Strassia, would you mind, if you could , spoiling the last two books? (Heretics and Chapter House Dune)? Like your previous post, it might help me to understand them better.
Was definitely an option for House Atriedes, before leaving for Arrakis, as set out in the first book.
I read the first four a couple years ago when I found them as ebooks on a now defunct site. The last three I haven’t read since high school, so I really can’t do it properly, but I can give you some tidbits:
[spoiler]Arakis is blown up (by the Ixians, I think) with the new superman (a descendant Paul, Leto II lost his gonads before puberty, so he had no kids. His “heirs” where descended from his sister (official also his wife) and the heir of the emperor that Paul beat) still on it. He had just recently learned how to speed up his metabolism to leave everyone around him as virtual statues. The new Duncan Idaho and a group of Bene Gesserit were captured by the Honored Matres and one of them tried to sexually enslave Duncan, which triggered a trap meant for the BGs causing him to sexually enslave her right back and also releasing the memories of all the Duncan gholas since the first back in Dune Messiah (previous gholas had just had Duncan’s memories up till his death in Dune). Duncan, the BGs, and the baby worm end up on the BGs’ home world. The next book picks up with that world turning into a new Dune so the Ixians cannot control all spice production. Some of the things revealed during this time is that the Honored Matres were BGs that had to find a replacement drug to treat their Spice addiction, but the one they found made them hyper aggressive and physically powerful rather than giving them future sight and long life. The Ixians did not have mechanical womb like devices to grow their gholas and spice, but rather had enslaved their women, and converted them into their tanks. They had also created a race of neuter shape shifters. If I remember correctly, it is the shape shifters that went out with the Scattering and learned to reproduce that were driving the HMs back to the Empire area. The BGs create a ghola of the super Atriedes that was killed and try to sexually bond him at the ripe age of 8 or 9, this back fires because his mother had conditioned him to resist, but the resulting trauma does restore his memories. No one really knew what he was capable of and he wasn’t telling.
I don’t remember what drove the rest of the action, but I remember that Duncan kept getting visions of two of the shape shifters watching him from far away, and at the end he takes a captured and grounded HM ship that he and his sex slave/master former HM had been confined in since the second book and learns to transport it with his mind to somewhere beyond all humans (possibly another universe).[/spoiler]
I really enjoyed all the books when I first read them, but they are an odd bunch. You have a clear trilogy with the first three that ends with the death of Paul and the rise of his son. The next book is 3500 years later and stands alone in time and seems to be an effort to fully explore and wrap up the themes introduced in the trilogy. Then comes the second trilogy, which picks up tens of thousands of years later, but while it remains focused on a limited group, seems to want to make the first books look clear and simple to understand by comparison. I wonder if FH was really trying to be confusing in a “so you think my books are convoluted? I’ll show you convoluted!” way.
Jonathan
Some minor corrections, from what I recall:
[spoiler]Arrakis was “blown up” by the Honored Matres (actually, I think it’s atmosphere was burned off), while the Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres were in the midst of negotiations on Dune. Murbella – the Honored Matre sent to infiltrate the Bene Gesserit who was turned to their side – ends up nominal leader of both due to some scheming shennanigans.
The Honored Matres were actually derived from Bene Gesserit and Fish Speakers out in the Scattering. Their methods owe quite a bit to the Sianoq of the Fish Speakers.
Although the mysterious two beings that Duncan has visions of were apparently intended to be advanced Face Dancers, Herbert’s son and co-necrorast retconned them into being AIs… so as to justify their crappy prequels in which the Thinking Machines were the Big Bad. (thus missing the point that Herbert used the Thinking Machines backstory to justify the culture he wanted to depict that did not rely on machines but on human ability, so as to showcase what his books were actually about. instead they shoehorned in their dumb man vs. machine theme.)[/spoiler]
I loved the first book and was baffled by the next two; haven’t read any of the others.
Why did Paul let the jihad go forward at all, knowing that it would cause such incredible suffering, death and carnage? Why not just be the power behind the throne (married to Irulan, with Shaddam under his thumb) and rule by proxy, to gradually mold the galaxy into what he wanted it to be?
And is there ever any reference to democracy? Does anyone ever advocate or fight for it in any of the Dune books? Why does humanity’s future necessarily include vastly-powerful tyrants? What a downer.
Would it be accurate to say that at least one of the themes of the original series was that people should not be looking for a savior to lead them to paradise?
I read the original trilogy and GE. Democracy didn’t appear to exist in that universe. There was slavery, it seemed, in at least some Houses. The Houses themselves appeared to have autocratic rule over the planets they owned.
Paul’s primary motivations and loyalties were to the people he cared about, first. So he made the choices he made because he thought that future was the best choice for the people he cared about, despite the jihad which he was trying to avoid. He basically kept choosing the Lesser Evil. It wasn’t until his son Leto II decided for the Golden Path that someone opted out of that particular trap of prescience.
There is never any hint of Paul considering rule behind-the-throne, but my WAG would be that would have been too close to the Bene Gesserit way – and Paul really was not fond of the BG.
Democracy does not come up in the books because Herbert was telling a story about humans of exceptional abilities. You’ve got a universe setting where some people are better than others; with Fremen/Saudarkar, Navigators, mentats, reverend mothers, and kwizatz haderaches around, not everyone is created equal. They’ve got a culture that accepts that some people are superior, evidence that these people are superior, and so it is not surprising that the system of rule which develops is one of superior persons being in charge.
Especially since the BG seem to have been manipulating such a structure into place for a long time. And the Guild – up until Paul, the true power in the Empire – also invested supreme power in the Padishah Emperor and the Houses.
The closest to democracy in the books would probably be the Landsraad… and that’s mostly presented as ineffectual, given that everyone in the books basically ignores them except inasmuch as they get CHOAM ownership out of them.
It’s been forever since I read the books, but wasn’t the whole point that the jyhad was inevitable, that Paul’s choice is either to lead it and keep it brief and under control or not, and have it take off without him. Basically the Fremen are destined to overthrow the Emperor and conquer the galaxy. Indeed, I remember when I read the first book as a kid realizing like a week later that its one of the few books I had read at the time where the progtagonist looses at the end, Paul appears triumphant, but his main problem still exists, he’s trapped on the path of jyhad with no way out.
Can someone clue me in on the jihad – not the historical one, but the one that happened when Paul took the throne. Who did it? Why? What happened exactly?
Most of the direct jihad events were not described directly, but as secondary descriptions in Dune Messiah and CoD. For example (it’s been a few years since I’ve read them), there were descriptions of Fremen vets returning from offworld campaigns who had “gone soft” or had lost their faith in Paul’s motives upon experiencing water-rich worlds. It was implied that seriously large war campaigns were being waged by the Fremen or by Fremen-led forces on other worlds.
Paul’s Jihad was for the purpose of converting the Imperium to the worship of Muad’Dib. The jihadists were the Fremen, more specifically the Fedaykin. The Fedaykin scattered throughout the Imperium and converted whole planetary populations by the sword. When Paul was blinded by the stoneburner attack and walked into the desert, the Fedaykin’s influence waned until Alia disbanded them.
Absolutely. Exploring (and debunking, to a degree) the messianic impulse in humanity was the second reason Herbert wrote the series (the first was to explore the ecological, especially as regards desertification, concepts he started researching while writing a journalistic article about the efforts to stop encroaching sand dunes in Oregon).
People think they need to be saved from their hard lives, and that things will be better when their world is made paradisical or idyllic. They don’t realize that their hardships are what make their lives worth living. The Fremen dreamed fervently of a mahdi who would change their desert world into a green paradise. Of course, this ruined their way of life completely and could well have destroyed the human race, because without Dune, there would be no spice, and without spice, the gears of empire ground to a halt. The price paid for a savior is sometimes too high, and really, do you actually need saving after all?
That was Leto’s point, in the end. “See, I made it all perfect for you, you never had to think for yourself or take action. Is everything better now? No? Then don’t do it again.”
Strassia and Lightray, Thanks for your responses. I may now have the courage to return to those two books.
The “advanced Face Dancer” couple in Chapter House appeared to be living on another plane of existence altogether and seemed extraneous to the story.
If nothing else is of interest in Heretics or Chapterhouse, at the least Miles Teg is probably the coolest character Herbert has in the Dune series.