She wasn’t dumb, but she WAS excessively sentimental. In fact, I don’t think that she actually qualified as human as BG define human. She was always letting her heart dictate her actions, rather than her head.
I wouldn’t go that far. IIRC, all BG sisters go through the gom jabbar, and the breeders especially.
There’s your problem. You read a book where Not Enough Happens right after two excellent books that used a literary device I like to call “Author Remembers To Make Things Happen”.
[credit for this revelation goes to Crow the Robot (MST3K): “Oh, yeah, It’s a great movie. Except in this part the director forgot to make things happen!”]
Regarding the Suk School conditioning. Thing is, Yueh’s wife wasn’t just his wife. She was a Bene Gesserit. And she used her secret BG techniques (apparently in the Dune universe, oral sex is a closely guarded BG secret) to brainwash him, even though/because she was also in love with him. So BG brainwashing met Suk brainwashing, and the BG won.
Really? Then how come the first book is so much better than the next two? (And after the fourth, which was worse still, I gave up on the whole business.) They just seemed to be getting worse and worse.) It always seemed to me he had the one brilliant, inspired book, a story and universe that had truly engaged Herbert’s imagination, followed by a series of potboilers cashing in on that initial success.
IIRC, Dune Messiah was supposed to be the end of the novel, Dune, but publishing concerns had the book split into two. I’m not too sure how much credence I give this - the books read as if they were written at different times - but it’s what I’ve heard for about 30 years.
Only considering the Dune books out of Herbert’s works really sells him short. He wrote a lot of other SciFi novels. But they all land firmly on the more cerebral side – what I like to call “talky SciFi”.
When they recommend “show, don’t tell”, Herbert tells. A lot. But you don’t really notice it in Dune, because he ends up having to show a lot of the stuff, just to establish the setting. After the setting set-up is out of the way, it’s off to Internal Dialogue City. (Really obvious in Lynch’s Dune movie, with Paul’s voiceover through the entire movie – that was really annoying, and brought the realization of how much of the books’ text is the same thing.)
Destination: Void is sort of the height of his writing like that, by the way. Limited setting to introduce, and really limited action – it’s all characters sitting around lecturing each other. Even worse than God-Emperor of Dune, really, since that one has some characters doing stuff throughout.
But, man, if you like that kind of SciFi, Herbert is really good at it. If you don’t, though, it’s probably snoozeville once the setting is established. I’d recommend trying his BuSab books, instead (Whipping Star & Dosadi Experiment).
She might have passed the test when it was administered to her. But I think that later events showed that she could not act rationally or obediently (obedient to the BG, that is) after she’d fallen in love with her Duke. From then on, if there was a conflict between her head and her heart, she always listened to her heart.
I wrote a bunch more questions I had but forgot it at home. I’ll also have some spoiler questions for later books too, just a warning
I don’t fault the motivation of the Emperor. Dune sets up humanity at this time to be a paranoid, war-like lot for the most part. But was there ever any indication that Leto was planning on moving against the Emperor? Other than highly trained troops, I didn’t get any impression from the first part of the book when Leto was alive that they wanted to depose the Imperial House at all. To me, it seems the Emperor, through his paranoia, brought all of this on himself
Is this explained in later books? Dune didn’t mention much of what the Baron told the Emperor, if anything. And the one thing we do know, that Leto had Duncan Idaho and elite troops that were as good as the Sardaukar, was actually true
Here’s a question that brings up: Was Leto planning on using his elite troops for offense, whether against the Emperor or the Harkonnens or were they simply for defense?
How did the Guild discover the use of the spice and its prescience and nobody else has? According to the book, pretty much everyone eats spice, even the poor, and the rich nobles ingest it in pretty large quantities. How does no one in 10000 years discover on accident what the Guild discovered? Is there some other process to turn humans into Guild Navigators that we don’t know about?
And speaking of the Guild, I find them very interesting because they are so mysterious. They’re an actual Guild right? Like a Union almost? Can anybody join? How does a huge Guild like that not leak any secrets? No disgruntled employees? And how does all the rest of the Houses and the Imperials think the Guild is moving these ships if not for spice-based prescience?
Nope, missed that completely! :eek:
Are those theories actually in the books? It sound a little like retcon by fans to me, but then I haven’t read the other books so I can’t be sure. Why weren’t they confident they could simply train her as she was growing up? And surely given the many sane Reverend Mothers that are cluttering around Alia’s brain, there was also a pretty good chance she be able to control it. In fact, why wouldn’t Alia inherit the control from previous lives as well as their memories?
This probably requires a bit of speculation, but since Paul turned out to be the Kwisatz Haderach, why did the Reverend Mother Helen Mohiam in one of the later books (I read some spoilers) try to get rid of him? Isn’t Paul what they were waiting for? I know they wanted Jessica’s daughter to be married to Feyd-Rautha, but even though Jessica defied them, the Bene Gesserit still got what they wanted right? So why aren’t they like “Yay, we’re done with our thousand year breeding program! Everybody dance!” and turn all their BG schools into parks?
So, about the Butlerian Jihad. A friend of mine once told me that even the Emperor couldn’t start building the so-called “thinking machines” again if he wanted to, in order to remove the influence of mentats and the Guild. Now that I read the book, I realized there was this whole religious theme that my friend didn’t mention to me.
Suppose people wanted some robots. After all, its been 10000 years since the war, and that only lasted about a hundred years. What are the chances of a rogue house, or IX doing that? Would that bring down the wrath of not only the Houses, but the Emperor, and the Guild (who probably wants to maintain their monopoly)?
About religion. It was specifically mentioned that the Guild were probably agnostic, but everyone else seems to be a flavor of theism. Other than the guild, is atheism essentially dead in the Dune universe? It wasn’t heavy-handed, or maybe it was just well-written, but I found the religions of Dune fascinating. Everyone seems to believe in something and follows the creed of the OC Bible, thou shalt not damage the soul, or something like that, and no one questions the fact that everyone’s simply taking for granted the accepted existence of a soul. Its one of the most religious sci-fi books I’ve ever read!
But given the controlled breeding of the Bene Gesserit, the fact that a drug replaces mysticism with a material biological reaction, I am having a difficult time attributing a reason as to why humans are so religious. They had machines that rebelled, so they are not unaware of artificial intelligence. People like the BG talk about past lives, but they got that through training and drugs. Why isn’t Dune more atheistic? Don’t get me wrong, I like the universe its created, and maybe there’s no explanation except Herbert wanted it this way, but you have all these science-y things going on and yet everyone’s a fundamentalist.
Sit back and get comfortable. This is going to be long.
The Imperium stood on three legs: The Emperor, the Landsraad, and the Guild. The whole foundation of the Imperium was a very careful, very detailed Great Convention which very carefully laid out exactly how much influence each of those legs of the tripod was able to exert. The balance was extremely delicate, and all three legs were constantly battling to get some sort of advantage over the others.
The Imperium was actually more of an economic state than a political one. CHOAM is mentioned a couple of times in Dune, without any real explanation of what it IS. CHOAM stands for Combine Honnette Ober Advancer Mercantiles, and it is the engine that makes the Imperium run. Economic importance IS political importance, and how many shares of CHOAM any given noble house has is a reflection of their power and influence in political circles. By the articles of the Great Convention, the Imperial House could not have more than 30-odd% of the shares in CHOAM outright. To get anything non-military done, the Emperor had to get some form of compromise with other Houses Major (the Houses Minor had too few votes to bother with and usually voted with the Great Houses instead of the Emperor).
The majority of the Emperor’s power lay in the Sardaukar (it’s because of the Sardaukar that there even IS an Emperor). The Sardaukar were feared by most of the Houses Major because they knew that if they gave the Emperor legal cause to use them against that House, they were done. There were no troops in the Imperium that could equal the Sardaukar until Leto Atreides came along. Through personal loyalty, inspired choices in commanders, and a sense of responsibility to his people, he created a House Major force that was the equal, man to man, of the Sardaukar. Personally, he was loyal to the Emperor…remember that even knowing that Arrakis was probably a trap for him, he obeyed the order to take the fief. The Emperor was wrong about Leto’s loyalty, but didn’t know that, with Harkonnen whispering in his ear. The point is that there was the POSSIBILITY that this “upstart duke” could best the Sardaukar with his troops, and with that possibility the whole Imperium could crumble.
The Guild is very mysterious, by design. They diverted attention in the first place from their NEED for melange for their navigation by presenting it to the nascent Imperium as a geriatric drug (in sufficient quantity, it can quadruple lifespan). They keep the loyalty of their people by being VERY generous and also by holding the monopoly on space travel…if you have a known dissident, you just exile him to your base world and never let him travel from there. If you have an unknown dissident, it’s quite likely that he or she is going to be found out by normal use of prescience before anything gets leaked. The Navigators were genetically manipulated, not mutated by the spice. The Tlielaxu made them for the Guild.
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A lot of my knowledge comes from The Dune Encyclopedia, which was approved by Frank Herbert. It differs significantly from those abortions his son and Kevin Hackerson have been spewing out, and I prefer to think of it as the “real history” of that universe.
Alia spent too long trying to deal with the voices on her own. In the third book (Children of Dune), she finally makes a deal with the one voice who can actually keep the others quiet, her grandfather, Vladimir Harkonnen. That’s her downfall.
Because they couldn’t control him. They wanted a KH that was theirs to command, not an independent who actually pretty much hated them as an institution.
There was a “black-market” type of existence of robots and computers…not very powerful ones…like the servobot that watered the plant room in the palace at Arrakeen. The Ixians (who were, ironically, the refugees from the very first battle of the Butlerian Jihad, exiled to the world where the Jihad came from) were in the market of contraband technology, just as the Tlielaxu were in the market of contraband genetic manipulation.
The Imperium is a strange mix of science-fiction and medieval/byzantine society. I’d say the most atheistic people were the Ixians, since their whole society depended on the manufacture and sale of pre-Butlerian technology. The most religious may have been the Tlielaxu and/or the Fremen, which were both Zensunni-based societies. The actual religious order, the Bene Gesserit, were pretty cynical, and probably atheistic in truth, but put on the religious finery to manipulate everyone else. If anything, the BG were probably secular humanists of an extremist sort…all of their prayers and invocations and such seem to elevate the human instead of calling on the supernatural. Considering that the BG were more or less the aggressive party in the Butlerian Jihad, the elevation of human above all and the particular insistence on testing humanity to determine that individuals WERE human rather than machine-bred, that’s appropriate.
Spoiler for the second book, but Alia doesn’t stay sane. In Dune it seems Mohiam is just being a bitch, calling Alia an abomination. Turns out, she was right.
As far as the spice being needed by the guild, my understanding is that lots of people know the that guild needs the spice and why, but it’s not common knowledge. It’s only on Arrakis itself that poor people eat the spice.
As to why everyone is religious, it’s because the powers-that-be want them to be religious. The Bene Gesserit don’t give away their secrets, they hide their techniques behind mysticism and bullshit. Religion is a tool of social control.
Herbert wanted to create the Dune universe as socially and technologically static. Yes, future tech exists, but it’s the same future tech that has been used for thousands of years. And so we have the feudal system–In Space. And swordsmen–In Space. And ninjas–In Space. And bedouin tribesmen–In Space. It’s justified by a mix of technology and social control, and you can’t change the technology because of the social control, and you can’t change the social control without a change in technology.
As to why the BG didn’t pop their champagne corks and celebrate when they found out Paul was really the Kwisatz Haderach, well, that’s pretty simple. They wanted a Kwisatz Haderach, but they wanted one under their control. Paul wasn’t under their control, in fact he hated them. So yeah.
Wow, great explanations. I may actually pick up book 2 now that I see that it remains pretty interesting later on.
One more question then: So the BG didn’t like Paul cause they can’t control him. If they had a Kwisatz Haderach that they could control, what was their endgame? Break the 3 legs of the Imperium and rule over all of humanity? Something less ambitious?
I don’t think THEY knew why they wanted a KH anymore. Remember, they’d been doing this for more than 20,000 years. They only knew that their purpose for 20 millennia has been to produce a man who could access both sides of the ancestral memories. They may have been planning to make him Emperor, an Emperor who had the memories of every king, bishop, potentate, padishah, etc, in his ancestry. Which they eventually got, to their great detriment.
As you may have noticed, this sort of static society is very common in science fiction. And the reason is that writers spend a lot of time creating a balance of technology and sociology that will result in the particular sort of setting that they want to tell stories in. But if it’s not static, then one invention or social movement later and your carefully constructed setting falls apart and transforms into something new. And now you can’t write about Tokugawa era Japan IN SPACE, or Napoleonic naval warfare IN SPACE or the Cold War IN SPACE anymore, and your main character, the grizzled space pirate captain with the neutronium cutlass doesn’t fit anymore.
Yes, but much too often authors don’t bother to explain WHY their society is static. At least Herbert offers the Butlerian Jihad and the delicate balance of the Great Convention as the things that are holding that static state in place.
jayjay has already addressed this, but while the BG’s reaction to Alia as “Abomination!” does seem a little knee-jerk in the first book, I always got the impression that there was a lot of history and hard-won experience behind that reaction on the part of the BG. In other words, there must have been unnamed past examples of individuals prematurely awakened to Other Memory, before their own personalities and identities were secure enough to cope with the onslaught, and they became puppets for the inner voices just as Alia eventually did. (Maybe that’s just my own fan-wank.)
I’m also a huuuge fan of the Dune Encyclopedia (I got my very own copy for my birthday several years ago-- glee!) and would recommend that plus the first four books (up through God Emperor) as worth reading. They stand on their own: the remaining two Herbert books (Heretics and Chapterhouse) are good and interesting, but the first four really complete an arc. (And, yeah, avoid the prequels and such.)
Stop and think what having all those past lives means for Reverend Mothers: they are the oldest people around. They remember all that religious history in a way that others simply cannot. When a Reverend Mother looks back through her Other Memory, there are women from before her still angry about the things that went on before (“They denied us the hajj!”).
The Bene Gesserit are super-conservative and religious/humanist because of this. And the BG have molded culture as they wanted – so it is not surprising that it, too, is conservative. And religious/humanist… or whatever you’d call their particular ethos.
Likewise, those Reverend Mothers – including Mohiam – remember themselves what happened with those Abominations. And up until they had a Kwizatz Haderach to deal with, those voices of experience in their Other Memories were pretty good predictors for things going all pear-shaped. Alia just wasn’t enough of a Kwizatz Haderach to lie outside the reliability of that prediction.
[spoiler]Unlike, say, Leto II and Ghanima, whose circumstances were so bizarre that prior experience couldn’t have predicted them. Alia had a relatively “normal” upbringing for a Preborn… despite her occasional prescience.
In particular, I’d guess, the fact of her Reverend Mother mother’s rejection probably hurt her chances a lot. That notably didn’t happen with Leto II and his sister.[/spoiler]
I remembered a couple of my questions from home that I had written down! 
Its been years since I saw the 1984 Dune movie and the 2003 Sci-Fi channel miniseries. I remembered that I thought the Dune movie was kinda weird, the climactic battle was fought with these weird handheld devices, I think they looked like door handles, that Paul and the Fremen would scream into and unleash some sort of sonic blast. I’m guessing that’s where they got the Atreides-only Sonic Tanks from in the Dune games, because there was no mention of it anywhere in the books.
From scattered reviews of the 2003 miniseries, I seem to recall that it was more accurate. Just exactly what differences where there between the books and each of these things? I liked the miniseries even though I watched all of it without ever reading Dune, but I think I was too young to really enjoy the movie when I last saw it probably on TV in the 90’s.
And my other question concerns Earth. Given that Dune is set like 20000 years in the future, do people still go to Earth? Is it still inhabited? Or is it like some ancient myth in the recesses of humanity’s collective unconscious? I’m curious if it ever figures into the plot, as several sci-fi universes that I partake in treat Earth as some kind of mythical homeworld like we’d treat Atlantis today.
I never saw any of the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) adaptations, and it’s been a LONG time since I saw the Lynch version, but I do remember the “Weirding Modules” being particularly egregious additions. That and the rain, at the end. The rain was just stupid. Oh, and the Guild Navigators they showed. Ick. I much prefer the version from “Barlowe’s Guide To Extra-Terrestrials”, which matches up with the description of Edric from Dune Messiah.
My understanding is that it’s legendary now, if not forgotten entirely.