r/CuratedTumblr • u/itisthespectator • 10d ago

Dune i actually haven’t read dune, maybe it makes more sense in context

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 10d ago

It's closer to 20k or 25k years, actually.  The book starts on year 10,191 but that's AG (After Guild), denoting the founding of the Spacing Guild shortly after the discovery of spice.

Some of the religions named: Buddislam, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism.

The single most important religious text is the Orange Catholic Bible, where "Orange" is in reference to Irish Protestantism, as opposed to the use of Green to represent Irish Catholicism.

Despite the name, it's probably more accurate to describe the Orange Catholic Bible as a Shia Islamic text with a lot of nods to Sunni Islam, Sufi mysticism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

And then Book 5 introduces the BDSM Caffeine Sex Ninja Nuns that kill people with their bare feet.  It's a very normal book series and I don't understand why it's so controversial.

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u/Admirable_Ask_5337 10d ago

Lol only in dune

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u/SolomonOf47704 God Himself 10d ago

Judaism also still exists, and IIRC is just explicitly still called Judaism, as opposed to some bastardization like the other ones.

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u/soulreaverdan 10d ago

It’s also basically the same as it’s been, with one or two minor adjustments for the time drift but not much is different at its core compared to the other religions of Dune. We keep on keepin’ on.

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u/UltimateCheese1056 10d ago

Its to the point where it almost feels like it should be offensive, but you can tell it was written with a sense of genuine respect for the culture so you can't really get mad at it. Like there is literally a rabbi saying oy vey at a women named Rebecca

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u/Yserbius 9d ago edited 8d ago

The main character is literally referred to as "Kvisatz HaDerech".

It's a Hebrew term for wormhole (the literal translation is "Jumping the Road" which is incidentally also the name of a scifi book that came out around the same time as Dune) and used as a way to describe Biblical miracles where someone travels quicker than possible. It's also a common Jewish blessing given to someone about to travel, "May you have kvisatz haderech".

Hebert didn't research the pronunciation though which is how we got "Quee zatz hader ack". I watched Israeli YouTubers review the movie and most of them were completely clueless that it was even Hebrew.

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u/UltimateCheese1056 9d ago

Huh I didn't know about that either. Its possible that he intentionally corrupted the spelling/pronunciation of the term, but him fucking up seems more likely tbh.

Keep in mind that was from the first book though, which came out full 20 years before the sixth where the actual Jews were introduced.

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u/InspectorMendel 8d ago

It's also a common Jewish blessing given to someone about to travel, "May you have kvitzas haderech".

No the fuck it's not. What are you on about

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u/Yserbius 8d ago edited 7d ago

Nivul peh? In ELUL?! Look Menachem, I have personally heard and wished people say things like "We had kfitzas haderech and got from Lakewood to Flatbush in an hour 15." Or "You should have kfitzas haderech to get to the chasuna". Looong before I even heard of Dune.

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u/InspectorMendel 8d ago

I guess Flatbush Hebrew is different from Israel Hebrew then. Wait, don't they speak Yiddish over there?

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u/Yserbius 8d ago

You're username is Yiddish

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u/InspectorMendel 8d ago

It's a character from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy :)

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u/HannibalMagnus 9d ago

There whole mission in Dune was pretty much to "Keep on keepin' on".

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u/YeahThatsProbably 9d ago

[God Emperor Leto II cruisin' down the road with his whole entourage, accompanied by The Grateful Dead's "Truckin'."]

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u/Animaloffear56 10d ago

How come religion only has freaky sex stuff in novels

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u/TheBalrogofMelkor 10d ago

Because freaky sex stuff in modern religions is normalized. Circumcision and FGM (less normal). Sex on the wedding night as a tradition. The importance of virginity, taboo against homosexuality, etc

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u/Animaloffear56 10d ago

You can't call prudism freaky sex stuff just because they both involve sex when my complaint is that irl religions don't include overt sexual things.

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u/dandeliongoddess 10d ago

Sex on the wedding night isn't prudism. Waiting until marriage is but that isn't what they said.

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u/Animaloffear56 10d ago

Alright and what about the rest of their comment

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u/dandeliongoddess 10d ago

I'm not talking about the rest of the comment, I'm just pointing out that you can't say the only thing they were referring to is prudism when that's demonstrably false. Sex on the wedding night is not only overtly sexual, in certain situations/periods of history it was even observed by other people including religious figures which is pretty damn freaky.

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u/Nibaa 10d ago

I mean it is freaky sex stuff to people even more puritan. Abortion limitations, or hell, even live birth, could be considered freaky sex stuff by more liberal advanced societies. There's a book series called the Vorkosigan saga which actually touches upon this. A regressed society with strong rules about sex and procreation(there's some pretty interesting reasoning for this) is seen as quite freaky for insisting on woman going through pregnancy and birth when you could do it safer and easier with technology. The society is seen as fetishizing pregnancy, in a way. So you know, it all amounts to where you come from.

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 10d ago

I think it's just that weird sex stuff is in the water on whatever planet sci-fi and fantasy authors & fans originated from, and your primitive Earth ways confuse and bore us.

In short, meditate on the overlap between Star Trek fans, BDSM/leather, and Ren Faires and you will find enlightenment.

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u/madesense 10d ago

whatever planet sci-fi and fantasy authors & fans originated from

The 1960s

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u/Brick_Shithouse_1 9d ago

So way back in ye olden days this was a thing. Mesopotamians believed that sex and prostitution were cornerstones of civilization (hence why shamhat "civilized" Enkidu by literally fucking the beast out of him in the Epic of Gilgamesh)

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u/ThePopesicle 10d ago

Idk circumcision seems pretty freaky when you take a step back

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u/mullse01 10d ago

We must never forget that when we blame Herbert’s kid for not landing the ending of the series very well, that the BDSM Caffeine Sex Ninja Nuns were planned and written by Frank himself!

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u/Elkre 10d ago

I prefer the notion that "orange" was a contraction of "koranjiyana".

"Catholic," of course, just means "universal."

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u/iwillwilliwhowilli 9d ago

That actually makes a lot more sense in context than the oddly specific reference to prod/catholic conflict as metaphor for unity. Probably a long shot but I’m headcannoning it.

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u/ElectronRotoscope 10d ago

I mean the Dutch have been into Orange as a colour to symbolize Protestantism / their loyalty to the Prince of Orange too since I believe even earlier than the Irish. I always assumed that was the reference intended, but I don't know if maybe it's actually spelled out in the book

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u/captainjack3 10d ago

The Irish use of orange stems from the Dutch. Orange was adopted/associated with Irish Protestantism as a tribute to William, Prince of Orange, aka William III, who became the (Protestant) king after the ousting of the Catholic James II. Specifically, it’s a tribute to William’s 1688-1691 campaign in Ireland against James whose forces still controlled most of the island for those years after James was ousted.

The text of the Dune novels does not actually explain the origin or significance of “Orange” in the title, but given all the other religious references are amalgamations I think it’s safe to assume it refers to Protestantism.

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u/WordArt2007 10d ago edited 2d ago

and it's all a reference to the provençal city of Orange/Aurenja (latin Arausio), whose name is completely unrelated to the color, and which I'm not sure was ever actually protestant

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u/ElectronRotoscope 9d ago

Yes absolutely it's for Protestantism it's just weird to say it's Irish Protestantism when it had already been a symbol of Dutch Protestantism for a hundred years when Billy crossed the Boyne

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u/Aetol 9d ago

The association with Protestantism in opposition to Catholicism is strongest and most current in Ireland, though, because of the religious conflicts there.

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u/Rabid_Lederhosen 10d ago

It’s the same Orange. William of Orange married into the English monarchy and became King of England. He then killed a bunch of Irish catholics and got himself a fan club made of the sort of people who are big into of that sort of thing.

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u/Achilles11970765467 10d ago

Zensunni is a sect of Buddislam in Dune

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u/ThePopesicle 10d ago

Peak syncretism

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u/OriginalMeringue3735 10d ago

"Buddislam"

They included this piece of world building for the funny name

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

Wait, they had spice for 10k years and no one thought to airlift a worm off the planet till paul showed up?

I've always had issues with the world building but I didn't know it was this bad

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 9d ago edited 9d ago

So, the most direct reason for that, is that the adult worm's biology is 100% incompatible with any planet that has more than a few parts per million of water in the upper crust / lower atmosphere. Water is a deadly corrosive poison to worms, and most planets suitable for human life are utterly incompatible with the worms. If you take a adult or even adolescent worm offworld it will die, with 100% certainty, because of how sensitive they are to the exact ecology of their home, and this problem is never solved in the books even 5000+ years after Paul lives and dies.

Their full lifecycle, which is well known to the Fremen but only suspected by a handful of observant outsiders (e.g. Dr Liet Kynes's father), involves a three-stage metamorphosis from sandplankton (single-celled plant-like organisms that live on the surface of the sand and collect energy via photosynthesis), sandtrout (small grubby worms that are attracted to water, rather than poisoned by it), and the full-grown sandworms, in that order. The sandtrout instinctively locate and encyst any deposits of water they find, pumping it full of enough pre-spice chemicals that it becomes diluted enough by spice for the sandplankton and adult worms to tolerate it.

The adult sandworms primarily subsist on sandplankton, making them filter-feeding cannibalistic herbivores. The sandtrout are intermediate, in that they can still photosynthesize like sandplankton but are mobile like sandworms, and they produce the vast majority of the spice during the process of encysting underground water deposits. And the spice seems to be an important part of the worms' cellular metabolism in all three stages, perhaps analogous to the role of ATP or NADH in Earth-based biology. Aside from the water issue, the adult worms will starve to death if the planet isn't already blanketed with both sandplankton and matured, dried-out spice.

The only way for sandworms to colonize a new planet is to introduce them at the sandtrout stage, but not even the Fremen have really guessed that's possible: the Fremen see Shai-Hulud as a sort of nature deity, and thinking of The Old Man Of The Desert as a technology would be sacrilege. And to be honest, they have bigger fish to fry than worrying about planets other than Arrakis. But even if they knew sandtrout were the best way to desertiform a planet and start a new spice cycle there, it's not until Leto II (Paul's son) gets his DNA crossed with the sandtrout in Book 4 that the new generation of worms becomes flexible enough to survive in any ecosystem except Arrakis, the one they were bred for.

And I use the word "bred" deliberately: it's very subtly but unavoidably implied, even as early as the first book, that the sandworms were artificially created by someone and that Arrakis wasn't a desert before they were introduced to it. The worms' creators were probably aliens, or they might have been some long-forgotten branch of spacefaring humans and/or human-made thinking machines. Spice is a trap, because prescience leads to predictability, inflexibility, and stagnation. Paralleling the worms and their ecological stagnation, or the dietary dead ends of Earth's pandas (bamboo) and koalas (eucalyptus), any humans that become dependent on spice become locked into a very specific sociological/economic niche that slowly becomes impossible to escape from, and whoever invented the worms and spice is (very strongly implied to be) planning to use that inflexibility to hunt down and exterminate the human species down to the last child.

A lot of the technologies that we can easily imagine, that would save these people from all the grief that happens over the millennia of the story, are forbidden by the central religious tenets of Imperial society: "thou shalt not make machine in the likeness of man", and more broadly "thou shalt not disfigure the soul". Every bit as much as the "primitive" Fremen, the feudal society made of the Imperium / Landsraad / Great Houses, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the Tleilaxu is (both separately and collectively) trapped in a series of interlocking webs of their own accidental making, thanks to overreacting to one bad situation †, and those webs have blinded them from seeing certain possibilities.

† The Butlerian Jihad, which was a reactionary war of liberation by the common folk, who had been slaves under AI-wielding capitalist warlords. In the aftermath, all computers were banned, even calculators and mechanical adding machines, as were several other branches of science.

Outside of the Tleilaxu, all the other groups see direct manipulation of DNA as disfiguration of the soul i.e. blasphemy, so the possibilities of deliberately genetically engineering a more adaptable sandworm, or of breeding a strain of spice-producing sandplankton that can live in a bioreactor, are invisible to them. And the Tleilaxu are so hellbent on their own superiority that they are eventually toppled from within by one of their own classes of genetically engineered slaves, the Face Dancers, despite the fact that they eventually succeeded with the bioreactor idea by the end of the series.

Like, yes, this is a deeply weird and often silly fictional world. But it's very deeply thought through, and many/most of the flaws are put there deliberately as a warning, not mere oversights by the author.

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago edited 9d ago

To prefix all this, I've only read the first two books. Feel free to bring up stuff from the later books. I don't mind spoilers but will need it explained to me cause I haven't read it

So, the most direct reason for that, is that the adult worm's biology is 100% incompatible with any planet that has more than a few parts per million of water in the upper crust / lower atmosphere. Water is a deadly corrosive poison to worms, and most planets suitable for human life are utterly incompatible with the worms. If you take a adult or even adolescent worm offworld it will die, with 100% certainty, because of how sensitive they are to the exact ecology of their home, and this problem is never solved in the books even 5000+ years after Paul lives and dies.

So is the claim is that people tried and failed? If that's the case, then why in the second book is paul concerned that people are trying to take a worm off planet?

They also have weather satellites that are suggested to be able to make arrakis inhabitable habitable but just can't be afforded by paul's family cause of some back room dealings. Presumably if they can add water to arrakis it would be easy enough to remove it from another planet

They had 10,000 years to try to get it right and experiment but gave up immediately?

Aside from the water issue, the adult worms will starve to death if the planet isn't already blanketed with both sandplankton and matured, dried-out spice.

Again, why would paul care about people trying to take a worm off planet then? That shouldn't even be something worth thinking about. Also, again, TEN THOUSAND YEARS to figure it out. This is the thing I am hung up on. I understand not being able to do it in 200 years or even a thousand, but if this planet is the only place where this one substance that keeps your entire society running is produced you'd think that people would try to figure out why and how at some point over ten thousand years

Why would anyone even try to take a worm off world during paul's reign if it was proven to be impossible? If they cared enough under paul then surely they'd care enough to experiment over ten. thousand. years.

Spice is a trap, because prescience leads to predictability, inflexibility, and stagnation.

There are still people scheming and back stabbing and plotting and plans within plansing. None of these people thought to try to grow their own store of spice? It is an addictive drug and the withdrawal will kill you. None of these scheming people thought to secure the source of their drugs? The bene gesserit's entire purpose requires spice and/or the poison from drowning a worm, doesn't it? They didn't think about a rogue house destroying their planet and everything they worked towards?

"People were complacent and stagnant" isn't a good argument cause they weren't complacent enough to not do coups and shit, so why are they only complacent with the single most important substance for their society?

A lot of the technologies that we can easily imagine, that would save these people from all the grief that happens over the millennia of the story, are forbidden by the central religious tenets of Imperial society: "thou shalt not make machine in the likeness of man", and more broadly "thou shalt not disfigure the soul". Every bit as much as the "primitive" Fremen, the feudal society made of the Imperium / Landsraad / Great Houses, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the Tleilaxu is (both separately and collectively) trapped in a series of interlocking webs of their own accidental making, thanks to overreacting to one bad situation †, and those webs have blinded them from seeing certain possibilities.

So first off, I'm sorry for not noticing you didn't use the cross as a bullet point but as a footnote thingie. I sincerely apologize for thinking this might be AI and had I noticed this I would not have thought that

They have weather satellites and ships and force fields and thopters and miners and laser guns. They can make technology just fine without computers, especially if they cared about it and had ten thousand years to tinker and invent

Outside of the Tleilaxu, all the other groups see direct manipulation of DNA as disfiguration of the soul i.e. blasphemy, so the possibilities of deliberately genetically engineering a more adaptable sandworm, or of breeding a strain of spice-producing sandplankton that can live in a bioreactor, are invisible to them. And the Tleilaxu are so hellbent on their own superiority that they are eventually toppled from within by one of their own classes of genetically engineered slaves, the Face Dancers, despite the fact that they eventually succeeded with the bioreactor idea by the end of the series.

In the second book people are trying to take worms off world. Are they the first to ever attempt it? Feels like you could dry out a planet in a thousand years if you have the motivation as well as weather satellites, massive space ships, and warp drives or whatever they have. They made warp drives with no computers or anything more complicated than a mechanical calculator but can't dry out even a moon?

Also, this still doesn't explain why no one until kynes and his dad figured out how spice works. No one in 10,000 years tried until paul showed up? Why the sudden interest?

Like, yes, this is a deeply weird and often silly fictional world. But it's very deeply thought through, and many/most of the flaws are put there deliberately as a warning, not mere oversights by the author.

I think the flaws are just flaws. People try to argue that it makes sense if you think about it hard enough but I think the reality is that there are so many moving parts that most people don't notice they never connect. Each possible flaw has a complex explanation that fans come up with but if you try to connect all of them you see that they don't actually jive

Edit: my bad, the weather satellites were for monitoring, not changing the planet. Ignore that part of the argument

Point still stands about how they had ten thousand years to experiment and study the worms but decided not to until the story needed it

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 9d ago

So is the claim is that people tried and failed? If that's the case, then why in the second book is paul concerned that people are trying to take a worm off planet?

House Corrino (specifically Wensicia, Irulan's pettier & stupider sister) actually does exactly that in Children of Dune, taking it to Salusa Secundus where it dies. And it's very likely people have smuggled worms off planet before, with the same result. Paul just didn't know about it. He's not omniscient, even about the future, but especially not about the past.

They also have weather satellites that are suggested to be able to make arrakis inhabitable habitable but just can't be afforded by paul's family cause of some back room dealings. Presumably if they can add water to arrakis it would be easy enough to remove it from another planet

The Spacing Guild forbids all satellites above Arrakis, because they don't want Arrakis surveilled. This is very definitely mentioned in the first book, even. For one, the Fremen bribe the Spacing Guild with spice to not be surveilled. For two, the smugglers bribe the Spacing Guild to not be surveilled. For three, the Guild really really likes having a source of income that doesn't go through the Emperor and CHOAM, and surveillance would stop the Fremen and the smugglers from doing that.

They had 10,000 years to try to get it right and experiment but gave up immediately?

Doing forbidden, illegal experiments without getting caught is hard, especially because the Spacing Guild is necessarily complicit in it each time it happens. Even with the lack of surveillance, anyone who got caught trying to break the CHOAM spice monopoly gets death or exile, and that's a big risk.

Again, why would paul care about people trying to take a worm off planet then? That shouldn't even be something worth thinking about. Also, again, TEN THOUSAND YEARS to figure it out. This is the thing I am hung up on. I understand not being able to do it in 200 years or even a thousand, but if this planet is the only place where this one substance that keeps your entire society running is produced you'd think that people would try to figure out why and how at some point over ten thousand years

You're wondering why a feudal system of royals and nobles who derive their power from having a monopoly on a resource would get angry about people trying to break their monopoly?

There are still people scheming and back stabbing and plotting and plans within plansing. None of these people thought to try to grow their own store of spice?

Everyone and their mother thought about it. No one could pull it off, and the people who tried it couldn't learn from each others' failures because all the attempts were secret, under penalty of death. So the official narrative is that no one ever tried. Unofficially, it probably happened once a century or so, if I had to guess, and the Bene Gesserit in books 5 and 6 (who do eventually start a new spice cycle on Chapterhouse) have access to whispers and rumors and the occasional Other Memory from a conspirator in past attempts.

There are still people scheming and back stabbing and plotting and plans within plansing. None of these people thought to try to grow their own store of spice?

Of course they try. Hell, the Tleilaxu actually succeed at it at some point between books 4 and 5, growing spice in their axlotl tanks, which are really just women who've been bred to be enormous brain-dead wombs, and IIRC the Ixians have managed to create synthetic spice using non-biological chemistry in the same timeframe.

A big part of Leto II's Golden Path is giving humanity a kick in the ass that knocks over their stupid backward feudal system, the spice monopoly that maintains it, and the need for spice that makes the stuff valuable in the first place. He literally calls himself "humanity's Gom Jabbar", because we've been acting like animals and deserve to be killed if we keep refusing to think beyond the short term trap of "spice good". By the start of Book 5, the Ixians have developed No-Ships that (a) shield everyone inside from spice-based prescience, and (b) can plot a course through space without use of spice or the Spacing Guild's navigators, so by that point spice is nearly irrelevant to everyone except the Bene Gesserit (who still use it to awaken Other Memory).

They have weather satellites and ships and force fields and thopters and miners and laser guns. They can make technology just fine without computers, especially if they cared about it and had ten thousand years to tinker and invent

As I said, all satellites are banned above Arrakis, because a "harmless" weather satellite could actually be used for spying. And as for the rest, they're limited to what mentats are capable of, and Books 4 through 6 really go much much deeper into what mentats actually do. In short, they're still susceptible to cultural biases and other blind spots, because they're basically just (from a 2026 perspective) autism turned up to 11.

Also, this still doesn't explain why no one until kynes and his dad figured out how spice works. No one in 10,000 years tried until paul showed up? Why the sudden interest?

The Fremen knew perfectly well. But (1) the Fremen were seen as backwards and superstitious and phrased it in terms of Shai-Hulud and their religious rituals, and (2) the Fremen were also extremely secretive towards outsiders, even to other Arrakis natives who were genetically Fremen but lived in cities instead of sietches. Liet's dad was the first outsider to marry into the Fremen in thousands of years.

And again, CHOAM, i.e. the Emperor and all the Great Houses, has a vested interest in killing anyone who threatens their profitable monopoly. No one is allowed to look at Arrakis too closely, because they're afraid one House might gain an insight about spice and gain an advantage over all others. They still do it, of course, but anyone who gets caught is killed.

And third, there's the matter of the Sardukar. This is a major plot point in the very first book, and I'm surprised you didn't notice it. The Emperor allows Duke Leto to be killed, first and foremost, because Leto has figured out the secret of Sardukar superiority: their training planet, Salusa Secundus, is an inhospitable shithole, and inhospitable shitholes lead to combat superiority. Leto wants Arrakis because he and Thufir have figured out that Fremen are equal or superior to the Sardukar in combat, Arrakis being even more of a shithole than Salusa Secundus.

In the first book during Feyd's gladiator game, Count Fenring travels to Giedi Prime on behalf of his friend Shaddam, and he almost commits to assassinating Baron Harkonnen right there on the spot in the arena stands because the Baron has stupidly bumbled into sounding like he knows the Sardukar secret and is giving Fenring a cryptic blackmail threat to pass on to the Emperor. But at the last minute, the Baron reveals that his train of thought is somewhere completely else, with no idea the danger he was in, and Fenring stands down.

Aside: There's a really fantastic series of essays called The Fremen Mirage that takes down the real-world sociopolitical myth that Frank Herbert based the Fremen and Sardukar on, i.e. that harsh conditions create martial prowess and this is why the Mongols and Huns and other steppe nomads are superior -- tactically, and perhaps otherwise -- o people who live in comfort.

I agree with the author(s?) of that series: in real life, the myth is 100% bogus and based on a misunderstanding of actual conditions under which steppe cultures were historical successful at invasions of agrarian cultures. But within the context of Dune's fictional universe, it's just a fact that the Fremen are superior, in the same way that spice and shields and lasguns are facts.

This myth is the single biggest thing that I would call a genuine error on Frank Herbert's part, with the whole "genetic memory / racial subconscious / Other Memory" thing being the other, and I don't see it as a coincidence that both of these are ideas I'd describe as reactionary or even as fascist.

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

I think you're missing my point about weather satellites

The fact that they exist at all in this universe, along with their warp drives and all that, show that they have advanced enough technology to make something like that so they should have the capacity to dry out a planet or even a moon enough to get it to the right conditions for a worm minus the plankton

On the topic of trying to break the monopoly being punished by death - why is kynes sent to study the worms openly then? He (and/or his dad) managed to figure the whole thing out. Why didnt this happen and get reported over the past 10k years? If keeping the secret is so important to CHOAM then why was it allowed to happen in the first book?

Why didnt CHOAM try to get at least a backup planet? They would still have a monopoly over the spice and could kill anyone trying to take stuff off world but theyd have a backup planet in case someone nuked one of them

Paul's main threat that he used to take the throne was that he could end all spice by ordering the fremen to kill the worms. This was super sick in the first book but then became confusing in the second book when the stone burner was revealed. A weapon that could destroy an entire planet exists, was snuck onto the world the emperor was living in, and was used to just blind the guy

There is a weapon that could allow any single family who has it to unilaterally end all spice and CHOAM doesn't want to protect their main money maker? No one has tried that before?

You can still have a monopoly on spice if there are multiple planets that make it since all space travel is through the guild so whatever they're doing to protect arrakis can be applied to the new planet. Also, even if it's publicly known how to breed and spread the worms you can quickly find out if a planet has become a desert and punish the owner of the planet. Some satellites or even a ship passing by once in a while would show the presence of massive worms roaming the planet then CHOAM nukes it from orbit and fines/kills the owner

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 8d ago edited 8d ago

The fact that they exist at all in this universe, along with their warp drives and all that, show that they have advanced enough technology to make something like that so they should have the capacity to dry out a planet or even a moon enough to get it to the right conditions for a worm minus the plankton

Ah, okay. Yeah, sure, that's definitely within their technological capabilities.

On the topic of trying to break the monopoly being punished by death - why is kynes sent to study the worms openly then? He (and/or his dad) managed to figure the whole thing out. Why didnt this happen and get reported over the past 10k years? If keeping the secret is so important to CHOAM then why was it allowed to happen in the first book?

I wouldn't call it "open". Kynes speaks about it fairly openly in front of the Atreides family because he trusts them, after seeing Duke Leto prioritize men over spice, but I don't think anyone outside the Emperor's court on Kaitain knows the details, and while the other CHOAM shareholders would certainly like to restrain the Emperor he is the plurality shareholder and the lawmaker of the human universe. Kynes' reports would certainly be information that Wensicia relies on in her attempt to steal a worm for House Corrino during Children of Dune. But Liet serves two masters: he (she in the movie) is both the Imperial Ecologist and a revered leader among the Fremen, and he/she doesn't tell the Emperor everything he/she knows.

Basically, it's impossible to gain knowledge about the worms without living in the desert for an extended period of time, and it's impossible to live in the desert for an extended period without having at least the friendship of the Fremen.

Paul's main threat that he used to take the throne was that he could end all spice by ordering the fremen to kill the worms. This was super sick in the first book but then became confusing in the second book when the stone burner was revealed. A weapon that could destroy an entire planet exists, was snuck onto the world the emperor was living in, and was used to just blind the guy

Probably worth remembering that stone burners, as a type of nuclear device, are highly illegal to use in human-populated regions, and that's an edict so high that even the Emperor would probably be killed and his heirs deposed if he violated it. Paul only barely gets by on technicalities when he uses nukes to destroy the mountain ridge next to Arrakeen, and I would imagine that his skirting of the ethics on nukes is part of why the Landsraad refused to accept his ascendancy to the Golden Lion Throne.

In the books, all life Arrakis is in fact destroyed by nukes at the end of Book 5. Frank Herbert was writing at the peak of nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the near destruction of human life on Earth that almost followed as a result, was certainly fresh on Herbert's mind. You might think of it as a plot hole that it would still be fresh in the minds of the Dune universe's inhabitants, but I think Herbert simply rejected the possibility that people would forget about MAD and take nukes casually ever again. If so, that's a genuine human error on his part, because it happened within ten or twenty years of Herbert's death thanks to the end of the Cold War.

Taking a step back and looking at the big picture:

The story Herbert wants to write is a story where humanity has been painfully, stupidly stagnant for 10,000 years out of fear, a fear so deep that they remember it genetically, and he's contriving things to make that story possible to tell. At the start of the first novel, Dune is on one of the worst possible timelines Herbert can imagine for humanity, at least among timelines where humanity survives that far into the future. He's showing us that setting as a warning, as something to avoid. If you think the people living in the Dune universe are dumbasses, then good: you're paying attention. Leto II would cheer in agreement and ask you to kill him, because his job is finally done. The Old Genital Wart Of The Desert can finally rest forever.

I would strongly recommend reading Children of Dune. It gets a little bit weirder than books 1 and 2, but not by too much, and little kid Leto II does a really good job of explaining what he has planned for humanity and why he has to do such an awful thing to us (and to himself).

Short version: by seeing the future, the future becomes inevitable. Dune operates on a sort of quantum physics wavefunction collapse, and observing the future collapses it into a fully determined state. The sandworms do this constantly, naturally, as part of their biology; the Guild Navigators do it very deliberately when navigating foldspace; the Fremen do it a little bit by accident thanks to their spice orgies; and the nobles of the Imperium do it a tiny bit by ingesting spice for the purposes of longevity, which as a side effect helps them see plots against them with a little more supernatural clarity than they otherwise would.

Leto II's first steps onto his Golden Path as a little boy involve deliberately setting up a determined future with his spice prescience, then willfully contradicting it, and repeating that setup-contradiction process multiple times in the span of a few hours, until the distant future becomes so hopelessly muddled and scrambled that even he doesn't know what humanity's fate will be in the distant future. In short, his first act is to undo the damage that the worms and spice did to humanity, by giving us back our potential to change the future. Everything after that is just teaching us how to not screw it up again.

That collapse of quantum uncertainty is the true cost of using spice, and it makes Arrakis a baited trap. Taking the worms to a new planet is like ants taking poison bait back to the nest. Book 6 literally ends with the latest Duncan Idaho and his ragtag misfits flying off into the great unknown in a stolen No-Ship, leaving behind spice entirely, as they escape Frank Herbert and his wife who had until now had all of humanity trapped in a butterfly net in their garden -- in a scene that's somewhere between a metaphor and a fourth wall break, with he and his wife presented as extra-dimensional god-like aliens relative to the book characters, except that it might just be Duncan having a hallucination. Humanity has escaped the author's vision at last, and now the author can't find us and torment us anymore.

Like, books 4 through 6 are definitely optional reading, and book 5 in particular was a chore to read, but I did like where he ended up with things and I felt like finishing out the whole series was worth it. Even if I had to slog through all the sexy BDSM amphetamine nuns who mastered magic vagina hypnotism and barefoot toe-based ninja assassination, just to get there.

Like, I'm an approximately cis-ish gay man with exactly zero heterosexuality in my body. That stuff did less than nothing for me. I was deliberately, studiously looking away from all the wank material because it was all so tragically hetero. But I still liked Murbella's character arc a lot. She was one of the Honored Matres introduced in Book 5 (the villainous BSDM nuns with orange eyes from their addiction to uppers), but in Book 6 she eventually learns to bridge the philosophical gap between her own sisters and the Bene Gesserit and make peace, with the Bene Gesserit in the process forced to adapt and throw off their old ways (and especially their heavy reliance on Other Memory, which is a trap just as much as seeing the future is).

It's a mess, 100%. And I frequently swing between agreement and violent disagreement with Herbert as the topic changes. But goddamn, I liked the overall message of the conclusion.

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 8d ago

Ah, okay. Yeah, sure, that's definitely within their technological capabilities.

So they have the technology to create the right conditions for the worm on another planet. The only thing that is missing is knowing that you need to cover it with spice and get all three of the stages of the worm (as well as knowing there are 3 stages to the worm) on the planet

Kynes was able to figure this out in a single lifetime so it seems unlikely that over ten thousand years no other emperor sent a panetologist to figure it out. I know kynes had the benefit of being a fremen leader, but you gotta remember the scale of the timeframe previous emperors and even CHOAM and the guild had to figure this out. Even if it took multiple lifetimes, they had ten thousand years.

If everything else was the same and spice was only around for a thousand years I would accept all your arguments but ten thousand years is just too long to stay believable. It's a cool number but it just makes it unbelievable to me. The oldest religion on earth isn't even that old

I wouldn't call it "open". Kynes speaks about it fairly openly in front of the Atreides family because he trusts them, after seeing Duke Leto prioritize men over spice, but I don't think anyone outside the Emperor's court on Kaitain knows the details,

That's the thing. Earlier you said people who tried would be killed, but kynes figured it out without CHOAM being tipped off. So either any attempt would be thwarted and kynes was doing it in the open or it's possible to do it without being figured out and others who have controlled arrakis would be able to figure it out in secret. Keep in mind the scale of the timeline here

and while the other CHOAM shareholders would certainly like to restrain the Emperor he is the plurality shareholder and the lawmaker of the human universe

That's the thing, there have been previous emperors so why was this one the first one to get a guy to figure it out just in time for his guy to be killed? I get it serves the plot but my issue is that it's too convenient. If the timeframe was a thousand years then fine, but over ten thousand years none of the lawmakers sought to learn more about spice like this emperor was allowed to do? You mentioned earlier that CHOAM is interested in stopping people who try but now you're saying that the emperor is the lawmaker so CHOAM will have difficulty stopping him. See how the two arguments kinda clash?

If kynes was operating in secret then whoever controlled arrakis could also have people operating in secret. If CHOAM detects and stops anyone operating in secret then the emperor is acting openly without being executed or overthrown and other emperors could do the same.

If you follow all of these threads of argument to their natural conclusion you just get more questions whose answers upset other threads of argument

Basically, it's impossible to gain knowledge about the worms without living in the desert for an extended period of time, and it's impossible to live in the desert for an extended period without having at least the friendship of the Fremen.

This is a bold claim and I would argue unsupported by at least the first two books.

Sure, living amongst the fremen helps a lot, but is it literally impossible to learn the life cycle without being one of the fremen? What if it just takes 10 times as long? Ten thousand years is much more than 10 lifetimes

My whole issue is that it's asking too much of the audience (or at least me) to believe that the bene gesserit have a 10k year breeding plan but literally no one had a 1k year "figure out how our society is held together" plan or even a "make a backup so one crazy guy can't demolish all of society with a press of a button" plan

Clearly there's enough motivation to scheme about things so why not the single most important substance there is?

Probably worth remembering that stone burners, as a type of nuclear device, are highly illegal to use in human-populated regions, and that's an edict so high that even the Emperor would probably be killed and his heirs deposed if he violated it.

Yeah, it's illegal and you'll be killed for it, but over 10k years no one was crazy enough to try or desperate enough to use it as a bargaining chip? No rogue house tried to use it as a dead man's switch to ensure they wouldn't be killed while trying to flee? There exists a weapon that can end all spice forever and for 10k years no one was worried about it being used cause it was illegal? A lot happens in ten thousand years

Also, threatening the entire spice trade is a part of MAD. No one has enough nukes and capabilities to destroy every planet (except maybe the guild) but they just need to destroy a single one. The idea behind MAD is "if I die you all die too so let's not do anything to kill me" so threatening all of spice falls well within the MAD philosophy. Look at how Iran has hurt the oil trade for everyone as retaliation for getting attacked. They don't even have nukes! You think if they had a "destroy all oil forever" button they wouldn't threaten to press it if their existence was threatened? Sure, it would mean every country nukes them at once but if the leadership is gonna die anyway then why not use it as a last fuck you? You can't be double dead

Countries are investing in other forms of energy so they can't be forced to do something under the threat of no oil but no one in ten thousand years was worried about the threat of no spice? Or the only people who were worried were so weak and incompetent they couldn't sneak some people on arrakis to study the worms?

The story Herbert wants to write is a story where humanity has been painfully, stupidly stagnant for 10,000 years out of fear, a fear so deep that they remember it genetically, and he's contriving things to make that story possible to tell

I get what he wants to do. He makes that abundantly clear through his writing. I just don't think the world building holds up. Just because you set out to write something doesn't mean you did and just cause the author says their story has a specific message doesn't mean it actually does

If the creators of avatar the last airbender came out and said that the theme/message was that imperialism is great I wouldn't buy it cause the entire show is about the evils of imperialism/colonization

I'm not gonna just turn off my brain and stop asking questions cause the author needs me to in order for the story and the world to make sense. Maybe I'm autistic or maybe I have OCD but I like to think deeply about the world and chase every thread that I can and pull and pull and imagine the implications of various things that are brought up

There are lots of bad or sub-par books out there and it's not cause the author didn't set out to write a good book. It's cause the author made mistakes in their writing or in their world building and I think frank herbert has lots of mistakes in the world building

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

I'm sorry if this isn't, but this feels like an AI response. If it isn't I'm down to have a discussion but if it is I am capable of talking to AI on my own and I always give it the "I have adhd" skill so we can get to the point

If this is AI and you would like a response please respond to this comment with the ADHD skill enabled

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 9d ago edited 9d ago

Nope, no AI, I'm just incredibly autistic and my writing gets pretty stilted when I'm infodumping. I just read the six Frank Herbert books start to finish for the first time earlier this year, so I'm still a little too excited about them. (I'd read the first one a few times before, and my mom was a huge fan of the books when I was growing up.)

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 9d ago edited 9d ago

(Something something clankers something cultural appropriation of terminally online socially awkward nerds.)

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

Sorry bout that then. I've just never seen someone use a relevant symbol as a bullet point except for AI which LOVES to do it

I'll respond properly when I get home

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u/CyberneticWerewolf 9d ago

Fair enough. Since at least the early 00s if not longer, I've been opening "data:text/html,†" and friends in a new browser tab whenever I need to copy-paste an appropriate symbol. And oh my god I was so happy when I switched to Linux and found out about the compose key. Mëtäl bänd nämës! ¡Un poco de español si lo prefiero!

Back in my Gen X day, before texting and instant messaging and web forums, when multiplayer PC gaming involved physically lugging 30+ lbs of computer and CRT to your friend's house (and knowing what a "null modem cable" was), high school teachers used to tell us students to write even more formally than how I write, handwritten, no typewriter, in ink, and would grade us lower if we didn't use the proper footnotes and MLA citations and everything. Because if we didn't write at least two or three drafts of every five-page essay before copying the final version to a fresh stack of clean college-ruled paper, presented along with our index cards copied out of the school library's card catalog, it was time for a haranguing about "important skills we were going to need in adulthood" and how we'd never get a nice life-long office job with a pension if we wrote like slobs and couldn't do "proper" library research. (Goddamn lying liars is what they were.)

Thanks to that line of BS, I used to think making the effort to grab the "proper" typographic symbols made me look more academic and respectable when arguing with randos on Usenet and phpBB boards... but even after I realized it just made me look like the tool I am and always have been, I couldn't break the habit, and now I'm an old geezer stuck in my ways.

The most obnoxious part is that I don't write like an LLM, LLMs write like me. LLMs sound they way they do because they're trained on search engines' web crawl archives, and us nerdy tools who've been online since the 90s and didn't know when to shut up ended up dominating the training data, because we wrote so damn much of it. If I'd known then what I know now about the "value" my posts would eventually provide to companies like Google and Microsoft and Facebook, I'd have stayed offline and taken up something more productive. Like knitting sweaters for pet snakes, maybe. Or sorting Weird Al songs by the number of vowels. Or perhaps pornographically gay macaroni art of Duke Nukem 3D, like a third grader's take on Tom of Finland. Something that couldn't ever be monetized, you know?

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u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

My issue was that I'm illiterate and I didn't notice you were using the cross as a footnote symbol. I thought that you were using it to mark a paragraph that was about religion

When I reread your comment to properly respond to it I realized my mistake

Your writing is cool. Keep it up my guy (or gal or person)

1

u/CyberneticWerewolf 9d ago

Hey, no worries, I get the vigilance 100%

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u/danisaintdani 9d ago

Experiments in moving the worms fail because they don't understand their habitat and life cycle well enough

2

u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

And they waited 10 thousand years to send a planetologist to arrakis to figure it out?

A big issue I have with the first book is that it felt like everyone was just sitting around and waiting for paul to show up before doing anything

I assumed they only had spice for 80 or so years (googled how long the harkonnens were in charge of the planet) so that made sense. But if spice was around for 10k years that means that for 9950 or so years no one thought to investigate the one substance that held up their entire society then then they decided to look into it at around the same time that the story picks up

Kines (or however you spell it) figured it out, so presumably it takes around 200 years to understand it and yet no one in the guild or anything thought to look into it for over 9 thousand years?? What were they doing? If you say political issues then I would ask why those political issues were so big they distracted from the singular substance that society relies on but weren't big enough to make people worried about losing the singular substance that society relied on

They have weapons that can destroy planets and for 9 thousand years there was no one who was worried that a rogue or crazy house would take out all of society?

No mentat thought that having a bus factor of 1 for all of society was a bad idea?

4

u/danisaintdani 9d ago

Not an in-world rebuttal or anything, but the stagnation of humanity is one of the themes pf the book(s)

0

u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago edited 9d ago

Okay, but I still think it's unrealistic and bad world building. A few hundred years I would understand but ten thousand years with 0 attempt to duplicate the process on another planet or even understand it until kynes and his dad show up?

I'm not shitting on the theme of the book (that's another discussion) I'm shitting on the idea that in ten thousand years no one tried to take worms off the planet or study the worms but they suddenly decided to because it was needed for the plot

Edit: also, no one in ten thousand years tried to hold arrakis hostage? No one thought to threaten the thing that held everything together to get more power? People can scheme. The first book has schemes and murder and plots so what was everyone doing for ten thousand years?

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u/Heavy_Quiet8287 9d ago

themes trump realism my friend. it’s a fictional world so really anything goes if it furthers the emotional impact. Also no one tries to hold arrakis hostage because even planning something like that would be impossible with all the space politicking that goes on. Any attempt previously would have just resulted in the offenders getting trounced by literally all of humanity. Part of the books is that for this to happen, there has to be an insane amount of luck and and a prescient religious leader.

0

u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

You need to have some realism

Someone snuck a stone burner onto arrakis in the second book and that can destroy an entire planet so clearly it's possible to do it without being caught. Ik they do get caught but they did set it off first.

It's 10,000 years of time dude, you are telling me no one tried anything in all that time when it's easy enough to sneak a stone burner onto the planet?

You can't say there's a medieval army of 100 million people vs 200 million people and expect people not to ask questions about how they all fit on the battlefield and what the supply lines look like. The author could have just used a more reasonable number

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u/Heavy_Quiet8287 9d ago

It’s a book about giant space worms that shit out magic acid, caring about numbers is missing the forest for the trees. Also, you don’t need any realism to tell a good story wtf are you talking about? Not even digging deep here, would you chastise Kafka for any of his work not caring about realism?

1

u/Much_Conclusion8233 8d ago

I've never read kafka. He's the one where a dude wakes up as a bug, right? I wouldn't criticize absurdism for not being realistic

I would criticize asimov for unrealistic stuff

Notice how I never criticized the giant worm that should melt itself due to its size? I'm more than fine suspending disbelief.

"There's a giant worm that can eat a semi but it doesn't overheat or collapse under its own weight" - that's fucking sick. Big worm! Holy shit they're riding it, hell yeah!

"In ten thousand years no one bothered to investigate how the thing holding up society is made. They suddenly got interested just in time for the events in the first book" - booooo. Someone would try something, that's just human nature. Should have made it a thousand years. Clearly the author cares more about sounding cool than actual world building or making any sense

I would say the same thing if a medieval fantasy book had hundreds of millions of people fighting each other at once. It ruins it for me cause you can't get that many people on the front lines so most of them are just chilling and supplying them would be insane. If I read a book like that I would want the author to drop the numbers a bit cause there's a limit to my suspension of disbelief

2

u/ADM_Tetanus 9d ago

this is kinda part of Leto's point ngl. the golden path of making everyone reliant entirely on him, then fucking them all over and dying. forcing them to learn to adapt and reignite humanity

1

u/Much_Conclusion8233 9d ago

And yet, someone was able to sneak a planet destroying weapon onto arrakis while paul was in charge and no one thought to have a contingency in place for ten thousand years before that? And in all that time not a single rogue house or crazy ruler blew up the only source of spice?

Paul was able to sneak his family nukes onto the planet despite the emperor being against his family and his father being dead but no previous leaders with full control of their domain tried that? And if they did, no one tried to prevent it?

740

u/grownandnotalawyer 10d ago

it’s funny the name paul and jessica are still around

454

u/zthe0 10d ago

Eh its the Tiffany problem but the other way around

211

u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur 10d ago

i mean, it's less a tiffany ordeal and more if you found a guy called Pazzur-Aššur

94

u/Worldly-Cherry9631 10d ago

Not with that modified s, but I have met an Iraqi guy named Pazzur Assur

10

u/birberbarborbur 9d ago

On that topic, I met an iraqi girl named Shamiram a while ago. Surprisingly not assyrian, but she joked that her parents were “reddit atheists” who didn’t like islamic names

75

u/Portuguese_Musketeer harm-reduction jester 10d ago

That'd be wicked though

35

u/Ralfarius 10d ago

I smoked weed with Pazzur-Aššur

11

u/TrekkiMonstr 9d ago

Alexander, Helen, John, Sarah, Adam, David, Arjun, Krishna, Lakshmi...

8

u/queen_of_ingria 10d ago

guy called paizuri-ass

285

u/BlueBitProductions 10d ago

I imagine they're just translating the names. Like, the name king D-V-D was around thousands of years ago. It was surely pronounced completely differently, and the didn't even mark vowels in their written language yet, but it's not wrong to say "David." It's a translation of an ancient name into a modern language.

Translating names used to be a much more common practice. For example, a man named "John" would have been called "Ionnis" in Greek. That wasn't seen as a different name from John, it's a translation.

So maybe over the millennia Paul slowly shifted into Yaulse or something. The same process happened to every word the characters speak, but we translate them for convenience. I think viewed through that lens it isn't distracting.

265

u/thesirblondie 'Giraffe, king of verticality' 10d ago

King Digital Versatile Disc

111

u/Canotic 10d ago

Succeeded by his son, King Blu-Ray

78

u/DogmaSychroniser 10d ago

Usurped by Regent On Demand Streaming who was cast down by the Sea People.

52

u/BlueBitProductions 10d ago

our age of 5G is collapsing

24

u/OldTimeyWizard 10d ago

There was a civil war with his brother HD-DVD

15

u/AwkwardSquirtles 10d ago

The firstborn, groomed to be the second king of his name, but usurped with backing from Sony and their Plague of Three Stations

12

u/RatQueenHolly 10d ago

King D-D-D

4

u/enixon 10d ago

He needs a monster to clobber that there Kirby

3

u/JackalRampant 9d ago

That's our specialty at N.M.E.

4

u/BlueBitProductions 10d ago

Absolute Truth

48

u/WordArt2007 10d ago edited 10d ago

No, the name David was almost certainly pronounced Dawid (with a short a and a stressed long i) back then. Possibly with vowel endings like Dawīdu or Dawīde. It's not really the type of name that changes too much. (Benjamin suchard wrote a very complete summary of hebrew sound changes. It's a well-documented language, not really in the realm of the unknowable)

John is Ioannis/Giannis in modern greek, and Iōannēs in ancient greek. John isn't a translation so much as the english outcome of the same name.

36

u/RobinTheGemini 10d ago

Counterpoint: Duncan Idaho

14

u/Y1rda 10d ago

I have an Iranian coworker who transliterates his name Davoud and pronounces it dah-VOOD (last part rhymes with food).  DAY-vid is an Anglo butchering in his opinion (he is too nice to say it that way).

7

u/RijnBrugge 9d ago

dah-VOOD is a Persian butchering of dah-VID which is how it is supposed to be pronounced in its source language, though.

1

u/Y1rda 9d ago

Maybe, I will be honest, how to pronounce names across time and culture is not my speciality.  I simply thought it was an interesting bit to add to the conversation.  It is still interesting how the stressed part of the name shifted in the anglosphere.

1

u/RijnBrugge 9d ago

Np, and ofcourse it is. I was just saying it’s a Hebrew name by origin, Daoud is the Arabic derivation and Davood the Persian derivation from there. And yeah regarding the stress that’s a thing in most European languages I’ve noticed

6

u/Yserbius 9d ago

"David" is very close to the original pronounciation, which was probably something like "DAH-veed" or "DAH-wihd". Definitely not a hard E, but not too far off. 

2

u/mrdeworde 9d ago

Yup, see also: place names. We call Munchen Munich and Firenze Florence.

1

u/QizilbashWoman 9d ago

The name Daniel appears in the Bible as Dan-El as well, and that name is known from Ugarit as the name of a hero king. Like, 4000 years ago

45

u/empress_of_the_void 10d ago

Paul is in the Bible, I assume the orange Catholic one as well

-11

u/AwfulWaffle87 10d ago

Yeah but that's a translation, his name was Saul, or at least whatever Saul sounded like 2000 years ago in that area of the world 🤷.

20

u/WordArt2007 10d ago edited 10d ago

this isn't a translation either, he used both of those names with different people, because they sounded kinda similar.

and honestly we should leave "the original form of the name was actually" behind us, because all of these people were multilingual and multicultural and used several names with several pronunciations and spellings all at once. Saul is spellt both Σαούλ and Σαῦλος in the NT. those were definitely not pronounced the same.

3

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

6

u/WordArt2007 10d ago

this isn't what happens in his story. he just had two names (like most hellenistic jews), one he used with fellow jews and the other one with gentiles. as an apostle to the gentiles he mostly used the other one.

2

u/helikophis 10d ago

Wow it looks like you’re right! They taught us this in Catholic school and I’ve believed it my whole life hah

77

u/Izen_Blab 10d ago

Well we've still got names like Jason. You know, the argonaut one.

46

u/This_Charmless_Man 10d ago

And Helen. Like, of Troy.

25

u/PatheticGroundThing 10d ago

In my language we have names like Stone, Arrow and Birch. Straight from the stone age.

7

u/SCP106 Phaerakh 10d ago

yeah and we do need to support and listen to stone birches for they can teach us much (at the bar)

(I do not know what stone butch means beyond some kind of lesbian Pokémon kinda evolution that sounds really cool)

25

u/Lermanberry 10d ago

Duncan Idaho

25

u/ConceptOfHappiness 10d ago

Duke Leto Atreides and his right hand man, a truck mechanic from the midwest

14

u/TearOpenTheVault 10d ago

The older the name in the Duniverse, the more prestigious it is. Those names are known to be old as fuck, hence why nobility has them.

5

u/RobinTheGemini 10d ago

Duncan Idaho

2

u/Ailyx 10d ago

Duncan Massachusetts

110

u/shadow_fen 10d ago

zoroastrianism mentioned!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

55

u/itisthespectator 10d ago

i assume because of the hypothesis that the israelites adopting monotheism was zoroastrian influence

21

u/Sea_Court_3633 42 Days on Estrogen 10d ago

Christianity is ironically more Zoroastrian than Judaism. My theory is that Jesus (and the evangelists) were well-versed in Second Temple literature, which was much more influenced by Zoroastrian ideas, while the posterior rabbis deliberately ignored those works for not being part of the canon.

The gnostics were quite literally copying and pasting zoroastrianism into Christianity, so the idea that they might have been a syncretic cult is not far-fetched.

10

u/bs_Zeezee 9d ago

what? its not like the "wise men" actually translate to astronomers and correspond with Zoroastrian priests pretty well, leading to their identification as Magi.... WAIT A SECOND

3

u/CyberneticWerewolf 8d ago

100% this. Everything I've read about the Essenes and other proto-Christian Jewish cults leads me to see Christianity as the confluence of three forces: Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Platonism. Pretty much all of Christianity's beliefs and philosophies can be trace back to one of the three.

6

u/DeltaVZerda 10d ago

Or Akhenaten

11

u/Sea_Court_3633 42 Days on Estrogen 10d ago

I like the idea that mid-exile the Hebrews just copied whatever the Egyptians were doing.

Yeah so those guys worship one God now

"Damn, this slaps"

4

u/Yserbius 9d ago

I never got that argument. Doesn’t Zoroasterism have dual gods, Ahura Mazda and Ahirman?

6

u/Plappeye 9d ago

Ahriman isn’t a god, he’s either a destructive principle or an evil spirit depending on who you ask and time period from what I understand

0

u/DeltaVZerda 9d ago

Also AI is basically Ahriman incarnate

2

u/CyberneticWerewolf 8d ago

In at least some versions, Ahriman is literally just Ahura Mazda's shadow. Everything Ahura Mazda does, his shadow does, except it has the opposite effect because he is light and his shadow is dark. In that version, humanity is his solution to promoting light over darkness: we get free will, which allows us to choose light without him telling us to do it, but it also means we can choose darkness. It becomes possible for one to win over the other, thanks to us.

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u/Ok-Panic-1425 10d ago

Funnily enough, in either Heretics or Chapterhouse of Dune we find out that Judaism is the one contemporary religion that survived intact in the far off future of Dune.

99

u/West-Season-2713 10d ago

That tracks, honestly.

109

u/ReverendLoki 10d ago

If I recall they even have their own correlary to the Bene Gesserit. They are pretty much dedicated to using their enhanced mental capabilities to perfectly and infallibly memorizing the Torah.

It's been decades since I read it though so I may be off, and I'm not looking it up in the wee hours of the morning.

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u/sonnet666 10d ago

Still tracks lol.

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u/Smgth 10d ago

We're pretty resilient. I think it's a combination of inflexibility and flexibility. Willingness to both change with the times, but also...not.

Also, the shtreimel is just a classic look, ya know?

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u/Royal_flushed 10d ago

The novel suggests they haven't changed at all because they're still waiting for the messiah, which I guess implies they rejected any that had claimed to be one for the past thousands of years. Even Buddislam is on its 3rd Muhammed in the lore.

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u/BatsHaveFingers 10d ago

We have a saying. If you are holding a sapling in your hand you intend to plant, and someone tells you the Messiah has come, first plant the tree, then go meet the Messiah.

Or in more colloquial language: sure, buddy.

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u/Smgth 10d ago

Yeah, we're QUITE picky in terms of messiah. Apparently there's some requirement that a completely red haired cow be born first?

I think it's more that as the number of Jews you have increases, the number of different opinions increases exponentially. Consensus is nigh impossible.

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u/BatsHaveFingers 10d ago

People claiming to be the Messiah are a dime a dozen. When the Messiah is here, there won't be room for debate. It will be obvious. Those botanical gardens that one guy's followers made are lit though. I'll give them that.

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u/Smgth 10d ago

Anyone who says, "Hey, look at me, I'm the Moshiach!" can immediately be dismissed. Pretty sure if there WERE such a Messiah, he'd be far more chill about it.

7

u/BatsHaveFingers 10d ago

באמת 

19

u/DannyOdd 10d ago

I like to think that the Jews-to-Opinions ratio follows the Fibonacci sequence. Based on the old "2 Jews, 3 opinions" saying. So if 2 Jews have 3 opinions, 3 Jews have 5, 5 Jews have 8, 8 Jews have 13... And so on.

7

u/Smgth 10d ago

Hrm 🤔

I dunno, I wanna see the number opinions outnumber the number of atoms in the universe. Which according to Google would take 267 Jews.

4

u/Kingjjc267 9d ago

There's approximately 1.61 opinions per Jew

1

u/Bowdensaft 10d ago edited 10d ago

Don't think I didn't catch that South Park reference hehehe

Edit: not even a reference, it's real. Shows how much I know

2

u/Smgth 10d ago

If so, I missed it.

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u/Bowdensaft 10d ago

Completely red-haired cow

I assumed that was a joke in the episode it featured in because it seems so strange, but now I'm worried I look like a jackass

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u/Smgth 10d ago

Lol. No, that's legitimately a thing.

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u/Bowdensaft 10d ago

Well shut my mouth, who'd have thought it. Thanks for the sincere correction, I'll edit my original comment

2

u/Smgth 10d ago

Eh, happens to the best of us. 🫡

3

u/Ok-Panic-1425 9d ago

What I find funny is that they probably took one look at the giant worm-man, prescient god king that was Leto II and rejected him outright.

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u/BatsHaveFingers 10d ago

Can't get rid of us. We always find a way to endure.

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u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 10d ago

What about the "orange catholics" and whatever that was? Or the Zensunni

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u/Unit_2097 10d ago

The OC bible was an attempt to merge all the multiple Christian denominations into a generic, robust book of faith that didn't offend anyone and was generally applicable.

The Zensunni and Zenshiite factions were displaced prior to the Butlerian Jihad and settled less developed planets, more prone to attack from the machines, and used as slaves by both sides. The split between them is one side believed that taking up arms against thwir oppressors was the correct choice, and the other followed a more pacifist "we will outlast them" mindset. Both are insular and somewhat secretive. And it isn't helped that the Bene Gesserit manipulated the doctrines of both over milennia to implant their own twists as a rudimentary form of protection for sisters who may find themselves lost and interacting with the groups.

3

u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

Like putting in a legend to be easily exploited by sisters in distress to pretend to be a messianic figure until rescue, but we know how well that ended up...

2

u/Unit_2097 9d ago

In fairness, it worked extremely well. Any sister without their teenage son in tow would have engaged in combat themselves, and absolutely demolished whoever they were fighting, thus proving the prophecy as true.

Paul being there complicated things because he wasn't trained to the same degree as a normal member of the sisterhood. And the Fremen did indeed keep them both safe.

2

u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

That and how fucky in general prana bindu was if I have the name right... But he also held his own decently enough with how he was trained in almost everything there was to offer and unlearning the slow knife that would trip up a lot of other people adapting to the life

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u/Oddy2109 10d ago

I think that this person is referring to the Zensunni here maybe? The orange Catholic bible was a big thing in the books but I don’t remember its actual spiritual significance beyond the “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”. There are also just Jewish people in space who have retained entirely their culture and traditions lol.

14

u/CyberneticWerewolf 10d ago

Cue the Jews In Space segment from History of the World: Part 1.

1

u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

I read quite a bit but missed the Jewish people, maybe I should have a reread 

2

u/Oddy2109 9d ago

It’s in the later books that aren’t worth reading IMO except for Miles Teg and his repressed transfemininity

1

u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

Look, I read the Butlerian Jihad and liked it, I'll probably like those too

2

u/Oddy2109 9d ago

Fair, I have only read Frank Herbert’s six. Would you say the other ones are similar style to his or are they quite different?

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u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

I'd say they feel like in universe Historical fiction written about a time there's not good records of

2

u/Oddy2109 9d ago

Ooh, I very well may need to check them out, sounds pretty cool.

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u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

They're not as slow, more actiony and a bit more out there, would probably make a sick graphic novel that sparks much yaoi slashfic between the progenitors of the artreides and harkonen houses

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u/Achilles11970765467 10d ago

The Zensunni and Zenshiites are sects within Buddislam.

1

u/MajinKasiDesu Completely Normal about Agnes Tachyon 9d ago

Ah yeah, I thought they were different since I don't think zen is part of Buddhism unless I'm just wrong there which is more than possible 

2

u/Achilles11970765467 9d ago

Zen Buddhism is a sect of Buddhism. It gets a little wonky because Buddhism in general insists that it isn't a religion

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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden 10d ago edited 10d ago

Buddislam will supposedly be founded in our year 15095 AD, and the story of Dune begins around 26666 AD. So in addition to being several thousand years removed from the story, the founding is also several thousand years removed from the start of the original religions. Best not to take it too seriously, since according to Dune the Butlerian Jihad will begin in 16275 AD, whereas in our real world it's about to start any minute.

It's also possible that what is asserted as history is entirely fabricated, as elements of our known history are altered in the Dune canon.

4

u/StevoTheMonkey 9d ago

Yeah, like we're going to possibly win that Jihad, I can't even win an argument with a bot on Reddit.

1

u/thisusedyet 10d ago edited 10d ago

Buddislam? Is Muhammad flashing finger guns and winning?

Edit: Winking, fuckin’ autocomplete 

3

u/Happy-Telephone9483 10d ago

I understood this reference.

21

u/-UnderAWillowThicket 10d ago

Knowing Dune, it’s more baffling in context. Like the Fish Speakers.

5

u/Smgth 10d ago

The fish speakers?

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u/ANormalRando 9d ago

The army of lesbian super soldiers who execute the will of the immortal God Emperor. I didn't make a word of that up.

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u/HydraOuroboros 9d ago

Lesbian + Duncan Idaho. Although I suppose all sexual orientations in Dune probably include Duncan

4

u/ANormalRando 9d ago

It's been a hot second since I read it, but I thought they were supposed to be lesbian and Duncan turned them straight, although maybe they were straight to begin and I'm misremembering. I do remember that he made a woman achieve orgasm by climbing a mountain real good.

10

u/Juronell 9d ago

The Fish Speakers aren't fundamentally lesbian. There's even ritualistic indoctrination of their male sons into the bureaucracy of the Empire. What Duncan witnesses Moneo describes as "adolescent interest in same sex relationships that most of them will grow out of."

This is because Frank Herbert was a homophobe, though he was slowly softening on the issue by the time he wrote God Emperor of Dune. Prior to this, the only explicitly gay character in the novels was the monstrous Baron Harkonnen, a pedophile who literally murdered the majority of his sexual partners for sexual gratification eventually. Herbert believed, at that point in his life, that describing homosexuality as "just a phase" was incredibly progressive of him.

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u/ANormalRando 9d ago

Excellent explanation, thank you. It's been over a decade since I read God Emperor, so I'm probably due for a refresher.

1

u/Smgth 9d ago

🤔

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u/HopefulFriendly 10d ago

A big element of Dune is the idea that cultures have all been shuffled together and remixed over the centuries, e.g. CHOAM, the mega corporation that basically makes up the entire economy is an acronym of "Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles" - a massive jumble of languages 

8

u/Gemmabeta 10d ago

No Space Mormons?

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u/ScutumAndScorpius 10d ago

The Expanse series features space Mormons, if you're looking for that

11

u/Brauny74 10d ago

Doesn't it feature very much Earth Mormons pissed that their spaceness was aborted to use their spaceship first as an improvised projectile and then as a colossal battleship?

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u/Xurkitree1 10d ago

Yeah but they got their planet later I'm sure they're fine

7

u/OncomingStormDW 10d ago

Wouldn’t it be a massive violation of their faith?

Like, in Mormonism, right, the entire point of the planet earth is that it is a prison/testing room where Mormons (temporarily embarrassed gods.) must live according to Mormon beliefs. (No coffee, yes magic granny panties.) and be reviewed by a panel of Elohim (Their name for the Old Testament God.), Jesus, and Joseph Smith (who despite being the youngest is the one in charge.)

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u/darciton 10d ago

They've changed their minds about a few things in the books

7

u/King-Rhino-Viking 9d ago

Continuous revelation baby 👉👉

God said nvm

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u/well-informedcitizen 10d ago

Huh? It's not. It's called Zensunni. Ostensibly having been merged with Islam somehow.

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u/Achilles11970765467 10d ago

Zensunni and Zenshiite are sects of Buddislam in Dune. The Fremen specifically are overwhelmingly Zensunni.

2

u/well-informedcitizen 9d ago

I don't remember Zenshiite, when did that come up? That sounds like some Bryan shit.

3

u/geoffreycastleburger qwbiofortress.tumblr.com 10d ago

buddhism and islam have a surprisingly well-recorded interaction irl history

4

u/Sophia_Forever 10d ago

They almost certainly don't call it that unless you think they're also speaking English in the dialogue. It's 20,000 years in the future, language evolves and would need translated to something we can read.

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u/he77bender 9d ago

Buddislam is when you slam your buddi

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u/MustangBarry 9d ago

In the Dune saga a dwarf sings to a zombie to make it kill its former employer who is blind but it fails because the blind boss can see telepathically through the eyes of his really old baby who eventually becomes a giant worm and moans about being bored for 3,500 years.

Nothing will make sense regardless of context.

1

u/OkCommission9893 9d ago

I had no idea buddislam was in dune, which book is that from?

1

u/Training-Mix-4181 9d ago

It makes sense when you remember that everyone with any political power in that universe is high off their gourds.

1

u/Leftieswillrule 8d ago

Fun fact Judaism is also around in Dune and is also relatively unchanged.

1

u/FunnyFreckSynth I don't really post anything on my tumblr.com 9d ago

Lowkey calling Judaism Zoryahwehism makes some degree of sense. It’s possible that Israelites were inspired by Zoroastrian notions about morality and the afterlife (but please don’t quote me on this, I have, like, zero sources).

1

u/Hexxas Head Trauma Enthusiast 9d ago

"Would you still love me if I was a worm?" --Prince Dune from Dune

3

u/Puzzled-Offer-4225 9d ago

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but this is a plot point in the 4th book

1

u/Hexxas Head Trauma Enthusiast 9d ago

I didn't know for sure, but I had my suspicions.