Dune books. A what if, and help with understanding the series. Open spoilers

Cafe Society
1

I read Dune several years back, and watched the David Lynch movie back in the day. After finishing it, I though about reading the sequels, but their number deterred me, and so I instead read the plot summaries on Wikipedia. The direction the sequels take seem very bizarre. I’d like to have a better understanding of what happens, but don’t have that much time to dedicate to a project that I suspect may not pay off in the end. That’s the background I bring to Dune.

Here’s the what if. What if Duke Leto I had managed to hold off the Sardakaur and Harkonen forces using only his own troops? Let’s say he maybe has more of them, or he had a little more time to arrange better defenses and improve their training, or he knew about the betrayal that Dr. Yueh was planning, or some such thing. How would things have gone differently? Would this be the Star Wars equivalent of what if Mace Windu had managed to kill Palpatine during their duel, AKA good guys win - end of story?

Now for the sequels. The descriptions I’ve read seem very convoluted, with multiple clones of the same characters brought back to life, a jihad that occurs for some reason or another that I don’t understand, and things generally going haywire. Does Paul basically turn into a bad guy when he unleashes the Fremen Jihad? Why did he do it to begin with? Without spaceships, it doesn’t matter how much control the Fremen have over the melange, they’ll be stuck on Arakis. All Paul has to do to prevent the Jihad is tell them “no spaceships for you.” It’s not like the Fremen have a spaceship factory of their own. I’m sure I’m missing many of the explanations, but the summaries on Wikipedia don’t do a good job of explaining things. Veterans of the series, please help me out here. What’s the straight dope on the sequels?

2

Basically, Paul had no choice in the matter - he’d already seen into the future and seen that it would happen, and future events, once foreseen by a prescient individual, cannot be changed. The overarching plot of the sequels is largely about Paul and his descendents trying to find a way to break the path they’ve been locked into and prevent Kralizec from bringing about the extinction of humanity.

3

Not quite:

So, no, he is not bound by any single vision, and anyway he has multiple visions of the same events and no vision of some events. But you are correct that he is a freaky prophet. Think of the historical Muhammad. Was he a bad guy? Certainly it was not his fault if later Arabs or other Muslims unleashed a jihad. And not everybody loved the (Byzantine) Empire.

As for sequels, honestly, I would just ignore them. Same as with The Matrix.

4

It’s been a while since I read Dune through Chapterhouse Dune- IIRC

Even in Dune, Paul knows there’s no way to stop the Jihad from coming. Before he duels Feyd, he thinks “If I lose, they will say I let myself die so my spirit could lead them”.

Re Ships and the Fremen

The Fremen end up controlling the Spice. He who controls the Spice controls the universe. In Children Of Dune, the house of one of Paul’s friends is described. The text notes that it would be a palace on most planets. On Arakis, it’s a middle class home because the Fremen have become so rich.

Re Duke Leto 1 Winning

I just don’t see that as possible. Emperor Shadam IV and the Harkonens had more resources and troops and were willing to fight very dirty.

5

IIRC, that scene is before Paul becomes the Kwizatz Haderach and becomes fully prescient. The sequels make it quite clear that his visions of the future are inescapable and Kralizec is inevitable. He begins to see the Golden Path but as far as he can tell it can only delay the end, not prevent it, and it’s ultimately Leto II becoming the Tyrant, bringing about the Scattering, and eventually discovering no-tech that provides a loophole out of doomsday.

6

Well, from the POV of many of his old friends, the answer is yes. He is not the honorable leader that his father was, and is instead much more the brutal tyrant his father-in-law (and maternal grandfather for that matter) wanted to be. He feels (and is) bound by the visions he has seen, and from his POV (although his son did NOT agree) he is trying to pick a course with the least ‘evil’. He is at best willfully blind (deliberate irony for those who’ve read the sequels) to the consequences of his neglect of those around him.

In part, because of the trap his visions leave him with. In larger part, because he’s riding the tiger: the Fremen believe in their messiah, and are more than happy to put worlds that won’t support him to the torch. His strength is based on the control of the spice and Fremen, and they are bound and determined to eliminate the nonbelievers.

In the prior point, I made it clear that the jihad is more the will of the Fremen, rather than that of Paul. He is attempting to control it as well as he can, so he’s not going to demand they sit at home and get rich and fat. As for why the Guild doesn’t stop him, ell, without melange, every single guild navigator would die. So there’s that. As well as the vast majority of aristocrats and the wealthy, all of whom use the spice for its longevity and health benefits. It’s all well and good to say ‘stop that, or we won’t take you anywhere’ if you know the consequences aren’t an inevitable, painful death as you go into withdrawal. And due to their own limited abilities, the Guild knows what would happen, and worse, knows that Paul knows that they know. :slight_smile:

While a great ‘what if’, the only way that it would have happened would likely have made things worse from the POV of everyone else. In the first novel, the Duke was reaching out to the Fremen though Duncan: the only way he would have the resources to fight off the forces would likely have been for Jessica to pre-emptively activate the prophecies of the Missonaria Protectiva, and have her and Paul take the roles they ended up with early. Which would have reduced Leto, and probably Jessica and Paul into puppets of the Bene Gesserit. For that matter, without the emotional hardening of his father’s death and his own desires to crush his enemies, I doubt Paul would have found the mental fortitude to either attempt or survive the trial of the water of life.

I suspect though the BG would have manipulated things as such so that they would be able to get their breeding program back on track within a few generations through a child or grandchild of Paul and a Harkonnen descendant. After all, Paul is a mutant of sorts - and they’d want to study him extensively, and make sure they were the ones in control.

ETA - while I was correcting typos, I was thinking about Paul and his inability to fully control the Fremen, and it reminds me of Trump telling his people in the most mild possible terms to get vaccinated, for which they booed him. And he found himself walking it back immediately.

7

No. If it was revealed that the Emperor had taken sides in a Great House squabble to that extent, it would mean galactic civil war.

8

I was going to say the exact same thing. Had Leto’s forces been successful, the false flag operation would have been revealed and the result would have been open war between two of the most influential Great Houses in the galaxy with the Emperor having explicitly taking the side of one. The ensuing galactic civil war would probably have been even more massive and bloody than Paul’s jihad, and it’s likely that atomics would have come into play.

Also, by that point, Leto I’s terraforming plan had already started an irreversible climate change on Arrakis, which would have lead to the extinction of the sandworms and Kralizec if Paul (and by extension Leto II) hadn’t been prepared to enact the Golden Path.

9

Sorry, what now?
It was Leto II who enacted the terraforming, and that was long after the events of Dune. There’s no mention in Dune of Duke Leto doing any terraforming (the Fremen do, according to Pardot Kyne’s plan, but not at scale and with an awareness of the worms’ importance). There’s talk of a possibility of weather control satellites (although unknown to the Atreides, the Fremen wouldn’t allow it)

10

Leto (perhaps with some advice from Kynes, it’s been a long time since I read the book) starts the program during his brief reign over Arrakis in an attempt to make life more comfortable for the Fremen. That’s the reason that, by Children of Dune, Arrakis is experiencing rainfall and has open flowing water where there was none previously. Leto II accelerated the process that was already taking place, but the ball was already rolling at that point - as he points out to Duncan in one of their conversations in God Emperor, if he had not become what he was, the sandworms would now be extinct and so would humanity.

11

I must have missed where that was Leto’s doing. As I recall, it was Paul, as Emperor, enacting Kynes’ full plan with the might and resources of the Empire behind it - expanding the existing Fremen initiative.

12

I may be misremembering it slightly, but at the very least Leto asserts an interest in the plan. The point is that Leto II becoming God Emperor is essential to stopping the terraforming from killing off the sandworms, and probably wouldn’t have happened if Paul had not been exiled into the desert and become the Kwizatz Haderach.

13

Not really. If Paul never is exiled, while the Fremen might have been more amenable to alliance with the Atreides, they would still be independents. The Fremen would have proceeded as they had before, and would have continued to prevent satellites from being deployed (the standard terraforming technique, apparently). And the Kynes plan definitely involved preserving enough desert for the worms.

14

Leto II’s Arrakis still had an equatorial desert where he and the Museum Fremen live, but the sandworms aside from Leto II are extinct anyway. Granted, Leto II wanted the other worms to die off so that, after he died, all the worms that succeeded him would have a piece of his consciousness within then, but it’s possible that even Kynes’ plan, without satellites, might have tipped the scales to the point where the worms were doomed.

15

yeah it was when they first arrived and someone was caught trying to steal water which would have been an instant death sentence under the Harkonnen regime and he gave the go-ahead to begin it …

16

IIRC, Kynes work was independent of the Houses… he was an Imperial servant, iirc… and while it was concurrent with the Atreidian takeover of Arrakis, it wasn’t dependent on it.

17

Kynes was imperial planetologist and Judge of the Change, which made him responsible for overseeing the orderly transition of power on Arrakis from the Harkonnen to the Atreides. His affiliation with the Fremen was a well-kept secret; upon first meeting Leto, he speaks of the “Liet” the Fremen follow as a culture hero who probably doesn’t really exist, and Paul is shocked later on when he hears the Fremen address Kynes by that name.

18

Yes. But the terraforming project was the Fremens, not the Houses. Leto 1 had nothing to do with it.