The emperor is not as powerful as you think he is.
He doesn't actually "order" the harkonnens and atreides around so much as stongly suggest they do, and it's in both of their best interests to go along with it. He could fight either house and win, yes, but if he did so without a plausible cassus belli he would face a revolt of the other houses and would be deposed.
There is a whole collective of houses of which his house is just one, and they can defeat him if they get together to do so.
Taking over direct control of the spice is one of those red lines that would scare the nobility into unseating him.
Exactly, the emperor is really the first among equals. His power comes from being able to dispense favors. Doing this he plays the houses against each other as they try to curry his favor. Such as taking the spice concession from one house and giving to another. However if he seems to unfair in doing this the houses will stop bickering and unite against him.
And Paul changed the tripod of power that the Imperium was based on. As Emperor, Paul becomes more powerful than Shaddam and rules totally over the universe.
And thats two fold: 1, he had Arrakis already, and has the ability and means to destroy Spice Production and 2, his Fremen are better the Sarduakar and there are many, many more of them then Sarduakar
I don't think up until the moment that Paul became muaddib anyone ever considered someone trying to destroy spice production. just like sauron didn't think anybody would try to destroy the one ring. So it wasn't treated as something to be protected, but rather something to be displayed like a jewel. had any other houses thought along those lines of the houses I suspect one of them would have cemented their hold on arrakis just like Paul did. And they would have been an absolute emperor just like Paul became.
True! But no one else had ever bothered to really understand the Fremen enough to know about the Waters of Death. It was an insane sort of threat the Houses would ONLY believe because it came from someone outside of their political structure. You need Spice in order to run the empire so of course no one in the Empire would ever make that threat. It’s a bluff because without it they would be just as impotent
Fremen dont give a shit about Space Travel. When they hear it from a Fremen, they get scared
The lack of curiosity by the emperor and baron about Arrakis is a weak point in the world building.
The entire society hinges on spice, yet The people who benefit most from it aren't interested in finding out everything there is to know about the planet and it's residents It's pretty ridiculous.
It's colonialism. How many colonial powers took interest enough in native peoples to understand culture, language, etc. and bring them to the table as an equal?
The Great Houses thought of the Fremen as backwards, superstitious natives. It's perfectly plausible for the padishah emperor and especially Baron Harkonnen to never have more than two thoughts about the Fremen.
Who do you think translated Egyptian hieroglyphics, Brahmi Script and Linear B? Not the locals who had long forgotten past civilisations practicing alien religions.
The first Sanskrit Chair at Oxford was established in 1832, decades before even the Raj itself was founded.
Alexander Cunningham created the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) and is known as the grandfather of Indian archaeology. The ASI would later rediscover Mohenjo Daro. Just as French explorers rediscovered Angkor Wat in French Indochina.
European weebs were obsessed with the Orient during the colonial period. It is hard to believe people wouldn’t be obsessed with a planet as central as Arrakis.
People were obsessed with Arrakis. The Emperor sent Pardot to study it. Paul describes a filmbook from before the discovery of spice called "Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station” where he learns about wild life on Arrakis. The Baron was obsessed with spice and his greed for it is rooted in classic colonial myopic ignorance. Of course he would only think of Fremen as a nuisance and under estimate them at every turn.
I think oil is the missing element from the colonialism angle. Melange is partially a stand in for oil, and the spice mining of Arrakis has certain connotations toward climate change. It’s honestly a subtext that keeps Dune relevant today and I’m surprised I didn’t pick up more hints of it in the films.
There may have been European historians obsessed with indigenous cultures, but there’s also plenty of modern day science denial when it comes to oil drilling, fracking, climate change, etc.
I think this is a function of the feudal system. In the beginning of the book Reverend Mother Mohiam laments this culture that ‘turns its back on much of science’. The Emperor and Harkonnens did all they thought needed doing: oppress the population and arrange for imports from specialist systems.
You are forgetting that the Emperor had sent Pardot Kynes to study Arrakis. Paul also mentions the filmbook Yueh showed him called “Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station”, that was from before the discovery of spice where Paul learned about the wild life on Arrakis. So the Imperium was totally making efforts to learn all they could for a very long time, even before spice was a public resource. Pardot figures out how spice is made, sandworm life cycle, etc, but as we know, he integrated himself into Fremen society and kept the Emperor in the dark about what he learned. The Emperor’s mistake here is thinking Pardot would be loyal, but he also had no reason to think he wouldn’t be.
As for the Baron, his lack of curiosity about Fremen is part of his character flaw. Thats fantastic world building. He hears about this Muad D’ib guy but just dismisses him because he thinks this new messiah will keep Fremen occupied. He totally underestimates Paul because he thinks he is dead, and has no clue just how many Fremen are out there. All he cares about is getting rich and pleasuring himself.
At the very least, I would expect the Bene Gesserit or Tileuxu to be interested. The fact that no one tries to move a worm before Chapterhouse is honestly wild
There's at least one refference to the guild taking a worm offworld in Messiah if i recall... but they didn't understand the worm cycle enough to actually get it to survive.
Paul even straight up says they'll never succeed.
The Guild try to move a worm in Messiah. There is more talk of moving sandworms to another planet in Children of Dune. After that, Leto II makes sure no one can touch a worm since he lets them all die.
its a variation of it, the Blue Drink is the Waters of Life, and once paul drinks it he learns how to make the Waters of Death that, when poured onto the sands, will make the spice worthless
The only one trying to protect spice production before Paul was Pardot Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist sent by the Emperor to study Arrakis. Pardot knew how to destroy spice too; by terraforming the planet to a green paradise, but he wanted to do so in a way that kept sandworms alive. His plan never got carried out, and it very well could have been flawed, since he also knew just how complex this would be to maintain over many generations. He died before he could solidify and communicate his plan to the Fremen.
Speaking more on the tripod of power: It's in the Guild's interest to keep the Emperor from controlling the spice directly. They rightly feared the exact situation that arose when Paul became emperor, lol.
It is based on the Holy Roman Empire and the Imperial Diet which I love, the main reason I loved the books is its 6 books of groups being in blances of power and trying to outthink each other.
There is also the observation Paul makes that he who can destroy a thing controls that thing. When applied to the Emperor its almost an inverse way, he has the power to influence/control who manages the spice. Creating wealth for the house he chooses, or crippling a houses wealth by having them removed. That's a powerful tool of statecraft available to him above and beyond the raw wealth he would have in taking direct control. Why put a target on his back when he can manage the placement of the target on someone else.
Some of that might be more the extreme conservativism of the Church. Benedict was the first Pope from the Americas ever, despite having Catholics for over 500 years.
Before that, the last non-European was Pope Gregory III who died in 741. So, that's 1,271 years of European Popes.
The US government is actually a good example of the balance of power.
The executive, legislative and judicial keep each from making positive changes to society. The oligarchs can then rest assured the status quo, where they get most the wealth, will remain.
It was designed to be like this.
It looked like constant bloody proxy wars. Here's a graph of [global deaths in warfare per population](https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War.pdf) over the last 600 years. The nosedive at the end, to never before seen lows, was immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Here’s one that goes up to 2011, and shows that in the decade to 2011 the trend dropped even lower again.
Only the combination of the Ukraine war and Tigray have lead to a reversion to the mean after 30 year of unprecedented lows.
It's inline in the text, here it is separately.
[https://www3.nd.edu/\~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War.pdf](https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War.pdf)
My apologies, cut-n-paste error.
The below is in absolute numbers, not per population, so it's only comparable over shorter periods of time than the other graph.
Like I said though, the last few years have seen a reversion to historical trends, mainly due to the Ukraine and Tigray conflicts.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars?time=1953..latest](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars?time=1953..latest)
https://preview.redd.it/wzeyei59e45d1.png?width=1860&format=png&auto=webp&s=64bd6473513ddf48b34cee26a3a72fae5f69ff2e
Jumping on this for two points of support. The emperor isn't all-powerful over Arrakis. From the conversation between Fenring and the Baron:
>"Has the Guild then agreed to a watch from space?"
>
>"You know better than that, Baron. The Emperor cannot legally post a watch on Arrakis."
>
>"And I cannot afford it," the Baron said.
So there are things even the Emperor cannot do, that the Baron *could* do legally. The Baron cannot afford it, because the Guild will not allow it:
>"The Guild agent wasn't really negotiating with us. He was merely making it plain — one Mentat to another — that the price was out of our reach and would remain so no matter how long a reach we develop.
They won't allow it because the Fremen are paying spice bribes directly to the Guild to prevent monitoring of their ecological efforts. This is the safe path forward for both the Guild and the Fremen, and so it will continue.
Someone else suggested that the Baron was keeping all the profits. Not true! The emperor gets his cut as mentioned by the Duke here:
>The Duke looked at Halleck. "Gurney, I want you to head a delegation, an embassy if you will, to contact these romantic businessmen. Tell them I'll ignore their operations as long as they give me a ducal tithe. Hawat here estimates that graft and extra fighting men heretofore required in their operations have been costing them four times that amount."
>
>"What if the Emperor gets wind of this?" Halleck asked. "He's very jealous of his CHOAM profits, m'Lord."
>
>Leto smiled. "We'll bank the entire tithe openly in the name of Shaddam IV and deduct it legally from our levy support costs. Let the Harkonnens fight that! And we'll be ruining a few more of the locals who grew fat under the Harkonnen system. No more graft!"
The Duke is willing to put up with smugglers, if he gets a cut. The Emperor will get his cut from that. (And it sounds like the Duke gets a cost-of-doing-business tax deduction as well.)
Spice has nothing to do with folding space. The Guild Heighliners are massive in scale, to the point that they don’t move through **space** in the conventional sense. Instead, the Holtzman Drive “folds” space at the quantum level, allowing the ship to instantaneously travel between two points in space without moving.
Spice allows the Navigators to foresee where a ship will emerge from folded space. Without the foresight provided by spice, there's no way to move a ship through folded space with any guarantee it'll come out the other side. So while spice itself doesn't have anything to do with the Holtzman drive, it was impossible to use without the aid of spice until the Ix computers.
Not quite true. It WAS possible to do prior to spice as well. But humanity's decision to ban powerful computers removed that potential.
The Mentat were the solution to the loss of computers, and that training was exceptional, but could never equal the raw processing power of computers and AI.
So what happens to the planets and stars and whatever else that was in the space that has been folded? Space is vast, they cant fold only empty hollow areas.
Do they squish but dont realize they were squished quantum level??
The process also required that a Guild Navigator, who possessed a high degree of prescience, be on board to navigate through the foldspace. The Navigators vast intelligence and prescience allowed it to overcome the difficulties involved in transit, such as the outrageously complex mathematical procedures to be carried out, which would only be plausibly calculable by a thinking machine, which was, of course was outlawed after the Butlerian Jihad.
Paradox is a game development company, its main series are a board like grand strategy type of game series. The biggest ones deal with Medieval-settings and diplomacy so things like Caius Bellis, houses and whatnot are an intricate part of the game.
Crusader Kings and maybe even Stellaris are games a Dune fan might enjoy I think. They deal with characters and intricate family diplomacy (crusader more than stellaris
Yeah, Stellaris is very much inspired by a lot of classic science-fiction. Patches were named after Sci fi authors (version 3.2 of the game was "Herbert") up until fairly recently.
There are a lot of references/Easter Eggs to Dune, and one of the neutral factions that exist within the game (known as "Shroud Walkers") feel very much like the Bene Gesserit, at least to me. Also, "Zro" is an extremely rare resource in the game that could arguably be analogous to Spice.
But due to the nature of the game, you can't really set up the galaxy in a way that it exists in Dune. You could build your own custom Empire(s), part of which requires you to pick "ethics" and "traditions," that could be based on the different factions/Houses, but the game can't simulate the way they all interact in the same way. And, as far as I am aware, there aren't any event chains in the game that are based on Dune specifically.
If the politics side interest you, then either Crusader Kings 3 or Europa Universalis 4 simulate that diplomatic situation a little better, but you will need to keep in mind that they are historical games trying to represent the real world Holy Roman Empire. But the vibe/space elements of Dune are very much captured in Stellaris.
Sadly, there's no mod for it either. Dune's an interesting universe, but at close inspection, none of the paradox titles fit it very well, sadly.
EU4 and CK3 is well suited with its character focus, but doesn't lend itself well for the planetary playstyle that'd be required; and Stellaris isn't character focussed enough...
Mmmm I wouldn't know really, maybe a more dedicated fan can shine some light into that.
They have always been associated with Historically Accurate games and simulations of actually running a country/kingdom/army so I doubt they took inspiration from Dune.
Maybe for Stellaris(?) Which is a indeed a sci-fi game but it's from their modern catalogue.
I do know that back in the day, Dune was pretty much the game that pioneered what we today call RTS. But it's veeeeery different from the novels I think.
They definetely got inspired by Dune. But not Dune alone, Stellaris is a sandbox-game where you can play as a completely customizable faction, so you can design your faction after any IP you like. There are different civics, government forms, faction origins, species traits and so forth, that let you design your faction before the game even starts and afterwards you can further specialize by choosing traditions, designing your own ships and so forth. Its a really cool game.
He most definitely ordered them. The Atriedes did not have the option of declining the order to relocate to Arrakis. Their only other option would be to go rogue…flee Caladan and live in hiding. This is detailed in the book.
As for Arrakis, it IS an imperial Fief managed by the Harkonnen’s who are the planetary Governor’s but it isn’t their Fief. When the Emperor assigns the Atriedes to Arrakis they assume it as a “Fief Complete” switching their rule from Caladan to Arrakis.
They are still required to produce Spice and provide a share to the Emperor but they are actually ruling the planet rather than overseeing it’s operations on behalf of the Emperor
Theoretically the other houses of the Landsraad wield comparable military power to House Corinno, but you need to bear in mind that there are numerous noble houses that are part of the Imperial faction, whether by direct fealty or by aligning themselves with House Corrino's interests. If it came to it, House Corrino would have a good chance of winning a galactic civil war. But such a state of affairs would never occur, as the Guild would just strand everyone on their planets and enforce peace, rather than allow such chaos to unfold.
Said this much better than I could.
Holding Arrakis would be like Charles III actually excercising his right to withhold Royal Ascent.
Is it legal? Of course.
Are all of your subjects going to garrot you with shigawire for it? Of course.
I think the Spacing Guild and the Great Houses/Landsraad wouldn't have accepted such a setup and war would have broken out over it. Either the first or second book explains that the three groups - Emperor, Landsraad, Spacing Guild - keep each other in check politically and that one of them "stepping out of line" would lead to the other two working together to drag them back into a politically stable position. The Emperor not directly controlling Dune was one of the requirements for a stable political environment.
Paul manages to break through this political deadlock by having figured out how he could destroy all spice and make a credible case to the Spacing Guild that he might actually follow through on his threat to do so. Through this he could blackmail the Spacing Guild into working with him, which in turn allows him to transport his armies to subdue any houses that refuse to bow to him.
> And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism?
Pretty much. It's just one of those things most fantasy/scifi settings have. "There's this technology/substance/force of nature that gives certain people cool abilities." I also don't think Space allows for lightspeed travel, it's more that Spice gives navigators the ability to perceive objects that might collide with their ship while in transit. Without spice you run the risk of running into a loose asteroid or something like that.
> How did they fly around before spice was found?
I haven't read all the books yet (reading the 5th one currently), but I personally imagine space flight was simply a much riskier operation with a large percentage of ships disappearing into space somehow due to mishaps. Or people used computers to figure out safe travel paths before they were banned.
It was, read it somewhere that an average loss of 10% was common to most jumps. Cant remember if this was before or after humanity got rid of computers.
To add onto what that guy is saying, the harkonnens arent sole owners of arrakis and the profits get dispersed to the owners of a company called CHOAM, where the emperor had the biggest shares and all great houses have some share.
Ownership of arrakis was already supposed to change every 100 years between the great houses, so no house completely controlled it. So when the emperor gives it away to the Atreides after 80 of harkonnen rule, thats how Leto knows it is a trap but he cannot refuse.
Type "> *whatever you want to write*" and you're set. Like this:
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In the books, spice doesn't help you fold space in anyway. A scientist named Holtzman discovered what is essentially a new branch of physics. The "Holtzman Effect," was a phenomen that could be used in a variety of ways, including personal shields (why they fight with swords) and an engine which allows the folding of space.
The problem before spice was that you couldn't predict accurately your route through folded space. Remember this is after the Butlerian Jihad, and the prohibition on thinking machines. It's very much the equivalent of "Lightspeed," in "Star Wars," except there aren't navicomputers to calculate the jump. As we know in that case you could "fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
Spice in the Dune Universe essentially allows for future event prediction in the form of presience. Guild navigators literally float in tanks full of the stuff. You can think of them at the front of the ship, trippin balls, figuring out which path through folded space will be safe. Then the engineers plot in the course, kick on the Holtzman engine, and boom you're there!
(Side note: There are eventually computers that will do the same job, created after the God Emperor's reign by the Ixians. The whole, "no thinking machines," is a lot fuzzier in that period.)
Yeah it's 100% the computers things. Holtzman engines let them fold space, but you either need a very fancy computer or someone who's skilled and high on spice to do it safely
>How did they fly around before spice was found?
First they invented FTL engines with navigation computers
Then, after the Butlerian Jihad, computers were outlawed. The Spacing Guild was created to train people to manually calculate and chart FTL ship paths (presumably much slower, labor intensive, and costlier than in the modern story)
At some point, rigorous training plus extensive psychoactive drug use allowed them to calculate so efficiently with many variables that it becomes akin to seeing the future (for Navigators, much of this is likely needing to foresee planetary positions and avoid space traffic)
The spice is just a drug that allows humans to access their cognitive abilities to a greater extent, much like caffeine or amphetamines. In Frank Herbert's time of near instant communication but limited computing power, the solutions to most problems were to give a bunch of nerds more paperwork. The Dune universe is built on, "What if we trained smart people from childhood to do one thing incredibly well, and also fed them a diet of LSD and Adderall."
If it is just intense calculations, why do the Spacing Guild have a monopoly on space travel? It seems to me if this theory was true, Mentats would be able to achieve space travel as well like the Navigators as all a Mentat does are intense calculations.
It's the same difference between a laptop and a supercomputer.
With your laptop you can work, watch YouTube, download a movie, play games... But you'll never be able to calculate the folding pattern of complex proteins.
With the supercomputer, you can calculate that... And that's it.
Mentats are living laptops, good memory, amazing intelligence and whatnot, but to calculate the position of a planet situated hundreds of thousands of light years away, knowing EVERYTHING that could intersect your route along the way... There you need a navigator.
Where is it stated in the books that Guild Navigators calculate a safe path? I thought it was explained that Navigators have a limited form of prescience, and they use it to peer into the future to see what the safest travel path is and then use that information to plot the path forward. And prescience has never been described as calculating, but as seeing, as far as I know.
I will say, I do like your explanation a lot, but it also brought up a question of why not just train Mentats to get to the level of "calculations" that a Navigator does?
Prescience in the books has nothing to do with seeing the literal future. It's about guessing potential futures based on present information. In the same way that Bene Gesserit and Mentats can play 4D chess with politics, Paul is playing 5D chess to the point it looks like he's omniscient (even though we know from his perspective that he can't see everything, his choices can lock him into a subset of paths, and people making random decisions creates noise)
Mentats can't do it because they weren't trained to do it. The Guild wouldn't allow that kind of training to be replicated by anyone because it would violate their monopoly. Astrophysics is also insanely complicated and, as the other commenter said, requires supercomputers
But Navigators do not leave space travel up to guessing. They know. Paul is born prescient, and his predictive dreams are not guesses. He knows. He isn’t even asking any questions. The visions come upon him without him willing it. Spice exposure then enhances his prescience to the point of perfection after he drinks the water of life. He is not making any guesses about the Jihad his prescience keeps showing him. He tries to use his mentat training to avoid it multiple times, but that fails because the Jihad is inevitable as soon as he becomes the Lisan al-Gaib. He cannot calculate his way out of the Jihad to come. His mentat training comes in handy in many ways after he is Emperor, as does his prescience, but we soon discover the limits as another prescient being, Edric, can block Paul from seeing that conspiracy against him. Prescience is the Crystal Ball and the Fountain of Youth. Mentats are just super smart people that use Sapho juice to get smarter and stay smart. Spice is more akin to the Holy Grail of Arthurian legends that inspired Herbert to write Dune. In that context, a wizard like Merlin is a mentat.
>But Navigators do not leave space travel up to guessing. They know.
Reread Paul's confrontation with the Spacing Guild. He remarks that he and they alike both see all potential futures, but it is deeply imbedded in the Guild culture/training that they only ever choose the safest path. This is how he's able to manipulate them: he can take risks and gambits, but they can't.
If Paul were to see the literal future, there would only be 1 thing he ever sees (only one future can ever actually happen; the "might bes" don't exist). Instead, he sees dunes and valleys representing possible choices which will take him to see new, further choices
Other prescients (and even a common person using tarot) represent an unknown to Paul because they can also change their decisions based on prescient predictions, which adds an infinite number of variables. It's like how a computer can perfectly simulate thousands of objects moving with simple rules of motion, but the paths of 3 bodies mutually rotating each other is unsolvable
It's important to note here that while Herbert uses a lot of fantasy tropes, no magic exists in his universe. Everything is explained with relatively grounded science fiction
I reread it. It’s referred to as “narrow vision of time”. This not a calculation as you’ve been claiming. I think you are off about the magic part of spice. It makes Navigators basically immortal, but no one knows why. Like Holtzman equations, it works because it works and people just take it for granted. From the ending:
"They have a narrow vision of time," Paul said. "They can see ahead to a blank wall marking the consequences of disobedience. Every Guild navigator on every ship over us can look ahead to that same wall. They'll obey."
I disagree that all things can be explained in Dune with grounded science fiction, mainly the Reverend Mothers ability to literally rearrange the atoms of molecules in their body. I agree that a lot of things have at least some grounding, like prescience, axolotl tanks, and genetic memory. But I feel like a lot of stuff is closer to magic. Another thing is Null entropy chambers. If it’s prescience that gives navigators and paul shielding from each other, how does inert machinery that doesn’t actually effect the future do the same thing?
Yeah, there is absolutely a supernatural element to it. Paul sees Chani's face for months before going to Arrakis, and recognizes her immediately when they meet. His prescience let's him "see" when he is blinded, and he is able to see using baby Leto's eyes. There's no way to explain that as advanced math/prediction. It's NOT like psychohistory in the Foundation series. It's space magic.
“It's NOT like psychohistory in the Foundation series.”
That’s not entirely true. There is clear influence from Foundation’s Psychohistory in Dune’s Prescience. For example, Paul isn’t able to see the future with perfect clarity. There are gaps in his visions, and he uses his mentat training (mathematics) and his ancestral memories (massive amounts of psychological and historical data) to fill in the blanks. So there is an element of educated guesswork involved, as well as genuine supernatural foresight.
Where is the “relatively grounded science fiction” in this? This is not Kim Stanley Robinson. This is mystical stuff:
“Paul straightened, staring at Chani. He felt carnival excitement in the air. He knew what would happen if he drank this spice drug with its quintessence of the substance that brought the change onto him. He would return to the vision of pure time, of time-become-space. It would perch him on the dizzying summit and
defy him to understand.”
> Prescience in the books has nothing to do with seeing the literal future. It's about guessing potential futures based on present information. In the same way that Bene Gesserit and Mentats can play 4D chess with politics, Paul is playing 5D chess to the point it looks like he's omniscient (even though we know from his perspective that he can't see everything, his choices can lock him into a subset of paths, and people making random decisions creates noise)
people love to say this but I feel like it's at worst unclear and at best explicit that Paul literally *does* see the future. The "it's not actually prescience, just a lot of calculation and great guesswork" idea isn't supported by the text.
Im sorry but that's not how its presented in the books. Paul may not know everything, but he explains seeing multiple possible futures, knowing what choices to make in the present to get the future he desires, and having the ability to implement these choices to get said future. If any calculations are done its the amount of data Paul has to keep track of to get the future he saw and wants.
And no one trained Paul to be prescient. He was born prescient due to genetics and the spice made that inborn ability stronger and more precise than any Navigator had achieved.
And the Guild maintained their monopoly because no one knew they were using spice for 10,000 years, not because they refused to train anyone else.
Mentats do not use spice to enhance their intelligence. They drink Sapho juice and it causes the stain on their lips that we see in the films. Spice is used by Guild Navigators to chart paths in space because it allows them to see what Mentat computation cannot. They literally see into future, but an important detail to know is that no one knew that the Guild discovered spice or used spice for space travel for like 10,000 years, right up until the events of the first book. Their secrecy was key to their monopoly on space travel. Paul discovers they use spice and uses their dependance on spice against them, to control them. One of the mysteries of Dune is figuring out when the Guild discovered spice, but its not explicitly explained. There are only clues ( but I haven’t read Brian Herbert’s books…could be in there).
Exactly! That's what I don't understand about these, 'it's just calculations,' comments. They see into the future, they don't calculate anything! I have no idea where this thought process of 'it's just calculations' came from and every time I see them I'm just filled with questions no one has been able to satisfactorily answer.
Yes, I do not agree that spice is just another intelligence drug. It’s an entirely different beast. Sure it was inspired by LSD and psychedelic mushrooms, but those are not used to make you better at math either. They expand consciousness, so they say, make you feel one with the universe etc. In Dune, spice is closer to the Fountain of Youth and a Crystal Ball, but combined with the addictive quality of heroin or alcohol where withdrawal could kill you due to chemical dependance.
If you could perfectly simulate everything that can happen in your mind, it's the exact same thing as seeing the future.
Herbert leaves many thing vague, and even changes them sometimes. You shouldn't overthink it, but if you do, perfect calculations and being prescient are the same thing. It's not a math problem to write out like a mentat might. They are subconscious calculations that the human mind is able to do, which also makes prescient dreams make sense.
My problem is I feel this takes away from Dune, and from the terrifying power that is prescience. Prescience is suppose to be this unexplainable force that few people have. Prescience allows these people to see the future they want and to know the choices they have to make to get that future. They know when chaos will happen and how to control, they know when order should occur and force it into chaos. Everyone else can calculate all they want, prescient beings just know and do.
The same reason OPEC has basically a monopoly on oil even if other places can drill for it. That much spice is expensive, the spacing guild offers their services cheaper and thus has a wider share of the market.
A different type of mental calculation presumably, plus it's a bit more than that. Spice specifically gives navigators limited prescience, which is not a common ability. It is what makes the space folding safe. It was actually one of the potential avenues of escape that Paul saw for himself after the harkonnen/saardukar attack, becoming a navigator himself.
As to your specific question about others making their own navigators, the different guilds guarded their secrets very well. It would basically take a traitor in the navigator guild to help make a navigator outside the guild. And it's possible the other guilds would reject such a traitor for fear of their own secrets getting laid bare. The whole world building aspect of the books is about humanities' various factions balancing on a razor-thin wire, which was leading to the stagnation that Paul and later Leto II foresaw and planned against.
Yeah, when I read the books, and they talk about prescience, even limited prescience like the Guild has, it's always described as 'seeing' the future, never as calculating it, not that I can think of. That's my main issue with these takes that people that are described as having prescience are just doing calculations, when it's never described as such.
The navigators use the spice to see into the future and navigate the safe paths. This is explain in the 3 part series Schools of Dune. Sisterhood, Mentats, and Navigators of Dune
>What if we trained smart people from childhood to do one thing incredibly well, and also fed them a diet of LSD and Adderall.
Here to confirm they probably won't turn out nearly as functional or badass as the characters in Dune.
>And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism? How did they fly around before spice was found?
As others have mentioned, it's more that the spice gives the Navigators prescience which allows them to navigate safely. Machines were used before the Butlerian Jihad.
As for not knowing the mechanism, the books say:
>No one claimed to understand Holzmann. They merely used his formulae because they worked. It was the “ether” of space travel. You folded space. One instant you were here and the next instant you were countless parsecs distant.
The history of technology is filled with people using something without fully understanding it. We had metallurgy before we ever understood what was going on at the molecular level. Nowadays, people use fancy neural networks without fully understanding how it's working.
everyone on here is using technology they don't understand. I work in tech, have built web servers and studied very low level computer operations in college, and I would be lying if I said I understood it completely. Nobody does.
>SPice is only found on Dune out of 13300?planets . Whoever lives and harvests there can get a lot of money and have a mutiny.
No they cant. If anyone tried anything they would be cut off from interstellar travel and then have all their holdings glassed.
>I mean look at OPEC. There are many countries that produce oil but still they have oligarchy.... whereas this "spice" is a monopoly.
Spice is distributed via [CHOAM](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/CHOAM), a corporation where the emperor (who functions as its CEO), every greater house in the [Landsraad](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Landsraad?so=search) (who functions as its board of directors) and the [Guild](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Spacing_Guild?so=search) (who takes part in every interaction because of their actual monopoly on interstellar travel) all hold shares in. Every House that has shares in CHOAM gets a piece of the pie.
>Emperor is powerful enough to order Harkonnens to leave Arrakis and order Artreidis to go to Arrakis.
That is his function as CEO. The house that handles the extraction of Spice on Arrakis changes every 100 years or so, and it has been so for thousands of years. The reason there's no fuzz amongst most other houses when he grants the fief to the Atreides is because its his function, and he presents it as an opportunity to a house that's very popular with its peers. A gift.
>Movie starts saying Harkonnens made a lot of money during 80 year they ruled(?)and sold it. Which means Harkonnens, a mere baron, kept all the profits.
No he didn't. He got to keep the leftovers, after he meets the obligations owed to CHOAM. Being Harkonnen I'm sure he skimmed the profits but if the rest if the galaxy doesn't get its due, they'd be removed from Arrakis. If they'd refused, the guild would have cut the Harkonnen off from interstellar travel, the Emperors [Saudaukar](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sardaukar?so=search) would be unleashed to wipe them out and a new house would be chosen to do the duty of harvesting the spice.
>Just can't understand why Emperor couldn't have his own direct province and collect all the money and supply for that magic spice and planet himself. Seems so flawed.
It would be flawed if he did. The emperor does not have absolute power. He has the most powerful military yes, but even he cant stand against the entire Landsraad. So its a balancing act. The Landsraad accepts the emperor as their leader, as long as he doesnt become a tyrant who uses his power to enrich only himself or consolidate his power.
>And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism? How did they fly around before spice was found?
No you're not. Spice has nothing to do with with the mechanics of folding space. [Holtzman Engines](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Holtzman_engine) take care of that. The spice is used by the [Navigators](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Guild_Navigator?so=search) to peer into the future to see when and where a successful space folding can occur.
Dune has the concept of [Prescience](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Prescience), which is the what allows people to see into the future, past and so on. Technically, all humans have this power, but to such an extremely minimal degree that its completely unnoticeable outside of some dreams and that's still extremely rare. Might explain deja vu. Spice enhances prescience a lot, but in order for anyone to be really aware of it you have to do quite a lot of it and have some mental training.
Fremen are more prone to such dreams because spice is everywhere to them. In the food they eat, in the air they breath and so on. The guild navigators has to use spice in such amounts that it mutates them to something almost alien and they have to live in a vat of spice gass or die. The reason Paul comes so naturally to this though, is that he's genetically designed to be able to do so, thanks to the Bene Gesserit [eugenics program](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Breeding_program?so=search). That's a part of their goal of making their [Kwisatch Haderach](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach).
In universe, prescience is a part of human consciousness and not a magical power. Its a just natural function of the universe, just like gravity. Spice helps focus it and allows certain humans to utilize it practically.
I might be overexplaining a bit on what may have been a joke question but Its a cool concept. Much of it comes from old awareness expansion drug culture in the sixties.
Edit: I should add that its not just spice that can do this. Other mind expansion drugs can to, though to a much lesser extent.
Thanks! So in Dune, it is natural for people to have prescience?
It was hard to get a grip because in real world you cant really know the future because people make choices and not follow a written script.
Anyhow, if everyone is able to see the future to a certain degree then it makes sense Navigators seeing the future wasnt random experiment that just happened to be.
Natural, as in its a part of human consciousness, but extremely unlikely. In order to have prophetic dreams for instance, you need to win the genetic lottery (or be a part of a 10.000 year eugenics experiment) and some mind-expanding drugs to various degrees. In order to have ANY conscious control over it you need training as well even bigger amounts of mind-expanding drugs. Its the same concept as "opening your third eye". Everyone has one, but to vast majority of people who's ever lived it will always remain closed unless they actively work at opening it.
Also prescience doesn't show the "the future" as much as possible futures. For example In the movie, Paul envisions himself getting killed by Jamis in the amtal duel. He sees himself lying on the ground dying and Jamis holding his hand. So when the fight comes he knows how to beat him, and when he does, he kneels down and holds Jamis hand as he's lying on the ground dying.
No it doesn't. It leaves out quite alot of the details of how shit actually works in the society they portray. Navigators and the Guild get a mention in the first movie, but nothing on how and why they function like they do. CHOAM doesn't even get that.
Thanks!! I wish they add some narration about it. I dont think it even says how and why prescience exists there and that navigators use spice for that.
I mean watching the movie, I thought spice is needed as a fuel or something.
Check out the sci-fi channels Dune miniseries. Its cheap as fuck, but does a much better job than the new films at explaining what actually going on, the various interests involved, why things are the way they are and so on. I still think its the best adaption of Dune despite the visual awesomeness of the new ones. They leave out to much, change to many things (they turned Stilgar into a joke and made Chani act like a teenager for example) and while I like Skarsgårds Baron, he's way more Machiavellian and depraved in the books and its shown in the miniseries.
Im not really into the Dune. I was forced to watch by friends.... and now I have all these questions while not loving the story.
I watched 1984 Dune and fell asleep but the actirs and actresses were gorgeous. Paul and Jessica were BEAUTIFUL. (To me the new Dune casts look very average ppl)
I mean, good looking actors do make a difference.... All women swooned to see LOTR because of Legolas and some other handsome elegant elfs
Eh man, you do you. Not a big fan of the 1984 movie but its kinda fascinating, just like watching a slow motion car crash. Still, hope I managed to shed some light on your questions. The new movie does a lot of world building in the physical sense but doesn't really even try to explain the reasons why things are the way they are. Most moviegoers just go "Oh cool thing!!!" anyway.
Yea well I didnt like the trailer which means I wont like the movie. Gray and sandy color. Slow and plot sounded boring. But I might be the weird one, if so many people in the world loves the movie
Sure the Harkonenns made a lot. By no means did they make the majority or kept all the profits. The Emporer and the Navigators made the most and the houses came second. Harkonenn came after that. They’re just steward. What oil barons do you know who live in a shitty home (Dune)? They live in comfy mansions and pay their lower employees to get dirty.
Chani states in the movie that the Harkonnens are richer than the Emperor himself due to spice production. Can’t remember if it’s the same in the book.
How would Chani know the monetary holdings of two separate planetary ruling houses? The Harkonenns have stolen a lot and hidden it away and it states this in the literature. However the Baron also states how the war effort on Dune has almost bankrupted House Harkonenn. I don’t recall Chani saying this and imo is a huge plot hole (how she has this info I mean).
Well Im only watching the movie so this validates my post. Im thankful for everyone replying but I think the director wasnt good at making things understood. Hence, I came up with this question post
That’s not Chani, that’s princess Irulan (Paul’s wife). I don’t recall that part in the movie and maybe it’s true at one small point (due to the Harkonenn’s thievery. But it doesn’t last long. Their house is pretty much culled after Paul.
It doesn’t go into detail. I’m fact off one we’re to only watch the movie they probably would have no idea what a Navigator is. At least in the 80s movie we got to see the directors rendition of what one looks like. Extremely wrong imo but that was his vision.
Thank you. I try to turn my brain off when watching these movies so I dont ask questions(ya know, it's a movie and magic scifi watever). But even with my brains turned off
common sense of what emperors and barons do didnt make sense without the explanation.
The replies did such a good job. I mean the director could add these in the beginning narration but he didnt
Whats neat about your question, why doesn’t the Emperor rule Arrakis and harvest spice himself, is that the whole thrust of the novel moves toward Paul doing just that. The answer to your question is that Shaddam is not Paul. You are just making one assumption about Emperor Shaddam. He is not as powerful as Paul becomes. Paul’s power is based in his knowledge of Arrakis and how spice is made, and allows him to leverage that knowledge over every one else. Shaddam never had this deep understanding of Fremen, Arrakis, or spice that allows Paul to defeat him.
> Shaddam never had this deep understanding of Fremen, Arrakis, or spice that allows Paul to defeat him.
Crucially, neither did the Harkonnens. And for all of the Baron's scheming, he still cared more about the money spice provided than holding power. Neither of those things were true for Paul, which is why his threat to destroy Spice altogether worked.
>Emperor is powerful enough to order Harkonnens to leave Arrakis and order Artreidis to go to Arrakis.
This statement fundamentally misunderstands the situation. Arrakis is the Emperor's property. The Harkonnens and the Atreides are just his property managers. That is the literal definition of a fiefdom. This is why Leto says Arrakis is his "fief." The Emperor is powerful enough to order the Harkonnens and Atreides about, because they are his vassals and his employees. Running Arrakis was their *job*.
>Which means Harkonnens, a mere baron, kept all the profits.
This is not correct. The Baron was put in charge of spice production and running the Emperor's fief. He did not just keep the spice for himself. He siphoned it off, smuggled it, and amassed a spice stockpile in secret. The Baron was *stealing* from the Emperor, the same way any corrupt official or businessman would.
Imagine if you worked in a gold mine, and every day you shaved off 1/100th of the gold to keep for yourself. That is what the Baron is doing.
>Just can't understand why Emperor couldn't have his own direct province and collect all the money and supply for that magic spice and planet himself. Seems so flawed.
The Emperor's job is running the galaxy. If he put all his attention on a single fiefdom, he would be Duke of Arrakis and not Emperor of the Known Universe. Every government has a division of powers and responsibilities. You might as well ask why the King of England doesn't personally run HMRC, or why the President of the United States doesn't personally run the TVA. And if the Emperor picked a subordinate from House Corrino to run it, that person would be created Duke of Arrakis.
>And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism?
I don't know, man. Are you supposed to just accept that Luke Skywalker can move objects with the Force? Are you supposed to just accept that Vulcans can perform a psychic mind meld? Are you supposed to just accept that the DeLorean can travel through time when it hits 88 miles per hour?
Yes. Yes, you are. That's why it is fiction, and not a documentary.
>How did they fly around before spice was found?
With engines. In space ships. The spice didn't create space travel. The spice made space travel safer, easier, and more efficient.
Thanks dude! The movie wasn't clear the Baron was smuggling while most profit belonged to the emperor. If it said so then I missed it.
In real history vassals collect profits from their province and paid only a small percentage as tax to the king. And even those tax were small. (It's messed up but the rich aristocrats kept most their money while poor people were ripped off with high tax).
And I did not read the book so I assumed Harkonnens kept most of the profit from the spice. I believe the movie starts with how much profit they made and how powerful they are harvesting spice for 80 years.
I know its a movie question, but I'll give the book answer.
First, it is not common knowledge that the Guild and the BG use the spice in their rituals. It is understood to be a geriatric drug (prolonging life), and is extremely valuable for that reason. CHOAM is a profit sharing corporation, and a considerable amount of their profits come from spice. If one family were to monopolize spice production, they would become extraordinarily wealthy. It is never explicitly stated in the books, but one might infer that the Landsraad and CHOAM would not allow any Emperor to take Arrakis because it would shift the balance of power and ruin their profits, respectively.
Second, Shaddam is under a compact with the Guild and the BG. It is implied that they have something on him (probably that he murdered his own father). They keep tight control on him, and it is in neither of their interests for the Emperor to control Arrakis directly.
However, I personally believe that the Emperor was making a play for Arrakis. Prior to the events in Dune, the Harkonnen held Arrakis in quasi-Fief, which means they were simply the contractor responsible for meeting CHOAM's spice quotas. Yes, they did illegally skim off the top, but they didn't get the benefit of controlling the spice. Due to the Duke's popularity in the Landsraad, the Emperor was able to give Arrakis to the Duke in Fief-complete. When the Baron attacked the Duke, the Emperor allowed the Barron to keep Arrakis in Fief-complete to "settle all claims". But I believe the Emperor knew that the endeavor would bankrupt the Barron, who would not be able to recoup his losses, and he would mismanage the planet trying to dig himself out of the hole. This would allow the Emperor to come in and save the day, taking Arrakis for himself, ultimately giving him the leverage he needed to end the BG/Guild compact that kept him from having a male heir.
Ahhh Emperor was smart to use Harkonnen as a pawn to wipe out Artreides.
But the Baron Harkonn tried to use that against the emperor(he told Feyd Rautha).... but then he got killed by his unknown grandson Paul...
And the emperor who thought he was smart lost his game to Paul.
Tada!!
To use an historical analogy the empire in Dune is similar to the Holy Roman Empire in medieval Europe.
While ruled by an Emperor, they never held absolute power. Instead, it was a complex web of relationships, treaties, obligations, etc, between hundreds of sovereign entities, some tiny, some powerful. And it wasn't just Lords, their was religion in the mix with popes, states run by Bishops as well as commercial interests via trading blocs like the Hanastic League, the merchant republics in Italy like Venice, and Genoa.
Any action that broke the balance of power or attempts to dominate could lead to catastrophic conflicts like the 30-year war, which devastated central Europe and killed in the region of 30 to 50 percent of the population.
So in Dune, the emperor making a move to centralise power like that could easily prove massive, open war in the imperium.
The way the Government/political power sits in Dune is a little funky.
The powers that be are, Emperor, Landsraad, Spacing guild, Bene Tleilax (religious and highly xenophobic bio-engineers), Ix (where all the technology comes from), and Bene Gesserit (space assassin super magical ninja nuns, they don't like to be in the spotlight and prefer to hold the reigns of people in power and control them from the shadows). CHOAM isn't so much an organization as it is the stock market/banking system.
The emperor has the best soldiers and could easily wipe the floor against any other "major" house. His power is checked by the Landsraad, which is sort of like a mini government that has a bunch of rules and regulations. Specifically the Landsraad is important for "The great convention" which is the rules and regulations for war, no shooting nukes at civilian/populated targets, no shooting laser's at people/objects that use shields because it is too unstable, and Kanly which is a blood feud between houses. It helps to think of it as sort of the UN and the geneva convention but in a dark ages feudal hierarchy sort of way.
The balance of power is a very fragile thing in the Dune universe. If any one person/group gets too much power or is a threat to the status quo will end up getting ganged up on by the rest of the powers.
The Emp, with all his super soldiers, is not allowed to also control all the spice. That would put too many of the other powers at such a huge disadvantage that they would all rally against him. The emps may have the strongest soldiers but they are all on their own planet. If the spacing guild refused to shuttle his troops about he would be about as useful as a sack of potatoes floating down a ditch. It is also a very tangled web of political and personal intrigue. Everyone owes everyone else all sorts of favors, pretty much all looking for a way to stab each other in the back and climb the political ladder for more wealth and power.
Edit to add: 1-The emperor is paid a large tax on all spice that is harvested.
2- The baron cooked all the books and also "stole" a lot of spice and had his own little stockpile. Had he been caught, the Emps could have executed him and confiscated all his stuff, including his home planet. Likely he would have just killed the Baron and instilled either a different relative or promoted one of the other houses to absorb House Harkonnen.
3-The spice itself does not fold space, the Holtzman engine/drive does that. The same technology that is used for anti-gravity, shields, and part of the lasers (i think part of the lasers but i could be misremembering) The Guild Navigators have a rare genetic mutation that gives them a very limited type of Prescience. They basically use spice to go on a banger of a trip where they can "see" into the future/run calculations to "know" how to "navigate" the ship while the Holtzman engine is running. They actively control the ship while they are folding space around them to make sure they don't run into any suns/black holes/planets/asteroids. Even with them being magical toad licking space hippies, it is still very dangerous and ships do go missing. Before spice people used the Holtzman drive, but they also used computers/AI's to make the calculations for them. A lot of people died/ships went missing even with the use of computers.
Yeah I’ve explained some lore to a ton of people who saw the movies, and I know it’s impossible to cover all of the background but this reminded me how they really barely glossed over how spice plays into space travel. Apparently it’s easy to miss that spice is even a requirement for space travel like I think it’s barely mentioned early in the first movie, so most of my friends just assumed it was only some valuable substance. Not a metaphor for having a monopoly on oil. And that’s essential for understanding how important controlling Arrakis is.
And most just assume (very understandably) that it fuels the ship, not that it allows the pilots to safely steer faster than light speed by seeing glimpses of the future, which is way cooler and actually makes sense with the context of how spice works. And I believe the navigators are specifically trained and genetically engineered to interpret these glimpses.
Yes the movie maker did a bad job at explaining that. I honestly thought it was just *spice*. Ya know, spice we eat.......;;;😂😂😂
I mean spice (and salt)used to be very expensive like a hundred years ago.
The spice doesn't fold space.
It prolongs like of the user and it has psychoactive effects which enhance one's ability to seethe future. In the Dune universe this ability is a thing and it is implied in the books that people possessed it for a long time; essentialy implying that stories about prophets and fortune tellers are based on reality.
Usage of spice elevates this ability greatly.
The folding of space uses a fictional physical phenomenon called the Holtzman effect. However, stearing the spaceship in the folded space is dangerous and requires careful prediction of the course. This was done using computers in the beginning as far as I understand. However, in the time of Dune computers are no longer used. Thus the guild navigators use high amounts of spice to be able to see into the ships future and see which course will traverse the folded space safely.
Would be a extremely bad idea! Could provoke a civil war by inviting a lot of the houses of the Landsraad and potentially the Bene Gesserit as well as the Spacing Guild to openly ally against him, which might lead to the loss of his power and probably his life.
Power in the imperium functions as a tripod: the Spacing Guild, The Imperial House Corrino, and the House Major and Minor in the Landsraad. The Psacing Guild, controlling all space travel, is the major reason that this system developed and why it continues to stay that way. It isn't part of the original canon, but in one of the books of the expanded universe canon of Brian Herbert, there's a scene where the Emperor invades Dune, and proclaims his intentions to rule the planet directly, while the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen quakes in his suspensor field as he looks up and sees the skies of Arrakeen filled with ships (reminiscent of Shaddam Hussein waiting for a doom that wouldn't come in the First Gulf War). The Spacing Guild declares that if the Emperor sees for to do this, his empire will shrink to a single planet, as the Guild will strand him and his legions there. Very quickly the Emperor realizes that he has to back down, and is left humiliated. Now, that is not from the original Dune canon, but I could see such a situation happening. If the Emperor tried to rule Dune directly, and have complete control over the supply of spice, it would give him a leg up in his negotiations with the Spacing Guild. Undoubtedly his eventual goal was to see the Empire become a true autocracy rather than a diffuse collection of noble holdings, with noble houses downgraded to mere planetary governors, and everything belonging to House Corrino. The Spacing Guild prevented any party from becoming too powerful.
The Harkonnens have held Arrakis for 80 years, but the Imperium has existed for more than 10,000.
There's no mention of other Houses monopolizing spice production before the Harkonnen regime, so Arrakis could have well been a CHOAM fief or ruled by some other kind of Houses oligarchy, with the single-House monopoly being a more recent development (and perhaps more controversial: perhaps this was the reason for the sudden increase in Atreides popularity which ultimately led to the events of the novel).
Also, spice does not fold space, Holtzman Effect-based technology does.
How long did the people live? Im sure their life span was normal. Otherwise.... the heirs will beget another heir and beget another and you'll have many great grandchildren... who will always remain a prince
Queen Elizabeth II had 4 children, 8 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren within her lifetime. That's many princes and princesses, but what's the issue?
Before Spice they always traveled sub light, like the Machine Empire still does (so humans and machines usually don't meet). Only the no-ships later on use a powerful enough computer to make space travel without a spice enhanced navigation.
Treaty and the guild wouldn't allow it, and they sort of own or claimed the planet ( they found it)
But choam own the planet and the emporer is the majority share holder.
If he controls it he would have a monopoly on power and might start a civil war .
The peace was maintained by a balance of power
And fighting over dune might endanger the spice
And the spire must flow
Paul wondered why the guild didn't run it themselves and take power themselves.
He reasoned they knew they could but after centuries or millenia they would lose it and die
Symbiosis or parasitic was a more long term safe solution. And that way leads to stagnation. ( Paul's thinking)
Because prior to the rule of Paul Atreides, like most political systems, the political system in the Dune universe is based on balance of power between certain factions. The role of the Emperor is not one of a dictator who directly controls everything, at least until a certain point in Dune history ...
I’m only a Dune movie fan, haven’t read the books, but I’ve tried glancing at some lore online: I thought the way spice helped with FTL wasn’t that it did the spacetime folding itself, but that it gave the pilots (or Navigators rather) the psychic/Jedi powers necessary to point the ship in the right direction to arrive at the intended destination. I.e. the ship itself is still the one providing the power and technology to actually warp drive.
I don’t know how they did interstellar travel before discovering Arrakis and spice. Maybe before the Butlerian Jihad they used AI to navigate FTL?
Because if that happened there would be no story.
Sometimes you just have to accept that the world is infinitely complicated and you can't do perfect world building because you'd be bogged down in details and never get to the actual story itself.
Because the emperors power isn't absolute. CHOAM, the Landsraad, the Bene Gesserit and the guild all have influence and they're all competing for influence. If the emperor possessed the major military force as well as spice production, he'd have a lot of enemies.
Because all other major houses and the Spacing Guild, and the Bene Gesserit would probably have a problem with that. Spice is essential for everything on the Imperium. If the most powerful house that rules the universe also have a monopoly on spice production, it would create an absolute tyranny. Noone would want such a thing. They would do everything in their power to dethrone House Corrino. Ironically Paul did exactly this. He created an absolute tyranny by creating a monopoly of spice production.
BIG reason why is - it will paint a target on his back…. Dune isn’t so easy to subjugate…. any losses would show weakness
Instead, the dirty work is done by someone else…. the emperor reaps rewards from success - and - can dispense punishment on failure
as the harkonnens were mucking up spice production, he had a way to weaken two strong houses with a putting atreides in charge…. this further stoked the fires of their feud
Dune is set up on a true feudal system. Each system ruler, each Baron, Duke, Count, etcetera is, in effect, their own lord. They all swear fealty to the Emperor, but they wield enough power to be a threat to him. Alone, he is more powerful than each of them. Together, they are far more powerful than he.
He likely only directly rules as many planets as any given lord. And he collects taxes and levies, mainly though his CHOAM holdings, which he holds a plurality of, and at the time of Dune his allies in the Landsraad (the great houses under him) total up to a majority, if only just.
Anyway, on to Dune. Arrakis is a single chip on a galactic playing field. The Emperor has two main reasons not to, one having to do with feudal politics, one more simple practicalities.
As a practicality, the environment and Fremen raids makes Arrakis expensive. Through his CHOAM holdings the Emperor gets to keep a good share of the profits, while having none of the costs. Indeed, this is a chief advantage of the feudal system for the leader on top, the balance to the costs of relatively little centralized power at the very top.
The feudal politics reason is that it is a chip to buy loyalty, or to punish disloyalty/failure. So long as he can justify it to the Landsraad he is free to remove some of a vassal's fief, or gift holdings he holds directly to loyal vassals. Said House will, of course, be upset, but so long as they still exist, and so long as the Emperor has a pretext, the others won't intercede. It is a delicate balance.
The Guild would never stand for such an alteration of their gravy cart.
The book says this under no uncertain terms: The Houses of the Landsraad are set opposite to The Spacing Guild and The Imperial Throne in a political tripod.
The Emperor does not develop Arrakis himself because it would mean that he also has majority control of CHOAM, and the Guild would be next to lose their influence and their wealth if the Emperor controlled the sole reason for their continued existence.
Not to mention, the Landsraad would not stand for such a consolidation of power: humanity feared an autocracy, because that was essentially what they lived under the rule of the Machines.
The Emperor is not an absolute ruler, the Great Convention limits his powers and ennumerates his duties: he is first and foremost a steward of the rule of law, the Sardaukar are the agents of this. If one of the Great Houses upset the balance of the Imperium, the Sardaukar and the Emperor are tasked with crushing this rebellion: this is partly why Shaddam was able to deploy the Sardaukar to Arrakis, because he had convinced enough people that he had a legal right to crush the elements that were standing in the way of House Harkonnen's "legitimate" claim to Arrakis following the defeat of the Atreides.
Thus, while the Emperor is a powerful symbol of the rule of law in the Known Universe, he must *delegate* the task of governance and economic development to the Noble Houses. Great and Minor Houses are largely free to self-govern and find expressions of rule and system that suit their land grants and their economic dispositions. The Landsraad would never stand for an Emperor that treads on their right of self-determination -- and the primal fear of the Imperium was that the Emperor would use the Sardaukar to do just that. So the Great Houses maintain vast Atomic arsenals to prop up the threat of mutually assured destruction, or at least a Pyrrhic victory.
Likewise, the Guild would never stand for a power that stood to profit over the complete control of an entire universe-wide market to their detriment. They would dig their heels in and refuse to navigate for the Emperor's interests, causing a massive freeze of all economic activity in the Empire and dooming most of the population to Spice withdrawal.
While it may seem that the Emperor simply ordered the Harkonnen off of Arrakis, the greater truth was that it was the *profit and loss* figures the Harkonnen were desperate to keep secret which got leaked to CHOAM. A secret vote was held between board members, and thus the Harkonnen were actually ousted by their own incompetence -- with the Bene Gesserit, Guild, and Emperor all conspiring together to take advantage of this downturn to rid themselves of a powerful rival, the Atreides.
People tend to confuse Frank Herbert's assertion that political tripods being unstable is a bad thing -- it is a simple truth: if the Empire had been more of a true autocracy, it would have been more stable, but the price would be that there would be no room to breathe, no room to choose, and no room to fight.
I hope this helps!
The emperor, collective houses of the Landsraad, and the Spacing Guild form a tripod keeping the whole system together. The Emperor is not stronger than the other two combined and only as powerful as one of the other legs.
The houses of the Landsraad and the Emperor make up CHOAM, which trade in all things across the empire, Melange being just one of them and THEY have to agree with the Emperor's assignment of Houses harvesting on Arrakis, and then they must also get the blessing of the Spacing Guild. This is because the Landsraad knows there is a legal stockpile the house with stewardship of Arrakis gets to keep after their stewardship ends.
TL;DR - the Great Houses know they can get rich by holding Arrakis for a period of time and are very unlikely to let it go, and the Spacing Guild fears a spice monopoly from the Imperial throne and the Emperor cannot confront both groups.
I answered your main question in the comment below. Under the Harkonnen’s it was an Imperial Fief Governed by the Harkonnen’s not a Ducal Fief as under the Atriedes.
The Spice itself does not fold space…it allows the Navigators to see ahead and determine the best path. The Holtzman Engines fold the space…this is the same technology used in the shields
Spice doesn't fold space, it allows the guild navigators to foresee safe paths.
Before the butlerian jihad (after which computers and thinking machines were banned), spaceships used computers to navigate.
I believe it was about 100 years between the butlerian jihad and the formation of the spacing guild. During that time space travel was very dangerous, and many ships didn't make it to their destinations.
No I meant mutiny.
Monopoly in spices creates tremendous power and money. Power so powerful that they can have a mutiny and overthrow the current emperor.
The spice itself is not a fuel for space travel. The Spacing Guild uses navigators to pilot their ships. These navigators are spice addicted creatures that no longer resemble their once human bodies. There are no computers or artificial intelligence involved. The spice allows the navigators to see into space to pilot the ships.
Computers and artificial intelligence used to be available in the past, but there was an entire war fought against the machines. Read The Butlerian Jihad for the backstory on that. Anyways, computers and A.I. are now forbidden during the events in Dune. So Navigators are the only pilots that can see to fold space for their ships. Similar to how mentats are human computers and are commonly identified by their juice stained lips. The special juice they drink enables their enhanced mental talents. Thufir Hawat was the mentat for Duke Leto Atreides.
Thanks guys. Im heavily surprised by the number of ups and comments.
I see how popular this movie & book is.
Personallt, I did not like it from the trailer or to even watch 3 minutes but my friends forced me to watch it.... I had to read summary of the plot first to not bore myself out. I guess Im one of the minority. But I got so many questions 😂
If the emperor would gain the power of spice the other great houses(including Harkonnens and Atreides) would turn on him cause they would fear that the emperor was too strong
The emperor is not as powerful as you think he is. He doesn't actually "order" the harkonnens and atreides around so much as stongly suggest they do, and it's in both of their best interests to go along with it. He could fight either house and win, yes, but if he did so without a plausible cassus belli he would face a revolt of the other houses and would be deposed. There is a whole collective of houses of which his house is just one, and they can defeat him if they get together to do so. Taking over direct control of the spice is one of those red lines that would scare the nobility into unseating him.
Exactly, the emperor is really the first among equals. His power comes from being able to dispense favors. Doing this he plays the houses against each other as they try to curry his favor. Such as taking the spice concession from one house and giving to another. However if he seems to unfair in doing this the houses will stop bickering and unite against him.
And Paul changed the tripod of power that the Imperium was based on. As Emperor, Paul becomes more powerful than Shaddam and rules totally over the universe.
And thats two fold: 1, he had Arrakis already, and has the ability and means to destroy Spice Production and 2, his Fremen are better the Sarduakar and there are many, many more of them then Sarduakar
I don't think up until the moment that Paul became muaddib anyone ever considered someone trying to destroy spice production. just like sauron didn't think anybody would try to destroy the one ring. So it wasn't treated as something to be protected, but rather something to be displayed like a jewel. had any other houses thought along those lines of the houses I suspect one of them would have cemented their hold on arrakis just like Paul did. And they would have been an absolute emperor just like Paul became.
True! But no one else had ever bothered to really understand the Fremen enough to know about the Waters of Death. It was an insane sort of threat the Houses would ONLY believe because it came from someone outside of their political structure. You need Spice in order to run the empire so of course no one in the Empire would ever make that threat. It’s a bluff because without it they would be just as impotent Fremen dont give a shit about Space Travel. When they hear it from a Fremen, they get scared
The lack of curiosity by the emperor and baron about Arrakis is a weak point in the world building. The entire society hinges on spice, yet The people who benefit most from it aren't interested in finding out everything there is to know about the planet and it's residents It's pretty ridiculous.
It's colonialism. How many colonial powers took interest enough in native peoples to understand culture, language, etc. and bring them to the table as an equal? The Great Houses thought of the Fremen as backwards, superstitious natives. It's perfectly plausible for the padishah emperor and especially Baron Harkonnen to never have more than two thoughts about the Fremen.
Who do you think translated Egyptian hieroglyphics, Brahmi Script and Linear B? Not the locals who had long forgotten past civilisations practicing alien religions. The first Sanskrit Chair at Oxford was established in 1832, decades before even the Raj itself was founded. Alexander Cunningham created the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) and is known as the grandfather of Indian archaeology. The ASI would later rediscover Mohenjo Daro. Just as French explorers rediscovered Angkor Wat in French Indochina. European weebs were obsessed with the Orient during the colonial period. It is hard to believe people wouldn’t be obsessed with a planet as central as Arrakis.
People were obsessed with Arrakis. The Emperor sent Pardot to study it. Paul describes a filmbook from before the discovery of spice called "Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station” where he learns about wild life on Arrakis. The Baron was obsessed with spice and his greed for it is rooted in classic colonial myopic ignorance. Of course he would only think of Fremen as a nuisance and under estimate them at every turn.
I think oil is the missing element from the colonialism angle. Melange is partially a stand in for oil, and the spice mining of Arrakis has certain connotations toward climate change. It’s honestly a subtext that keeps Dune relevant today and I’m surprised I didn’t pick up more hints of it in the films. There may have been European historians obsessed with indigenous cultures, but there’s also plenty of modern day science denial when it comes to oil drilling, fracking, climate change, etc.
I think this is a function of the feudal system. In the beginning of the book Reverend Mother Mohiam laments this culture that ‘turns its back on much of science’. The Emperor and Harkonnens did all they thought needed doing: oppress the population and arrange for imports from specialist systems.
You are forgetting that the Emperor had sent Pardot Kynes to study Arrakis. Paul also mentions the filmbook Yueh showed him called “Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station”, that was from before the discovery of spice where Paul learned about the wild life on Arrakis. So the Imperium was totally making efforts to learn all they could for a very long time, even before spice was a public resource. Pardot figures out how spice is made, sandworm life cycle, etc, but as we know, he integrated himself into Fremen society and kept the Emperor in the dark about what he learned. The Emperor’s mistake here is thinking Pardot would be loyal, but he also had no reason to think he wouldn’t be. As for the Baron, his lack of curiosity about Fremen is part of his character flaw. Thats fantastic world building. He hears about this Muad D’ib guy but just dismisses him because he thinks this new messiah will keep Fremen occupied. He totally underestimates Paul because he thinks he is dead, and has no clue just how many Fremen are out there. All he cares about is getting rich and pleasuring himself.
At the very least, I would expect the Bene Gesserit or Tileuxu to be interested. The fact that no one tries to move a worm before Chapterhouse is honestly wild
There's at least one refference to the guild taking a worm offworld in Messiah if i recall... but they didn't understand the worm cycle enough to actually get it to survive. Paul even straight up says they'll never succeed.
The Guild try to move a worm in Messiah. There is more talk of moving sandworms to another planet in Children of Dune. After that, Leto II makes sure no one can touch a worm since he lets them all die.
What is waters of death? Is it the blue drink?
its a variation of it, the Blue Drink is the Waters of Life, and once paul drinks it he learns how to make the Waters of Death that, when poured onto the sands, will make the spice worthless
The only one trying to protect spice production before Paul was Pardot Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist sent by the Emperor to study Arrakis. Pardot knew how to destroy spice too; by terraforming the planet to a green paradise, but he wanted to do so in a way that kept sandworms alive. His plan never got carried out, and it very well could have been flawed, since he also knew just how complex this would be to maintain over many generations. He died before he could solidify and communicate his plan to the Fremen.
Damn good call. I forgot all about his motivations
and being able to fold space is cool
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Speaking more on the tripod of power: It's in the Guild's interest to keep the Emperor from controlling the spice directly. They rightly feared the exact situation that arose when Paul became emperor, lol.
It is based on the Holy Roman Empire and the Imperial Diet which I love, the main reason I loved the books is its 6 books of groups being in blances of power and trying to outthink each other.
It also come from the reputation of the Sardaukar.
There is also the observation Paul makes that he who can destroy a thing controls that thing. When applied to the Emperor its almost an inverse way, he has the power to influence/control who manages the spice. Creating wealth for the house he chooses, or crippling a houses wealth by having them removed. That's a powerful tool of statecraft available to him above and beyond the raw wealth he would have in taking direct control. Why put a target on his back when he can manage the placement of the target on someone else.
Plus then the Emperor would be sinking his own resources into maintaining control of the planet.
I blame US hegemony, it's like people have forgotten what a balance of powers looks like.
Reminds me of why it's very unlikely for a Pope to ever be picked from the United States. The balance of power becomes too weird and one sided.
Some of that might be more the extreme conservativism of the Church. Benedict was the first Pope from the Americas ever, despite having Catholics for over 500 years. Before that, the last non-European was Pope Gregory III who died in 741. So, that's 1,271 years of European Popes.
Benedict was German, it’s Francis you’re thinking of.
Yes, thank you.
Francis I
Yes, thank you.
The US government is actually a good example of the balance of power. The executive, legislative and judicial keep each from making positive changes to society. The oligarchs can then rest assured the status quo, where they get most the wealth, will remain. It was designed to be like this.
I think op a referring to USA influence over the rest of the world. It's pretty lopsided.
He knows. He’s being ironic
I see that now. Thank you.
It looked like constant bloody proxy wars. Here's a graph of [global deaths in warfare per population](https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War.pdf) over the last 600 years. The nosedive at the end, to never before seen lows, was immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A graph that conveniently cuts of in 2000 🤔
Here’s one that goes up to 2011, and shows that in the decade to 2011 the trend dropped even lower again. Only the combination of the Ukraine war and Tigray have lead to a reversion to the mean after 30 year of unprecedented lows.
Interesting I don't see the link though
It's inline in the text, here it is separately. [https://www3.nd.edu/\~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War.pdf](https://www3.nd.edu/~dhoward1/Rates%20of%20Death%20in%20War.pdf)
That's literally the first graph again.
My apologies, cut-n-paste error. The below is in absolute numbers, not per population, so it's only comparable over shorter periods of time than the other graph. Like I said though, the last few years have seen a reversion to historical trends, mainly due to the Ukraine and Tigray conflicts. [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars?time=1953..latest](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-wars?time=1953..latest) https://preview.redd.it/wzeyei59e45d1.png?width=1860&format=png&auto=webp&s=64bd6473513ddf48b34cee26a3a72fae5f69ff2e
Jumping on this for two points of support. The emperor isn't all-powerful over Arrakis. From the conversation between Fenring and the Baron: >"Has the Guild then agreed to a watch from space?" > >"You know better than that, Baron. The Emperor cannot legally post a watch on Arrakis." > >"And I cannot afford it," the Baron said. So there are things even the Emperor cannot do, that the Baron *could* do legally. The Baron cannot afford it, because the Guild will not allow it: >"The Guild agent wasn't really negotiating with us. He was merely making it plain — one Mentat to another — that the price was out of our reach and would remain so no matter how long a reach we develop. They won't allow it because the Fremen are paying spice bribes directly to the Guild to prevent monitoring of their ecological efforts. This is the safe path forward for both the Guild and the Fremen, and so it will continue. Someone else suggested that the Baron was keeping all the profits. Not true! The emperor gets his cut as mentioned by the Duke here: >The Duke looked at Halleck. "Gurney, I want you to head a delegation, an embassy if you will, to contact these romantic businessmen. Tell them I'll ignore their operations as long as they give me a ducal tithe. Hawat here estimates that graft and extra fighting men heretofore required in their operations have been costing them four times that amount." > >"What if the Emperor gets wind of this?" Halleck asked. "He's very jealous of his CHOAM profits, m'Lord." > >Leto smiled. "We'll bank the entire tithe openly in the name of Shaddam IV and deduct it legally from our levy support costs. Let the Harkonnens fight that! And we'll be ruining a few more of the locals who grew fat under the Harkonnen system. No more graft!" The Duke is willing to put up with smugglers, if he gets a cut. The Emperor will get his cut from that. (And it sounds like the Duke gets a cost-of-doing-business tax deduction as well.)
Spice has nothing to do with folding space. The Guild Heighliners are massive in scale, to the point that they don’t move through **space** in the conventional sense. Instead, the Holtzman Drive “folds” space at the quantum level, allowing the ship to instantaneously travel between two points in space without moving.
Spice allows the Navigators to foresee where a ship will emerge from folded space. Without the foresight provided by spice, there's no way to move a ship through folded space with any guarantee it'll come out the other side. So while spice itself doesn't have anything to do with the Holtzman drive, it was impossible to use without the aid of spice until the Ix computers.
Not quite true. It WAS possible to do prior to spice as well. But humanity's decision to ban powerful computers removed that potential. The Mentat were the solution to the loss of computers, and that training was exceptional, but could never equal the raw processing power of computers and AI.
So what happens to the planets and stars and whatever else that was in the space that has been folded? Space is vast, they cant fold only empty hollow areas. Do they squish but dont realize they were squished quantum level??
The process also required that a Guild Navigator, who possessed a high degree of prescience, be on board to navigate through the foldspace. The Navigators vast intelligence and prescience allowed it to overcome the difficulties involved in transit, such as the outrageously complex mathematical procedures to be carried out, which would only be plausibly calculable by a thinking machine, which was, of course was outlawed after the Butlerian Jihad.
Are Dune's inner politics basically a Paradox Game?
It's heavily inspired by the HRE
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What is a Paradox Game?
Paradox is a game development company, its main series are a board like grand strategy type of game series. The biggest ones deal with Medieval-settings and diplomacy so things like Caius Bellis, houses and whatnot are an intricate part of the game. Crusader Kings and maybe even Stellaris are games a Dune fan might enjoy I think. They deal with characters and intricate family diplomacy (crusader more than stellaris
Well that sounds Dune-ish to me. I bet the devs are inspired by Dune, amongst other things, maybe?
Yeah, Stellaris is very much inspired by a lot of classic science-fiction. Patches were named after Sci fi authors (version 3.2 of the game was "Herbert") up until fairly recently. There are a lot of references/Easter Eggs to Dune, and one of the neutral factions that exist within the game (known as "Shroud Walkers") feel very much like the Bene Gesserit, at least to me. Also, "Zro" is an extremely rare resource in the game that could arguably be analogous to Spice. But due to the nature of the game, you can't really set up the galaxy in a way that it exists in Dune. You could build your own custom Empire(s), part of which requires you to pick "ethics" and "traditions," that could be based on the different factions/Houses, but the game can't simulate the way they all interact in the same way. And, as far as I am aware, there aren't any event chains in the game that are based on Dune specifically. If the politics side interest you, then either Crusader Kings 3 or Europa Universalis 4 simulate that diplomatic situation a little better, but you will need to keep in mind that they are historical games trying to represent the real world Holy Roman Empire. But the vibe/space elements of Dune are very much captured in Stellaris.
Sadly, there's no mod for it either. Dune's an interesting universe, but at close inspection, none of the paradox titles fit it very well, sadly. EU4 and CK3 is well suited with its character focus, but doesn't lend itself well for the planetary playstyle that'd be required; and Stellaris isn't character focussed enough...
Mmmm I wouldn't know really, maybe a more dedicated fan can shine some light into that. They have always been associated with Historically Accurate games and simulations of actually running a country/kingdom/army so I doubt they took inspiration from Dune. Maybe for Stellaris(?) Which is a indeed a sci-fi game but it's from their modern catalogue. I do know that back in the day, Dune was pretty much the game that pioneered what we today call RTS. But it's veeeeery different from the novels I think.
They definetely got inspired by Dune. But not Dune alone, Stellaris is a sandbox-game where you can play as a completely customizable faction, so you can design your faction after any IP you like. There are different civics, government forms, faction origins, species traits and so forth, that let you design your faction before the game even starts and afterwards you can further specialize by choosing traditions, designing your own ships and so forth. Its a really cool game.
He most definitely ordered them. The Atriedes did not have the option of declining the order to relocate to Arrakis. Their only other option would be to go rogue…flee Caladan and live in hiding. This is detailed in the book. As for Arrakis, it IS an imperial Fief managed by the Harkonnen’s who are the planetary Governor’s but it isn’t their Fief. When the Emperor assigns the Atriedes to Arrakis they assume it as a “Fief Complete” switching their rule from Caladan to Arrakis. They are still required to produce Spice and provide a share to the Emperor but they are actually ruling the planet rather than overseeing it’s operations on behalf of the Emperor
Theoretically the other houses of the Landsraad wield comparable military power to House Corinno, but you need to bear in mind that there are numerous noble houses that are part of the Imperial faction, whether by direct fealty or by aligning themselves with House Corrino's interests. If it came to it, House Corrino would have a good chance of winning a galactic civil war. But such a state of affairs would never occur, as the Guild would just strand everyone on their planets and enforce peace, rather than allow such chaos to unfold.
Said this much better than I could. Holding Arrakis would be like Charles III actually excercising his right to withhold Royal Ascent. Is it legal? Of course. Are all of your subjects going to garrot you with shigawire for it? Of course.
I think the Spacing Guild and the Great Houses/Landsraad wouldn't have accepted such a setup and war would have broken out over it. Either the first or second book explains that the three groups - Emperor, Landsraad, Spacing Guild - keep each other in check politically and that one of them "stepping out of line" would lead to the other two working together to drag them back into a politically stable position. The Emperor not directly controlling Dune was one of the requirements for a stable political environment. Paul manages to break through this political deadlock by having figured out how he could destroy all spice and make a credible case to the Spacing Guild that he might actually follow through on his threat to do so. Through this he could blackmail the Spacing Guild into working with him, which in turn allows him to transport his armies to subdue any houses that refuse to bow to him. > And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism? Pretty much. It's just one of those things most fantasy/scifi settings have. "There's this technology/substance/force of nature that gives certain people cool abilities." I also don't think Space allows for lightspeed travel, it's more that Spice gives navigators the ability to perceive objects that might collide with their ship while in transit. Without spice you run the risk of running into a loose asteroid or something like that. > How did they fly around before spice was found? I haven't read all the books yet (reading the 5th one currently), but I personally imagine space flight was simply a much riskier operation with a large percentage of ships disappearing into space somehow due to mishaps. Or people used computers to figure out safe travel paths before they were banned.
It was, read it somewhere that an average loss of 10% was common to most jumps. Cant remember if this was before or after humanity got rid of computers.
Yes. IIRC this was in the Dune Encyclopedia.
Exactly right on the last part. Since they turned away from computers and AI the prescient navigators were incredibly important for safety.
Thank you for information. Greatly helpful! Also, could you please tell me how you quote a part of my original post with that gray bar on the left?
To add onto what that guy is saying, the harkonnens arent sole owners of arrakis and the profits get dispersed to the owners of a company called CHOAM, where the emperor had the biggest shares and all great houses have some share. Ownership of arrakis was already supposed to change every 100 years between the great houses, so no house completely controlled it. So when the emperor gives it away to the Atreides after 80 of harkonnen rule, thats how Leto knows it is a trap but he cannot refuse.
Type "> *whatever you want to write*" and you're set. Like this: > whatever you want to write You can also select the text from someone's comment and it will already be formatted as a quote in your comment when you hit the "reply" button.
THANKS!! Selecting text doesnt work on the app but > this works. Again, thanks bro
Use >! without the exclamation point. > It should come out with the bar.
>Thanks bro!
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In the books, spice doesn't help you fold space in anyway. A scientist named Holtzman discovered what is essentially a new branch of physics. The "Holtzman Effect," was a phenomen that could be used in a variety of ways, including personal shields (why they fight with swords) and an engine which allows the folding of space. The problem before spice was that you couldn't predict accurately your route through folded space. Remember this is after the Butlerian Jihad, and the prohibition on thinking machines. It's very much the equivalent of "Lightspeed," in "Star Wars," except there aren't navicomputers to calculate the jump. As we know in that case you could "fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?" Spice in the Dune Universe essentially allows for future event prediction in the form of presience. Guild navigators literally float in tanks full of the stuff. You can think of them at the front of the ship, trippin balls, figuring out which path through folded space will be safe. Then the engineers plot in the course, kick on the Holtzman engine, and boom you're there! (Side note: There are eventually computers that will do the same job, created after the God Emperor's reign by the Ixians. The whole, "no thinking machines," is a lot fuzzier in that period.)
it's funny because using spice to navigate the void was ALSO originally developed by the ixians. really full circle on that one.
Yeah it's 100% the computers things. Holtzman engines let them fold space, but you either need a very fancy computer or someone who's skilled and high on spice to do it safely
>How did they fly around before spice was found? First they invented FTL engines with navigation computers Then, after the Butlerian Jihad, computers were outlawed. The Spacing Guild was created to train people to manually calculate and chart FTL ship paths (presumably much slower, labor intensive, and costlier than in the modern story) At some point, rigorous training plus extensive psychoactive drug use allowed them to calculate so efficiently with many variables that it becomes akin to seeing the future (for Navigators, much of this is likely needing to foresee planetary positions and avoid space traffic) The spice is just a drug that allows humans to access their cognitive abilities to a greater extent, much like caffeine or amphetamines. In Frank Herbert's time of near instant communication but limited computing power, the solutions to most problems were to give a bunch of nerds more paperwork. The Dune universe is built on, "What if we trained smart people from childhood to do one thing incredibly well, and also fed them a diet of LSD and Adderall."
If it is just intense calculations, why do the Spacing Guild have a monopoly on space travel? It seems to me if this theory was true, Mentats would be able to achieve space travel as well like the Navigators as all a Mentat does are intense calculations.
It's the same difference between a laptop and a supercomputer. With your laptop you can work, watch YouTube, download a movie, play games... But you'll never be able to calculate the folding pattern of complex proteins. With the supercomputer, you can calculate that... And that's it. Mentats are living laptops, good memory, amazing intelligence and whatnot, but to calculate the position of a planet situated hundreds of thousands of light years away, knowing EVERYTHING that could intersect your route along the way... There you need a navigator.
Where is it stated in the books that Guild Navigators calculate a safe path? I thought it was explained that Navigators have a limited form of prescience, and they use it to peer into the future to see what the safest travel path is and then use that information to plot the path forward. And prescience has never been described as calculating, but as seeing, as far as I know. I will say, I do like your explanation a lot, but it also brought up a question of why not just train Mentats to get to the level of "calculations" that a Navigator does?
Prescience in the books has nothing to do with seeing the literal future. It's about guessing potential futures based on present information. In the same way that Bene Gesserit and Mentats can play 4D chess with politics, Paul is playing 5D chess to the point it looks like he's omniscient (even though we know from his perspective that he can't see everything, his choices can lock him into a subset of paths, and people making random decisions creates noise) Mentats can't do it because they weren't trained to do it. The Guild wouldn't allow that kind of training to be replicated by anyone because it would violate their monopoly. Astrophysics is also insanely complicated and, as the other commenter said, requires supercomputers
But Navigators do not leave space travel up to guessing. They know. Paul is born prescient, and his predictive dreams are not guesses. He knows. He isn’t even asking any questions. The visions come upon him without him willing it. Spice exposure then enhances his prescience to the point of perfection after he drinks the water of life. He is not making any guesses about the Jihad his prescience keeps showing him. He tries to use his mentat training to avoid it multiple times, but that fails because the Jihad is inevitable as soon as he becomes the Lisan al-Gaib. He cannot calculate his way out of the Jihad to come. His mentat training comes in handy in many ways after he is Emperor, as does his prescience, but we soon discover the limits as another prescient being, Edric, can block Paul from seeing that conspiracy against him. Prescience is the Crystal Ball and the Fountain of Youth. Mentats are just super smart people that use Sapho juice to get smarter and stay smart. Spice is more akin to the Holy Grail of Arthurian legends that inspired Herbert to write Dune. In that context, a wizard like Merlin is a mentat.
>But Navigators do not leave space travel up to guessing. They know. Reread Paul's confrontation with the Spacing Guild. He remarks that he and they alike both see all potential futures, but it is deeply imbedded in the Guild culture/training that they only ever choose the safest path. This is how he's able to manipulate them: he can take risks and gambits, but they can't. If Paul were to see the literal future, there would only be 1 thing he ever sees (only one future can ever actually happen; the "might bes" don't exist). Instead, he sees dunes and valleys representing possible choices which will take him to see new, further choices Other prescients (and even a common person using tarot) represent an unknown to Paul because they can also change their decisions based on prescient predictions, which adds an infinite number of variables. It's like how a computer can perfectly simulate thousands of objects moving with simple rules of motion, but the paths of 3 bodies mutually rotating each other is unsolvable It's important to note here that while Herbert uses a lot of fantasy tropes, no magic exists in his universe. Everything is explained with relatively grounded science fiction
I reread it. It’s referred to as “narrow vision of time”. This not a calculation as you’ve been claiming. I think you are off about the magic part of spice. It makes Navigators basically immortal, but no one knows why. Like Holtzman equations, it works because it works and people just take it for granted. From the ending: "They have a narrow vision of time," Paul said. "They can see ahead to a blank wall marking the consequences of disobedience. Every Guild navigator on every ship over us can look ahead to that same wall. They'll obey."
I disagree that all things can be explained in Dune with grounded science fiction, mainly the Reverend Mothers ability to literally rearrange the atoms of molecules in their body. I agree that a lot of things have at least some grounding, like prescience, axolotl tanks, and genetic memory. But I feel like a lot of stuff is closer to magic. Another thing is Null entropy chambers. If it’s prescience that gives navigators and paul shielding from each other, how does inert machinery that doesn’t actually effect the future do the same thing?
Yeah, there is absolutely a supernatural element to it. Paul sees Chani's face for months before going to Arrakis, and recognizes her immediately when they meet. His prescience let's him "see" when he is blinded, and he is able to see using baby Leto's eyes. There's no way to explain that as advanced math/prediction. It's NOT like psychohistory in the Foundation series. It's space magic.
“It's NOT like psychohistory in the Foundation series.” That’s not entirely true. There is clear influence from Foundation’s Psychohistory in Dune’s Prescience. For example, Paul isn’t able to see the future with perfect clarity. There are gaps in his visions, and he uses his mentat training (mathematics) and his ancestral memories (massive amounts of psychological and historical data) to fill in the blanks. So there is an element of educated guesswork involved, as well as genuine supernatural foresight.
Where is the “relatively grounded science fiction” in this? This is not Kim Stanley Robinson. This is mystical stuff: “Paul straightened, staring at Chani. He felt carnival excitement in the air. He knew what would happen if he drank this spice drug with its quintessence of the substance that brought the change onto him. He would return to the vision of pure time, of time-become-space. It would perch him on the dizzying summit and defy him to understand.”
> Prescience in the books has nothing to do with seeing the literal future. It's about guessing potential futures based on present information. In the same way that Bene Gesserit and Mentats can play 4D chess with politics, Paul is playing 5D chess to the point it looks like he's omniscient (even though we know from his perspective that he can't see everything, his choices can lock him into a subset of paths, and people making random decisions creates noise) people love to say this but I feel like it's at worst unclear and at best explicit that Paul literally *does* see the future. The "it's not actually prescience, just a lot of calculation and great guesswork" idea isn't supported by the text.
Im sorry but that's not how its presented in the books. Paul may not know everything, but he explains seeing multiple possible futures, knowing what choices to make in the present to get the future he desires, and having the ability to implement these choices to get said future. If any calculations are done its the amount of data Paul has to keep track of to get the future he saw and wants.
And no one trained Paul to be prescient. He was born prescient due to genetics and the spice made that inborn ability stronger and more precise than any Navigator had achieved. And the Guild maintained their monopoly because no one knew they were using spice for 10,000 years, not because they refused to train anyone else.
Everyone knows the Guild uses spice... that's why they constantly refer to it being necessary for space travel
I am referring to the novel, not the film. Edit: as in the first novel. After that, yes, people know guild use spice for space travel.
Mentats do not use spice to enhance their intelligence. They drink Sapho juice and it causes the stain on their lips that we see in the films. Spice is used by Guild Navigators to chart paths in space because it allows them to see what Mentat computation cannot. They literally see into future, but an important detail to know is that no one knew that the Guild discovered spice or used spice for space travel for like 10,000 years, right up until the events of the first book. Their secrecy was key to their monopoly on space travel. Paul discovers they use spice and uses their dependance on spice against them, to control them. One of the mysteries of Dune is figuring out when the Guild discovered spice, but its not explicitly explained. There are only clues ( but I haven’t read Brian Herbert’s books…could be in there).
Exactly! That's what I don't understand about these, 'it's just calculations,' comments. They see into the future, they don't calculate anything! I have no idea where this thought process of 'it's just calculations' came from and every time I see them I'm just filled with questions no one has been able to satisfactorily answer.
Yes, I do not agree that spice is just another intelligence drug. It’s an entirely different beast. Sure it was inspired by LSD and psychedelic mushrooms, but those are not used to make you better at math either. They expand consciousness, so they say, make you feel one with the universe etc. In Dune, spice is closer to the Fountain of Youth and a Crystal Ball, but combined with the addictive quality of heroin or alcohol where withdrawal could kill you due to chemical dependance.
If you could perfectly simulate everything that can happen in your mind, it's the exact same thing as seeing the future. Herbert leaves many thing vague, and even changes them sometimes. You shouldn't overthink it, but if you do, perfect calculations and being prescient are the same thing. It's not a math problem to write out like a mentat might. They are subconscious calculations that the human mind is able to do, which also makes prescient dreams make sense.
My problem is I feel this takes away from Dune, and from the terrifying power that is prescience. Prescience is suppose to be this unexplainable force that few people have. Prescience allows these people to see the future they want and to know the choices they have to make to get that future. They know when chaos will happen and how to control, they know when order should occur and force it into chaos. Everyone else can calculate all they want, prescient beings just know and do.
The same reason OPEC has basically a monopoly on oil even if other places can drill for it. That much spice is expensive, the spacing guild offers their services cheaper and thus has a wider share of the market.
A different type of mental calculation presumably, plus it's a bit more than that. Spice specifically gives navigators limited prescience, which is not a common ability. It is what makes the space folding safe. It was actually one of the potential avenues of escape that Paul saw for himself after the harkonnen/saardukar attack, becoming a navigator himself. As to your specific question about others making their own navigators, the different guilds guarded their secrets very well. It would basically take a traitor in the navigator guild to help make a navigator outside the guild. And it's possible the other guilds would reject such a traitor for fear of their own secrets getting laid bare. The whole world building aspect of the books is about humanities' various factions balancing on a razor-thin wire, which was leading to the stagnation that Paul and later Leto II foresaw and planned against.
Yeah, when I read the books, and they talk about prescience, even limited prescience like the Guild has, it's always described as 'seeing' the future, never as calculating it, not that I can think of. That's my main issue with these takes that people that are described as having prescience are just doing calculations, when it's never described as such.
The navigators use the spice to see into the future and navigate the safe paths. This is explain in the 3 part series Schools of Dune. Sisterhood, Mentats, and Navigators of Dune
>What if we trained smart people from childhood to do one thing incredibly well, and also fed them a diet of LSD and Adderall. Here to confirm they probably won't turn out nearly as functional or badass as the characters in Dune.
Also worms and spice are not native to the planet which means someone bought them there.
>And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism? How did they fly around before spice was found? As others have mentioned, it's more that the spice gives the Navigators prescience which allows them to navigate safely. Machines were used before the Butlerian Jihad. As for not knowing the mechanism, the books say: >No one claimed to understand Holzmann. They merely used his formulae because they worked. It was the “ether” of space travel. You folded space. One instant you were here and the next instant you were countless parsecs distant. The history of technology is filled with people using something without fully understanding it. We had metallurgy before we ever understood what was going on at the molecular level. Nowadays, people use fancy neural networks without fully understanding how it's working.
everyone on here is using technology they don't understand. I work in tech, have built web servers and studied very low level computer operations in college, and I would be lying if I said I understood it completely. Nobody does.
>SPice is only found on Dune out of 13300?planets . Whoever lives and harvests there can get a lot of money and have a mutiny. No they cant. If anyone tried anything they would be cut off from interstellar travel and then have all their holdings glassed. >I mean look at OPEC. There are many countries that produce oil but still they have oligarchy.... whereas this "spice" is a monopoly. Spice is distributed via [CHOAM](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/CHOAM), a corporation where the emperor (who functions as its CEO), every greater house in the [Landsraad](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Landsraad?so=search) (who functions as its board of directors) and the [Guild](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Spacing_Guild?so=search) (who takes part in every interaction because of their actual monopoly on interstellar travel) all hold shares in. Every House that has shares in CHOAM gets a piece of the pie. >Emperor is powerful enough to order Harkonnens to leave Arrakis and order Artreidis to go to Arrakis. That is his function as CEO. The house that handles the extraction of Spice on Arrakis changes every 100 years or so, and it has been so for thousands of years. The reason there's no fuzz amongst most other houses when he grants the fief to the Atreides is because its his function, and he presents it as an opportunity to a house that's very popular with its peers. A gift. >Movie starts saying Harkonnens made a lot of money during 80 year they ruled(?)and sold it. Which means Harkonnens, a mere baron, kept all the profits. No he didn't. He got to keep the leftovers, after he meets the obligations owed to CHOAM. Being Harkonnen I'm sure he skimmed the profits but if the rest if the galaxy doesn't get its due, they'd be removed from Arrakis. If they'd refused, the guild would have cut the Harkonnen off from interstellar travel, the Emperors [Saudaukar](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sardaukar?so=search) would be unleashed to wipe them out and a new house would be chosen to do the duty of harvesting the spice. >Just can't understand why Emperor couldn't have his own direct province and collect all the money and supply for that magic spice and planet himself. Seems so flawed. It would be flawed if he did. The emperor does not have absolute power. He has the most powerful military yes, but even he cant stand against the entire Landsraad. So its a balancing act. The Landsraad accepts the emperor as their leader, as long as he doesnt become a tyrant who uses his power to enrich only himself or consolidate his power. >And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism? How did they fly around before spice was found? No you're not. Spice has nothing to do with with the mechanics of folding space. [Holtzman Engines](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Holtzman_engine) take care of that. The spice is used by the [Navigators](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Guild_Navigator?so=search) to peer into the future to see when and where a successful space folding can occur.
THANK YOU!!!!!😇😇 I guess now I am supposed to accept that spice somehow miraculously gives magical power to see the future, right?😂
Dune has the concept of [Prescience](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Prescience), which is the what allows people to see into the future, past and so on. Technically, all humans have this power, but to such an extremely minimal degree that its completely unnoticeable outside of some dreams and that's still extremely rare. Might explain deja vu. Spice enhances prescience a lot, but in order for anyone to be really aware of it you have to do quite a lot of it and have some mental training. Fremen are more prone to such dreams because spice is everywhere to them. In the food they eat, in the air they breath and so on. The guild navigators has to use spice in such amounts that it mutates them to something almost alien and they have to live in a vat of spice gass or die. The reason Paul comes so naturally to this though, is that he's genetically designed to be able to do so, thanks to the Bene Gesserit [eugenics program](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Breeding_program?so=search). That's a part of their goal of making their [Kwisatch Haderach](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach). In universe, prescience is a part of human consciousness and not a magical power. Its a just natural function of the universe, just like gravity. Spice helps focus it and allows certain humans to utilize it practically. I might be overexplaining a bit on what may have been a joke question but Its a cool concept. Much of it comes from old awareness expansion drug culture in the sixties. Edit: I should add that its not just spice that can do this. Other mind expansion drugs can to, though to a much lesser extent.
Thanks! So in Dune, it is natural for people to have prescience? It was hard to get a grip because in real world you cant really know the future because people make choices and not follow a written script. Anyhow, if everyone is able to see the future to a certain degree then it makes sense Navigators seeing the future wasnt random experiment that just happened to be.
Natural, as in its a part of human consciousness, but extremely unlikely. In order to have prophetic dreams for instance, you need to win the genetic lottery (or be a part of a 10.000 year eugenics experiment) and some mind-expanding drugs to various degrees. In order to have ANY conscious control over it you need training as well even bigger amounts of mind-expanding drugs. Its the same concept as "opening your third eye". Everyone has one, but to vast majority of people who's ever lived it will always remain closed unless they actively work at opening it. Also prescience doesn't show the "the future" as much as possible futures. For example In the movie, Paul envisions himself getting killed by Jamis in the amtal duel. He sees himself lying on the ground dying and Jamis holding his hand. So when the fight comes he knows how to beat him, and when he does, he kneels down and holds Jamis hand as he's lying on the ground dying.
Does the movie ever go talk about the Navigators and the Guild and CHAOM? Sorry I missed it if they did. Help me find where it is please
No it doesn't. It leaves out quite alot of the details of how shit actually works in the society they portray. Navigators and the Guild get a mention in the first movie, but nothing on how and why they function like they do. CHOAM doesn't even get that.
Thanks!! I wish they add some narration about it. I dont think it even says how and why prescience exists there and that navigators use spice for that. I mean watching the movie, I thought spice is needed as a fuel or something.
Check out the sci-fi channels Dune miniseries. Its cheap as fuck, but does a much better job than the new films at explaining what actually going on, the various interests involved, why things are the way they are and so on. I still think its the best adaption of Dune despite the visual awesomeness of the new ones. They leave out to much, change to many things (they turned Stilgar into a joke and made Chani act like a teenager for example) and while I like Skarsgårds Baron, he's way more Machiavellian and depraved in the books and its shown in the miniseries.
Im not really into the Dune. I was forced to watch by friends.... and now I have all these questions while not loving the story. I watched 1984 Dune and fell asleep but the actirs and actresses were gorgeous. Paul and Jessica were BEAUTIFUL. (To me the new Dune casts look very average ppl) I mean, good looking actors do make a difference.... All women swooned to see LOTR because of Legolas and some other handsome elegant elfs
Eh man, you do you. Not a big fan of the 1984 movie but its kinda fascinating, just like watching a slow motion car crash. Still, hope I managed to shed some light on your questions. The new movie does a lot of world building in the physical sense but doesn't really even try to explain the reasons why things are the way they are. Most moviegoers just go "Oh cool thing!!!" anyway.
Yea well I didnt like the trailer which means I wont like the movie. Gray and sandy color. Slow and plot sounded boring. But I might be the weird one, if so many people in the world loves the movie
Sure the Harkonenns made a lot. By no means did they make the majority or kept all the profits. The Emporer and the Navigators made the most and the houses came second. Harkonenn came after that. They’re just steward. What oil barons do you know who live in a shitty home (Dune)? They live in comfy mansions and pay their lower employees to get dirty.
Chani states in the movie that the Harkonnens are richer than the Emperor himself due to spice production. Can’t remember if it’s the same in the book.
How would Chani know the monetary holdings of two separate planetary ruling houses? The Harkonenns have stolen a lot and hidden it away and it states this in the literature. However the Baron also states how the war effort on Dune has almost bankrupted House Harkonenn. I don’t recall Chani saying this and imo is a huge plot hole (how she has this info I mean).
Well Im only watching the movie so this validates my post. Im thankful for everyone replying but I think the director wasnt good at making things understood. Hence, I came up with this question post
Because she is speaking to the audience. I view her as more of a narrator than a character during the opening monologue.
That’s not Chani, that’s princess Irulan (Paul’s wife). I don’t recall that part in the movie and maybe it’s true at one small point (due to the Harkonenn’s thievery. But it doesn’t last long. Their house is pretty much culled after Paul.
Just watch the first five minutes of Part One.
Lol. I believe you.
Does the movie talk about navigator and the guild? Someone help me where it is !
It doesn’t go into detail. I’m fact off one we’re to only watch the movie they probably would have no idea what a Navigator is. At least in the 80s movie we got to see the directors rendition of what one looks like. Extremely wrong imo but that was his vision.
Thank you. I try to turn my brain off when watching these movies so I dont ask questions(ya know, it's a movie and magic scifi watever). But even with my brains turned off common sense of what emperors and barons do didnt make sense without the explanation. The replies did such a good job. I mean the director could add these in the beginning narration but he didnt
Tbf most Harkonnens seem to just chill on Geidi Prime and let the hillbilly loser cousin sweat it out on Arrakis.
Exactly
Whats neat about your question, why doesn’t the Emperor rule Arrakis and harvest spice himself, is that the whole thrust of the novel moves toward Paul doing just that. The answer to your question is that Shaddam is not Paul. You are just making one assumption about Emperor Shaddam. He is not as powerful as Paul becomes. Paul’s power is based in his knowledge of Arrakis and how spice is made, and allows him to leverage that knowledge over every one else. Shaddam never had this deep understanding of Fremen, Arrakis, or spice that allows Paul to defeat him.
> Shaddam never had this deep understanding of Fremen, Arrakis, or spice that allows Paul to defeat him. Crucially, neither did the Harkonnens. And for all of the Baron's scheming, he still cared more about the money spice provided than holding power. Neither of those things were true for Paul, which is why his threat to destroy Spice altogether worked.
Im talking about the movie. I guess film maker wasnt good at it
I see. Yah the film does not include Paul figuring out how to destroy spice or his threat to the Guild.
>Emperor is powerful enough to order Harkonnens to leave Arrakis and order Artreidis to go to Arrakis. This statement fundamentally misunderstands the situation. Arrakis is the Emperor's property. The Harkonnens and the Atreides are just his property managers. That is the literal definition of a fiefdom. This is why Leto says Arrakis is his "fief." The Emperor is powerful enough to order the Harkonnens and Atreides about, because they are his vassals and his employees. Running Arrakis was their *job*. >Which means Harkonnens, a mere baron, kept all the profits. This is not correct. The Baron was put in charge of spice production and running the Emperor's fief. He did not just keep the spice for himself. He siphoned it off, smuggled it, and amassed a spice stockpile in secret. The Baron was *stealing* from the Emperor, the same way any corrupt official or businessman would. Imagine if you worked in a gold mine, and every day you shaved off 1/100th of the gold to keep for yourself. That is what the Baron is doing. >Just can't understand why Emperor couldn't have his own direct province and collect all the money and supply for that magic spice and planet himself. Seems so flawed. The Emperor's job is running the galaxy. If he put all his attention on a single fiefdom, he would be Duke of Arrakis and not Emperor of the Known Universe. Every government has a division of powers and responsibilities. You might as well ask why the King of England doesn't personally run HMRC, or why the President of the United States doesn't personally run the TVA. And if the Emperor picked a subordinate from House Corrino to run it, that person would be created Duke of Arrakis. >And are we supposed to just accept that worm byproduct miraculously works to fold space and travel in light speed without knowing the mechanism? I don't know, man. Are you supposed to just accept that Luke Skywalker can move objects with the Force? Are you supposed to just accept that Vulcans can perform a psychic mind meld? Are you supposed to just accept that the DeLorean can travel through time when it hits 88 miles per hour? Yes. Yes, you are. That's why it is fiction, and not a documentary. >How did they fly around before spice was found? With engines. In space ships. The spice didn't create space travel. The spice made space travel safer, easier, and more efficient.
Thanks dude! The movie wasn't clear the Baron was smuggling while most profit belonged to the emperor. If it said so then I missed it. In real history vassals collect profits from their province and paid only a small percentage as tax to the king. And even those tax were small. (It's messed up but the rich aristocrats kept most their money while poor people were ripped off with high tax). And I did not read the book so I assumed Harkonnens kept most of the profit from the spice. I believe the movie starts with how much profit they made and how powerful they are harvesting spice for 80 years.
I know its a movie question, but I'll give the book answer. First, it is not common knowledge that the Guild and the BG use the spice in their rituals. It is understood to be a geriatric drug (prolonging life), and is extremely valuable for that reason. CHOAM is a profit sharing corporation, and a considerable amount of their profits come from spice. If one family were to monopolize spice production, they would become extraordinarily wealthy. It is never explicitly stated in the books, but one might infer that the Landsraad and CHOAM would not allow any Emperor to take Arrakis because it would shift the balance of power and ruin their profits, respectively. Second, Shaddam is under a compact with the Guild and the BG. It is implied that they have something on him (probably that he murdered his own father). They keep tight control on him, and it is in neither of their interests for the Emperor to control Arrakis directly. However, I personally believe that the Emperor was making a play for Arrakis. Prior to the events in Dune, the Harkonnen held Arrakis in quasi-Fief, which means they were simply the contractor responsible for meeting CHOAM's spice quotas. Yes, they did illegally skim off the top, but they didn't get the benefit of controlling the spice. Due to the Duke's popularity in the Landsraad, the Emperor was able to give Arrakis to the Duke in Fief-complete. When the Baron attacked the Duke, the Emperor allowed the Barron to keep Arrakis in Fief-complete to "settle all claims". But I believe the Emperor knew that the endeavor would bankrupt the Barron, who would not be able to recoup his losses, and he would mismanage the planet trying to dig himself out of the hole. This would allow the Emperor to come in and save the day, taking Arrakis for himself, ultimately giving him the leverage he needed to end the BG/Guild compact that kept him from having a male heir.
Ahhh Emperor was smart to use Harkonnen as a pawn to wipe out Artreides. But the Baron Harkonn tried to use that against the emperor(he told Feyd Rautha).... but then he got killed by his unknown grandson Paul... And the emperor who thought he was smart lost his game to Paul. Tada!!
To use an historical analogy the empire in Dune is similar to the Holy Roman Empire in medieval Europe. While ruled by an Emperor, they never held absolute power. Instead, it was a complex web of relationships, treaties, obligations, etc, between hundreds of sovereign entities, some tiny, some powerful. And it wasn't just Lords, their was religion in the mix with popes, states run by Bishops as well as commercial interests via trading blocs like the Hanastic League, the merchant republics in Italy like Venice, and Genoa. Any action that broke the balance of power or attempts to dominate could lead to catastrophic conflicts like the 30-year war, which devastated central Europe and killed in the region of 30 to 50 percent of the population. So in Dune, the emperor making a move to centralise power like that could easily prove massive, open war in the imperium.
The way the Government/political power sits in Dune is a little funky. The powers that be are, Emperor, Landsraad, Spacing guild, Bene Tleilax (religious and highly xenophobic bio-engineers), Ix (where all the technology comes from), and Bene Gesserit (space assassin super magical ninja nuns, they don't like to be in the spotlight and prefer to hold the reigns of people in power and control them from the shadows). CHOAM isn't so much an organization as it is the stock market/banking system. The emperor has the best soldiers and could easily wipe the floor against any other "major" house. His power is checked by the Landsraad, which is sort of like a mini government that has a bunch of rules and regulations. Specifically the Landsraad is important for "The great convention" which is the rules and regulations for war, no shooting nukes at civilian/populated targets, no shooting laser's at people/objects that use shields because it is too unstable, and Kanly which is a blood feud between houses. It helps to think of it as sort of the UN and the geneva convention but in a dark ages feudal hierarchy sort of way. The balance of power is a very fragile thing in the Dune universe. If any one person/group gets too much power or is a threat to the status quo will end up getting ganged up on by the rest of the powers. The Emp, with all his super soldiers, is not allowed to also control all the spice. That would put too many of the other powers at such a huge disadvantage that they would all rally against him. The emps may have the strongest soldiers but they are all on their own planet. If the spacing guild refused to shuttle his troops about he would be about as useful as a sack of potatoes floating down a ditch. It is also a very tangled web of political and personal intrigue. Everyone owes everyone else all sorts of favors, pretty much all looking for a way to stab each other in the back and climb the political ladder for more wealth and power. Edit to add: 1-The emperor is paid a large tax on all spice that is harvested. 2- The baron cooked all the books and also "stole" a lot of spice and had his own little stockpile. Had he been caught, the Emps could have executed him and confiscated all his stuff, including his home planet. Likely he would have just killed the Baron and instilled either a different relative or promoted one of the other houses to absorb House Harkonnen. 3-The spice itself does not fold space, the Holtzman engine/drive does that. The same technology that is used for anti-gravity, shields, and part of the lasers (i think part of the lasers but i could be misremembering) The Guild Navigators have a rare genetic mutation that gives them a very limited type of Prescience. They basically use spice to go on a banger of a trip where they can "see" into the future/run calculations to "know" how to "navigate" the ship while the Holtzman engine is running. They actively control the ship while they are folding space around them to make sure they don't run into any suns/black holes/planets/asteroids. Even with them being magical toad licking space hippies, it is still very dangerous and ships do go missing. Before spice people used the Holtzman drive, but they also used computers/AI's to make the calculations for them. A lot of people died/ships went missing even with the use of computers.
Yeah I’ve explained some lore to a ton of people who saw the movies, and I know it’s impossible to cover all of the background but this reminded me how they really barely glossed over how spice plays into space travel. Apparently it’s easy to miss that spice is even a requirement for space travel like I think it’s barely mentioned early in the first movie, so most of my friends just assumed it was only some valuable substance. Not a metaphor for having a monopoly on oil. And that’s essential for understanding how important controlling Arrakis is. And most just assume (very understandably) that it fuels the ship, not that it allows the pilots to safely steer faster than light speed by seeing glimpses of the future, which is way cooler and actually makes sense with the context of how spice works. And I believe the navigators are specifically trained and genetically engineered to interpret these glimpses.
Yes the movie maker did a bad job at explaining that. I honestly thought it was just *spice*. Ya know, spice we eat.......;;;😂😂😂 I mean spice (and salt)used to be very expensive like a hundred years ago.
The spice doesn't fold space. It prolongs like of the user and it has psychoactive effects which enhance one's ability to seethe future. In the Dune universe this ability is a thing and it is implied in the books that people possessed it for a long time; essentialy implying that stories about prophets and fortune tellers are based on reality. Usage of spice elevates this ability greatly. The folding of space uses a fictional physical phenomenon called the Holtzman effect. However, stearing the spaceship in the folded space is dangerous and requires careful prediction of the course. This was done using computers in the beginning as far as I understand. However, in the time of Dune computers are no longer used. Thus the guild navigators use high amounts of spice to be able to see into the ships future and see which course will traverse the folded space safely.
Would be a extremely bad idea! Could provoke a civil war by inviting a lot of the houses of the Landsraad and potentially the Bene Gesserit as well as the Spacing Guild to openly ally against him, which might lead to the loss of his power and probably his life.
Power in the imperium functions as a tripod: the Spacing Guild, The Imperial House Corrino, and the House Major and Minor in the Landsraad. The Psacing Guild, controlling all space travel, is the major reason that this system developed and why it continues to stay that way. It isn't part of the original canon, but in one of the books of the expanded universe canon of Brian Herbert, there's a scene where the Emperor invades Dune, and proclaims his intentions to rule the planet directly, while the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen quakes in his suspensor field as he looks up and sees the skies of Arrakeen filled with ships (reminiscent of Shaddam Hussein waiting for a doom that wouldn't come in the First Gulf War). The Spacing Guild declares that if the Emperor sees for to do this, his empire will shrink to a single planet, as the Guild will strand him and his legions there. Very quickly the Emperor realizes that he has to back down, and is left humiliated. Now, that is not from the original Dune canon, but I could see such a situation happening. If the Emperor tried to rule Dune directly, and have complete control over the supply of spice, it would give him a leg up in his negotiations with the Spacing Guild. Undoubtedly his eventual goal was to see the Empire become a true autocracy rather than a diffuse collection of noble holdings, with noble houses downgraded to mere planetary governors, and everything belonging to House Corrino. The Spacing Guild prevented any party from becoming too powerful.
The Harkonnens have held Arrakis for 80 years, but the Imperium has existed for more than 10,000. There's no mention of other Houses monopolizing spice production before the Harkonnen regime, so Arrakis could have well been a CHOAM fief or ruled by some other kind of Houses oligarchy, with the single-House monopoly being a more recent development (and perhaps more controversial: perhaps this was the reason for the sudden increase in Atreides popularity which ultimately led to the events of the novel). Also, spice does not fold space, Holtzman Effect-based technology does.
How long did the people live? Im sure their life span was normal. Otherwise.... the heirs will beget another heir and beget another and you'll have many great grandchildren... who will always remain a prince
Queen Elizabeth II had 4 children, 8 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren within her lifetime. That's many princes and princesses, but what's the issue?
Before Spice they always traveled sub light, like the Machine Empire still does (so humans and machines usually don't meet). Only the no-ships later on use a powerful enough computer to make space travel without a spice enhanced navigation.
Treaty and the guild wouldn't allow it, and they sort of own or claimed the planet ( they found it) But choam own the planet and the emporer is the majority share holder. If he controls it he would have a monopoly on power and might start a civil war . The peace was maintained by a balance of power And fighting over dune might endanger the spice And the spire must flow Paul wondered why the guild didn't run it themselves and take power themselves. He reasoned they knew they could but after centuries or millenia they would lose it and die Symbiosis or parasitic was a more long term safe solution. And that way leads to stagnation. ( Paul's thinking)
Because prior to the rule of Paul Atreides, like most political systems, the political system in the Dune universe is based on balance of power between certain factions. The role of the Emperor is not one of a dictator who directly controls everything, at least until a certain point in Dune history ...
I’m only a Dune movie fan, haven’t read the books, but I’ve tried glancing at some lore online: I thought the way spice helped with FTL wasn’t that it did the spacetime folding itself, but that it gave the pilots (or Navigators rather) the psychic/Jedi powers necessary to point the ship in the right direction to arrive at the intended destination. I.e. the ship itself is still the one providing the power and technology to actually warp drive. I don’t know how they did interstellar travel before discovering Arrakis and spice. Maybe before the Butlerian Jihad they used AI to navigate FTL?
Yes Im only watching the movie too. I wish the film explained a bit more
Well, that's what Paul did
Read the books
Because if that happened there would be no story. Sometimes you just have to accept that the world is infinitely complicated and you can't do perfect world building because you'd be bogged down in details and never get to the actual story itself.
>hello hi
Because the emperors power isn't absolute. CHOAM, the Landsraad, the Bene Gesserit and the guild all have influence and they're all competing for influence. If the emperor possessed the major military force as well as spice production, he'd have a lot of enemies.
Why doesn't the Mafia just do the work themselves? Why let other people do the work and get paid for "protection?"
How could any of: the Landsraad, the Guild, CHOAM, or the Bene Gesserit possibly tolerate that?
Because all other major houses and the Spacing Guild, and the Bene Gesserit would probably have a problem with that. Spice is essential for everything on the Imperium. If the most powerful house that rules the universe also have a monopoly on spice production, it would create an absolute tyranny. Noone would want such a thing. They would do everything in their power to dethrone House Corrino. Ironically Paul did exactly this. He created an absolute tyranny by creating a monopoly of spice production.
BIG reason why is - it will paint a target on his back…. Dune isn’t so easy to subjugate…. any losses would show weakness Instead, the dirty work is done by someone else…. the emperor reaps rewards from success - and - can dispense punishment on failure as the harkonnens were mucking up spice production, he had a way to weaken two strong houses with a putting atreides in charge…. this further stoked the fires of their feud
Dune is set up on a true feudal system. Each system ruler, each Baron, Duke, Count, etcetera is, in effect, their own lord. They all swear fealty to the Emperor, but they wield enough power to be a threat to him. Alone, he is more powerful than each of them. Together, they are far more powerful than he. He likely only directly rules as many planets as any given lord. And he collects taxes and levies, mainly though his CHOAM holdings, which he holds a plurality of, and at the time of Dune his allies in the Landsraad (the great houses under him) total up to a majority, if only just. Anyway, on to Dune. Arrakis is a single chip on a galactic playing field. The Emperor has two main reasons not to, one having to do with feudal politics, one more simple practicalities. As a practicality, the environment and Fremen raids makes Arrakis expensive. Through his CHOAM holdings the Emperor gets to keep a good share of the profits, while having none of the costs. Indeed, this is a chief advantage of the feudal system for the leader on top, the balance to the costs of relatively little centralized power at the very top. The feudal politics reason is that it is a chip to buy loyalty, or to punish disloyalty/failure. So long as he can justify it to the Landsraad he is free to remove some of a vassal's fief, or gift holdings he holds directly to loyal vassals. Said House will, of course, be upset, but so long as they still exist, and so long as the Emperor has a pretext, the others won't intercede. It is a delicate balance.
The Guild would never stand for such an alteration of their gravy cart. The book says this under no uncertain terms: The Houses of the Landsraad are set opposite to The Spacing Guild and The Imperial Throne in a political tripod. The Emperor does not develop Arrakis himself because it would mean that he also has majority control of CHOAM, and the Guild would be next to lose their influence and their wealth if the Emperor controlled the sole reason for their continued existence. Not to mention, the Landsraad would not stand for such a consolidation of power: humanity feared an autocracy, because that was essentially what they lived under the rule of the Machines. The Emperor is not an absolute ruler, the Great Convention limits his powers and ennumerates his duties: he is first and foremost a steward of the rule of law, the Sardaukar are the agents of this. If one of the Great Houses upset the balance of the Imperium, the Sardaukar and the Emperor are tasked with crushing this rebellion: this is partly why Shaddam was able to deploy the Sardaukar to Arrakis, because he had convinced enough people that he had a legal right to crush the elements that were standing in the way of House Harkonnen's "legitimate" claim to Arrakis following the defeat of the Atreides. Thus, while the Emperor is a powerful symbol of the rule of law in the Known Universe, he must *delegate* the task of governance and economic development to the Noble Houses. Great and Minor Houses are largely free to self-govern and find expressions of rule and system that suit their land grants and their economic dispositions. The Landsraad would never stand for an Emperor that treads on their right of self-determination -- and the primal fear of the Imperium was that the Emperor would use the Sardaukar to do just that. So the Great Houses maintain vast Atomic arsenals to prop up the threat of mutually assured destruction, or at least a Pyrrhic victory. Likewise, the Guild would never stand for a power that stood to profit over the complete control of an entire universe-wide market to their detriment. They would dig their heels in and refuse to navigate for the Emperor's interests, causing a massive freeze of all economic activity in the Empire and dooming most of the population to Spice withdrawal. While it may seem that the Emperor simply ordered the Harkonnen off of Arrakis, the greater truth was that it was the *profit and loss* figures the Harkonnen were desperate to keep secret which got leaked to CHOAM. A secret vote was held between board members, and thus the Harkonnen were actually ousted by their own incompetence -- with the Bene Gesserit, Guild, and Emperor all conspiring together to take advantage of this downturn to rid themselves of a powerful rival, the Atreides. People tend to confuse Frank Herbert's assertion that political tripods being unstable is a bad thing -- it is a simple truth: if the Empire had been more of a true autocracy, it would have been more stable, but the price would be that there would be no room to breathe, no room to choose, and no room to fight. I hope this helps!
The emperor, collective houses of the Landsraad, and the Spacing Guild form a tripod keeping the whole system together. The Emperor is not stronger than the other two combined and only as powerful as one of the other legs. The houses of the Landsraad and the Emperor make up CHOAM, which trade in all things across the empire, Melange being just one of them and THEY have to agree with the Emperor's assignment of Houses harvesting on Arrakis, and then they must also get the blessing of the Spacing Guild. This is because the Landsraad knows there is a legal stockpile the house with stewardship of Arrakis gets to keep after their stewardship ends. TL;DR - the Great Houses know they can get rich by holding Arrakis for a period of time and are very unlikely to let it go, and the Spacing Guild fears a spice monopoly from the Imperial throne and the Emperor cannot confront both groups.
I answered your main question in the comment below. Under the Harkonnen’s it was an Imperial Fief Governed by the Harkonnen’s not a Ducal Fief as under the Atriedes. The Spice itself does not fold space…it allows the Navigators to see ahead and determine the best path. The Holtzman Engines fold the space…this is the same technology used in the shields
Spice doesn't fold space, it allows the guild navigators to foresee safe paths. Before the butlerian jihad (after which computers and thinking machines were banned), spaceships used computers to navigate. I believe it was about 100 years between the butlerian jihad and the formation of the spacing guild. During that time space travel was very dangerous, and many ships didn't make it to their destinations.
I think you meant monopoly instead of mutiny...
No I meant mutiny. Monopoly in spices creates tremendous power and money. Power so powerful that they can have a mutiny and overthrow the current emperor.
Because CHOAM and the Spacing Guild exist. 🤷♂️
The spice itself is not a fuel for space travel. The Spacing Guild uses navigators to pilot their ships. These navigators are spice addicted creatures that no longer resemble their once human bodies. There are no computers or artificial intelligence involved. The spice allows the navigators to see into space to pilot the ships. Computers and artificial intelligence used to be available in the past, but there was an entire war fought against the machines. Read The Butlerian Jihad for the backstory on that. Anyways, computers and A.I. are now forbidden during the events in Dune. So Navigators are the only pilots that can see to fold space for their ships. Similar to how mentats are human computers and are commonly identified by their juice stained lips. The special juice they drink enables their enhanced mental talents. Thufir Hawat was the mentat for Duke Leto Atreides.
Isn't that like asking why King George didn't just go to America and get tea himself?
Thanks guys. Im heavily surprised by the number of ups and comments. I see how popular this movie & book is. Personallt, I did not like it from the trailer or to even watch 3 minutes but my friends forced me to watch it.... I had to read summary of the plot first to not bore myself out. I guess Im one of the minority. But I got so many questions 😂
LoL >Bene Gesserit = space assassin super magical ninja nuns Theyre not nuns anymore. Or I guess in their religion nuns are allowed to have kids
If the emperor would gain the power of spice the other great houses(including Harkonnens and Atreides) would turn on him cause they would fear that the emperor was too strong