I’ve seen both the David Lynch movie and the SciFi channel mini-series and I have a question for anyone who’s read the Dune books by Frank Herbert:
If Spice is necessary for interstellar travel and Spice is only found on Arakis and humans are not indiginous to Arakis (which they can’t be since there is no water), how did humans get there?
I was hoping maybe the book explained this cause the movies never did.
IIRC it’s not absolutely “necessary” it’s just that it’s a lot more dangerous without it in that you can’t have an enhanced prescient vision of precisely where you are going pop back into normal space.
Long before the time of Dune, man travelled space using computers that would calculate where they were going and when they would get there. During this time, Arrakis was found and colonized.
At some point, there was a religious reformation that culminated in the Orange Catholic Bible. This new religion, which claimed to combine the tenets of all previous religions and managed to get itself accepted far and wide, held a commandment “Thou Shalt Not Make a Machine to Mimic the Mind of a Man”.
This lead to the abandonment of some types of technology, such as computers, and the establishment of many of the orders of ‘human computers’ such as the Mentats. It was found that the spice made these people more efficient, and, when taken in huge doses, made the Guild Steersman capable of true precognition. This was the only way to think fast enough to control a spaceship.
This is taken from memory. If any real Dune fans can refine or correct what I’ve written, please do.
I think you did a pretty darn good job there. My only addition is that I seem to recall that the “no machine” thing stemmed from some sort of cataclysmic event that involved thinking machines, but I could be getting mixed up.
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*Originally posted by JeffB *
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Yeah…It was called the Butlerian Jihad, but I don’t remember the specifics…
I’ve only read the first novel in the series, but I’ll have to disagree with Saltire. In the first novel there’s no mention that Mentats need spice for their “human computer” capabilities. Mentats are created using “genetic engineering” or a similar method. There is a mention of “red-stained lips” because of some drug they take, but it’s not spice.
Spice gives you long life and, when taken in excess, allows you to be “prescient”. Which is how guild navigators do what they do - not through computing ability but because they can see “in the future” (so I agree with Saltire on this part.)
To add to Arnold Winkelried, the only way that ships of the Dune era could travel without the Guild navigators was very slowly as space is a dangerous place, especially for those without the help of the Millenium Falcon’s Nav computer.
The Guild navigators had a limited ability to see into the future which allowed them to predict the safest path through interstellar space thereby allowing the ships to travel at speeds great enough to make travel economically possible.
The Dune Encyclopedia talks about drugs used before spice was discovered. They did not work nearly as well, the navigators often died, or went mad quickly, and many ships never returned.
My understanding of the Butlerian Jihad was that it was the war between the computers and the humans, the humans ultimately winning and banning life-like computers from existance.
Sort of like Terminator 2, only bigger.
The Butlerian Jihad was not a war between humans and computers, it was a war by humans against computers, because someone figured out (à la Heidegger) that the prolonged use of and dependence upon computers limits human potential by training them to act like computers–meaning, computers train humans to act like deterministic machines, when the essence of humanity is not rationality but the infinite possibility represented by consciousness.
It’s been quite awhile since I read the Dune books and unfortunately I’ve seen the SciFi channel series since then so I may be off here.
I thought the Guild Navigators could fold space. The ships didn’t really move much on their own. Basically the ship would be here, then it’d be there.
The prescient ability of the navigators was a side effect of the spice also shared by anyone else who took enough of the stuff (to greater or lesser degrees). Navigators were shown as seriously mutated from their original selves (not really human anymore). The ability to see the future could be gained by far less spice, and no need for mutation, than the navigators used so it would seem the navigators had something else going on.
I think I remember something about that in the movie. In the super long extended directors cut they give a kind of prelude containing the history of the Dune universe (Duniverse?). Part of it included something about a war between man and the machines that had enslaved them. I assume that is the reason why there are no robots 30,000 years in the future.
The Butlerian Jihad was something that Herbert never directly gave any background information on in the novels, although he did reference and allude to it frequently. No events were detailed however.
The Dune Encyclopedia (out of print but if you can get one it is fantastic) elaborated on the events greatly. From my hazy memory, there was a woman named Jehanne Butler who led a religious purge against all “thinking” machines. This was not merely against machines, but against all people who used or built or programmed them as well, killing many billions of people. The Orange Catholic Bible was a result of this. The major commandment was “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”. This extended even to mere mathmatical calculating machines. There is a timeline in the encyclopedia, the Jihad was several thousand years before the Dune series started IIRC. There were also several major flare-ups of the jihad after the original, anytime someone was suspected of violating the OCB.
Anyway, the Jihad was very important to the setting of the novel for Herbert, explaining the extreme secretiveness of the guilds, Ixians, and Tleilaxu, as well as providing a universe that was very technoligically utilitarian and would force the radical biologically driven evolution of humans and society through the series.
I heard that in some of the new Dune books, written by other authors, they have revised and elaborated on Herbert’s future history by making the Butlerian Jihad a reaction to out-of-control nanotechnology.
Having read the “Dune Encyclopaedia” I can authoratively speak on the Butlerian Jihad*. It was inspired when a medical computer ordered the abortion of Butler’s unborn child on the pretext that it was suffering a congenital defect. The woman concerned, being Bene Gesserit, thought that it was odd that she hadn’t realised this and had tests performed on the fetus. It was evenetually found to be healthy. The computer had ordered the child killed because it, or some other machine, had predicted that Butler becoming pregnant would bring about the demise of all computers and it was trying to stop this. Of course in the classic MacBeth style ‘prophecy of doom’ it was the very act of terminating the pregnancy that led to the fulfilment of the prophecy. The mother got mad and the rest is history, no it’s prophecy, no it’s literature, ah whatever.
On the OP, the Encyclopaedia also suggets taht the worms (and hence spice) may also not be native to Arrakis, and the lack of water is a result of the worms life cycle. This implies that perhaps humans brought the worms to the planet. Bare in mind the Encyclopaedia, while a great read, is apocryphal.
*Actually this is nothing more than a rant based on hazy recollections from a couple of paragraphs I read about 15 years ago. YMMV.
Whatever the official history of the Butlerian Jihad, it seems likely that Herbert meant the name as a tip of the hat towards Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon. (In this particular Utopia, all machines are destroyed, so that human beings won’t become dependent on them).
The Mentat stuff is Sapho:
I’ve found a few references claiming that Sapho is derived from spice, but I don’t remember reading that in the books.
They get stained lips by partaking of Sap[p]ho?
Anyone else hear Frank Herbert chuckling in the background like a schoolboy?
Let’s get back to the OP, people! Only the movie said that the guild “folded space”. The book detailed how the spice enabled the navigators to use the limited prescience it gave them to safely navigate thru hyperspace.
Sigh. Couldn’t you have asked this question earlier yesterday? By coincidence, I’m re-reading the Dune series now. I just took Dune home yesterday, so I don’t have it (and its handy glossary) w/ me at work. But from what I recall of reading in the past few days (and yes, I did check up on sapho, etc.):
sapho juice is derived from the elacca tree, grown on the planet Ecaz. Elacca-wood is psychoreactive. The wood can be shaped by human thought (so sculptors love it). Elacca wood is also treated/distilled to create:
The OP has been answered. Interstellar flight was possible before the spice was discovered, it was just much more dangerous and difficult.