In the first book, soon after Paul and his family first arrive on Arrakis, I think I recall Paul surprising one of the Fremen guides by being able to adjust the fittings on his stillsuit all by himself, so that it perfectly fits against his body. The impression I came away with was that the suits are form-fitting.
I always wanted to know what powered those huge worms? What did they live on? The energy necessary to get a worm the size of a blue whale through sand must be enormous.
Sorry if this is answered in the later books, I only ever got through the first one.
I don’t know about the heat thing, but I consider it one of those suspension of disbelief things. Just like the anti-gravity thingamajigs the Baron had and I dunno… pretty much anything in most scifi books ever written. It’s not something that would drop me out of the world in my head.
Besides, unless they had to didn’t the fremen only move around at night and certainly not during the hottest times of the day? It makes more sense that way. Keeping under cover from the sun for the most part, only moving in the mornings, evenings and night.
Don’t know what it was made out of, but in my head the cloak is akin to a burnoose.
It’s answered in the appendix to the first book, on the ecology of dune.
They eat “sand-plankton”, which lives off spice residue, which comes from pre-spice mass generated by “sand-trout”, which are the amoeboid larval form of sandworms, which seal off water, which is poisonous to adult sandworms.
no, really.
I guess you’re right. Yes, I did read the books – the first four – a long time ago, but I remember nothing about Fremen factories. What stayed with me was their religious rituals, duels, secluded water reservoirs, and sandworm-riding skills.
But where does photosynthesis come into it? Any advanced planetary ecosystem has got to be based on photosynthesis, right? (Unless the lifeforms get energy from their planet’s natural radiation – I’ve seen that explored now and then.) Are these “sand plankton” photosynthetic plant-like lifeforms?
Re Photosynthesis
The worms make oxygen. I can’t recall the details, but an organ described as a furnace and located in their last segment of their bodies does some chemical reaction dealie that makes it very hot and produces oxygen.
Okay, but life on a planet’s surface is an open system, an endothermic system – it doesn’t work unless energy is being pumped into it from outside at some point. Where does the energy come from to drive Dune’s life-cycles?
Herbert was never very much for scientific precision. Yes, Dune, as it is written, monstrously violates thermodynamics. He also violates common sense. He has lasers and shield systems that blow up in a nuclear fireball when used on each other, then makes “atomics” super-deadly weapons only posessed by noble houses. But he’s hardly the worst violator. I think Asimov (or Clark?) had a story where the moon seceded from Earth by threatening to bombard it with boulders fired from a matter-accelerator. This was made out to be an invincible weapon against which Earth could not stand. Except… that Earth could also easily have wasted the Moon-dwellers with the same technology. Asimov waved his hands to distract the audience from the fact that this logically should have been a standoff, with both partis in essentially the same position. Except, of course, that the Earth needed the moon a lot less than the Moon needed Earth - good food, extra water, etc being much harder to get in space.
Sand-plankton eat only spice which is made by larval sandworms, which in turn eat only sand-plankton when they grow up? It’s as if earth plankton only ate whale-poop and whales only ate plankton! Where does the extra energy come into the equation?
What always bothered me most was the way he violated the rules of storytelling. I mean, he has to use so many words to keep everything so fucking mysterious! Dune had a whole appendix on “Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes.” I read it twice without learning anything about Bene Gesserit motives or purposes. What the Bene Gesserit could do, that I understood well enough, but not why – what their political or social aims where, why they were meddling in noble families’ mating and breeding, whether they wanted to save humanity from some undefined threat or just augment their own power as an organization, or what use they intended for the Kwizatz Haderach. And three volumes later I was still no wiser. And I read God Emperor of Dune all the way through without gaining the slightest insight as to what this threat was, from which Leto thought he had saved humanity. “If I had not acted there would now be no people, anywhere.” Why not?
Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. No, Earth couldn’t have used the same technology, both because of Earth’s thick atmosphere, and because Earth is in a deeper gravity well. It’s like a guy on the sixth floor throwing bricks down at a guy on the street: The guy on the street can’t just throw the bricks back for a stalemate.
As for those shields and lasguns, Herbert tried to explain away using them as bombs because the lasgun would also explode, killing whomever used it. But he never (at least not in the first book) considered the possibility of just attaching a simple timer or remote control to the trigger. And we know that non-programmable timers are allowed under the Butlerian rules against computers, because they’re used elsewhere in the book (for an automated sprinkler system, as I recall). And even if it were absolutely necessary for a human to pull the trigger, there’s apparently no shortage of suicidal martyrs on Arrakas.
What I’m getting at is that one of the reasons sweat works to keep you cool is that it will continue to absorb heat from your body until it evaporates off. Water uses a large amount of energy to change from liquid to gas in that process, and some of that energy in the case of sweat is heat from your body. If you wear a suit that prevents the evaporation of your sweat, and takes the sweat away from your skin so it can’t absorb heat, you will overheat and die.
Except in science fiction, of course.
And except that Chronos has pointed out that it’s possible that Fremen stillsuits do allow your sweat to absorb heat & evaporate. I don’t remember that part from the book, but I’m assuming he’s right about that because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense.
In real life, while many desert-dwelling peoples wear dark clothing, it’s usually not skin-tight and form-fitting because that would encourage you to overheat.
I think they would tough it out into some sort of Fremen jerky. 
Sure, moisture’s important, but you’re just as dead if you die of heat stroke. You’ve got to solve both problems if you’re going to survive in the desert. That’s why I prefer cold deserts like in Antarctica. 
I know whereof you speak, but that’s what makes Dune of the most interesting worlds in all of science fiction: sniffing out the clues so that it all makes sense. And, for the first four books, it kind of does… but it’s not easy figuring it out at times.
The Bene Gesserit (BG) were a female-only political organization who, through training and the use of the spice, gained the ability to remember the past but only on the female side of their descendents (your mom, her mom, her mom’s mom, etc). They set about the goal of breeding a man who can be a Bene Gesserit, reliving both male and female memories stretching back until the dawn of time. This “Kwisatz Haderach” (KW) would also have the ability to see the future (it’s tied in with seeing the past - Herbert’s Dune is strictly Newtonian in its philosophy about time and space), and, as for “why” they’re going through all this effort, it is their long term goal to control the KW and use him to decide mankind’s future.
They set up the breeding programs among the nobility in order to finally achieve the KW. Jessica was ordered to give birth to a female child, but she decided to make her lover happy and gave him a son. The potential female child was to be bred to Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Sting in the movie), with the ensuing male offspring almost certain to be a KW. Instead, Jessica screwed it up by giving birth to Paul.
Now on to the Kralizek, and the Scattering.
Paul learned that being prescient has a price - by viewing the future, you are locking in mankind to that future… the KW dooms all notions of free will. What’s worse is that Paul realized that the use of prescience, coupled with the ending of the spice, will eventually damn mankind into one final war, Kralizek (I hope I’m spelling that right - I’m doing this all from memory), which destroys the human race. Paul’s solution was to run away: he allowed himself to be blinded by the stoneburner so he could flee into the desert, away from his responsibilities. He was able to take his prescience to such a high level that he could literally use his ability to see the future as eyesight, seeing things how they happen just a split second from now.
Leto II was another KW, one who went through the spice agony at the hands of Gurney Halleck, who vowed to kill Leto if he turned out like his father. Leto, too, saw the future war, but unlike his father discovered a means to possibly avoid it: Take away the spice.
Leto forsaw that Kralizek was about the end of the spice, an ending brought about by his families all-too-successful attempts to terraform Dune. However, he saw a path out of it - if he could make the current stock (+ 400 years of dwindling production) last at least 3,000 years, that would give the Tleilaxu (or others) the time needed to synthesize a substitute. By taking complete and absolute control over all spice in the known universe, he cut space travel to a minimum, pruned back the Bene Gesserit to more manageable levels, and subdued the species’ impulse to expand for 3,500 years. Leto was a hardass with the spice, with everybody used to ever-decreasing amounts of spice allocation.
Leto knew that when he died, the sandworms that made up his body would flee back into the soil, making Arrakis a desert again, and eventually bringing back the sandworm. By the time the Arrakeen spice was available again, the substitute had been discovered, giving mankind more than enough spice to embark upon the final stage of Leto’s plan, the Scattering. Also, with more than one location of supply, there was far less of a chance of having just one entity control such a valuable resource.
The Scattering was the explosion of mankind to a multitude of other worlds, possibly other galaxies. Leto determined that if there were enough people on enough worlds mankind would become just too big and too multidinous (word?) to be locked into a future by potential Kwisatz Haderach’s. That’s the threat to mankind Leto is saving us from: people like himself.
I hope that helps!
blinks at JohnT Wow… note to self… read the rest of the Dune books, not just the first one.
Also… I kinda got from the first that the Bene Gesserit’s wanted someone like themselves (only male) to see the future and control so they would have ultimate control… and I’ve only read the first book and seen the mini-series.
It makes sense from what little we know. They go about amassing power, specific breeding program, they put these little hypnotic suggestions into what pretty much everyone right? in case they need to do something. Like the word that would stop Feyd-Rautha long enough for Paul to kill him, except Paul refuses to say that word (though of course he still kills him)
It all seemed pretty self-evident to me that they wanted to be the complete and utter rulers of mankind.
And I didn’t even read the appendixes
Wow, did I ever read the Dune books at the wrong time. I probably only understood about half of what I would have due to preoccupation when I read them. Making it through six books in nine days was not wise. I sense a trip to the library in my future.
You forgot the part about No-ships, No-domes and “The Sonia Gene”. All of which make peopl invisible to presciene, thus making it possible for people to truely disappear and scatter. And preventing any one source from knocking out the entire human race.
Wasn’t there some Dream Leto had about killing machines that could track anyone by prescience, so you truely could never hide from them?
It wasn’t the only technology they had - they could easily have blown the moon base to peices… Heinlen made it out to seem as though Earth was helpless against a few people on the moon with rocks, completely forgetting all the way they could handily win.
But more to the point, rail-gun tech capable of hitting the moon is something we could probably build now if we cared to do so - its a pretty practical proposal. The earth was by no means helpless from a practical viewpoint.
The use of rail guns to launch things into orbit would be a fascinating GQ thread.
I just happen to be re-reading Dune. Here’s the bit where Kynes explains the function of stillsuits to Duke Leto and Paul:
So there you have it. Herbert didn’t ignore the need to have the cooling effects of sweating, he just waves away the Second Law with “heat exchange filaments”.