Comment by Animats
2 days ago
Bear in mind that the Dune universe relies on heavy plot armor to make it go. Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet, like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. "Spice" is important because it's needed to enhance the mental powers of pilots for interstellar travel. That's a job which probably could be done by a few avionics boxes in a rack. That's what requires the Butlerian Jihad.
(Or "spice" might be synthesized. In Herbert's day (the 1960s) organic chemistry wasn't up to synthesizing arbitrary small-molecule drugs, but now it is. It's a service you can order on line, even. Biologicals take more work, but that's what genetic engineering is for.)
The "mental powers" in Dune aren't that impressive. Compare, say, the Harry Potter universe. In Dune, mentats can convince people. Bene Gesserit can look up stuff in their genetic past. Some people can multitask. There are apps for that.
Herbert wanted knife fighters to matter in battle. Not going to happen. Militaries teach knife fighting to build aggression and for desperate situations, but nobody's battle plan depends on a knife fight. Needs too much surprise. Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat. Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets. Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War. Herbert wrote before a big, modern, desert war.
So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.
Plot armor refers to important characters being invulnerable. What you're describing is just plot (or "internal logic" that underlays the plot). You might think of it as "contrived plot" but that's generally how scifi works.
I don't see how most of the plot holes/unrealism you identify is connected with the Butlerian Jihad at all. But re "critiquing Dune's idea of future warfare" (shields and knives, ornithopters, etc) you might also be entertained by Bret Devereaux's recent take:
https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-pa...
>Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War
Armor and dart guns exist in dune. Not to mention poison gas. I don't know if riot shields would help much.
They also have rockets and lasers in dune, so those tanks and bulldozers will probably be ambushed like the rest of the spice harvesters, and they require supply lines for diesel. All that equipment also has to be shipped into arrakis, which is expensive, and the harkonnen didn't maintain their equipment very well anyways in a despirate attempt to extract as much wealth as quickly as possible. The lasers are effective on dune where shield use is limited because it attracts sandworms.
Even conventional artillery is used to destroy the cave systems, which play an important role in the book (and in real life if you consider this US-Iran war). Not to mention nuclear weapons exist on the planet and play a key role in diplomacy.
What happened in dune is more like what we saw when the US recently pulled out of afganistan.
Most of the important conflict in dune isn't based on knife fighting, the war revolves around raids, smuggling, suprise attacks, and the destruction and siezure of key pieces of equipment (like spice harvesters, spacecraft, atomics). The knife fighting is only really pivotal in champion combat.
>Marines say that their K-Bar knife is useful for everything but combat.
Okay but if they lived in a world where firearms were often useless against many enemies, and the flow of war was based on operating and siezing equipment, it would make sense for them to only carry a knife and not a gun. A knife is more general-purpose even as you describe. In dune the knives also have cultural value which is what makes the champion combat relevant in the first place.
>Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet
If it wasn't for the spice, arrakis could be a habitable, green planet. It's engineered to be a desert to facilitate the production of spice, as explained by kynes.
> like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia
I have seen a critical analysis that sees the origin of Dune as a roman à clef of the rise of the house of Ibn Saud.
Arrakis is Saudi Arabia.
Spice, melange, is oil: the surrounding empire needs it for travel and transport.
House Atreides is the Saud dynasty, which defeated House Harkonnnen.
I find the entire dune series to be boring as hell for this reason. Like watching paint dry. Literally everyone in it is a slave in one way or another. No one lives better than today's modern humans. We're as readers meant to take the extremist "correct" position that of course labor is its own virtue and that therefore automating anything is wrong. Nothing in the dune universe is actually compelling. I don't care what happens to any of the characters at all. It's baffling that this series gets all this attention.
It's not so much slavery but feudalism. It is a return to form. I think there are a lot more people capable of self-actualization and meaning in the dune universe than our own.
>We're as readers meant to take the extremist "correct" position that of course labor is its own virtue and that therefore automating anything is wrong.
I don't think the book forces the reader to take a position on anything. It just portrays a brutal yet intricate medieval-like society.
It is only sci-fi and not fantasy in the sense that some people are concious of their role as both a cause and effect of ecology. (Whereas in our modern society we are only the cause, and in our ancient history we are only an effect).
The reason why everyone's hands are tied is because they are constrained by politics/war/religion/culture/economics/technology and if you tug the thread back the it all goes back to ecology. The key mover in the plot isn't paul but pardot kynes.
Edit:
Shower thought. There is a fifth element in dune that is able to free people from their political/religious/cultural/economic constraints. It's love. People do irrational things out of love. Paul Atredies was a forbidden love child, and his existence is the impetus for the whole conflict and his existence as a messiah destroys pardot kynes' post-mortem plan.
You might have misunderstood. Automation isn’t wrong, what’s wrong is allowing machines to control or direct humans. So a machine that builds cars is fine, and most worlds have plenty of those, but a machine that decides what the car should look like how how many to build would be anathema.
Of course the book mostly takes place on a world with so little infrastructure that most of the goods are made offworld and imported. The native Freemen population makes plenty of stuff out of local resources, but they want to or have to stay hidden from the rest of society and so they don’t have any factories. The stillsuits they wear are hand made, but are exquisitely high–tech and display an ethos of perfectionism in their construction.
Also you might not have picked up that anyone able to afford a small amount of spice in their diet can live for much longer than anyone does today, and even the average person enjoys a wealth of products from hundreds of planets. House Atreides made their fortune harvesting whale fur and selling the clothes and other products made from it. At some point in history they became a Great House by arming themselves with nuclear weapons. There’s a form of personal wealth that doesn’t quite exist today! :)
It’s probably been a while since your read the book, so you have forgotten some things.
For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.
Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.
Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.
The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).
They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.
> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.
Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.
Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.
The good news about this navigation is that the best course for almost any journey is just "straight line", with a minor deviation here and there. Its funny, but due to the emptyiness of space, even in our solar system, if you just pick a random direction, you likely won't hit anything. Trace a line to pluto from earth, and its clear 99.99999...% of the time if its not behind the sun. So the mentats maybe don't have such a tough job :)
Interstellar travel is a bit more difficult than that, and doing it at FTL speeds is presumably more difficult still.
But that’s not really important. Science fiction is allowed to make things up that aren’t perfectly realistic. Campbell surmised that a good science fiction author would pick just one unrealistic thing, such as FTL space travel, for every story, and the reader would oblige by suspending their disbelief. Frank Herbert might have stretched that a bit but I still think he wrote a good story. I don’t hold it against him.
I can make up a plausible sci-fi explanation for the need easily: the folded space might not look like our almost euclidean geometry. Maybe in folded space masses take volume proportional to the mass.
Could even envision it in some future film. E.g. when NCC-1701-N goes to warp in addition to the blur effect all the stars swell up.
I agree with lostmsu's point here that "folding space" is not as literal as you're interpreting it. "Folding" and "Navigation" is a metaphor some sort of extra-dimensional or non-euclidian operation that enables space travel. What it entails exactly eludes our perception.
> Arrakis is important because it grows "spice". Otherwise it would be a useless and planet, like the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia.
Any resource heavy planet/country would be irrelevant if it wasn’t for its resources, what’s your point?
> (Or "spice" might be synthesized. In Herbert's day (the 1960s) organic chemistry wasn't up to synthesizing arbitrary small-molecule drugs, but now it is. It's a service you can order on line, even. Biologicals take more work, but that's what genetic engineering is for.)
Bene Tleilax managed to clone of the main characters from his dead cells, and repeat the process for thousand years, they have face dancers who can change their appearance at will. Do you seriously think they wouldn’t synthesize spice if they could? Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t. Without going into spoilers territory, nobody would permit to disrupt arrakis monopoly on spice.
> The "mental powers" in Dune aren't that impressive. Compare, say, the Harry Potter universe. In Dune, mentats can convince people. Bene Gesserit can look up stuff in their genetic past. Some people can multitask. There are apps for that.
Because it’s a story about human evolution, and not wizards?
> Herbert wanted knife fighters to matter in battle. Not going to happen. Militaries teach knife fighting to build aggression and for desperate situations, but nobody's battle plan depends on a knife fight.
Do militaries also teach how to use a shield that is impenetrable to conventional guns?
> Knife fighters, even with force shields, would be vulnerable to riot control weapons, from tear gas to guns that throw sticky nets.
That’s why most fights in the book and movies require element of surprise and not an outright medieval clash between armies.
> Or to being run over and buried by tanks with bulldozer blades, which the US used in the Gulf War. Herbert wrote before a big, modern, desert war.
Which would be mowed by lasguns?
i’m not sure how to distinguish any difference from modern reality from what you seem to consider plot-armour to be.
what does the Butlerian Jihad “working” mean?
you have it backwards. good world building means everything makes sense. you're basically saying evolution isn't real - it's intelligent design.
You are confusing plot armor with world-building.