Actually, Denis Villeneuve had this to say in an interview
“Yeah, it’s a thing you ask yourself,” the director admitted to io9. “I’m sure the Fremen thought about that. I’m sure that there’s a way to recycle because it’s a culture that is all about recycling. It’s a bit like people living in space. It’s an environment that’s so harsh and they are very clever people. So, there’s a way of recycling those thumpers to find them back. We should ask a Fremen.”
Wait, did he say recycle? How do you recycle something that’s been eaten? Oh. Oh, Denis, no. “[Maybe] there is something that they can find back there out of the digestive system of the worm,” he said. Yes, the director of Dune: Part Two just admitted what makes the most sense is that Fremen find, and reuse, thumpers found in sandworm shit.
I read the first book in paperback form (I didn’t read Analog in the early 1060s, so I didn’t see the serialization until later. The paperback was Ace). I read Dune Messiah shortly afterward in paperback, too (that one was from a different company – Berkeley). Amazingly, they actually set up a book display (charmingly called a “dump”) right at the entrance to my local 5 and ten with that book in it. I only recall a half dozen times they did that. The novel had been serialized in Galaxy instead of Analog, because John W. Campbell didn’t care for the mysticism of Oracular Vision and the like.
I read Children of Dune when it was serialized in Analog (they’d changed editors by then).
God Emperor of Dune didn’t get serialized anywhere. It was excerpted, however, in Playboy, which is where I read it (Hefner was a big SF fan.) Based on that, and the ludicrously long timeline, though, I didn’t read the book until fifteen years ago. I still haven’t read Frank Herbert’s last two books, or any of the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson books, except for The Road to Dune, which I actually recommend.
It contains what Dune might have been if Herbert had written the story the way he originally intended.-- everbody has different names, but you’ve got the Atreides, the Harkonnens, the Emperor, Arrakis, sandworms, and Spice. But you don’t have the Bene Gesserit or the Butlerian jihad or the Fremen, and the spice doesn’t mutate people and give them the ability to fold space. The main thing about the spice and why it’s so important is that virtually everyone is addicted to it. There’s no Steersman Guild , no worm-riders, none of the huge cultural movements that make the Dune universe so interesting.
In the movie, the Fremen are collecting decaliters of water to turn the planet green.
Is this how the planet is made green in the books? I didn’t remember this detail in the book.
In part, but it’ll be generations later. Paul and Leto have the resources of the known sphere to make it happen… and of course, part of the problem is role of the ecology of the sandworms and dessertification.
Which leads to an almost completely green Arrakis with one one semi-sandworm left by God-Emperor of Dune. 