimir Fenring was a 'failed Kwisatz Haderach,' but his Bene Gesserit wife didn't rush to kill him or anything. Failure to pass the test of humanity carried the gom jabbar, but failure to live up to an ideal is just a fact of life.
  • The only person in the Universe who knew Fenring was a 'failed Kwisatz Haderach' was Paul, due to his powers - for the Bene Gesserit, he was just another power-hungry nobleman and also sterile.

Stillsuits and heat loss

• Stillsuits supposedly function by letting your sweat evaporate, then immediately distilling the vapors so the moisture isn't lost. But how can such a self-contained system provide for adequate heat loss, which is what the body sweats to achieve in the first place? They're described as form-fitting, with no fins or other heat-radiating accouterments.
  • Magic! Okay, let's stop being facetious. Like how lasguns or shields work, the mechanism honestly doesn't matter, only the effects. Since you're getting liquid water out of the process, the heat is obviously being dumped somehow. It's the future, stillsuits might be made from some remarkably efficient radiation material.
  • Same way that clothes that real desert people achieve heat loss. A stillsuit is simply the natural evolution of that concept. It's worth remarking that in the desert, sweat evaporates too fast to achieve adequate heat loss, and the clothes are meant to keep it in contact with the skin for longer.
  • The construction of the stillsuit is actually noted by Paul (pre-Muad'Dib) as evidence that the Fremen have access to very advanced technology, considering that the construction of it is incredibly complex and technologically brilliant. That handwave is pretty much all we're going to get on the matter, I'm afraid.
  • The book says the sillsuit derives energy from the pumping motion of walking. This energy can be used to concentrate the heat in one point, as with standard refrigerators, where the heat can be released more efficiently than with sweat (possibly using the "thimble of moisture" still lost). The salt content of sweat or a coolant in the stillsuit itself can act as coolant, and a sufficiently advanced refrigerator would be very efficient. There would be a noticeable drag when walking or running - it would cost at least 20% more energy - but it's entirely physically possible.
  • Water evaporating is an endothermic reaction. It doesn't matter how it evaporates, it's still taking up heat. So long as the sweat was still evaporating, it would cool whoever was wearing the suit down. I might need to double check my chemistry notes, though...
  • Evaporation is endothermic because heat is being transferred from the body to the water molecules, causing them to move further apart and become water vapor instead of liquid water. For the vapor to then condense against the stillsuit, the heat would need to be transferred from the water molecules to the suit, which means 1. that the stillsuit is now very, very hot, and needs to vent that heat away from the body somehow, and 2. that whatever mechanism allows the suit to vent the heat is so efficient that the suit not only does not heat up, it is somehow consistently below room temperature so that it can continue to attract heat from the water vapor. Heat concentration (the same principle as a refrigerator, meaning that some part of the suit, such as the joints, would be very hot so that the rest of the suit can stay relatively cool) is a good guess, and the entire thing is certainly well within the realms of physics (if not yet technologically possible), but it's still a marvel of engineering and well worth debating the mechanics of.

Southern hemisphere of Arrakis and maps

• In the appendices to the first book, Dune, there's a map of Dune that shows most, if not all, the locations in the book. Its center is the north pole. It doesn't show the whole planet. So, what happened to the south pole? Why is there people only near the northern polar region ? Obviously, the closer to the equator you are, the hotter it is, so it makes sense that there would be no one between certain latitudes, but why do we never hear about the southern hemisphere? The climate in the southern polar regions of the south hemisphere should be similar to that of the northern region of the north hemisphere.
  • The south polar regions are forbidden going by what I know.
  • The book internal coherence suggests that it's the south of the northern polar region that is forbidden, not the south pole.
  • The southern hemisphere isn't forbidden, but Fremen propaganda and misinformation has caused the common belief that they're uninhabitable due to greater concentration of Coriolis storms and lack of major geographic shelters such as the Shield Wall. The Fremen keep it this way by bribing the Guild to keep the price of their orbital topographical surveys at absurdly high levels, to the point that no House-quasi-fief has had the budget to afford it. (It probably helped that the Emperor's official planetologists, Pardot Kynes and his son Liet, were in thick with the Fremen and therefore probably lied to the Emperor as well.)
  • That explanation does not work after the end of the first book.
  • That's where the map is, isn't it?

Paul's angst in the second book

• This pisses me off about the entire series: how the books go on constantly about little minutiae in plans and movements, and then second book was nothing but a guy angsting over his wife and deciding whether or not to fuck his sister. Why, in a series entailing very dramatic events, did all the focus go on a bunch of angsty aristocrats?
  • Did you even bother to read the book, or go any further than Messiah?
  • I did, but I just got really really bored with it. The first one was good. The second was annoying (thank god it was short), the third one was almost as good as the third, the fourth was the best (except for the Strangled by the Red String), the fifth was overly drawn out, and the sixth was a disappointment. The biggest, most awesome events in human history, and all we get to see is an old crone thinking about her childhood.
  • Because you've fallen into the trap of assuming Paul is a hero. He's not: he's a very flawed individual trapped in the role of the villain, to which he is very much aware. By the time of the second book, Paul has become the figurehead of arguably the most genocidal regime in known human history (even comparing himself to Hitler at one point, in a very bitter tone), knows that Chani is going to die, and is also aware that, if he is to actually follow through on a path that will lead to the betterment of humanity (and its survival), he will have to become even worse than he is now (essentially, becoming what Leto II became). He's broken by end of the novel, because he's had to do and endure more than anything he was ever prepared to face.
  • The book was split in two due to sheer size. Originally whining and planning should've been intermixed.

Why did Thufir work for the Harkonnens?

• What was Thufir Hawat's angle in working with the Harkonnens? How did he want to bring the House down? He had both the opportunities to kill Vladimir and Feyd-Rautha, however this was just maneuvering. Was it to train some Fremen loyal only to him and to use them?
  • The Atreides were dead, and he wanted revenge on Jessica (who he calculated was a traitor) at any cost, even working with his sworn enemies. It does not quite make sense, but his beloved Duke just died, so maybe he was not thinking straight (which for a Mentat must be fairly hard to manage).
  • Considering that Mentats are supposed to be the Chessmasters due to their highly advanced ability to compute outcomes of events based on variables and facts available, pretty much proves that he's either holding the Idiot Ball on this particular issue, or that he's just a failure as a Mentat. (Because the spice smuggler Tuek figures things out based on much less knowledge, and Hawit is stupid enough to be openly manipulated by the Harkonnens. I have no idea why this guy is so prized for his Mentat abilities when he's a FUCKING IDIOT! The only possible reason why he's so stupid about this is that he's so prejudiced against the Bene Gesserit that he can't see how supremely stupid he is actually being, and if he's that easily affected by prejudice then he's a waste as a Mentat anyway. And exposure to the spice is supposed to improve mental capacity, not hinder it. Hence, the most probable reason for Hawat siding with the Harkonnens? He's a prejudiced idiot who can't see two moves in front of his face (I'm still fuming over the fact that he dismissed Yeuh out of hand as the traitor... yes, because obviously the Imperial Conditioning can't be broken by a conflict of morals (because training to apply complete moral values based on saving people's lives ISN'T what the entire thing is based on, obviously). Hawit didn't even do a background check to find out his wife was a fucking bene gesserit held prisoner by the Harkonnens (he is completely stunned by this fact when JESSICA tells him). Furthermore he acts so goddamn surprised that Leto has been betrayed and killed when everyone and THEIR MOTHER knew Arrakis was a trap in the first place and he didn't have safeguards in place to deal with that (Yeuh just walked into the fucking shield room and deactivated it that easily...)). Thufir Hawat, YOU FAIL!
  • My thoughts was that Hawat was trying to get revenge against the Baron by playing him and his beloved na-Baron against each other. I believed that he had attempted to get the na-Baron killed in the Arena and, at the same time, have the Baron killed by the pleasure slave with the poisoned needle. Just my interpretation.
  • I'm with you on the first interpretation, but how is the poison needle Hawat's work? While the Baron gloats over Feyd's failure to assassinate him, he's honest enough to admit in his own thoughts that the poison needle trick would have succeeded, if Hawat hadn't warned him.
  • Mentats aren't quite super-duper geniuses; they're intelligent humans with a very tightly defined set of mental skills useful to the Imperium. Hawat gets sidelined because the Harkonnens make a dedicated effort to play to his weaknesses. And he isn't the only one not to suspect Yueh on account of his conditioning; it's implied that the Emperor will destroy the Harkonnens out of hand if he finds out they've suborned the only trusted medical school in the universe.
  • The Mentats aren't even trying to be Chessmasters - they're human computers. They are good at putting two and two together, but in the face of insufficient evidence (or sufficient madness) they fail spectacularly. Why do you think Leto II was able to conquer all the Mentats, and the Bene Gesserit, and the Spacing Guild?
  • But that's the point. There is very plainly a point being made about love and loyalty. Hawat isn't a superhero like Paul is, and even super awesome magical conditioning isn't as strong as his love is. Leto II talks about that, and Herbert himself does in the epilogue to Chapterhouse. Gender and relationship commentary is all over that series, and the Bene Gesserit, Bene Tleilax, and Honored Matres are all anvils referential not to politics or anything impersonal, but the breakdown of the personal by the impersonal. Leto II talks about that, too.
  • You're forgetting the Feyd vs Vladimir subplot. Hawat clearly despised the Harkonnens, and there is mention that he was still being secreted messages by Gurney (about the Fremen tactics). He played Feyd against the Baron and vice versa, turning them against each other, trying to bring the House down. See: Slave Boy assassination attempt.
  • Exactly. I asked the question about Thufirs angle in the first place, the reason I'm wondering is: after he proposes to the Baron to make Arrakis a Prison Planet just like Salusa Secundus, Thufir asks himself if his victory over the Harkonnen will be as complete as the victory over the Atreides had been. So how did he want to do it? I now suspect that he wanted to raise the Emperors anger against the Harkonnen, just as the Emperor did not want to let the Atreides Army get as good as his own Sardaukar.
  • Precisely. The Baron thought he was manipulating Thufir by exploiting his hatred of the Harkonnens, dangling the possibility of undermining the House in front of him and luring from him the service required to get close enough to do real damage. Thufir knew this, of course, but the Baron was convinced he understood Thufir's emotional weaknesses well enough to spot and head off his inevitable betrayal. What Thufir didn't know was that he had been given a residual poison that would kill him without the antidote hidden in his food. What the Baron didn't realize is that Thufir was plotting to destroy the Harkonnens by making them so successful that the Emperor would become fearful of their rise.
  • A great problem with Thufir's justification was that his love for the Duke and the Atreides, and the hatred to Bene Gesserit blinded him. The problem is that Mentat's way to think is called "The naive mind", which is (quoting) a supralogical mind without preconception or prejudice, one that can extract the essential patterns or logic of data and deliver, with varying degrees of certainty, useful conclusions. Mentat conditioning makes one unable to be sidelined by petty things like love or hate!

Stillsuits and water

• What I have always wondered is how can stillsuits be so efficient, and water still be a rarity. The human body produces around 500 ml of water per day from cellular respiration, yet stillsuits allow you to lose only 50 ml or so if I remember correctly. In those conditions, it should become more important to go on finding food (which can hardly grow in the desert) than water, which you already have more than enough if properly managed.
  • Maybe the suits actually release 550 ml per day. Given they say you "lose" 50 ml per day, that's probably just the net result, after factoring in any and all sources and losses of water. That's the only thing an administrator would care about anyway.
  • It always occurred to me that Stillsuits were a not-quite-break-even measure. You could survive in one indefinitely, losing only miniscule amounts of water, but you'd probably eventually lose enough to die of dehydration, and it still requires the "initial input" of the amount of water a human requires to survive in a given day. A stillsuit is never going to generate more, and just a bit less, than the amount of water one human needs to survive one day, no surplus to go to other humans (or anything like agriculture).
  • Stillsuits function analogously to rebreathers that divers use. Rebreathers don't add additional oxygen to the air you breathe per se, but by scrubbing CO2 from your exhalations, it helps you more efficiently use the oxygen in the system's closed loop of air, helping you swim longer without the effects of higher CO2 concentration. A stillsuit is merely intended to help conserve body moisture by recycling it into the body where possible — you'll still have to use external water sources at some point, but it's the difference between dying of exposure in less than a day and living long enough to make it to the next sietch or outpost for a proper drink of water. (Also of note: the Fremen's terraforming efforts involve moisture/wind traps and planting of specific crops, which have an infinitely higher yield than stillsuit recycling.)

The true Kwisatz Haderach

• If Duncan Idaho was the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, then how come he didn't predict the events of the whole series?
  • He wasn't the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach until the very end of the series, where he did start to predict events. Every time Duncan was revived, he kept improving his mind a little more each life. When Duncan somehow gained the memories of all his ghola incarnations, his mind functioned just like a Kwisatz Haderach's. Unlike other Kwisatz Haderach, who were bred into the role, and used their genetic memory, Duncan developed his own body himself, and used his own memories.

Later books necessary?

• Books 4, 5 & 6. 4- Author Tract. 5- We're told a lot of things, shown very little. (at least we got to see Miles Teg kick ass) 6- There's a lot of talk about a secret weapon the bad guys have only for nothing to come of it (except some dead redshirts). The Bene Gesserit are even more elf-like than ever...
  • Based on my interpretation and going strictly by the books by Frank Herbert, the first three books (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune) were one story arc; Heretics and Chapterhouse were another story arc; and God Emperor of Dune was a bridge between the two story arcs. More to the point:
    1. Dune explored the consequences of the superhuman; the implications of prescience; the idea of genetic memory and race consciousness; and the manner in which tough environment and religious conditioning can be exploited.
    2. Dune Messiah is effectively Scry vs. Scry and introduces the notion of gholas and whether or not they can reclaim memories of previous lives.
    3. Children of Dune explores the early life of Leto II and the manner in which the pre-born must adjust to the imposition of Other Memory without a lifetime of experience to contextualize these experiences ( Alia fails to do so and is possessed by her ancestor, the Baron Harkonnen; Ghanima unintentionally silences her Other Memory with self-hypnosis; and Leto II achieves a partnership with an ancestor named Harum who has the capabilities necessary to act as God Emperor, in the process ceasing to be either Leto II or Harum). There is also an element of Scry vs. Scry afoot in Children of Dune in the sense that Leto II's prescient visions oppose those of his father.
    4. God Emperor of Dune is basically about Leto II using prescience and absolute control of the spice to become a super-predator who acts on the human population to select for methods of defying prescience (specifically: the Siona gene and the no-room) and reducing dependency on spice and human specialists ( the Ixian machine that can replicate the functions of a Guild navigator without the spice; also, the Tleilaxu production of spice in their axlotl tanks). These capabilities combine with the pressures Leto has deliberately fermented in his empire. Basically: Frank Herbert theorized that people, when presented with someone vulnerable, will always be urged to victimize the vulnerable person; by creating universal tranquility, Leto created a bunch of potential victims whom all red-blooded people are tempted to exploit — but Leto also uses his Fish Speakers, prescience, and control of the spice to prevent people from from exploiting the potential victims he created, which leads to resentment. When Leto dies and the aforementioned developments ( the Siona gene; the no-room; the Tleilaxu spice; the Ixian navigation machines) proliferate, the resentment Leto created explodes in the Scattering. The canon motives for Leto II's actions are contradictory: in God Emperor of Dune, Leto tells Hwi Noree that he predicted that the Ixians would create a prescient hunter-seeker that would eventually kill all humans. In Heretics of Dune, Odrade reveals that prescient abilities do not PREDICT futures, they CREATE them; Leto II's Golden Path was actually a plan to liberate humanity from prescience.
    5. Heretics of Dune returns to the idea of a race consciousness: the Honored Matres are a threat because they use sexual pleasure to enslave men, thereby meddling with what Frank Herbert considered one of the fundamental motives of humanity (mingling genes). In addition, Taraza manipulates events such that the Honored Matres sterilize Arrakis, killing off all the worms that contained the pearls of Leto's awareness. These pearls of awareness represented "an oracular force that held us in bondage" (remember, prescience doesn't predict, it creates), so Taraza used the Honored Matres to kill the worms, removing the prescient force holding humanity prisoner. The remaining worm will eventually reproduce on Chapterhouse, but by then, humanity will have produced too many countermeasures to prescience to be held prisoner by prescient abilities.
    6. Chapterhouse: Dune progresses primarily along three narrative axes. The first axis is the juxtaposition of an Other-Memory-mediated-jury-monitored-democracy (the Bene Gesserit) in which everyone automatically knows their place and knows what to do (because Other Memory) and everyone constantly monitors everyone else for signs of deviance (which they can automatically detect, because Other Memory) with a runaway entrenched bureaucracy (the Honored Matres) in which the military and the civil service have joined hands, full of sloppy, undisciplined leaders who can't make decisions and look for scapegoats. The second axis of Chapterhouse is an evolutionary arms race of sorts: Sheeana's immunity to the Honored Matres' sexual bonding, Teg's ability to see no-ships (a new form of prescience), and Duncan's ability to reach outside of Time for information (including the memories of Duncan Idaho gholas whose cells DID NOT go into his making) are all new traits that will give humans who possess them an evolutionary advantage against humans who do not possess them. In short, creation never stops; the human form is unfixed. The third narrative axis by which Chapterhouse can be interpreted is the influence of the advanced Face Dancers (represented by Marty and Daniel) who drove the Honored Matres back into the Old Empire. Advanced Face Dancers are complete prana-bindu mimics who can acquire memories from multiple people over time. These Face Dancers eventually acquire enough memories to become independent of Tleilaxu Masters and, somehow, exert control over the destination of a no-ship (perhaps because they, like Teg, can see no-ships). Duncan is only able to circumvent their control by erasing his no-ship's data and forcing it to make a ''random'' space-fold: unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable.
  • In general, the Dune franchise acts as an apologia for Frank Herbert's beliefs. For instance: Face Dancers are framed as antagonists because Face Dancers are sterile — like Count Fenring (a potential Kwisatz Haderach who is considered a failure because he is sterile), this makes them failures because they have no ability to mingle their genes and therefore any egoism they have is ultimately untrustworthy. To quote Heretics of Dune, "(Face Dancers) have no self-image. Without a sense of self, they go beyond amorality. Nothing they say or do can be trusted." Frank Herbert is fairly consistent in his belief that proper morals extend from the need to facilitate human survival and reproduction; from Frank Herbert's perspective, hedonism is immoral. For instance, Frank Herbert frames the obesity and homosexuality of the Baron Harkonnen in a negative light and ascribes these traits to hedonism. To quote Moneo in God Emperor of Dune, "The Baron was a seeker after sensations. The fat was a side-effect, then perhaps something to experience for itself because it offended people and he enjoyed offending." Likewise, in Chapterhouse: Dune, Sheeana comments, "Life was always a reaction to pressures. Some gave in to easy distractions and were shaped by them: pores bloated and reddened by excesses. Bacchus leering at them. Lust fixing its shape on their features." Note that I don't subscribe to this particular argument; I merely analyze and report.

Yueh's conditioning

• Dr. Yueh has Imperial Conditioning, which is supposed to be impossible to break. Then the Harkonnens break it by... threatening his wife. Quite possibly the most obvious way to leverage someone, and the supposedly unbreakable conditioning just snaps. Did they never consider threatening someone's family as a possible danger at Imperial Conditioning School?
  • He isn't motivated by fear of his wife's safety; the conditioning probably covers that obvious loophole. What motivates him is that 1.) he is angry enough to want to kill the Baron and 2.) by betraying his charge, he has a Hail Mary chance of using him to kill the Baron in a suicide attack. He knows his wife is dead, and says as much.
  • Knowing in his mind and being sure without a doubt are two different things. He does say that he knows she's likely dead but works on the off chance that she might not be.
  • This troper understood the leverage to be a result of whatever loyalties his Bene Gesserit wife would have used to bond him to her - given how they seem to like ensuring things go their way Wanna would have Yueh wrapped around her little finger - which would be more powerful than anything the Imperial Conditioning was designed to counter.
  • It's my understanding that the conditioning wasn't broken by threatening his wife. They tortured her in front of him - this got him pissed off enough to want to kill the Baron, which broke the conditioning. Once that was done they controlled him by saying that they'd stop torturing her + let her go if he did what he did.
  • I think that Wanna, as a Bene Gesserit, did indeed have Yueh wrapped around her little finger. It might have even been like the sexual addiction that the Honored Matres employed. What the Harkonnens did to her likely played off of Yueh's need for her.
  • I thought it was that he didn't know whether she was dead or alive that broke the conditioning. He needed to find out whether she was alive and in agony or dead and to avenge her. It was the uncertainty that broke the conditioning.
  • I've looked into this, and as far as I can tell, the "conditioning" Yueh underwent makes him unable to harm or kill someone. And you will note, he did not kill anyone in the book. He did drug people, but I guess that doesn't count as harming them.
  • It may also bear clarification that using his wife as leverage is not what actually broke the conditioning. Feyd Rautha knew about Wanna, but the Baron was still close–mouthed about exactly how the broke Yueh. The Harkonnens just used Wanna as leverage after Yueh was broken, and therefore susceptible to normal methods of manipulation. (Though this troper would guess that some interaction between the Imperial Conditioning and whatever Bene Gesserit skills Wanna employed against him is what provided the chink in his conditioning. For example, as this troper read it, Thufir Hawat wasn't surprised that Wanna was Yueh's wife, or that the Harkonnens had killed her... but that she was a Bene Geserit, which opened up new possibilities for his Mentat mind to consider.)
  • Always thought that conditioning was just s scam to over-price supposedly undying loyalty where there wasn't any.

Logistics of the spice

• Is it even logistically possible to supply billions upon billions of people with spice on a regular basis from a single world, when you're not even sure if it's a never-ending resource?
  • Depends on how much is actually needed - is it ever stated just how much spice a Guild navigator consumes to acquire and keep their abilities?
  • If I remember it correctly, it is stated somewhere that a briefcase of spice melange can buy you a planet. It is also not clear how many people use the spice, so it is difficult to say how big the supply problem is.
  • Not quite a briefcase: the actual quote was that the price of a planet could be carried in your hand luggage. (Imagine a large suitcase full of cayenne pepper or turmeric.) Dune portrays a feudal society, so nobody outside the nobility and their closest advisers will ever get anywhere near the spice. (The Dune Encyclopedia says that there were about a hundred Great Houses and at most one million Houses Minor, probably less, so the total market for spice might have been on the order of ten million people throughout the Imperium.)
  • It says in the appendix of the first novel geriatric and immunity boosting properties of the Spice (the reason most people would consume it in the first place) need only a very small dose to be consumed periodically, like a 20th century medical drug. The only consumer big enough to matter is the Guild, whose Navigators practically eat, drink and breathe Spice derivatives only.
  • Who says they supply billions upon billions? This shortage could be used as a political leverage to an unfathomable degree: you set an interval and by each turn evaluate the value of different planets, their loyalty and other factors, and then decide who receives the spice and who is to sit back and wait. If they decide to revolt, you just cut them off, then wait a bit and come back later, seizing what remains after their societal collapse, viewed as a saviour (and backed by propaganda).

House Moritani

• Why would the other houses, much less the Emperor, allow the rabid House Moritani to keep doing their thing? Wouldn't they want a mad dog to be put down rather than have it turn on them at the drop of a hat? Especially since their actions affect the entire Imperium, such as the destruction of the Ginaz school, which was supplying Swordmasters to all houses.
  • The books were written by Kevin J. Anderson. Based on my own experiences with another series he wrote, he probably just didn't care.

FTL travel pre-Guild

• The original books don't even bother mentioning what (if any) FTL method was used prior to the Holtzman drive. You can't maintain an interstellar civilization without a reliable method of getting from planet to planet quickly. The prequels written by his son aren't much better, just saying ships accelerate very fast. However, that's not FTL, and there's no way accelerating fast can get you to a remote star system in a month.
  • Throwing the crap prequels out, the Holtzman drive is probably considerably older than the Imperium (and thus computer-driven before the Jihad and the installation of the guild), and may have been the thing that unified the scattered human-inhabited worlds in the first place.
  • Chapterhouse: Dune mentions folding space. When Idaho is contemplating weapon systems for the attack on Junction, he turns his attention to the Holtzman effect: "A wave system that ignored light speed's limits. Light speed obviously did not limit foldspace ships."
  • The Holtzman drive was always used. But without prescience, to determine whether any attempted Jump would be safe, each attempt carried a moderate chance of failing to arrive at the destination - whether the ships arrived somewhere else in the universe or were simply annihilated is unknown, and I believe the appendix states as many as one ship in three was lost. The uncertainty in the process could not be avoided, except through the limited prescience of the Navigators.
  • Holtzman drive and AI navigators. Then a little inconvenience called the Butlerian Jihad happened...

Bene Gesserit and the noble houses

• My big question is "why does any noble house allow a Bene Gesserit anywhere near them?" Okay, you have a secret organization that only seems to have a token effort at hiding that it has some manner of mysterious self-serving agenda, the individuals of which are all beautiful women who are killing machines capable of mind-control voice and controlling which chromosome goes into the sperm cells that impregnate them, apparently, as well as intense control over every nerve and muscle and emotion they have as long as we're still in the narration and not the action of the book. So with this in mind, why do these noble houses all seem to be taking in Bene Gesserit?
  • They're useful. The Reverend Mother's truthsayer abilities are incredibly useful for the Emperor, even the lesser members of the Sisterhood have political skills and aptitude that are very useful for the heads of ruling Houses. And as bad as having a consort/retainer with their own agenda might be, making an enemy of them is even worse (if you're not a once-in-a-trillion genetic anomaly with prophetic powers, that is). Besides, given the "control over every nerve and muscle," some House heads may not be making the decision with the big head, so to speak.
  • Jessica was deeply in love with Duke Leto. It's made clear that the Bene Gesserit are shocked by this; that sort of thing just isn't supposed to happen. Duke Leto was deeply in love with Jessica. Nobody is remotely surprised by this; Bene Gesserit girls are apparently just that good. (And not merely on a physical level: they are trained to understand politics to an almost superhuman degree. Their desirability to an ambitious/ horny nobleman is overdetermined.)
  • It's worth mentioning that the Bene Gesserit's main goal is the advancement of the human species through genetic pairings. As a result, if you wanted to have an extremely healthy heir and didn't mind getting him/her the old-fashioned way with a mistress who can control every muscle in her body, the Bene Gesserit option is pretty damned appealing.
  • Keep in mind, also, that the Bene Gesserit very rarely use any of their powers openly. Most of the things that would make people suspicious about them are commonly dismissed as mere rumor.
  • In the first book, Jessica uses the Voice on Thufir Hawat as a way of making a point to him — that she could control everyone in House Atreides by herself, but she doesn't want to, as it would be completely counterproductive and a betrayal of trust.
  • Since the houses were made by Gesserit in the first place, they most likely bred into them a decent amount of trust to themselves and/or subtle vulnerabilities to specific mind manipulations, just in case.

Bene Gesserit original plan for Jessica's child

• So the original Bene Gesserit plan was to have Jessica bear an Atreides daughter, then wed that daughter to the Harkonnen heir (presumably Feyd-Rautha), and that union would produce the Kwisatz Haderach. Seems to me that there's a rather large flaw in this plan - what in the name of all that is holy would compel the Atreides and Harkonnens to wed their offspring? If it weren't for the Great Convention, either Caladan or Geidi Prime would have been reduced to molten slag long ago by the other side. I suppose the Harkonnens could have been blackmailed (assuming, of course, that the Baron stopped laughing long enough to notice), but I don't believe for a moment that Bene Gesserit mind control would be enough to compel Duke Leto to marry his daughter to a Harkonnen. Jessica would be lucky if Leto simply threw her on the next transport to Wallach IX! And while I know that marital alliances were common to end disputes, both in RL and in-universe, the Atreides and Harkonnen don't want peace between their houses. Of course, it's possible that the Bene Gesserit hadn't realized the true depths of the emnity between the two houses.
  • How deep does that enmity really run? Neither party is really willing to wage war against the other without some sort of clear incentive (i.e, the Sardaukar aiding the Harkonnens in the takeover of Arrakis). Every time the Duke or Baron speaks out against the other, they're in the presence of subordinates that are in various degrees of indoctrination. If it was to their political or economic advantage (and bear in mind, we're talking about a group that is a silent partner in CHOAM and powerful enough politically to deny the ruling Emperor a legal heir), they would certainly do it.
  • Presumably the plan was for the Atreides daughter to be raised as a loyal Bene Gesserit. She'd willingly seduce Feyd-Rautha much as Lady Fenring did. Leto might have an "unfortunate accident" so his daughter (read: the Bene Gesserit) could take over the house.
  • Would the Imperium tolerate a Bene Gesserit in charge of a noble house? I actually don't recall reading about any house ruled by a woman implying a heavily patriarchal system.
  • IIRC, the Bene Gesserit had orchestrated that the Harkonnen house would obliterate the Atreides, but knowing the Harkonnen, the most likely scenario would have been that if Jessica would have given birth a girl, she would be most likely been kidnapped and raised as a slave to Feyd-Rautha or even the Baron.
  • It is very unlikely that the Bene Gesserit planned on leaving the Kwisatz Haderach with either of the major houses. If the original plan had gone forward that Lady Jessica's daughter would have been trained as a Bene Gesserit & would have seduced Freyd (not apparently that hard) which is *precisely* the way Jessica herself was bred, as revealed by Allia's genetic memory in later books. The Kwisatz Haderach would have been conceived without the knowledge of the Harkonen or the Atreides and would have been raised in some far-flung Bene Gesseric temple under close supervision and profound secrecy.
  • Why would the Bene Gesserit think they'd have trouble breeding Harkonnens and Atreides? They already pulled that off. The Lady Jessica was the Baron Harkonnen's daughter. Not only were they able to pseudo-marry her off to an Atreides, but they were able to get the clearly homosexual Baron to sire her.
  • The Baron could be bisexual and just lean more towards liking men than women.
  • With the technologies at their disposal they could do an artificial insemination.
  • Is there a particular reason why the Bene Gesserit only care about noble genes? Are they naive enough to assume that authority equals good genetics? It's also surprising that their breeding program has lasted this long, given how many houses don't shy from sending assassins against the others.
  • Nobles 1.) control all the political and economic activity and 2.) are the only ones likely to breed with someone from another planet. The Bene Gesserit may in fact serve to "destratify" the genome, mating with "human" commoners and nobles alike in order to improve the species.
  • Given that the nobles are likely to have fewer children than the commoners, there is still a high likelihood of an entire family line being wiped out by a successful assassination attempt. The Bene Gesserit don't exactly try to prevent these from occurring.
  • No, but they have been shown to attempt to "save" bloodlines in danger of loss, especially when it's a key gene in their breeding program.
  • It is easier to control the bloodlines of nobles. Every royal family in the world can list their ancestors far back in time.
  • And there are fewer of them (as noted in one of the above entries, there are probably only about a 100 million nobles or so. That's hard enough to make plans with, but compared to trying to take into account the genes of trillions of people...). Plus, it's a self-strengthening process — after centuries of Bene Gesserit meddling, authority may well be fairly close to equalling good genetics, because the people in (feudal, inherited) authority are the people the Bene Gesserit have focused their breeding plans on.
  • This. You become a noble because Bene Gesserits have bred you specifically for ruling. They were, after all, formed to do politics in the same way the Guild does mathematics.
  • The history of the universe for the last ten millenia said only people with best of the best talents (scientists, generals, politicians, spies) raised themselves to nobility and power after the Butlerian Jihad. From a Certain Point of View, each scion of a Great House was more or less a potential superhero.
  • They don't. It only looks that way if you disregard the Bene Gesserit themselves. While they do use the noble houses as breeding stock in the plan, this is largely because of the convenient fact that nobles tend to practice arranged marriages. Which makes it a lot easier to manipulate their bloodlines than it is for common people who do irrational things like marry for love or procreate accidentally via casual sex. But while the Bene Gesserit are often descended from nobles (e.g. Jessica), this is not mandatory as they are not considered nobility themselves. Thus they can take genetically promising female commoners into their order as members or else simply seduce male ones to obtain progeny from them. Indeed, this would allow the Bene Gesserit to straddle the noble-commoner divide as many nobles that would never consider having children with an ordinary commoner will do so gladly with a Bene Gesserit (or can be tricked into doing so).
  • It's also worth noting that the Bene Gesserit had manipulated bloodlines for thousands of years up to this point. This is a rare case of nobility actually being born to rule being justified, as they were (possibly unknowingly) genetically manipulated by the Bene Gesserit in an attempt to create their superhuman.
  • Possibly a combination of a by-product perks of controlling said nobles and their politic decisions to a considerable extent, which is nice no matter how you slice it, and an acquired snobism - they view themselves as messengers on a holy mission, which sounds suspiciously similar to plain old clergy, who in turn preferred to rub elbows with nobility instead of unwashed masses.
  • And it wasn't so simple as "Atriedes + Harkonnen = Kwizatz Haderach." When Paul reveals to Jessica that she's the Baron's daughter, they realize that the Bene Gesserit thought they needed to double-down on some specific piece of genetics that they would get from a close Atreides-Harkonnen breeding. What they didn't realize was that this wasn't necessary, the genetics they wanted existed in Paul. This is vague enough that what specific traits the Bene Gesserit thought were necessary are unspecified.

Fremen effectiveness in non-desert planets

• One of the points of the books is that the Fremen are tough because of their environment. They also know the ways of the desert. However, how does that make them an effective army on other planets, which are not Single Biome Planets? If anything, the local forces would be more effective in environments like plains, woods, swamps, or snow. Especially since they mostly rely on guerilla tactics, and those require intimate knowledge of the area. You can't go from a guerilla force to a conventional army at the drop of a hat. The beginning of the Children of Dune miniseries also shows them fighting on other worlds while still wearing the traditional desert robes. Not very effective combat clothing outside of the desert.
  • They're tough, but not that tough (Paul outclasses pretty much all of them at the age of 15). Remember, as far as the Arrakeen battles go, the Harkonnen military is pretty much a conscript force, the Sardaukar have declined in strength, and no one takes the Fremen seriously. By the end of the novel (and the next two books), they've been extensively trained in Atreides military tactics and Bene Gesserit infighting. At that point their main attribute is their religious fanaticism, which means that Paul and Alia can replace any losses with more well-trained, highly loyal troops. By the time all these die off, so has pretty much any resistance to Atreides rule or religious practice.
  • One book, Paul of Dune I think, does show that the Fremen are having a lot of trouble on planets with wetter biomes.
  • In Dune Messiah, a Fremen man recounts his time on a wetter planet and his awe at seeing an ocean for the first time. He gulped ocean water and immediately threw up, not understanding that salt water isn't drinkable like fresh water.

Noble titles in the Imperium

• Can anyone explain the Noble House Ranking System to me? I may have missed something but I always assumed that: Baron = small fief, Count = medium fief, might have several Barons under him, Duke = Large fief, might have several Counts under his direct control. So, why is Baron Harkonnen's nephew, Rabban, a Count and the Baron on an equal playing field with the Dukes of Atreides? Or did Herbert just assign random/cool sounding titles to the characters?
  • Counts can't be siridars, which is the imperial term for a planetary governor; Hasimir Fenring is a count, but he has no executive authority over anyone^note (although Count Fenring and Lady Margot were formerly the Emperor's ambassadors to Arrakis, which may hint at the kind of position counts usually hold), and Count Rabban governs Arrakis not as his own fief but strictly as a regent of the siridar-Baron. Leto is, presumably, a siridar-Duke. I get the impression that siridar-Dukes traditionally concentrate their authority on a single planet, while siridar-Barons traditionally have authority over one homeworld and one or two other tributary worlds — which would explain why Duke Leto was required to move to Arrakis, while the Baron never had to. The Emperor is probably siridar-governor of a whole handful of planets, but then again his house (Corrino) is the only one rich enough to own so many.
  • Cite? Herbert and his bastard-spawn use various "noble-sounding" terms more or less randomly. Some connections can be implied ("Duke" outranks "Baron" may outrank "Count") but the peerage of the Imperium isn't explained in any great detail.
  • You are making a minor detail more complicated than it needs to be, but there is a small issue. House Atreides was headed by a Duke who was siridar of Caladan, and House Harkonnen was headed by a Baron who was siridar of Geidi Prime. Hasimir Fenring was a Count, governing what the Emperor needed him to at the time (Arrakis and Caladan, both temporarily). House Harkonnen could match House Atreides through economic manipulation. It should not have been that way, but he played the system and his lowly title stopped matching his status. The problem comes when a Baron's subordinate nephew is a Count of their ancestral home. No idea why that is.
  • The official noble rankings are Baron -> Viscount -> Count -> Marquis -> Duke. Those noble rankings however were more a matter of formal etiquette than anything. Baron Harkonnen had Giedi Prime, Lankiveil and Quasi-fiefdom of Arrakis, while Duke Leto had Caladan, reason being that in the Imperium, economic power was the bigger determiner than noble rank.
  • To all the above, this is a bit of an unexplained gap by Herbert, but not too much of one if you think about it. Caladan, and the Atreides exports are said to be chiefly agricultural. They have lordship over a very blessed world for agriculture and therefore possibly quite a bit more land - and other planets besides we do not hear about. The Harkonnens are an industrial powerhouse. Therefore they make more money and have controlled Arrakis for 80 years. Formally they are much lowlier than the Atreides but in practical terms their equals if not superiors. It is implied Leto Atreides commands a larger voting bloc in the Landsraad, but that the Harkonnens are richer. A Baron who controls a rich oil well will be richer than an agricultural magnate who owns far greater acres of land.

The Guild's power

• How comes that Guild isn't controlling everything. I understand that powers of Emperor (Super Soldiers), Landsraad (We Have Reserves) and Bene Gesserit (Manipulative Bastard), but Guild isn't since it is only faction capable of reliable ftl (unless you use AI which is big no-no in Dune universe). Basically the Guild could have destroyed every other faction by simple denial of service and conquering Arrakis (presumaby by hiring mercs or by secretly having an army) and suffer no retribution whatsoever (since all the factions would have been isolated in their own star systems).
  • Mentioned in-book that they've used their limited prescience to continually choose "safe" courses for their future. What you've laid out is fraught with risk (it exposes the Guild's dependence on melange and Arrakis, the secrets of FTL are out there, and there's no guarantee that a closed-off faction won't say "screw the jihad" and develop a nav computer).
  • Okay it carries some risks, but from what I have seen it is pretty obvious that most of the major players are already aware that Guild depends on melange (only thing you need to do is to have someone review sales of melange and you probably find that guild is buying the most of it) and as for nav computer development, there are only few planets which have advanced enough R&D labs to even think of such a resarch (Ix and perhaps Riches) not to mention they would have to start it from the scratch (since all AI plans were undoubtedly destroyed)which would take years or decades, not to mention poor self sufficiency of most planets which means that supposedly many planets would be forced to either capitulate or starve.
  • Paul explicitly calls them out on this. Their limited presence has make them really, really risk adverse. They *could* have seized power at any time but could never figure out a way to do it with out any risk. His prescience sees the same problem as theirs, any attempt to seize control lead to a prophesy snarl that you can't predict your way out of. While they decided to just become parasites he gathered an unstoppable army, lured his enemies into one place, and then rolled the dice that it would work out. He could have died, but being "human" saw a calculated risk that ended in a total win or instant death as being a good gamble while the Guild Navigators were all too timid to try.
  • Because they're terminally dependent on spice, whole their existence will implode at a barest sneeze near the supply lines, and it's implied they're deliberately kept this way, in part by hiding all the information about true source of melange for millenia. And there are enough chessmaters besides them to counter at least some of their attempts to plot their way out of this trap, making the whole thing a dangerous gamble.

Alia's vision

• In Dune Messiah there is a scene in which Alia takes a great dose of Spice and has a vision of her future children, but can't see their father. Duncan speculates that's because she would have them with Paul. But Alia had no problem with seeing Paul in her other visions. So who was this mysterious figure? I can't remember if it was explained in any other book.
  • I don't believe it is followed up, but she does marry the first Duncan Idaho ghola. Many thousands of years later a serial clone of Duncan Idaho attains prescience, which it is well established makes you invisible to prescient visions. It is perhaps a bit of fan-wank, but I always took it to mean that even though the current Duncan wasn't prescient and would never be, the fact that his genetic clone would eventually be played all kinds of havok with prescience. It is commented on in God Emperor that Leto II was fascinated with him for some reason no one else understood. He may have deduced Duncan's eventual importance based on these odd visions.

Swords vs. robots

• Ok, I get the handwave that personal shields necessitate the use of blades in the post-Jihad galaxy (I'm sure anyone creative enough would've come up with dozens of other ways of killing people remotely). But what's the deal of going up against an army of robots with swords, even if they're pulse swords designed to short out their systems? It's understandable with the crazed Jihad fanatics (religious fanatics are never sane), but the Swordmasters of Ginaz are supposed to be trained warriors. A trained warrior would likely use a ranged weapon against them given the choice.
  • The reason is that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson completely missed the point. Frank Herbert never conceived the Butlerian Jihad as a Robot War or even A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Rather, Frank Herbert conceived the Butlerian Jihad as a movement against automation. To quote Leto II in God Emperor of Dune, "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger." Earlier in the novel, Leto lectures the Reverend Mothers Luyseyal and Anteac thusly: "Is automation synonymous with conscious intelligence? (...) A well-maintained machine can be more reliable than a human servant. (...) We can trust machines not to indulge in emotional distractions." And to Moneo: "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines. (...) Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed." In short: charging an army of robots with a sword constitutes cheap theatrics on the part of Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert, who did not understand that machines were cast aside during the Jihad to create a human universe.
    • Maybe they missed the point, but it’s also possible they updated the Butlerian Jihad to make more sense considering the issues brought up on the Values Dissonance page regarding Mentats; Dune was written in a time when computers were room-sized and used for crunching numbers, so discarding them in favor of super-geniuses who can do everything they were capable of and more actually makes a sense, in a way. With the advent of personal computers and the various ways they can be used for entertainment, that no longer makes sense. Taking personal computers and everything they can do away from people across the galaxy would be impossible; hardly anyone would go for it, and such a tiny group attempting to violently enforce a galaxy-wide ban on computers would get them stomped flat by the rest of civilization. A devastating Robot War is probably the only thing that could justify a total ban on computers.
  • Shields largely fall out of favor post-Dune. In Dune, shields are used because the Great Convention prohibits the use of atomics against humans; this includes subatomic fusion generated by the intersection of a lasgun beam with a shield. Because shields stop fast-moving objects, projectile weapons are largely useless; lasguns, meanwhile, must be used very cautiously. Consequently, melee weapons are the only course. In God Emperor of Dune, lasguns are in full use and shields are banned (presumably because subatomic fusion could conceivably kill the God Emperor, but also perhaps because shields drove sandworms into a killing frenzy (which is one reason the Fremen disliked them) and Leto is a pre-sandworm). Likewise, lasguns are common weapons in Heretics of Dune, and in Chapterhouse: Dune, Odrade mentions to Scytale that the Scattering makes the Great Convention irrelevant — anything goes, including nukes and lasgun-shield explosions. Consequently, shield-lasgun explosions are used to reveal no-ship positions during the assault on Junction in Chapterhouse: Dune.

Immunity to prescience

• How do you scientifically create a person invisible to prescience anyway? I mean, most of the way they explain precognition and whatnot goes way over my head, so some explanation would be useful.
  • In the Dune Universe, prescience hides prescience. If you are prescient, then other people can't see you or your influence on the future (and others can't see yours). It's why, in one of the earlier books, they bring a Guild Navigator in on a plot against Paul. With the Guild Navigator, Paul can't "see" them. Leto II's plan was to breed enough low-level prescience into people that they'd be invisible to prescience but not so much that the prescience locks them into a path (like it did to him and Paul). The goal was to free humanity from the "curse" of prescience and give them total free will.
  • He also apparently hoped to instill humanity with an instinctive dislike of centralized government and enough prescience-invisibile humans to make sure no future Pauls or Letos could ever conquer everyone as he had.

Shouldn't the Atreides be more powerful than the Harkonnens?

• Leto Atreides is a Duke and Vladimir Harkonnen is a Baron. Assuming the noble titles match to their historical counterparts, the former is the highest noble title next to the king himself (or Emperor in this case) and the latter is one of the lowest noble titles. Given this, shouldn't there be a bit of a power disparity between Duke Leto and his arch-enemy? It never seems to come up just how much lower the Baron's title implies he is in the feudal hierarchy.
  • It's specified that the Atreides are relatives of the Emperor, while the Harkonnens only have a noble title because they bought one. My headcanon is that this is why Leto has a much more prestigious noble title than Vladimir, even though as a practical matter their houses are roughly comparable in power.
  • Duke Leto and Thufir Hawat were confident that they were, even with the Emperor secretly allied with the Harkonnens. Their failure was to underestimate just how much their opponents were willing to spend to destroy them.

Paul and the Jihad

• It's been a while since I've read the books, but couldn't Paul have avoided the jihad by just talking to the Fremen and saying "Look, please don't scatter across the universe killing people in my name, got it?" Or are wild primitive barbarians just not so reasonable?
  • Not only would telling them not to do it have had no effect, at a certain point he makes it clear nothing short of his own death, the death of his mother and the death of everyone who knew about him amongst the Fremen with him would be enough to stop it. Why is that? Good question. Perhaps it's meant as a commentary on how the movement surrounding a 'Messiah' tends to take on a life of its own which eclipses the individual at its center. Paul himself never gives a clear answer as to why 'Hey, guys, don't commit a genocidal Jihad in my name' wouldn't have been enough, but clearly for the book's purposes it would not have been.
  • Dune Messiah never suggests that Paul tried to stop the carnage. He was resigned to Fremen atrocities, despite his immense sway over his followers. Even Chani observed that he could have commanded them to stop.
    • Similar to what the above poster says, Paul could have created something like Articles of War and tell the Fremen he expected them to abide by them, using his status as their messiah to keep them enforced by saying that he would consider any man among them disregarding the Articles to have betrayed him personally.
  • It's frequently implied that doing so would have caused much worse carnage in the long run, making it a lesser of two evils sort of deal - consolidate Paul's Empire quickly with terrible bloodshed, or let it collapse into a grinding civil war with unimaginable bloodshed. Paul couldn't bring himself to do what was truly necessary - the Golden Path - and was struggling to find a way forward through his visions.
  • Frank Herbert ascribed the Jihad to a racial motivation to mingle genes via war rape. To quote Dune: "(Paul) remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he could no longer hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this, the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad." That's right: if you're a proper human, you're motivated to mingle your genes, and if it's been long enough since genes were mingled on a large scale, jihad will allow you to mingle your genes through war rape. This is not an isolated sentiment. For instance, we have this passage in Chapterhouse: Dune: "The urge to conflict went far deeper than consciousness. The Tyrant had been right. Humankind acted as 'one beast.' The forces impelling that great collective animal went back to tribal days and beyond, as did so many forces to which humans responded without thinking. Mix the genes. Expand Lebensraum for your own breeders. Gather the energies of others: collect slaves, peons, servants, serfs, markets, workers... The terms often were interchangeable. [...] Energy-eating drove war's violence. This was described as 'greed, fear (that others will take your hoard), power hunger' and on and on into futile analyses." I don't subscribe to this argument; I merely report the author's words.

Training on a death world

• Why would a Death World with little moisture necessarily turn an entire planet's population into a Badass Army? This was discussed above in terms of environment, but even in a desert it doesn't necessarily make sense. Certainly such conditions would make the entire planet into experts at desert survival, and would make for an extremely resilient population, but survival doesn't necessarily turn you into a warrior who can make mincemeat out of armies of regular soldiers. If anything, I would think the desert environment would select for Fremen who were experts at hiding; fighting (accepting the existence of stillsuits and their help in curbing the issue to some extent) uses up a lot of moisture in the form of perspiration, making it extremely wasteful compared to just staying out of sight in the face of danger.
  • Well, the way this troper interperets it is; the life on Arrakis is so spartan and harsh that it has instillied an almost superhuman level of discipline in the Fremen (there is a reference in one of the quotes in the beignning of the chapter that they had mastered the art of "the pause between wanting a thing and the reaching out for that thing"). This life had also created a close tribal bond where each Fremen instinctively puts the welfare of the sietch before their own (didn't one kamikaze a Harkonnen troop transport during the invasion of Arrakis, casually sacrificing himself to kill 300 enemy soldiers). Essentially, Fremen life from birth has the same physical and mental effect as the rigoruous training of elite military units like paratroopers and Special Forces. Secondly, constant exposure to the spice in the air and food from the Arrakis environment has developed the latent psyhic abilities of the Fremen, though they aren't aware of it (it's known as the "Tau" or sense of oneness within the community). This would contribute to their remarkable unit cohesion (which accounts for their fighting prowess) but also makes them unusually intelligent (Pauls sees a classroom of Fremen children being taught basic scientific concepts, and it's implied that they pick these up very quickly), which would account for their adaptability. It's these qualities that turn the Fremen ito a Badass Army.
  • Herbert writes about Fremen discipline and community cohesion, but the behavior of several Fremen characters contradicts this. Jamis killed a fellow Fremen simply because he wanted Harah. When Paul and Jessica joined Stilgar's sietch, several Fremen men wanted to slay him (but were killed by Chani before they could challenge him). If anything, quite a few Fremen men are selfish, ill-tempered, and short-sighted, which are not qualities of disciplined warriors or resilient societies.
  • The appearance of being a Badass Army may have helped the Fremen during the Jihad, as well — this is the army that defeated the Sardaukar, and while the reader can see much of that was the decline of the Sardaukar and the Fremen's deep experience with fighting on Arrakis, that (especially the Sardaukar's decline) would not be as common knowledge in-universe — so the Fremen would generally be facing forces demoralized by knowing they're facing the fighters who defeated what had been the Badass Army of the Imperium.
  • The real reason is that Frank Herbert didn't really know anything about the raising of armies or the training of soldiers. You may as well ask why armies in any science fiction or fantasy novel behave in ways that are militarily unrealistic. For that matter, you may as well ask how it could be possibly be that a technology as useful as the computer could ever be fully suppressed in an otherwise technologically advanced civilization for any length of time. The only real answer is because the author said so.
    • It’s possible that the environment of Arrakis shaped the Fremen into utter badasses, and after Paul took over he made sure they got trained to work as a regular army.
  • Survival of the fittest. Under normal conditions, human society effectively stops Darwinian selection. We keep individuals alive and let them reproduce, even when they are relatively weak. A world like Arrakis doesn't give you that option. Fremen have been pushing themselves through a very selective filter for many generations. When Tufir discusses the population he mentions numbers of 'tens of millions'. Here on earth, we surpassed that in the stone stage. Arrakis keeps it down to that level even with a scifi technology society. The Fremen are quite literaly the descendents of the toughest of the tough. On top if that, their environment, which must have a staggering mortality rate, has turned them into fatalists that are willing to throw their lives away when necessary.
  • Except that the fitness to survive does not equal the badassitude. Though they fanatically follow some distant offshot of hybrid between Zen Buddism and Sunni Islam, so the founders could add an artificial rule along the lines "Try to kill everyone, the desert will decide the rest".

Why is the Guild bad?

• Apparently, Guild Navigators using prescience to safely navigate is considered a bad thing by Herbert. How is this bad? Would any of us use this method of travel if there wasn't assurances that it's safe? If they didn't use prescience, could they still assure a safe journey?
  • Using prescience to safely navigate isn't bad in and of itself. The problem is that A) Only one group controls all navigators. If they don't like you then you don't get to leave your planet. This means they have a really disproportionate amount of power for a bunch of living FTL computers. and B) The Guild has started running all its affairs via prescience, but whenever they contemplate changing their own future they get a "Divide by Zero" error because the way prescience works will not allow anyone to predict their own predictions. This causes the Spacing Guild to strangle the rest of the galaxy with the status quo. He sees breaking their monopoly as being just as important as breaking the Emperor.

Why isn't Jessica more messed up than she is?

• Why doesn't Jessica show any signs of psychological trauma from her Bene Gesserit upbringing? Not only would she have survived the gom jabbar ordeal at a young age, but she experienced emotional abuse all her life from Reverend Mother Mohiam. Despite these early traumas, Jessica doesn't exhibit depression, anxiety, PTSD, low self-esteem, or any other conditions associated with childhood abuse.
  • Because part of her upbring is also heavy emotional training to the point of brainwashing and heavy conditioning. She shows only what she wants to show and she wants to show what she have been trained as acceptable to show.
  • There is a scene in the Children of Dune novel where Leto II reveals to Jessica's great consternation that even decades after she's left the Bene Gesserit, there are still mental triggers buried in her head that can be used to yank her emotional state around like a kite on a string, without her even noticing it. Jessica isn't showing normal psychological reactions because her psyche isn't remotely normal; an organized conspiracy of the known galaxy's greatest mind-fuckers have been screwing with her head-wiring literally from birth, just like they do to all their other members.

Why did Yueh believe Paul was doomed?

• Dr Yueh promises to Duke Leto to protect his son and Jessica in return for using Leto as a weapon against Vladimir Harkonnen. If he meant to do this, why did he spend the first few chapters lamenting that Paul would be lost despite later promising to place him among the Fremen? He doesn't show that he has learned something new about the Fremen when arriving upon Arrakis. Perhaps it was only after he arrived on Arrakis that he realised the potential of the Fremen, but what would have been his response to Leto's initial refusal if he thought that Leto's son and partner were doomed?
  • Yueh's efforts might keep Paul alive (and even he admits it's a pretty big "might"), but he'll be living a harsh, brutal life among desert warriors for whom water is the most valuable commodity; he simply doesn't believe Paul will have a long, happy, or fulfilling life because of his betrayal. What Yueh doesn't know is that Paul is, in fact, the messiah (though his life still isn't what one would call long, happy, or fulfilling).

Why were the Bene Gesserit upset at Jessica?

• So the Bene Gesserit were upset at Jessica for giving Leto a son rather than the daughter that their plan called for. But what's the big deal? It's not as though she couldn't have more children. She did eventually have a daughter; why not just try for a daughter much sooner? Why wait for Paul to be a teenager? For that matter, the Bene Gesserit were worried that they might lose both the Harkonnen and Atreides bloodlines to the feud, but why did they do nothing about it? Why not just tell the Baron that Jessica was his daughter and Paul his grandson? Even a man as evil as Vladimir Harkonnen might have been reluctant to kill his only child and his only grandchild.
  • It wasn't that she had a son so much that she disobeyed them. Bene Gesserit are trained to view love as a weakness, to rise above it and put the well-being of the Sisterhood above all other concerns. Jessica, however, blatantly disobeyed them out of love for her Duke, giving Leto the son he wanted. That meant that she was loyal to the Duke over the Sisterhood, and that is something they consider to be unacceptable.
  • That may explain why they were upset, but it doesn't really explain anything else, does it? Why did she wait so long after Paul's birth to have more children? Why did the Bene Gesserit do nothing about the danger of losing both bloodlines, which they were worried about?

Why the Jihad?

• Why does Paul need to send the Fremen out on some jihad to conquer the universe? Doesn't he have a complete monopoly on the one commodity that their entire civilization depends on? Isn't the whole point supposed to be that he who controls the spice controls the universe? Furthermore, isn't he also already the legitimate ruler, since he married Irulan? Why does he have to conquer anyone? Wasn't the whole point of the political settlement at the end of the first book that he was inheriting an already existing empire?
  • It wasn't Paul. It was his followers who went out on their own and caused all the carnage and all the atrocities, presumably because they (like every religious fanatic) wanted everyone to bow down to their messiah and worship him, instead of merely treating him as another emperor. Paul didn't stop them either because he couldn't or because he didn't want to. It's mentioned that he didn't even try.
  • Why didn't he try? For that matter, how did they get off-planet to do it? It would require a massive fleet to move an expeditionary army from one planet to another, and to overcome whatever space-based defenses the planets they were attacking had, against which the magical growing-up-in-a-desert-makes-you-an-invincible-soldier powers of the Fremen would not avail. Where did they get one, if not provided by the imperial navy?
  • If the Messiah gets the cold feet, he's killed, ahem, ascends to heavens alive, and now he doesn't get in the way while still being a leading symbol and a convenient excuse to commit said atrocities. More or less the whole point.
  • Remember, the Spacing Guild has the tightest control over interstellar travel, not the Imperial throne. Paul essentially had two choices regarding the jihad. He could try to oppose it, and keep every Fremen on Arrakis, but they could easily bribe the Guild under his nose and get off-world that way. Plus, even for being the Kwisatz Haderach, he can't look at every future all the time, and if he pissed enough people off in his attempt to prevent the jihad, even his own Fedaykin would turn on him and kill him, and be free to spread the holy war across the galaxy. OTOH, while Paul is not shown trying to outright stop it, he could use his influence as the Emperor/Lisan al-Gaib to at least channel and control the path of destruction somewhat, like pacifying the other Landsraad houses. Like it says in Dune Messiah, the jihad ended up killing "only" 60 billion—it's possible without Paul's guiding hand, they would've killed more.
  • All the prescient visions kept telling Paul that humanity needed a bloody re-mixing of the status quo, and just changing out who the Emperor was wasn't enough. It turns out even the Jihad was insufficient. Re-reading the first couple of books after having read the whole series, there is a strong implication that Paul sees several different timelines ahead, many of them very bad for Humanity. The "Golden Path" Leto II keeps going on about is the series of actions that could be taken to get the "good ending" for Humanity and avoiding all the bad futures. The problem is that it involves a *lot* of cruelty, tyranny, and oppression to get there, along with profound personal sacrifice. The "good guy" path ends with Humanity being destroyed by some mysterious force far in the future. Paul sees the path but is repulsed at what has to be done to get there and keeps taking half-measures. His jihad is stated to delay the choice of timeline but not avoid it. There is a scene in Children of Dune where Leto II and Paul meet in the desert and discuss Leto's choices. Paul admits the Golden Path is for the best, but expresses his sympathy for what his son will have to do to get there and says he did not have the inner will to do it himself. When Leto II becomes emperor he goes much, much farther than his father did in oppressing and brutalizing the citizens of the Empire.
  • Been awhile since I've read the books (and only made it up through Children of Dune), but if memory serves, it was also about Paul's choices and consequences. Once he's with the Fremen and being exposed to all the Spice Arrakis has to offer, he sees two possible paths. He can raise the Fremen into an army, strike back at the Harkonnens, and finally get revenge on them for destroying his family (and the Emperor while he's at it, who helped them do it). This means, obviously, raising an army of fanatical badasses, since his main currency in gaining Fremen loyalty is implanted prophecies of the Bene Gesserit, and later his own gradual apotheosis. Armies of fanatical badasses are famously difficult to reign in once you get them going. Once he's led them to victory over the Harkonnens and the Emperor, the Fremen have a taste for victory, for finally being somebody on the universal stage after countless generations of being ignored in the desert, hunted for sport by the Harkonnens, or oppressed by assorted other overseeres of Arrakis who don't care about these desert nomads, just the Spice. So they're going to want to go out and kick some ass to make themselves feel better, and Paul won't be able to stop them with a Patrick Stewart Speech (he is trying to curtail it as much as he can, but that's a delicate game). Or he can not raise a Fremen army, just live out his life as an adopted Fremen. Which means giving up on his revenge, leaving the Harkonnens in charge of Arrakis, letting them and the Emperor get away with murdering his House, and allowing whatever plots they have now that the Atreides are out of the picture unfold unchecked. And it's implied that Baron Harkonnen wants to eventually earn the loyalty of the Fremen and raise them as his army, which would probably lead to the exact same thing as when Paul does it, only under the command of a sadistic monster instead of someone who wishes he could do the right thing but circumstances won't allow him to. It's not even a choice between "the lesser of two evils," it's a choice between two pretty equally bad options, and Paul chooses the one that at least includes some measure of justice and room for possible, eventual, overall improvement of human society. . . after loads and loads and loads of violence, bloodshed, and death. Which was probably where this was all inevitably going to end, sooner or later.

Hatred of Abominations

• Do the books ever explain why the Bene Gesserit hate "abominations" so much? I can certainly understand why it would be bad for an individual to be possessed by an ancestor, but why would it necessarily be bad for anyone else? A given person's ancestors might be better people. Obviously that wasn't the case with Alia, since her grandfather was a monster, but is there any reason to think it would normally be the case?
  • Probably because they are unpredictable and hard to control. If you create people as dangerous as the Bene Gesserit you need to not have any wild cards.
  • Why would they be any more unpredictable or harder to control than anyone else? Why would a person's ancestors be less predictable and controllable than the person himself?
  • Because Bene Gesserit typically don't get access to ancestral memory until after they've gone through tons of training and are mentally prepared to handle the Other Memory. Someone like Alia would have access to those memories from before birth. Who knows what kind of effect that would have on a person's mind?
  • Well, the Bene Gesserit might know if they bothered to study the phenomenon. The only thing that seemed to go wrong for Alia was that she happened to get possessed by the memories of a particularly vile ancestor. If she had been possessed by Leto, things might have turned out much better.
  • It's spelled out in Children that the benevolent figures tend to be less likely to dominate a host than the malevolent ones, and if you go back far enough, everyone's going to be related to a monster of some description - and the pre-born do go very far back; Leto II, remember, forms a "pact" with an ancestor from Ancient Egypt. I'm pretty sure that Reverend Mothers explicitly aren't able or willing to go that far back. A given person's ancestors "might be" better people, but that's a gamble involving millions or billions of lives, many of them from before any kind of surviving historical record; it's understandable that the Bene Gesserit might be a little worried about creating, for example, a new Genghis Khan or Jack the Ripper.
  • The Bene Gesserit believe strongly in "Humans", individuals that are self-actualized and think beyond what feels good right now. All of their initiates are Humans, and the possession of a Bene Gesserit by an ancestor involves the destruction of the Human whose body is taken over. That is a pretty repugnant thought to them.

Why create the Kwisatz Haderach?

• For that matter, why were the Bene Gesserit trying to create the Kwisatz Haderach anyway? What was the goal they had in mind for him once they had him? After all, weren't the Bene Gesserit more or less sitting pretty? They already had tremendous political influence and had all kinds of cool superpowers as individuals (the weirding way, the commanding voice, ancestral memory, et cetera). Why were they conducting a program that could put all that at risk, and which did in fact pretty much wreck things for them?
  • The Kwisatz Haderach could see the male ancestral memories and the future, which would allow them to do what they were already doing, but better.
  • That seems like circular reasoning, as what they were doing was trying to create the Kwisatz Haderach.
  • The Bene Gesserit see themselves as the protectors of humanity. They use their future-sight and ancestral memory to help shepherd the human race down the best path. They believed the Kwisatz Haderach would be a leader and guide, opening new and better avenues the Sisterhood hadn't been able to see before. Which is pretty much exactly what happened, except the Kwisatz Haderach they got wasn't under their control, and had no particular reason to keep them in power over human government.
  • The Bene Gesserit cannot really see the future. They use a combination of their incredible knowledge of history, psychology and sociology to make highly-accurate predictions. This is not good enough for their long-term plan, which unlike the Spacing Guild does not center around eternally preserving the status quo. But trying to chart the future course of humanity based on guesswork, even if it is very good guesswork, is unacceptably risky. They wanted to be able to capitalize on both the male line of ancestral memory to better examine the past, and combine it with a Navigator-like ability to see the future so as to enable them to plan with greater precision. In essence, to "shorten the way" to a better future.
  • Motive Decay? They were doing it for so long, they forgot what they should do when they finally succeed. Like in actual, real-life mystery cults, when the purpose of the rituals often fades away with time, and then is replaced by circular reasoning mumbo-jumbo.

Atreides+Harkonnen=Kwisatz Haderach?

• On that note: okay, the Bene Gesserit are trying to breed their super-being, and they believe (correctly) the last link they need to do that is an Atreides/Harkonnen offspring. Okay. So they order Jessica to only bear daughters to Leto, hoping that such a daughter can marry a Harkonnen, and they'll get the genes they need. But how did the self-proclaimed masters of human genetics miss that Jessica already is a Harkonnen descendant, and that by sending her to Leto, they were essentially making the super-being already? The whole plot of the books is that the Bene Gesserit weren't prepared for Paul to be the Kwizatz Haderach, and he was beyond their control (ultimately, probably, a good thing, even if a lot of bad came from it). But how did the Bene Gesserit not figure this out in the first place? Were they just holding the Idiot Ball at this crucial juncture?
  • They thought they needed another genetic composition in their Kwizatz Haderach, like a a quarter Atreides and three quarters Harkonnen. They are not infallible too, as Hasimir Fenring's existence shows. Paul was unexpected for his gender, his genetics, his training, his knowledge and finally by his contact with the Fremen that made him able to face the agony and survive it.
  • Once Paul reveals to Jessica that she's the Baron's daughter, they both realize that the Bene Gesserit thought they needed to double-down on some specific piece of genetics they would get from a close Atreides-Harkonnen breeding. As it turns out, they were wrong. So less Idiot Ball, more minor miscalculation with huge consequences.

Fremen and disease

• Shouldn't Fremen settlements in Dune be breeding grounds for all kinds of disease? The Fremen don't bathe, and unsanitary sietch conditions would allow pathogens to proliferate. With poor hygiene and unsanitary conditions, disease should be rampant among the Fremen.
  • Not necessarily. The inside of the human body is warm and moist; Dune is extremely dry and, being a desert, very cold at night. The germs that could thrive in the human body would die outside it.
  • I was under the impression that many germs are not killed by the cold, merely rendered dormant. So, they would go dormant at night only to become active during the day.
  • There are body-cleansing methods that don't use much water. Possibly the Fremen dust-bathe to remove sweat and body oils.
  • You underestimate the geriatric and health benefits of spice, and they live in a spice saturated ambient, eating spice saturated food.
  • So do the bacteria. Presumably spice doesn't offer any benefit to prokaryotes, else Arrakis would be swarming with super-pathogens.
  • No. Historically, diseases rarely originate in deserts. Both bacteria and viruses are vulnerable. They need a friendly environment with a high population density of both humans and animals to develope. Arrakis has neither.

How did Stilgar kill Mohiam?

• At the end of Dune Messiah, Stilgar kills Reverend Mother Mohiam off-screen. How was he able to do so? Mohiam was a Reverend Mother, an elite Bene Gesserit who should have had excellent combat skills and bodily control. If Jessica, a less experienced Bene Gesserit, was able to overpower Stilgar with ease in the first Dune novel, shouldn't Mohiam have been able to make quick work of him?
  • Jessica and Paul taught the Fremen the 'weirding way' - Bene Gesserit combat techniques - as part of their original campaign against the Harkonnen. By the time of Messiah Stilgar would have spent years learning those techniques from Jessica herself. No surprise that he'd be up to Reverend Mother standards in unarmed combat.
  • She was an old woman. Physicaly no match for him and he had been trained to resist the Voice.
  • Was she using a shield? If no, then a grenade or dozen would do the trick.

God-Emperor's oppression really necessary?

• Leto II oppressed his subjects, ruined lives, and killed countless innocent people during the course of his reign, all so that humans could break out of their stagnation after his death. Couldn't he have achieved the sundering of the human race through more efficient, less bloody means, such as space exploration programs and frontier colonies? With the time and resources at his disposal, he could have achieved his goals in a much more straightforward and less vicious manner.
  • The entire point of the Golden Path wasn't that it was the less bloody way, but the best way for humanity as a species, not for each individual.
  • Even Leto would have had trouble outright breaking the monopoly of the Spacing Guild and the technology restrictions of the Butlerian Jihad. What he really needed was for humanity to become so desperate for freedom of movement that they would tolerate the Ixian navigation machines despite Guild disapproval and Butlerian dogma. The Scattering needed to be a massive movement of people, not just incremental colonial expansion. His primary weapon was control of the source of the Spice. This meant that his power base was dependent on being able to limit its availability, not on a more positive means of influence.

Feyd vs. Paul

• How was Feyd able to put up a fight against Paul at all? I mean, yeah he loses the fight, but Paul was this super being who was above even the Bene Gesserits with their abilities. Yet Feyd, a trained but still normal human was able to fight against him rather evenly.
  • Paul was a "superbeing" only in the sense that he could (with certain limits) predict and shape the future, which the book explictly states was no aid to him in his duel with Feyd since the moment was a crossroads in time which essentially blinded Paul. As far as physical strength and speed are concerned, he was simply a highly trained fighter but still with human limitations, and Feyd was at least as highly trained and skilled as Paul.
  • Feyd's training was second to none and he was *also* part of the breeding program that created Paul. The Sisterhood's original plan was to mix his genes with the female Atredes Jessica was *supposed* to be have given birth to. It's likely he could match any physical advantages Paul had. Also, Right before the match Paul was musing that he was having lots of problems predicting how the meeting with the Emperor would go and that there were tons of futures where he would be killed by Thufir or Fenrig or Feyd. As it's stated that Paul had often seen his own corpse but never how he got that way, it's likely Paul was fighting Feyd without the benefit of any of his future sight.

Leto II's plans

• How could Leto II's plan to scatter humanity possibly work regarding scaring them from ever being under such a tyrant like him? Regardless of how horrible he treated everyone, time would obviously go by after his death and even he would end up passing into history and eventually legend. Anyone could end up becoming a new tyrant down the line and with the "true free will" given to Humanity by this plan, it would make that outcome all the more possible.
  • He wanted Humanity to no longer be organized under one government that could be taken over, or dependent on one Space Guild that could keep people in one place. He kept using the phrase "remember it in their bones" about the lessons he was teaching them. He wanted "don't centralize everything" to be as burned into human culture as "have children" or "protect yourself"

The spice and the worms

• Why is it no one ever learned that the worms and the Spice were connected? I mean, no one ever studied the worms at all? No one examined Spice being made? Hell, no one ever once considered the ONE planet where Spice can be made just so happens to be the ONE planet where these worms live?!
  • It was largely understood by the Fremen, and the Emperor's official scientist went native and likely doctored his reports back to the Empire. By the 2nd book the Space Guild was trying to steal a worm and get the spice cycle going on another planet, so it was generally understood by then.
  • Yes, but what about all the time before then? The hundreds or thousands of years (I forget the actual number) that they've depended on the Spice up to this point. No one ever once questioned where this stuff came from?
  • Pardot Kynes went into the desert to take some measurements and came upon some House Harkonnen troops attacking and torturing some Fremen children. He killed the troops; the Fremen believed he had to die anyway because he had seen a crysknife but at the same time they owed him a water debt so instead they captured him and brought him to their sietch and put him under guard while the tribal leaders debated what to do with him. While he was being held, Pardot started lecturing the guards and anyone who would listen about water cycles and how to make Arrakis green — which is literally the Fremen's notion of heaven. When the Naibs confronted him he was able to estimate, to a couple of percentage points, exactly how much water it would take; and when provided with details of Fremen population numbers and biology he even gave them an estimated timeline to within a generation. At any point in this process he should have died. He should have died facing trained House troops, he should have died being alone in the deep desert with Fremen, he should have died talking openly and frankly with the guards, he should have died when confronted by the tribal leaders. There's even a story about an assassin who comes to kill Pardot, listens to him give a lecture, and decides to die rather than destroy Arrakis's only hope for a green future. Any of those points could have killed an earlier ecologist and outside observers would have chalked it up to "Arrakis is a deadly planet." If all of this seems too unlikely and improbable, then remember that it is heavily implied that some force beyond the revealed timeline is influencing events. Some group or entity that we never meet in Frank Herbert's books wants the story to unfold like it does, and makes events fall out in such a way that it happens.
  • Because otherwise there would be no conflict and no point in the parable for which it is a plot device. In-universe: conspiracy. The Emperor is a glorified throne-warmer, with the realpolitiks happening in the shade of the throne (until he decides to fuck up everything and instigate that war between Harkonnens and Atreides without asking the grown-ups first), and everyone of real importance is already informed. That would also explain why he stopped after the first scientist: "Now, baby, put the planet back where you got it, put the scientists back into the box, and go wash your hands while the soup is still hot". As to the motive of the conspiracy: combination of corruption and power struggles with the Guild, who are already THE most powerful group in the universe, so that the means to curb their influence and prevent from seizing all the power are of vital importance.

Heartplugs?

• About those Harkonnen "heartplugs" (just concerning the (Lynch) film only—as far as this troper can remember anyway, these were not items in the books): In the film's end, Alia kills Baron Vladimir Harkonnen not just with the gom jabbar (as in the book), but also by ripping out his heartplug. We had previously seen a heartplug ripped from a servant boy by Baron Harkonnen himself in a depraved incident on Geidi Prime; and later we saw that Thufir Hawat, the Atreides mentat who crossed over to Harkonnen service, had one of those ("everyone gets one here" he was told). But assuming that the purpose of these was to install a rather terrifying easy-death vulnerability among those subject to the House's rule (why else would these be installed), why would the Baron himself have one, since he was the supreme ruler of his domain?
  • And also, these could provide an easy means of suicide, so given that House Harkonnen were fairly brutal rulers who no doubt had torture in their repertoire of tools for control, quick suicide could effectively remove that for dissidents, subversives, or rebels about to be captured. Overall, these heartplugs seemed to be for particularly visceral shock value in the Lynch movie (and Lynch uses these kinds of elements a lot), but if you think about them a bit, in many ways they wouldn't make sense.
  • Presumably "the floating 'fat' man" wasn't the Baron for eternity; it could have been installed under the previous head of House Harkonnen. And if it's too dangerous to remove, the current Baron may have simply decided to keep it.
  • That wasn't a heartplug. It was just some random wires and tubes.

Becoming Abomination

• When the Reverend Mother met Alia at the end of Dune she immediately calls her an abomination because she was pre-born and had memories of her ancestors before she was born. Yet, in Children of Dune, the twins were also pre-born, yet there was a lot of back-and-forth over whether they are abominations. Apparently you're only an abomination if one of your ancestors takes over your body? Did the meaning of the word change between books?
  • As best as I can figure, the Bene Gesserit assumed that the preborn would inevitably succumb to possession, it was only a matter of when. The twins, however, each figured out their own way to avoid it.

The logistics of jihad

• After Paul gains the allegiance of the Fremen, he launches a twelve-year jihad across the settled universe. The thing is, to wage a successful war it's not enough to have excellent soldiers. It's a lot, but it's not enough. You need a huge logistics operation to support your army, and even if the resources of House Atreides are still intact they don't seem like they'd be sufficient for the purpose. Think about the sheer number of ships required to transport tens of millions of people, think about all the equipment they'd need, think about how hard it would be to maintain supply chains across interstellar distances. How is this possible?
  • Think about the phrase "He who controls the spice, controls the universe." Acquiring the resources for a universe-wide jihad wouldn't have been a problem for someone who could bargain with literally the most valuable commodity known to man.

Fremen vs. shields

• When Paul first tries to fight in the Fremen way he's at a disadvantage because his reflexes are trained to fight shielded opponents. Why don't the Fremen have the same problem in reverse when they become Paul's army and have to fight enemies who have shields? Note that the Fremen are baffled by Paul's fighting style, so they aren't even familiar with anti-shield techniques in theory. Even if Paul tries training them in anti-shield techniques, how much use is that going to be with no actual experience in using them?

Ineptitude of the Harkonnens and Sardaukar

• The Harkonnen military are one of the best funded and equipped militaries in the galaxy. The Harkonnens are not above using lasguns, firearms and artillery. The Sardaukar might have 'atrophied' but are all the product of at least 20 years of military focused training on a death world where nearly half of all recruits do not make it. So how come they are bested by a bunch of untrained - if savage and combative - tribesmen even before Paul and Jessica teach them the weirding way.
  • It's a dangerous assumption to think of the Fremen as 'savage' or 'untrained'. The Baron believed the Fremen were desert nomads numbering no more than 50,000 when they in fact numbered 15,000,000 and had their own extensive network of settlements, an indigenous manufacturing base, and have been carrying out a Terraforming operation for generations. The Fremen were regularly hauling in enough spice from the desert to bribe the guild into hiding their activities from orbit.
  • To the above, Herbert based the Fremen in very large part on the Bedouin and the Arab Jihadists who followed the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) to conquest. BUT - and this is why it remains a headscratcher. Arab tribesmen had repeatedly fought and lost in pitched battles against Iranian and Roman armies. The French army in Algeria in the 1800s subdued the Bedouin - while wearing dark blue jackets, red trousers and having only muskets. Irregulars very rarely do well in pitched battles against regulars. European conscripts also often triumphed over Bedouin throughout history. Further even in the Zulu war on those occassions when Zulu (who were absolute pros at hand to hand combat) got closer enough to British soldiers to engage in the British soldiers would often best the Zulus and not be completely helpless, feckless, hapless what have you.
  • The Sardaukar weren't necessarily atrophying in their raw ability but specifically their warrior ethos was metastizing into arrogance in the absence of foes capable of reminding them that they too can be defeated. This arrogance, in its own way, made them vulnerable as they and their Emperor would never imagine that Paul would utilize atomics to break the shield wall, nor would they have suspected the Fremen ability to direct the worm's in battle.
  • As for the Harkonnen troops. It's repeatedly demonstrated that the Baron inspires no loyalty or love in his soldiers and such rulers are famous for 'coup proofing' their armies in ways that cripple their effectiveness. Ironically, one of the ways this is done is to supply the army with advanced technology, but limit the number of trained specialists who know how to operate it.
  • This still remains a headscratcher as the Sardaukar are highly trained soldiers - and soldiers throughout history have fairly consistently beaten warriors and beaten them decisively even when those warriors were - in physical terms - more robust and fit than the soldiers. This also means the point about the Harkonnen military does not work because conscript armies also not infrequently have defeated so-called 'professional' or long-service militaries in battle or even in one off engagements. A good bit of proof of this are occassions where conscripts fought elite units and lost but acquitted themselves well - the Battle of Mount Longdon in the Falklands War and the Cuban reservists versus US Delta Force and the US Rangers in Grenada in 1983. The point being with consistent training, regular military organisation, logistical support, working together as a unit and not as a bunch of individual warriors out for their own glory the Harkonnen military by itself and especially the Sardaukar would best the Fremen.
  • The Fremen are supernaturally good warriors though, as they've been living in a spice rich enviroment for generations. And Paul instils the discipline they need to win and use the tribal cohesion they have as an advantage. They still logically should have massive issues with shielded opponents though. And we see with Paul that a well trained individual can beat a Fremen. So...*shrug* No point using real world examples though as the situation, both the powers of the humans involved and the nature of the combat are pure fantasy.
  • The shields are part of it, actually. Nobody can use shields in the desert, so the Fremen have a massive advantage over anyone accustomed to using them. Yes eventually the Fremen go on to fight enemies who do have shields, but by that point Paul has smoothed out their rough edges and they're very much an organized fighting force.

What's the point of Gom Jabbar test?

• It's presented like a very big deal, but actually involves just some pain, threats and lots of empty metaphors, with relatively low stakes. Even modern humans can tolerate the pain described with sufficient conditioning. Animal in the trap actually loses the leg. It would be more appropriate if the box actually gnawed off the hand, and damaged the nerves in the process so that it cannot be easily restored. The participant is informed about losing the hand, but not about nerve damage, which would be able to be reversed only by Gesserites' secret technique (and worsened back, should you anger them). This way they would get test for self-control, resolve and loyalty, and fail-safe in form of dependence for the latter in one package, which would be handy in Jessica's case at least (unless her love was stronger, but still).
  • The point of the test isn't to prove that you're superhuman, just that you're human. This is the bare minimum that the Bene Gesserit require to consider someone a person. For most people it doesn't actually matter (which is why they don't test literally everyone), but they refuse to allow an "animal" to walk around with a bunch of dangerous superpowers.

Is there a pronunciation guide for proper names in the Duniverse?

• All three adaptations seem to dance around placing the accent on different syllables, especially the name "Harkonnen" ("Har-kone-in" vs "Harkening" with the "g" removed). The 2021 film now gives us another pronunciation of "Padishah" which is again, just placing the accent on a different syllable (This time, the herald pronounces it "Puh-dee-shuh" instead of "Pah-di-shah").
• A lot of the language Herbert used are real words. Padishah is Iranian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padishah. I won't pretend to know how to prounce it (though I guess the last comment is Shah like the Shah of Iran), but the actual pronunciations are probably out there and used actively by the communities they come from if you want to go look.

Reports of Shaddam's death being greatly exaggerated.

• In one of Irulan's epigraphs in the final chapters of the first book, she recalls an anecdote about her father at a time when he was 72 years old (but looked about 35). This would have been at some point prior to Shaddam being deposed as Emperor (circa 10,196) as Irulan mentioned that she was a young girl at the time. However, Shaddam is said (in the The Almanak en-Ashraf) to have died at the age of 68 in the year 10,202. So is there a retcon here? And if the Almanak is indeed incorrect, then when did Shaddam die?

Why is Irulan still unmarried?

• Irulan is the first born of an Emperor who looks decades younger than he actually is. Given that producing an heir is the first priority upon obtaining the throne (along with marrying off daughters to secure political relations), it's also strange that Irulan is not much older than Paul was. A male ruler generally makes it a priority to start siring heirs when young, even while still only a crown prince. The Plot Hole in the Children of Dune miniseries with a much older Wensicia is solely due to the casting of Susan Sarandon who is much older than Irulan's actor Julie Cox. Whom exactly was Shaddam saving Irulan for, if not the worthy Atreides whom he instead wanted to get rid of? Surely not Feyd, as he probably considered the Harkonnens as useful for his dirty work, but not worthy of marrying his daughter.

Why aren't gas weapons ubiquitous?

• We see in the first book a gas weapon used. Sure, it doesn't manage to kill the Baron, but it comes damn close, kills his super computer friend and manages to do so while being secretly secure in a container as small as false tooth...so...why isn't everyone using poison gas? No matter how good your shields are, humans still need to breath. Whenever any soldiers are fighting each other the enemy should be laying fields of mustard gas like it's WWI on steriods. And, in response and preperation, absolutely everyone wearing a shield should also have a gas mask on their face at all times. So, I guess the question is really why aren't gas masks ubiquitous, because for such a shielding enviroment gas weapons should be ridiculously effective and the possibility of them would beed to be defended against at all times.

Emperor's Plan? Surely there was a less complicated and cheapter method

So, the Emperor wants to kill Leto, fair enough. His grand plan is to have all the Harkonnen forces move off Arrakis (sabotaging the spice mining operation as they go), have all the Atredies move in, and then kill them all in a surprise attack. This just seems like a needlessly complex, and more importantly, expensive, plan to take down one man (who is a bit slapdash about safety with how many people he trusts to walk up to him as the charming fellow he is). Moving armies across space is expensive. And everything goes back to the spice. So moving all your enemies onto the source of all your wealth and then killing them there just seems like it's going to upset spice mining operations for basically no reason. In the months or years it takes for this exchange to happen the spice is not being mined, and when you do pull it off, you risk destroying valuable equipments and mines. It's like putting all your enemies on an oil rig and then shooting them with a flame thrower. That it backfired and Paul got control of the spice is almost a no brainer on retrospect. Don't shit where you eat, leave the spice status quo alone. Why did Leto need to be given Arrakis, and then killed for all of this to happen? I think the story wants us to believe it's because the Landsraad limits the Emperor's power so it needs to be done surreptitiously, though...I wonder what the Landsraad is told about the destruction of house Atredies, that the Baron managed to do it all alone? And that same lie couldn't work by attacking the Atredies home planet with secret Saradakar or attacking them on route form one planet to another. Is there a smoking gun that I'm missing that makes sense of this beyond Herbert wanting to set the whole thing on a desert planet? Because it just seems a foolish strategy to put the source of all your wealth at risk by giving it to your enemy and then killing him when he possess it all instead of just having Yueh slip him some cyanide.