Somewhere I encountered the speculation that the world of “Pitch Black” was on the tail end of an ecological apocalypse. The birds had eaten everything else on the planet, and were now living through cannabalism basically, which would result in smaller and smaller numbers with each generation, resulting in a die-off for the birds, followed by an ecological recovery. The people in Pitch Black were unfortunately on the planet at EXACTLY the wrong point in the cycle, when most of the animal life had been exterminated by the birds, but there were still enough birds around to darken the skies when they swarmed.
My personal issue is with all the stories in which interstellar empires are ruled by hereditary monarchies. There’s a reason we don’t have kings and queens and shit like that any more, except in superannuated form (like the British monarchs, no real power). Hereditary monarchies are inefficient, stupid and have a strong tendency toward corruption. Assuming that our technology will advance but our governmental system will stagnate seems ridiculous on the face of it. But very popular considering all the Lords and Ladies who fly around in spaceships.
Actually, it seems as though representative democracy being very difficult to maintain over thousands of planets and trillions of people. Just think of the campaigning costs! A return to some type of authoritarian rule is, unfortunately, quite likely, and add to that a class of ultra-awealthy, genetically-enhanced human “nobility”, I can see a return to monarchy of one form or another.
Hereditary dynasties make (somewhat) more sense in near-steady state economic systems: when there’s very little technological innovation and the basic means of production have remained unchanged for centuries. Dynasties rule politically, guilds dominate large-scale commerce and the little people get by doing what their ancestors did for generations. Dune and Star Wars portray galaxies which have high tech but apparently have had the same high tech for millennia. They’re essentially medieval fantasies in science fiction garb.
OK, the ecology of Arrakis is… unconvincing.
But there was something else that bugged me about Dune, though it took a while to figure out exactly what the issue was. But simply:
Why don’t the Fremen have rifles?
I’ll accept shield techology with some willing suspension of disbelief, since it’s sort of a postulate for the world. And, OK, it leads to lots of fighting with swords.
But, it turns out shields are bad on Arrakis, because sandstorms knock them out and they attract worms. The Fremen sneer at shields and never use them. OK, fine.
And the Fremen are vicious fighters; the Harkonnen occupation has more or less unified them against the off-worlders, but you don’t become super fighters without a lot of practice fighting each other internally.
However, Fremen technology is also not primitive; there are factories and sophisticated technology like plastics that change color with temperature.
And finally, while many cultures have had various taboos on how fightin happens, no group has ever really turned up its nose at whatever effective projectile weapons it could get its hands on. Maybe a small fraction or tribe has, but they weren’t the ones that survived. The historical Earth desert tribes certainly didn’t spurn rifles when they got the chance.
So why hadn’t some smart Fremen figured out how to build a rifle?
I’ve never understood why somebody didn’t build a remote laser and shoot it at some city-sized shield. Convince some poor loser that you’ll take care of his family if he goes on this suicide mission and voila! Your House Harkonnen problems are behind you.
I suspect they’ll come up with something other than monarchy. Maybe government by instantaneous virtual telepathy. The Culture society is pretty much run by benign artificial intelligences. Or some other, you know, science fictiony kind of idea. I suspect that most of the interstellar monarchies exist because the writer isn’t really interested in how the people are governed, for the purposes of his story, so he falls back on the only alternative to representative democracy he knows of, monarchy.
The Star Wars universe is actually governed by a council that votes on things, though I believe the representatives to the council are from planetary aristocracies. A minor point, really. I do agree that many SF interstellar empires are medieval fantasies in SF garb.
The water supply comes from a couple of sources. One is ice mining at the polar caps. The other main one is through condensation from the air by use of windtraps.
The worms are described as eating sandplankton, the way that huge whales eat plankton. The sandtrout (haploid version of sandworms?) encapsulte any open or subterranian water adding chemical buffers to create the spice, which the worms also eat. The sandworms also are described as being oxegen factories.
Remember this is a lifeform that evolved on an alien world and as a result likely has a very different chemistry.
As far as the monopoly on space travel. It exists because the Guild Navigators are the only ones who can safely see a safe path through space (via a limited for of prescience).
So in the absence of people, does the ecology work? If no one colonized Arrakis would the whole edifice of sandplankton/sandtrout/sandworms collapse?
The whole waterless biology thing bothers me – if the sand is full of sandplankton, then there’s plenty of water there, but it’s tied up in biological forms. really? Completely? The analogy of sea of sand + sea of water has been used by others (have a look at the Outer Limits episode “The Invisible Enemy”), but it isn’t really convincing. It’s hard to “swim” through sand, especially so if you’re an enormous sandworm. It uses up an outrageous amount of energy – if it didn’t, we’d have at least recreational sand-burrowers by now. There’s a reason the creatures in "Tremors’ don’t exist. And the sandworms are bigger.
I’m not saying that Herbert didn’t pay lipservice to a lot of the objections – many of them belatedly. I’m just saying it’s not really convincing. And, as I say, I love the Dune novels, nonetheless.
Probably a hijack but can anyone point out fictional (SF and fantasy) worlds that do make sense entirely as presented? I’d imagine that anyone who is willing to put their energy into describing the particulars of a real-world consistent fantasy world might have scant time for derring-do.
Problem there is that it blows up both the person who fired and the target, according to the physics Herbert laid out. Useless for taking territory since it was like dropping a bomb on whatever you were trying to take. A big part of what the Harkkonens were trying to do was to take the capitol and other infrastructure intact, which is why they used treachery instead of outright force.
Rifles were useless against shields since they would reject anything over a certain velocity. Relatively slow projectiles would penetrate, though, as long as your target was stationary or moving away. If a shielded target was moving toward you, the velocity vectors would add up to too high of a velocity, and the projectile would get shunted aside.
Atomics were shunned in much the same way chemical and biological weapons are now; the Houses probably have them, but would only use them as a weapon of last resort since winning through using them would lead to universal ostracism and completely cutting off all trade with whichever family used them. Paul did use atomics to take down the shield wall without destroying Arakeen, but he was setting himself up as Emperor, seizing control of all Spice production, and (mostly against his will) pursuing a pogrom/jihad against the other noble houses, so was in a position to tell everyone to fuck themselves if they didn’t like it.
He clearly understands that – the point is that if your goal is to fight the enemy – which the Fremen, who didn’t need the cities, would be willing to do, the threat of self-annihilation doesn’t really pose an insuperable barrier to the determined.
Like you said, this only works if you want to keep the city intact. If you’re a terrorist or some poor suicidal sap who is freaking sick of being oppressed, that’s not much of a concern.
