This week, time for something a bit silly: we’re going to think about the plausibility of the warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune! In particular, I want to approach the question in two parts (I, II) : first asking if the model of warfare among the Great Houses we’re introduced to in the first book of Dune (that is, in the first third of the book) makes sense given the fantastical technology and social structures Herbert has created to enable it. Then, next time, we’re going to return to ask, given that model of warfare, if the success of the Fremen jihad, occurring in the space between Dune and Dune Messiah actually seems plausible. Could a military society like Dune‘s Great Houses exist given their technology and if they did, could the Fremen have conquered them?
I should note here that while I am going to use a few images from the recent film adaptations, I want to focus here strictly on the combat model as presented in the books. Villeneuve’s film adaptation gets closest to replicating Herbert’s system of warfare – the other adaptations succumb to the temptation of simply introducing lots of guns of one kind of another – but there’s enough small changes or variations that I want to stick just to the books and the ‘pure’ expression of Herbert’s vision of futuristic warfare.
But first, as we’re going to cover below, equipping a fighting force with Dune’s version of modern military power – shields, ornithopters and frigates – is expensive. If you want to help me equip a Great House of trained fighters to challenge the Imperium, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Warfare Under Shields
Of course for those who know books (and at least the Villeneuve film), the fundamental technology shaping warfare among the Great Houses of Dune is shields. This is a production of the fictional ‘Holtzman effect’ which is the (again, fictional) physics principle in the Dune universe which enables the folding of space for faster-than-light travel (but not the safe navigation thereof), ‘suspensors’ that allow objects and people to be levitated and finally the operation of energy shields which would repel any object attempting to pass through above a certain minimal speed.
Now I’ll note that Herbert’s physics here is actually a bit dodgy. We’re told that the reason for the minimal speed is to allow air-flow into and out of the shield, but my understanding is that even in room temperature air that feels quite still to us, the individual gas molecules move very fast (something like c. 450m/s), so a velocity-lower-limit wouldn’t work effectively as a ‘filter’ to let in air but not, say, bullets. But I am prepared to just accept that the shields work the way they are described, permitting slow-moving objects (and also air, for some reason) but repelling faster moving objects.
Of course in a way, the reason shields work this way in Dune is that it produces the fighting system that Herbert wants: shields effectively nullify missile weapons and explosives of all types, leading to a return to contact weapons, particularly knives. That has all sorts of knock-on effects on the structure of armies in this universe which we’ll get to below, but let us stay focused here on individual combat. We’re repeatedly told that the fighting style that results from this near-total emphasis on shields is unusual and to a degree artificial, demanding combatants keep their offensive movements slow enough to penetrate a shield.
So we might first ask if this fighting system, at the individual level, makes sense given the fantastical constraints Herbert’s shields impose. And I guess my answer is…sort of? I think the idea of a return to contact weaponry in this context works in the main, but with two main exceptions, which is that the style of contact weapon fighting that dominates is not what I would anticipate and second that the way Herbert also excludes laser weaponry strikes me as perhaps not fully thought out.
When it comes to style it is important to separate the various film adaptations – particularly Villeneuve’s (which features a lot of armor) – from the books. In the books, the strong impression is that body armor is not a typical supplement for shields: we never hear about heavy armor and instead hear about shields being attached to fabric uniforms (such as when Duke Leto’s uniform is torn where the shield attachment was ripped off). Meanwhile, the contact weapons of choice seem almost invariably to be short blades, described as daggers or knives. The most common weapon of the Great Houses was the Kindjal and it is described as having a 20cm blade, which is quite short, very much a dagger rather than a sword (the smallest of swords generally still have blade-lengths upwards of 45cm).
That is great for producing lots of cool, dramatic knife fights, but honestly doesn’t make much sense to me given the constraints. The main factor in the decline of body armor was, quite famously, the fact that it became increasingly impossible to armor against firearms without massively thick armor that was impractically heavy. But shields remove this problem: the velocity (and thus energy delivery) of any strike is now strictly limited, meaning even relatively thin and light armor will be effective. Under those conditions, a combatant wearing armor could render most of their body’s surfaces functionally immune to contact weapons without a serious loss of agility, forcing an opponent to aim only for things like joints that cannot be armored easily with solid (if articulating) plates. Whatever agility is lost would be more than offset by being able to target all of an opponent’s body while only offering a tiny portion of your own in response.
People in Dune are often super-humanly intelligent, fast and agile, but they do not appear to be super-humanly strong to the point that they’d be able to, say, drive a knife through a millimeter of steel (or whatever exotic science fiction equivalent might be furnished). In short, I would expect armor to dominate formal combat in things like open battles or duels where fighters had time to put it on.
That in turn is going to mean that combat is going to consist of a lot of grappling, because to actually get a weapon through the relatively small gaps offered by that armor – or for that matter to slide a dagger at relatively low speed through a shield – it is going to often be necessary to get an opponent on the ground and to some degree pinned. Knives would be useful in that context, but speaking historically so would many polearms, designed for hooking and levering attacks that do indeed occur at speeds sufficiently slow to function through shields, in order to throw opponents to the ground. Alternately if for some reason body armor does remain rare, then the obvious optimal choice for combat is the spear, given the tremendous advantage that reach poses and the fact that a spear’s pin-point piercing attack has no problem penetrating a target even at low speeds.
The related problem is the relative lack of formation fighting. Now I want to be clear, there is some formation fighting in the books, particularly the note that the Sardaukar can be recognized in combat because they split into groups of three fighting in a triangle back-to-back when pressed. But we don’t see mass formation fighting in groups larger than three. But of course in the real world we’ve had a lot of experience with societies where close-combat fighting was core to military success and those societies almost without exception formed up their armies in large blocks of soldiers fighting together. Spacing and such might differ, but formation fighting was a near constant for armies that expected to do most of their fighting hand-to-hand. So while upper-elites might be trained mostly in a dueling culture, I would expect the common soldiers to be trained to fight as units. Those needn’t be massive units, but something less like the Sarduakar in their trios and more like a Roman maniple (120 men), with enough men to present a clear ‘front’ to an enemy that is hard to get around.
As an aside, this is one point where I think the Villeneuve adaptation really pushed the source material. We see the Atreides fight in armor, using long polearms and with a clear formation fighting technique, particularly the scene in the fall of Arrakeen where the Atreides soldiers are defending the stairs – and appear to be succeeding until the Sardaukar drop in behind their formation. All of which is to say, instead of being dominated by ‘swordsmen’ fighting unarmored with knives built for cutting attacks, I would expect this system of warfare to be dominated by armored fighters wielding primarily polearms, supported by thrusting daggers (something like a rondel dagger), whose primary method of fighting mostly consisted of formation fighting in groups and grappling when fighting alone.
The one oddity is how precisely coordinated these fighters’ motions seem to be, but that makes sense in the context of the fiction where training in the far future can achieve things impossible to do with training now.
The second problem I see is the laser weapons of the setting, ‘lasguns.’ I honestly find it strange that Herbert felt the need to even include militarized laser weapons, given that they seem to me to create pretty substantial problems that he only imperfectly resolves. The limitation imposed on lasguns is that if they strike a shield, the result is ‘sub-atomic fusion’ (the fiction’s term) which immediately produces a nuclear explosion, which occurs at a random point anywhere from inside the shield to at the lasgun or along the beam between the two. The idea is that this creates a powerful weapon which in the fiction can only be used against enemies without shields. In the context of the first book (the only one of the originals in which the military systems of the Great Houses are really functioning), that mostly comes up in the use of lasguns against the Fremen, since they do not use shields. The idea being that using a lasgun against an opponent with a shield is simply too dangerous.
And the problem here is that there are just obviously a lot of military targets which might be protected by shields where it would be worth risking the destruction of what is, I must stress, a man portable weapon-system in order to destroy through a shield. The most obvious would be the main palace of one of the Great Houses: it is very important that the Atreides residence in Arakeen is protected by a powerful shield generator, but why wouldn’t an enemy take the risk of sneaking a lasgun close to the shield and discharging it? Your soldiers needn’t even be present (nor must you use some sort of ‘thinking machine’): a simple egg-timer attached to the trigger of a concealed laser weapon would be enough to ensure your team had time to retreat out of the blast radius. Even if the explosion didn’t emerge within the shield, triggering an untraceable nuclear blast in the middle of an opponent’s capital or in the middle of their field army would be a really effective tactic and so one would expect ‘suicide’ lasgun attacks all the time. Especially in a society that engages in “wars of assassins.”
Now I cannot find if it is ever made clear if lasgun-shield explosions fall under the Great Convention’s ban on atomics (nuclear weapons) in the setting. I suppose if they do this is a partial fix: no Great House could openly use the above tactic without breaching the convention. But then of course the problem becomes the deniable or surreptitious use of these tactics, because in most cases the very act of a lasgun-shield attack is going to obliterate all evidence one might use to determine the perpetrator and given that all of the houses have both lasguns and shields, any such explosion could have been an accident.
It always seemed to me the storytelling solution here was curiously simple – just make the lasgun-shield interaction detonate just the lasgun and do so rather less intensely than a nuclear blast and you achieve the same results in terms of the story.
All that said, moving forward in this bit of silly analysis, we’re going to assume that the fighting system works as advertised: shields make basically all projectile weapons largely useless, reducing combat to contact warfare. Lasguns are powerful and reasonably readily available, but too risky to use in an environment where shields might be common.
What kind of warfare does that produce among the Great Houses and does it make sense?
Armies of the Great Houses
The in-universe term for the society of the Great Houses has never made it into any of the adaptations and so may be unfamiliar but it will be useful to us: it is the faufreluche system, with the plural, ‘the faufreluches’ used to mean the whole of imperial society.
What we see in the societies of the faufreluches is that they are intensely stratified and rigid, to the point of nearly being a hereditary caste system. This system is rules over in turn by the Great Houses who are responsible for enforcing it in their domains. They do that with their armies and the sense we get from the Great Houses that we see is that these are intensely militarized social institutions, wholly bent around the provision of violence in society. They are, in practice, military aristocracies.
They’re also small. Really small. House Atreides is the government for a planet (initially Caladan, then Arrakis), but it’s decision-making core is perhaps a few dozen people, as small or smaller than Alexander’s companions or the war council of a Roman general. Administrative capacity is also clearly severely limited: Duke Leto’s best response to having functionally no knowledge or control over the ‘Deep Desert’ that covers most of his planet is to send one guy (Duncan Idaho) on a mission to go check it out. We get no hint of the sort of vast administration we might expect from a modern administrative state governing even a mid-sized county, much less a planet.
The other bit of evidence we have is that their armies are also really small. We get a sense of what the largest sort of offensive operation the setting might generally see with the Harkonnen invasion of Arrakis. We get in snippets that the Harkonnen committed “ten legions” (which required something on the order of 2,000 ships), along with two legions of Imperial Sardaukar. The latter we may assume is a relatively small portion of the emperor’s total forces, but I think we should assume that the Harkonnen force represents essentially their entire offensive military potential. Thufir Hawat is utterly shocked by the scale of the assault and Vladimir Harkonnen notes that the cost of it meant burning through House Harkonnen’s considerable reserves of cash.
Now nowhere in the core text is the size of a standard legion ever stated, that I could find, but the broad fandom generally accepted – I believe from the Dune Encyclopedia – that a Dune legion consists of 30,000 men, divided into ten brigades. It would have to be a fairly standard unit size across the houses in order for it to be useful for both Hawat and the Baron as a tool to think with, so I think we can assume this is a more-or-less standard unit size for major operations.
That would make the sum total of offensive Harkonnen power around 300,000 troops. Presumably some further forces were held back on Geidi Prime or couldn’t be transported, but this force had to represent the lion’s share of Harkonnen forces simply because it expected to outnumber the Atreides defenders, which was all of the Atreides troops and House Atreides is a peer competitor to House Harkonnen and both of them are in the top rung of Great Houses in terms of military power directly behind the emperor himself (to the point that the emperor is threatened by the rising power of House Atreides and later by that of House Harkonnen).
I want to stop here and answer a key objection I know is coming which is that it is only the artificially high costs the Spacing Guild charges for transport that keeps armies small. The problem with this is of course when the Harkonnen attack Arrakis, while Harkonnen offensive power is limited by guild transport costs, Atreides defensive power is not: The Atreides gave up Caladan to come to Arrakis, so they are all there, the entire military force of a first-rate Great House. And yet the Harkonnen still expect to outnumber them. That suggests not that these Great Houses have huge mass armies they can’t transport, but rather that the Harkonnen, with a heavily industrialized homeworld, can build marginally more shields than most opponents and so have an unusually large army (which they can only move, because it is so large, by burning off a generation or more’s worth of wealth gained through the exploitation of the most valuable planet in the universe). So it is not just the Spacing Guild that keeps armies small – evidently these societies cannot reliably raise much larger armies even for domestic defense.
(That said, I do think a factor in the durability of the Great Houses is likely that few houses can do as the Harkonnen did – transport a large fraction of their overall military power for an offensive operation – because of Guild costs, leading to a strong ‘defender’s advantage’ in warfare in the setting. Of course the Atreides do relocate under this same regime with – we are told directly – the entire House, but we might assume that for such an ’emergency’ measure (which is actually a trap with the Guild complicit) those heavy costs were reduced or perhaps supported by the emperor.)
So I think we may say this is a military system in which 300,000 men is a lot for a ‘first tier’ Great House (excluding the House Corrino) to have as its military. Most Great Houses would have had smaller armies, presumably.
Which might sound big but these are the militaries of entire planets which are actively on a war footing. The Red Army in the Second World War reached a frontline strength of over ten million and it represented only one (very large and powerful) country. If Great House armies were similar in structure even to modern peacetime standing forces, we might expect their total strength to be in the tens of millions, just to match the level of militarization we have here on Earth during a period of relatively low warfare. These armies are very clearly not that large. The fact that an Atreides force trained by Duncan Idaho – a single person – is understood to be a potential threat suggests how small they are and how impactful relatively small bodies of troops are understood to be.
I actually think these elements fit together fairly well in suggesting a certain sort of society. It certainly isn’t that this is a depopulated universe – Arrakis is treated as an underpopulated, resource-poor wasteland and yet Arakeen is clearly a major city (and there’s another even larger center, Carthag, we hear about but do not see). Geidi Prime is described as a heavily industrialized world as well, implying a substantial population. This is a populated universe, but one with very weak states, which control relatively little of the real day-to-day activity.
We actually get one of the strongest suggestions of this with the scale of the Guild Heighliner that takes the Atreides to Arrakis: the whole of House Atreides fits within a relatively small portion of its interior. But presumably these ships were not built comically large because it was funny, rather much of the rest of that space is going to be taken up by regular commercial traffic – the movement of goods and private persons – which would then dwarf the size of the movement of the entire Atreides military. Which again, implies that there are a lot of people and production happening below the level of the Great Houses.
And that in turn fits with what we are told about the nature of the faufreluches as a social system: it is rigid, hierarchical, and stratified, with limited mobility under the motto “a place for every man and every man in his place.” Under that sort of system, we might expect the lower classes to be systematically de-militarized and indeed it seems like they mostly are. Local magnates might have access to small amounts of armed force, but mostly it is only the Great Houses that wield large amounts of armed force, with which they rule over their planets.
So what we have are relatively large societies ruled over by quite small Great Houses which as a result cannot reach or effect most of what people are doing, akin to the very weak states one often sees in the pre-modern period: the state can enforce tax collection, but it doesn’t really provide services (except violence) or have much of a role in regulating the day-to-day interactions. Given the strong sense of hierarchy in how the fraufreluches are described, I think we should probably understand that the common person is instead ‘ruled’ on a day-to-day basis by smaller local Big Men (probably substantial local property owners; in-universe the term for this class are the richece) who wield force notionally in the name of the Great House but in practice do so with minimal interference from ‘the state’ such as it is.
That structure enables the personalist, patrimonial sort of rule the Great Houses seem to exert, but also inhibits severely their ability to actually mobilize the resources of their society. House Atreides very evidently lacks even just the basic administration to, say, put all of Arrakis on a ‘war economy’ footing. If 300,000 men was the best the Harkonnen could do from an entirely industrial planet, they too lack this sort of administration (this even after building a war chest harvesting spice on Arrakis for years!). Instead, with weak administrations, the Great Houses survive by siphoning off only a relatively small portion of overall economic activity in order to perform their primary purposes: continuing to extract that small portion and using what of it they can to wage their petty wars.
Does It Work?
I actually think this more or less works given what we’re told about warfare. The key factors that seem to support a society being structured this way are the sharp limits to how many fighters a society can produce and the specific kinds of industrial military power available.
To simplify, there are basically four components of military power for the Great Houses as a result of their technology: trained fighters, shields, aircraft (ornithopters) and frigates (the term for the standard space-going warship/transport of the setting, capable of surface-to-orbit flight, but requiring a Guild Heighliner for interplanetary travel). We’re going to set aside the latter two for now except to note that they exist and matter quite a lot.
What the system needs to work is that shields are expensive and fighters are hard to train, but without both, a military in this technological setting is extremely hard to make and keep functional.
First, shields are an expensive piece of equipment. This is repeatedly stressed: the Fremen do not use shields because they enrage the sandworms, but also they cannot afford them. Duke Leto assumes it will take a long time, even with the massive income of Arrakis, to accumulate the wealth necessary to equip the Fremen with shields (which he assumes is necessary to use them militarily). So the cost of shields is going to shrink armies.
And it is going to shrink armies a lot. Again, the implication of the setting is that the armies of entire planets consist of perhaps a few hundred thousand shielded fighters, which certainly implies that shields are massively expensive. The normal counter-argument here is that it is in fact the cost of guild transport that keeps these armies small, but we’ve dealt with that already. I have a hard time imagining exactly what sort of man-portable device could be so expensive than an entire planet could field only tens of thousands of them, but we might imagine the effect to be something like a supercharged version of the way national air forces have changed as the cost of aircraft (and their capabilities) have risen. Despite being enormously more productive today than it was in the 1940s, the United States maintains only a few thousand modern fighters (the world’s largest fighter fleet) compared to the several hundred thousand far cheaper fighters the United States built during WWII.
Evidently in the Dune universe, even a man-portable body-shield seems to be an economic expense on the scale of something like a modern fifth generation fighter, so whole planets can afford only small numbers of them.
The other aspect, of course, is the supply of trained fighters. Of course one of the fantastical elements of Dune’s universe is that human training and learning is capable of producing far greater results than in the real world, a result of the refinement of human learning and training after the abandonment of ‘thinking machines’ in the Butlerian Jihad. As a result, the gap between a trained fighter and an untrained one in close combat (a distinction that will matter a lot for next week) is very large. The Baron Harkonnen observes that the two Sardaukar legions that accompanied his army to Arrakis might well be able to overwhelm them, despite being outnumbered five-to-one. Now what we see of the Harkonnen does not suggest their warriors are well trained – the Harkonnen military is a quantity-over-quality military, attempting to leverage its industrial capabilities to the degree it can to make up for what seem like poorly motivated and trained soldiers – but the fact that such performance gaps are possible is notable.
But it is also clear that training good fightiers in this society means demanding decades of focused effort. So not only do these societies need to support the production of what seem to be extremely expensive weapon-systems (shields), the fighters who use those shields are also really expensive, demanding an enormous amount of training in order to be fully effective.
Which then results in a military environment in which a small number of shielded warriors could dominate a very large ‘weekend warrior’ militia force. Shades of heavily armored knights on horseback: expensive weapon-system, difficult and rare training, leading power to concentrate in the relative handful of individuals (in Frank Herbert’s universe, seemingly always men) who possess both. I can see such a system, more or less, emerging under the conditions set out.
The problem I see, such as it is is that this system does not strike me as stable and the one thing we are told quite clearly in the text is that it is extremely stable. The basic structure of the Imperium under Corrino rule, we’re told, persists for ten thousand years and Leto II’s entire baroque plan (the ‘golden path’) has to be calibrated to in part to break the tremendous inertia of society under the faufreluches.1
The problem with this system being stable is pretty simple: these small noble houses are perched atop very large, complex societies, which are capable of supporting a modern administrative state. As noted, we don’t seem to have such a state apparatus: House Atreides arrives to Arrakis almost entirely as an army, to the point where they have to hire local housekeepers. Likewise it is notable in the banquet scene, the major local notables are “a stillsuit manufacturer […] an electronics equipment importer, a water-shipper […], a representative of the Guild bank […], a dealer in replacement parts for spice mining equipment” and so on (Dune, 128). What we don’t see are the heads of major bureaucracies – the Minister for Spice Refining or the Secretary for the Transportation and Orbit Administration, that sort of thing – because there don’t appear to be any.
Instead, the Great Houses are basically ‘all army’ and forced to contract out or delegate other functions to the local notables, the ‘richece.’ Which again, above, explains why these Great Houses can only siphon off a relatively small portion of the productive capacity of their worlds: there’s a wealthy upper-class that is essential to their administration which can resist extraction.
The problem for stability is that these societies have the technology (rapid communications) and the ability (large surplus population, capacity for mass education) to create a modern administrative state and the first Great House to do so would massively improve its economic and military position. Moreover, the richece themselves almost certainly are running large, administration-heavy bureaucratic organizations – those stillsuit factories and electronics importation operations do not run themselves – and so are actively building the class of educated bureaucrats that the nobility could harness (or the wealth to displace the nobility and rule themselves). So I would expect this system to be unstable, either tipping over into the emergence of modern, high-capacity administrative states or – if the importance of that training remained high enough – with repeated conflict between the richece (with their wealth and administrative capacity) and their Great House overlords (with their armies of trained fighting men) leading the rule of the Great Houses over their own planetary fiefs to feel profoundly precarious.
Either way, the setting ought to proceed quite rapidly from the somewhat ‘medieval Europe’ feel of its governing structures into an ‘early modern Europe’ feel of instability, political foment and fragmentation, potentially leading to the emergence of far more capable states (some under their old hereditary monarchies, some under the richece as republics). But in-universe that doesn’t happen: the social system is instead presented as extremely stable, only able to be disrupted by a major impact from outside of it: the Fremen.
And that’s where we’ll head next week: how do the Fremen fit into this? Could they disrupt the system? Would they win?
I’m skeptical of your assumptions about planetary populations. I didn’t get the impression that the Atreides were remotely peer competitors to the Harkonnen in troop quantity. I thought that the shock at the size of the Harkonnen force was shock at how much the guild transport costs, not the quantity of troops. The Harkonnen even ship over artillery which is a lavish expense. The Atreides definitely aren’t peer competitors to the emperor. Leto is a threat because he is a popular rival figure who has some sort of blood relation to the emperor (presumably sufficient to have at least a tenuous claim on the throne). The fear isn’t the Atreides fighting the emperor, it’s the Atreides leading a revolt of noble houses. It’s emphasized that while the Atreides had matched or surpassed the imperial elites in quality it was a very small number of soldiers trained to that level. The Atreides are probably one of the smaller houses, they are from a backwater planet without a good export crop.
Shield combat could have been a lot more logically sound if the books had come out 12 years later after Star Wars had put lightsabers in the public imagination. Instead of all the speed constraints for shields, just make it so that there is a specialized, melee way to counter shields which incidentally cuts through armor like butter. You could even tweak the constraints of the melee weapon to get the sort of combat style you want; maybe you need a bulky backpack with cables so the sword needs to be in your hand and even polearms are a dicey proposition; maybe you could briefly charge up some sort of plasma coating to allow for arrows and knives with very rigid speed and distance limits; maybe you want bucklers or scutum and you make some slightly different energy defense for those which can block the lightsabers but interfere with and/or repel the body protection shields. It’s a lot easier to tweak the idea if you can tweak both to offensive and defensive side of the handwave.
Agreed. My impression of the block was that Leto was dangerous because he was popular with the rest of the noble houses to the point of risking them coalescing into a force that could challenge Imperial authority, rather than the Atreides being powerful in of themselves.
I also wonder about the idea that their society is one with a high population. Arrakis, despite its harsh climate, is nonetheless an exceptionally important planet for the whole civilisation. And it has, what, two cities we know about? They never mention the number of Fremen sietches, but some back-calculation from Hawat’s total population estimate of ~5 million and sietch Tabr having ~10,000 people suggests not all that many for an entire planet (though as I understand it, Hawat significantly underestimated this).
I am having difficulty finding population estimates for Arrakeen. The only thing I can find is that the Atreides palace was ‘large enough to house 35 million people comfortably’, but that doesn’t actually imply that 35 million people actually lived there. Nor do we know what Arrakeen standards of ‘comfort’ are, if the whole thing isn’t hyperbole anyway.
Even if Arakeen is huge, and Cartag is similarly huge, that only puts us with a planetary population somewhere around a couple of hundred million tops (and potentially much lower if the size of the Atreides palace is more to do with monumental architecture than population size). If it is on the lower end of estimates, and importantly if most (if not all) human habitable planets are similarly sparsely inhabited, then it might go a reasonable way to explaining why what we see of states are so weak, and armed forces are so small.
Not all the way of course. But a little closer.
Arrakis is a sun blasted dry hellhole of a world. No water, except on the poles, barley any agriculture, the people that live on the north pole live there, because Melange is that profitable. The Guilds ships probably regularly bring more water and basic foodstuff for the people living there, than anything else.
The “civilised” area is the size of Europe, with the climate of the dryer parts of Sahel Africa. If they can still supply hundereds of millions there, other planets, even the rural ones, will have billions of inhabitants.
I’m not so confident. I can’t find good solid estimates of the population of Arrakeen or Carthag, but I’ve seen various planet-wide estimates of 10-15 million people (of which either 5 million or 10 million are Fremen).
Even taking the more generous of those options, that still puts that ‘Europe-sized area’ at a population density of about 1 person per square kilometer. That’s a little under the population density of the Western Sahara. I don’t particularly see why that would imply some highly effective offworld logistics process to keep it supplied.
And we also don’t know what the baseline of ‘habitable’ the folks in the Dune universe are measuring Arrakis against. We know that Arrakis is very inhospitable, but are we comparing that to an average of earth-like worlds, or are we comparing that to an average of significantly less earth-like worlds (that are nonetheless still more habitable than Arrakis).
If you do have a good source for the population of Arrakis then that would help clear it up somewhat, but from what I understand there isn’t anything that’s definitive. The closest we have is Hawat’s estimation of ‘maybe 5 million Fremen’.
10 million:
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In other words, about what a terraformed Venus could support.
“ they are from a backwater planet without a good export crop.”
I will not tolerate this pundi rice slander!
And don’t forget the whale fur.
Thufir Hawat tells Baron Harkonnen that the reason that the Emperor was afraid of House Atreides was that Leto had:
A) Trained his House troops to be almost as good as the Sardaukar.
B) Would now have access to the Fremen, who be could used to rapidly expand his Sardauker-level forces because they were all Proud Barbarian Warrior Race Guys.
Which is inconsistent with OGP’s idea that the limiting factor on military size is the incredibly huge cost of shield generators.
(It also raises the question of why the Emperor supported forcing the Atreides to move to Arrakis, instead of opposing it. Or was Leto just pretending he didn’t want to move?)
Of course, Hawat may have just been feeding the Baron a load of plausible lies in order to get him destroyed by the Emperor. Since we know Hawat never really switched sides as the Baron thought he would.
I don’t think B is right because at the beginning nobody knows about B. Aside from the Atreides elite troops the other issue is that Leto is popular enough that he could conceivably convince other houses to follow him. Leto thinks he is meant to perform poorly on Arrakis because:
“They wish the Atreides name to become unpopular,” the Duke said. “Think of the Landsraad Houses that look to me for a certain amount of leadership—their unofficial spokesman. Think how they’d react if I were responsible for a serious reduction in their income.’
And Hawat:
Yet, Hawat had said, this appearance contained the deadliest peril, for the Duke Leto was popular among the Great Houses of the Landsraad.
“A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful,” Hawat had said.
This could be egotism since it’s from the Atreides perspective, but I think the reader is meant to believe it.
Also, practically, if it’s not true there’s not really much reason for the Emperor to bother destroying the Atreides. Indeed, if it’s not true it may be to his benefit NOT to – the Harkonnens have had Arrakis long enough they’re unpleasantly powerful, having the Atreides counterbalance that is a good thing even if they think everyone likes them. Worst case, one revolts and you stomp them with the aid of the other (and let that other do most of the dying).
The Fremen are the recruitment pool but the other side of the coin is the profits of Arrakis, that would allow them to be equipped to imperial standards.
This is part of the bait of the trap for Leto, he sees a path to ultimate success if he navigates the trap, but the Baron and Emperor’s plot had elements he did not anticipate and so lost.
It wasn’t just bait, it was also a trap that he couldn’t afford to not walk into it. Openly refusing an Imperial order would have been the end of the Atreides. The attractiveness of Arrakis was less of a lure, and more of PR move so that the Emperor looked like he was being generous to the Atreides in the eyes of the other houses.
For sure, but that Leto sees the trap and thinks he can navigate it to ultimate victory is part of his decision making not to just give up and go to Tupile even though he knows there’s a danger of his family being wiped out.
A problem I see with all of these limitations causing a resort to contact infantry is that there’s too much wiggle room in the allegedly fantastic cost of shields and training. Historical contact infantry was driven by sources of mechanical energy, which on the battlefield was exclusively muscles powered by food.
What if every infantryman were driving a light tank with a bulldozer blade instead of a gun, just a big fast armored bulldozer, instead? The swords etc can be the backup weapons I guess. Are the shields expensive to miniaturize or are they similarly expensive at all scales?
I don’t expect answers. It just seems totally noncredible that, even if you couldn’t use projectile/energy weapons at all, you couldn’t do better than infantry by finding ways to increase the infantryman’s size/weight/power budget, since the size/weight/power budget of the industrial society backing up the infantryman is so much larger per person. It’s matter of mobilization, finding ways to get more of your resources into the fight.
Every infantryman driving a light tank? You’ve just recreated the classic Dalek problem: your invincible army will be stopped by the first set of steps it comes across. Such as those at the entrance to the Arrakeen Palace.
Maybe WWI tanks couldn’t handle stairs. But I’m pretty sure any tank from WWII or later can. (The stairs themselves are going to have a real bad day, though.)
The distinctive rhomboid shape of WWI British tanks was to make them extremely good at climbing as it happens. But I think the point of the comment you were relying on was a cheeky reference to the comical ineffectiveness of the Daleks.
So it’s not tanks, it’s mecha instead.
This is a scenario where mecha might actually work instead of being huge targets.
The balance problems we’ve had with bipedal robots wouldn’t be a factor. They have working ornithopters somehow, that coordination is a much worse problem. So they solved it, and supposedly without powerful computers.
Daleks don’t climb stairs, they level the building.
More seriously, there’s no reason the armor can’t be put on a human-shaped frame. Powered exoskeletons with plate, power sources, and shield generators bolted onto them certainly couldn’t be THAT hard with Dune tech.
Cross a lasgun with a limpet mine or sticky bomb and you probably have the reason light tanks aren’t very popular in Dune.
“limpet mine or sticky bomb and you probably have the reason light tanks aren’t very popular in Dune.”
Can you install a shield on the light tank?
If the shield stops explosions INSIDE the shield then a mine does limited harm to a tank. The shield will contain the mine explosion even if the mine enters the shield because the shield is moving slow enough to let everything pass.
If the shield does not contain explosions inside the shield then the obvious infantry weapon is a grenade. Throw a grenade into the shield, it´s slow enough to pass the shield, and explodes inside.
Even if the shield does contain explosions, you could throw something else noxious into the shield. Like a Molotov cocktail. It´s not doing harm with its kinetic energy but with heat. Unlike a javelin, you cannot throw it back – once it´s broken and burning liquid spills on the target and ground around the target, cannot be picked up or shaken off.
if you can shield infantry and Ornithopters (which the new film did rather well btw) you can probably shield a tank. the question becomes “just what can a tank do on the battlefield?” since tanks can’t do melee and guns are next to useless outside of arrakis. so if they are shielded they’re expensive mobile paperweights, and if they aren’t shielded they’re going to get sliced up by carefully aimed lasguns.
i suspect that all the houses make use of ground transport of one sort or another to move their troops around, but once battle commences it’s infantry with melee weapons that dominate.
Run enemy infantry over? As our esteemed host suggests, formation fighting with armoured infantry* should be the norm in a melee fight given its numerous advantages over what was shown in Dune, but a motor vehicle can be easily armoured to be impervious to melee weapons and be able to run over an arbitrary number of people. After all, what is a kinetic energy weapon other than a sufficiently mobile paperweight?
*Discounting the existence of power armor bulky and powerful enough to stop tanks
Pike with a bomb on the end. Slowly poke it inside the enemy’s shield.
Used in the “Rats, Bats, and Vats” humorous SF series by Eric Flint
Self-igniting (hypergolic) Molotov cocktails are a thing and were used by the French resistance during the 1944 Paris insurrection.
It’s worth pointing out that modern fighters are better compared to world war two heavy bombers than fighters. The F-35A has a maximum take off weight of around 65,000 lbs, which is about the same as a B-17 or B-24. The F-35 carries 18,000 lbs of internal fuel. A fully loaded P-47 (the biggest single engine fighter of the war by a considerable margin) weighs about 17,000 lbs. An Me 109 was more like 8,000 lbs.
If you want a history of fighter jets, you can start here (part 3 forthcoming):
https://www.navalgazing.net/Fighter-Generations-Part-1
https://www.navalgazing.net/Fighter-Generations-Part-2
WWII heavy bombers were still mass-action weapons, and manufactured by the thousand to support this approach. Individual raids used hundreds, and in several cases over a thousand.
My own father was trained to be part of a Lancaster crew, and was within a couple of weeks of starting his Tour of Deployment when VE Day intervened.
Military aircraft today are individual-action or small-group-action weapons. In terms of quantites (and costs) they probably equate more closely to small WWII Naval vessels than to any WWII aircraft.
“Military aircraft today are individual-action or small-group-action weapons. In terms of quantites (and costs) they probably equate more closely to small WWII Naval vessels than to any WWII aircraft.”
Yes – it’s interesting to look at different classes of hardware through the lens of “how much GDP does one of these things cost?”
Capital ships: USS Iowa, $100 million which is roughly 0.1% of US GDP at the time ($102bn). USS Gerald Ford, $13 billion which is a bit less than 0.1% of $19 trillion. Looks cheaper, but the air wing is going to add a bit. (Interestingly, “your capital ship must cost about 0.1% of GDP” seems to hold as far back as the mid-18th century, when HMS Victory was launched.)
Surface combatants are trickier because their functions are so different, but a Fletcher-class destroyer in 1940 was about $6 million (sixty millionths of GDP, let’s invent a name for that unit and call it a Hopkins) and a Burke is about $2 billion (a hundred Hopkinses). Of course you could say that a Burke is more like a light cruiser, which would be closer to $10 million in 1940 – exactly the same, also 100 Hopkinses.
Tanks: M4 Sherman, about $50k, which is half a Hopkins. M1A2 Abrams, about $20m, which is about one Hopkins.
Fighters: P-36, also about $50k, half a Hopkins as well. But the F-22 is closer to $200m, so as a share of GDP it’s way higher – ten Hopkinses.
Bombers: a B-24 cost about $250k, or five fighters, or 2.5 Hopkinses. A B-2 cost about $2 billion in 1997, or 100 Hopkinses.
So fighters have got far more expensive, and bombers have got even more expensive than fighters, and everything else has stayed… roughly the same?
” “your capital ship must cost about 0.1% of GDP” seems to hold as far back as the mid-18th century”
The capital ship is supposed to be armored and weaponed to fight anything else on the seas. This still holds true, the armor and weapons are the air wing. Speed isn’t as much of a consideration.
This means they’re really expensive, so much so that only the largest economies can actually build and operate one. Or more to the point, you want more than one if you’re really serious about using it.
I think that 0.1% GDP each ends up being the most expense that the largest economies can afford while still building enough capital ships to be worth deploying. Anything less expensive tends to suffer in performance enough to not be a good idea.
Air Force aircraft have the odd problem that they take so long to develop that a new government comes in. Who usually cut down the number of aircraft ordered, making each one more expensive (since development costs get amortized over the whole line). Which compounds the expense, etc. Not to mention change orders, of which there will be many more over 20 years of development than 2. Fewer new aircraft types also means that people get the bright idea of making the ones being developed cover more missions, which makes development cost more and take longer, and more change orders.
We see this in ships too – see the last three types. Likely also why nothing has replaced the Abrams in…I think it’s 40 years now. Just new models of the same tank. And I don’t think they’re different tanks that have the same name to confuse people.
The Abrams has undergone two pretty substantial revisions in that time, plus a large number of smaller refits, and apparently has a new major variant underway. I don’t know of any substantial efforts to create a new MBT, though a lot of other vehicle development projects have foundered.
Yes I knew about the revisions. But they’re not substantial enough to call the tank something else.
It may be playing name games to get things approved that otherwise would have more problems (“Oh, it’s only a revision…”) of course. I don’t know enough about procurement to comment.
I suppose the acid test would be if the tools and procedures are close enough between revisions to require minimal replacement and training for the new versions. Are they?
@ozajh
Sort of. If you look at pictures of, say, the F-35 factory today they look a lot like the heavy bomber factories of ww2. Long lines of partially built aircraft surrounded by scaffolds. And they pretty much have to be built that way because they’re similarly sized objects, bigger than a person, smaller than a house, weighing tens of thousands of pounds. (see here for a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW1-3cJyhlg)
Ships are a lot bigger and heavier. A fully loaded B-29 was twice the weight of any other ww2 aircraft, and it was 60 tons. The tiny flower class corvette was nearly 1,000 tons, and a frontline destroyer was more like 3,000.
Now, in terms of electronic widgets you have a point. By the end of world war two that destroyer was packed with multiple radars, extremely sophisticated optics and range finders, multiple radios, torpedoes, guidance computers, and more, all of which was cutting edge electronics. The fighter had…a radio. And maybe a gyroscopic gunsight. Today we do cram all that stuff into fighters, but size still dictates production
@ajay
Air groups in front line US carriers are about the same size (80+) today as in 1945, but, the relative cost per aircraft is a lot higher today than in 1945. An essex class cost ~80 million, and its air group was maybe 6 million, probably less. That’s ~7% of the cost of the carrier. Meanwhile the modern group costs about ~6.2 billion, or nearly 50% the cost of the Ford.
And really, that understates the change, because of how bad we’ve gotten at ship building in the last 20 years. Ford cost 13 billion, but Ronald Reagan (the last nimitz class, finished in 2003) cost about 7.5 billion, adjusted for inflation.
You’re also overstating the cost of bombers though, the B-2s were that expensive because the production run was truncated after 21 aircraft instead of the 75+planned. The B-21 is, somewhat miraculously, relatively on budget and is slated to cost 700 million per, compared to around 100-150 million for a frontline fighter.
Bear in mind, that math is very rough. All numbers about planes are lies but numbers about plane costs are ESPECIALLY lies.
“Air groups in front line US carriers are about the same size (80+) today as in 1945, but, the relative cost per aircraft is a lot higher today than in 1945. An essex class cost ~80 million, and its air group was maybe 6 million, probably less. That’s ~7% of the cost of the carrier. Meanwhile the modern group costs about ~6.2 billion, or nearly 50% the cost of the Ford.”
Thanks for the numbers – so, in fact, the USS Iowa and the USS Ford plus air group both come in at pretty much the same cost of a thousand Hopkins.
Point taken about the B-21 though I don’t think it affects the conclusion very much – $700 million is 35 Hopkins today, compared to 2.5 Hopkins for a B-24. And meanwhile fighters have gone from 0.5 to 10 Hopkins.
I think an under-appreciated aspect of Dune society is assassins. Leto I’s mentat is Master of Assassins, implying they had a team of them. One of the first threats Paul faves is assassination. In later books assassination attempts occur.
Part of Dune society is power to a point. The Bene Gesseret employ this routinely–subtle manipulation focused on applying precisely the right push in precisely the right spot at precisely the right time. Mentats exist to calculate those points (we see several do so in the first book, more in later ones). A society that can predict threats and employ assassins precisely to eliminate them, may be more stable than it would otherwise appear.
That stability would be focused on the good of the Great House, not society as a whole, of course. Thus leading to the need for the Golden Path.
It also would make the Harkonen attack more surprising, in that it violated the expectations of the society. A society of assassins doesn’t need a huge army, and won’t expect one.
i personally suspect that the idea that the social system of the empire is stable is a falsehood brought on what those within it perceive it to be, and that it’s actually in constant danger of falling apart except for the behind the scenes manipulations of the Spacing Guild and Bene gesserit.
the spacing guild in particular seems to fill most of the role of the bureaucracy.. they don’t just move cargos around but also manage the entire economy via CHOAM, manage essential advanced technologies like weather control, seem to handle all day to day interstellar communications.. which is what gives them the political power that they can demand the Emperor do things, and the emperor is scared to refuse.
I think your first paragraph misses the forest for the trees a bit, when it comes to what it means for a society to be stable.
It doesn’t matter what exact mechanism keeps the system from changing to a new one. If it keeps working for thousands of years, then the system is extremely stable
“the spacing guild in particular seems to fill most of the role of the bureaucracy..”
There are Minor Houses noted in Dune (by Leto, who specifically says that on Dune they’d be enemies to a man), who work on a planet to manage stuff in on-planet. My guess is that these are not highly regarded by the Major Houses, and thus would be viewed as stillsuit manufacturers rather than actual nobility. I think they handle the bureaucracy more than the Spacing Guild. At least in Dune, the Spacing Guild seems to mostly handle interstellar travel–which is not nothing, it’s a HUGE thing in fact, but still isn’t everything. If they allied too strongly with a single house it could still go badly for them. Interstellar communication was “man with note”, so they’d naturally control that as well.
I don’t think the Spacing Guild had much say on CHOAM. That’s managed by the Great Houses, with different houses getting directorships at various times.
The Bene Gesserit were in favor of stability, at least until they wanted to disrupt things. Remember, their main goal was a long-term breeding program, and stability allowed them to do it. Chaos would disrupt breeding (something that becomes a plot point in later books).
Going back to the Minor Houses, this would be fitting with the sort of low-state-capacity pseudo-Medieval setting Herbert was going for. The Emperor delegates administration of planets/systems to the Great Houses, who in turn delegate administration to Minor Houses, and on down the line until you get to a scale one person can reasonably manage. So a Duke wasn’t ruling a planet; he was ruling a confederation of people, each of whom ruled a part of the planet. The Emperor had certain authority over the Great Houses (limited, but there), but doesn’t appear to have had any over Minor Houses (which aren’t mentioned very much). Sort of like how the area that would become German was ruled for a long time. This would allow for a stable yet chaotic society. What I mean is, it allows for a lot of intrigue and bloodshed within the society, but because anyone who takes over a fief is going to be just another nobleman within a pre-established hierarchy such things won’t threaten the society. You see this in Dune as well: Leto going renegade would be a threat to his House, but not to the Empire. Some other House would take over the holdings. Even Paul wasn’t really a threat to the society. He radically increased the power of the Emperor, but it was a difference in scale not kind. Leto II was the one who really overthrew the order that existed within the book “Dune”.
Your comparison to the medieval/early modern Holy Roman Empire works very well for me. The Great Houses in Dune aren’t sovereign independent states, they’re nominally all part of one larger social structure and thus limited in some ways.
About spears vs swords: I hope that historical “fans” nowadays finally stop thinking “spears beat swords” and “”swords=useless”.
It wont stop me, because I like polearms, whether they’re spears, halberds, or a stick on a stick.
I think that Devereaux’s usage here is reasonable if we understand him to be including shields alongside body armour in the “armour” category; without any sort of protection, half-pikes really do seem to be dominant weapons. You might not get that much sword-work because the mingling of spears would be very decisive, like a Napoleonic bayonet charge.
With armour (and nixing the air-cycling business entirely, the shields just mostly block it and people carry oxygen canisters and can only stay under shield for so long, like a U-boat needing to resurface) the ideal is using captive-bolt guns; the issue is that those still require a certain length to function, so you’re probably going to get splendid misfires as the rear of the shaft gets driven into an unmovable object and the section past the shield is shorn off without inheriting any velocity. So probably mostly man-catcher style stuff and glues, caustics, etc.
Dr. Devereaux writes: “Now what we see of the Harkonnen does not suggest their warriors are well trained – the Harkonnen military is a quantity-over-quality military, attempting to leverage its industrial capabilities to the degree it can to make up for what seem like poorly motivated and trained soldiers – but the fact that such performance gaps are possible is notable.”
I observe that it is by no means unprecedented for a strikingly small force of “crack troops” to be able to ‘overwhelm’ a much larger but poorly motivated army if that army has a single leader or small group of leaders without whom their cause is lost and there is no point in further fighting. If the two legions of Sardaukar preparing for the invasion of Atreides-held Arrakis wanted to defeat the ten legions of their Harkonnen co-belligerents, they would not have to personally kill each individual man in the larger force. All they would have to do is rush and “cut through” to reach Baron Harkonnen and any of his immediate heirs present on the field.
Once they were demonstrably dead or hostages, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Harkonnen army would stand down. For the Harkonnen troops to fight on then would be useless, since the Harkonnen cause itself would be an empty cipher. The Sardaukar would have won, and the fighting would end unless the Harkonnen troops were fanatical loyalists willing to die purely to avenge their lords. To avenge their lords against the foot-soldiers that had killed them, not even against the distant emperor responsible for the deed.
So all that is necessary is that the Sardaukar be skilled enough and also fanatical enough to accept heavy losses cutting through to Baron Harkonnen under circumstances where he realistically cannot escape (because he is on a ship or because the army would scatter into easily destroyed fragments after their leader fled the field). Then the numbers of the Harkonnen troops, who are not that type of fanatic, are likely to stop mattering.
Woohoo Dune!
I wonder if some of the ‘why is there no bureaucracy’ challenge might be handwaveable by expanding the idea that human training has not only become phenomenally capable+expensive beyond military means.
Perhaps practically everything that exists beneath the Great Houses (of which we only get the tiniest of glimpses) operates on a similar practice of training humans to super-human ability in their one specific craft. If this operates like an apprenticeship and/or family business, then you end up with a million different ‘little houses’ that themselves are fairly resistant to extraction as they’re all fairly irreplaceable lynchpins. A society of craftsmen, from top (warfare) to the bottom (I was going to say water transporter, but this is Arrakis we’re talking about).
You could sort of support this vision using the banquet scene. Perhaps it’s not ‘stillsuit manufacturer (random guy that happens to own a factory)’ but ‘stillsuit manufacturer (borderline-irreplaceable superhumanly-trained craftsman-head-of-little-house’. It also very literally mirrors the ‘every man has a place and every man in his place’ approach of the Faufreluches.
This does rather open the question of just what the Harkonnens being ‘industrialised’ means, but that could easily be a comparable term to the other Great Houses.
Would this approach end up with something more long-term stable? No idea. It would certainly inhibit much technological development by effectively silo-ing all sorts of different professions from one another (potentially including administration).
It’d also be a fragile system where the deaths of specific portions of the population could have catastrophic effects for the function of society, thus incentivising the sort of wars-of-assassination and highly ritualised small-scale warfare that we see. It would also make it very difficult for anyone to
My read on the setting is that CHOAM and its associated conglomerates essentially function as the kind of administrative bureaucracy and infrastructure the Houses rely on to function. It is telling that a big part of a House’s status is tied to their presence on the CHOAM board of directors (and, I presume, their stocks/stock options tied to that position).
The books make oblique reference to Houses “skimming” CHOAM profits for their own gains, which implies that this is at least a significant – if not the primary – resource of a House’s income.
I had some similar ideas, at minimum I wouldn’t be surprised if the bureaucracy are heavily staffed by people with Mentat-adjacent abilities, meaning you can have 10 people who are superhumanly good at tracking balance sheets and reading reports, instead of 1000 normal people. Or that because thinking machines are outlawed, instead of a fully automated assembly line where machine arm tie together carbon fiber composites, you have superhuman craftsmen who can do micrometer precision with their hands, or individually manufacture shield generator circuitry on a custom piece by piece basis like a blacksmith making a sword.
Yeah that’s how I was picturing it. Craftsmen as mentats are to present-day administrative assistants.
“(in Frank Herbert’s universe, seemingly always men)”
Well, for the first few books… Then we get into Fish Speakers and Honored Matres and all that latter era dune stuff people usually like to forget
i think that’s largely a product of the IRL times that Frank Herbert lived in. i mean he started writing the book in 1961 and published it in 1965. while that’s in the middle of the Women’s Liberation Movement, he would have grown up with a lot of very male centric social ideas around him. which would have influenced his writing even if he wasn’t a social conservative (which he was).
It’s also a product of Herbert believing in a form of gender essentialism that would have been considered on the, let’s call them “traditional”, side of social views even in the early 1960s.
Now I need to both read and watch Dune… it’d help me understand this series of posts better.
You’re in for a treat. They’re very good. I’d personally start with the book, then the films. The films are very good, but I still hold that no-one has actually done Dune quite properly.
Villeneuve came very close, but personally I think he screwed it up by making the Harkonnens look as inhuman as he did. One of the major things I got from the books was the suggestion of just how normal the Harkonnens were. Not necessarily in their actions (those were very depraved), but in the way that it was believable that normal people could be goaded and encouraged to do those things by the manipulations of the Baron. The rest of the Harkonnen troops were as much victims of the Baron as the Atreides were (not that this absolves them of blame).
The insightful commentary on the dangerousness of charismatic manipulative leadership in that interplay completely disappears when you dehumanise the Harkonnens, even just a little bit. People need to see them as regular people for it to work.
Agree, although Villeneuve isn’t nearly as bad as the Lynch movie was in this regard. The Harkonnens or the Emperor are not the “bad guys” who need to be overthrown to restore peace and justice, it’s the entire system of faufreluches and great houses.
Frank Herbert pointed out in an interview that even Leto I, Paul’s father, is an absolute dictator, not a good guy.
It probably says something about me that I saw the Lynch Harkonnens as more believably human than the Villeneuve ones, but I’m not sure what…
Agreed that they’re not really ‘the bad guys’. They are guys that are broadly bad, and Leto is at least superficially an improvement…but not by an amount that’s actually appreciable.
Though I feel Herbert was a little more subtle with that last point, and a bit more bluntness could have saved him from having to clarify it in interviews. Though I have not written a seminal science fiction work, so I’m hardly qualified to criticise.
@Fish on Land, the rabbit hole (warren?) you are about to enter is very, very deep. You have been warned 🙂
Like Ynneadwraith I would recommend reading the book (Dune, single volume) first; but I’m old and that’s how I got into Dune. Watching the first two Villeneuve Dune movies and then reading the book (assuming you liked the movies) would probably work just as well. Plenty of younger Lord of the Rings fans seem to have started with the movies first, then books, and enjoyed them both.
Try to watch the Dune movies on the biggest screen you can. The title is a type of landscape, not a person or an event, and it matters to the story.
You can stop after reading Dune if you want, it’s a self contained story. You don’t **have** to read the others, just as if you’ve read LOTR, you don’t have to read the Silmarillion.
If you do keep reading, “Dune Messiah” and “Children of Dune” are the direct sequels and you would need to read them both. Again, you could stop there. After that “God Emperor of Dune” jumps forward a few thousand years and is mostly new characters, but it does assume you’ve read the earlier books. Then there’s another big time jump and the books end with “Heretics / Chapter House of Dune”, a single story released as two books and again mostly new characters.
On the visual side, there’s the SciFi miniseries-es (whatever the plural of series is) “Dune” and “Children of Dune” from the early 2000s, noteworthy for their amazing costumes and unfortunately cheap CGI.
And finally there is the movie “Dune” from 1984, directed by David Lynch. It is … legendary … in it’s own way. I won’t spoil it.
Also, Frank Herbert’s son wrote a Butlerian Jihad prequel series, a Leto I series, and a sequel series, but uh there’s a reason we’re currently mostly pretending they don’t exist.
As an addendum to this comment, Dune is the best of the series, although Dune Messiah and Children of Dune are both really good. However, if you stop at Children of Dune the ending isn’t really satisfying, so as a result I advise that you continue on to God-Emperor of Dune. It’s a bit uneven, with Herbert letting out a bit more of his id than was probably wise, but it works as an ending to the series.
However, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune are both pretty bad, and end on a cliffhanger to boot. Skip them, and confine yourself to the first four books. You’ll be glad you did.
I think the shield thing could work if it was assumed to be microporous. Oxygen molecules are quite small, and it seems extremely difficult to meaningfully wound someone with an 0.5 nm diameter weapon. There’s been a lot of work on microporous materials for gas seperation.
“difficult to meaningfully wound someone with an 0.5 nm diameter weapon”
My granddad use to kill snakes with blanks. It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the kinetic energy. The bullet is just an easy way to transmit that kinetic energy but alternatives can be found.
The missing piece could be access to space travel. If the spacing guild are restricted in who they deal with on each planet, it would become impossible for the richece to supplant their great house, without cutting their planet off from the rest of civilisation.
That’s even better than my thoughts on this. I was thinking violent asymmetric retaliation. E.g every planet deposing their Landsraat rulers will be annihilated by nuclear weapons. The Faufreluch reason behind is that those planets now own nuclear weapons without being bound by Faufreluch, which makes them a threat. In that way, the great house “protect” their planet by pledging not to use their nuclear weapons against those who could annihilate the planet.
One way to approximate a better solution would be to say that the shields generate a force field, which, when activated, does not allow any macroscopic object to pass through, with the boundary set at crc. 60 daltons to allow most air components to pass thrpufg What can pass through: Electromagnetic radiation: visible light (sunlight, etc), radio, infrared (heat), ultraviolet, X-rays, Gamma rays, etc; Other kinds of radiation: alpha particles (helions), beta particles (electrons), neutrons, neutrinos, etc; Substances in liquid, gaseous or plasma phase, composed of particles (atoms, ions, molecules) with a mass less than or equal to 60 daltons: almost all air components, water, salt (in solution), etc.
What’s important to the limit is that it has to has to be lower than most chemical weapons to prevent gassing, lowest i know is molecular chlorine (70-74), and lower than nuclear blast fallout / radioactive fission products (lowest i know of is germanium 76). It has to allow carbon dioxide (44-50) and probably ozone (48-54). So 55-69 is the range.
I do not think fluorine (36) has ever been used as a war gas but it is highly toxic.
CO has the same molecular mass as N2. And HCN has lower molecular mass.
On the ‘training requirements as an army size limiting factor’: as I understand it shouldn’t reduce the numbers available to these levels. Many different types of society have easily been able to separate off 2% of their population as full-time warriors. Whether they’re training the whole time or not is broadly irrelevant to their economic burden.
A heavy training and performance requirement does two things it somewhat reduces the number available for active service and it makes it much harder to replace losses.
On the former, assuming let’s assume this style of fighting is like an incredibly demanding sport. Let’s assume all soldiers are trained intensively – full-time – for *20 years*, from 8 to 28 (I’m not aware of any physical activity requiring more training), and they then serve from 28 to 35, the peak physical years, moving to instructor duties thereafter. They never have to do anything else and live to 80 years old. (Incidentally the books suggest that retired soldiers can do productive work elsewhere, so this is too strict)
Even with this regime 100 million people could field 200,000 men at peak condition, so maybe 5x as many as the books imply, assuming Giedi Prime has a population of 1 billion or more. However it would make a House Army *irreplaceable*, if you lose it on another planet then it’s 20 years at the earliest before you’ve fully replaced it with trained men (English with longbow,en and steppe nomads with horse archers had similar issues).
A fascinating analysis.
I do have one quibble. You get your full army back in 7 years. 1/7 in 1 year when the 27 year old in the training pipeline reach 28, another 1/7 in year 2 when the 26 year olds reach 28, etc.
But this does not invalidate the core of your argument.
The other question is whether or not the Great Houses can trust 2% of the population- is the limiting factor total population or reliable population?
Handful of notes, from someone who’s had a professional interest in Dune details:
– It’s commonly (near-universally) assumed that the Atreides are a big powerful house, but book one page 53 (in the version I have), Hawat to Paul: “[…] your father’s House isn’t one of the big rich ones, lad. You know that.”
– It’s also commonly believed/asserted/assumed that lasgun-shield interactions always produce a nuclear-scale blast, but page 264, Jessica: “A lasgun-shield explosion was a dangerous variable, could be more powerful than atomics, could only kill the gunner and his shielded target.”
– The only line I can find where Leto discusses equipping the Fremen is p81, “It’ll require patience to exploit them secretly and wealth to equip them properly.” I can’t recall or immediately find anything else about the cost of shields specifically beyond a note that the Harkonnen spent a lot on shield replacements and parts while they were on Arrakis.
Finally, for anyone wanting to understand how Dune came to be what it is: one major piece is this interview [http://www.sinanvural.com/seksek/inien/tvd/tvd2.htm], which suggests that the initial impulse was based in the ecology and manipulation of sand dunes; the other major piece is The Sabres of Paradise by Lesley Blanch, which Herbert had clearly read by the time he wrote Dune (there is no other plausible explanation for the use of the word “sietch” that I can see) and which clearly *heavily* informs the Fremen and many related aspects of the Dune setting.
Thank you for the interview link. New to me.
I wonder if your discussion of the faufreluches you underestimate the effects of a) Widespread use of drugs (I’m sure there are more drugs than spice) to maintain individual physical and emotional stability, and b) Centuries of genetic manipulation to produce desired (slave-)classes. I think you have assumed that individuals throughout the population are, perhaps like us, capable of what the members of the Great Houses are capable of knowing and thinking, and I think this is misreading the society that Herbert has created. People are controlled through genetics, ideologies (not late 20th century capitalism), and drugs. I think an analysis of the viability of such a society needs to place these things front and centre rather than the (economic) forces that we believe shape our society.
As for the “why not use lasguns as nuclear attacks against your opponents’ palace”, I do remember the text saying that a lasgun-shield explosion looks for all intents and purposed like a regular nuclear explosion, plus that there is a MAD-principle going on.
A house using lasguns like that will at some point be found out and their planet(s) nuked by the Landsraad’s and Emperor’s nukes.
Ya, that’s the explanation, that it would make it look like a great house has used atomics and they would immediately be exterminated by the Saurdies and the Great Houses. It really doesn’t pass anything more than a superficial inspection and actually pretty much makes shields obsolete when you think about it for more than a minute. I like our pedantic host’s solution, it’s much cleaner that the way Herbert concocted it
Unless access to lasguns is very tightly controlled you run the risk of a disturbed individual with a grudge against the local Great House getting their hands on one, aiming it at the local (shielded) palace, setting a timer and leaving the vicinity.
It may fizzle, it may not, but there is always a possibility of an earth shattering ka-boom.
I appreciate this very much. I love Dune (original/Encyclopedia, not what the wiki calls Expanded Dune by ~~the king’s stupid son~~ Brian), but it is extremely a vibes setting, through all its genre transformations, and many things do not work considered directly. The lasgun specifically always stood out (and I never was sure what the narrative purpose was, vs. projectiles; perhaps it was for Fedaykin to be suicide bombers later.)
A couple corrections:
– Bene Gesserit are capable of momentary super-strength. This probably does not peak high enough to penetrate steel plate but as we see it, it almost certainly could easily penetrate mail in one try, and we do not see them try against plate. This is a secret ability and it’s unlikely anyone else can do it, not even whatever a “Swordmaster of Ginaz” is.
– “Large, administration-heavy bureaucratic organizations” are in violation of the code established by the Butlerian Jihad.[1] Not because they need thinking machines, but because they are systems that are impersonal and machine-like. “Death panels” are a good analogy. The philosophy is captured pretty well by Charlie Chaplin’s monologue, except more concerned with bloodless administrators than brutes:
> Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!
– I think you’re somewhat overselling the single-person dependence on Duncan Idaho. As I read it, he’s creating a customized training program, including secret battle language and tactics, which can be taught to dozens who can teach dozens themselves, amounting to thousands if that’s as far as it goes and hundreds of thousands if there’s a third level before it breaks down. If the language encodes patterns of thought to make the training stick, which since The Voice exists seems likely to be possible, I think three layers is likely and four (millions) quite possible.
– You cannot be depicting the structure of rule as Herbert intended, because we know from Leto’s words (to Paul) that he puts substantial effort into propaganda among the masses. At minimum among people like the spice miners (who could theoretically be a fairly elite class of fortune-seeking second sons) but implied to be broadly. Feyd-Rautha’s duel suggests establishing reputation to Giedan masses is also considered important, but less clearly.
My overall conclusion is that industry is much weaker than you suppose and correspondingly population is much smaller than you suppose. A large army of 300,000 is still very small, but it seems likely that the Red Army’s ten million represents the *total potential militia* of a planet; they just are not very populous.[2] Industry is not handicrafts, but it’s closer to handicrafts than the 20th century sees for almost anything ‘industrial’ but garment-worker’s sweatshops. They support armies that look premodern because their economies *are* premodern, because there’s a religious prohibition on modern economies. I don’t know whether tha makes them stable; I expect not. But we do know the masses matter, in theory, from the propaganda operation.
[1]This philosophy is described only vaguely in the original books, but the Dune Encyclopedia elaborates a great deal, in one of the portions believed to be written by Frank Herbert himself under a pseudonym (we know there are some but not which), and in light of that the evidence in the originals coheres pretty strongly. They object not only to making machine which are minds but to making minds into machines and making machines out of minds. (The latter is what a bureaucracy fundamentally is, in my view. Unlike Butlerians I don’t object.) Whether any actual AGIs fought on the other side is unclear; the Encyclopedia tells us that uploads existed (such as Holtzmann) but is uninterested in exploring who the other side were, beyond cruel and ‘inhuman’ in a sense that suggests most were inhumane humans.
[2]Arrakeen and Carthag represent most of the non-Fremen population of Arrakis. Compare to Australia, where 40% live in Greater Sydney or Melbourne, 65% if you include the next three metros. Lots of wasteland much more habitable than even the inside-Shield-Wall parts of outlying Arrakis; everyone huddled along the coasts anyway.
“Large, administration-heavy bureaucratic organizations” are in violation of the code established by the Butlerian Jihad.”
The Spacing Guild has to be a large organization, as it has many huge Heighliners needing crew and maintenance personnel. CHOAM looks to me to be a large organization as well. And their nature seems to be administrative.
As for your claims that industry doesn’t exist in this universe because of the Butlerian Jihad, I don’t see any evidence in the books. The Orange Catholic Bible says “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”, it doesn’t say “Thou shalt not use machine tools”. People in the books have no issue with high tech like ornithopters, space ships or shields, as long as they don’t use anything close to AI.
The industry in the sietches is indeed very workshop-like, but I don’t think the Fremen represent the wider Empire regarding industry.
The idea that industry doesn’t exist is directly contradicted by pretty much every book outside of “Dune”. IX is specifically given as a manufacturing world, doing industrial-scale R&D as well as building Highliners and other advanced technology, culminating in the No-ships. Then you have the Bene Tlelaxu, who use bioengineering but still have the axlotl tanks, which become critical in the later books. Giedi Prime is mentioned as an industrial world as well. And there’s sufficient manufacturing to make the spice harvesters and associated equipment, which are most comparable to huge mining equipment in our world. There are hunter-seekers, advanced computer displays (computers exist, they just aren’t intelligent), laser guns, explosives associated with industrial warfare, various poisons (which require advanced technology to manufacture), ornithopters, glowglobes, suspensor belts, shields–all of which need to be manufactured.
So yeah, there’s plenty of industry. We just don’t see it because it’s not what the characters focus on. I mean, how often does Star Trek discuss toilets?
While I do agree that these things were made, I think we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming that they must be made in the manner that we make them (e.g. big industrialised factories). Especially considering that there appears to be a widespread social stigma against machines and automation (even if it’s automated processes involving people).
They could be creating these things on what is effectively an artisanal-apprenticeship master-craftsman model. No big factories, just lots of individual workshops where one bloke/blokette and their family specialise in creating that one particular thing they’ve always created. ‘A place for every man and every man in his place’.
We are told that Ix and Giedi Prime are ‘industrial worlds’ but given no frame of reference as to what ‘industry’ means, or what they’re being compared to.
I’m imagining something like a more extreme version of the way that Italian industry seems to be (mostly) divvied up between innumerable small family outfits rather than being consolidated into big conglomerates.
Is it as efficient as the alternative? Probably not. Does that matter in a monopoly as extensive as that presented in Dune? Not particularly.
“We are told that Ix and Giedi Prime are ‘industrial worlds’ but….”
If we’re just going to ignore the text there’s no point in this discussion. There’s nothing to ground it, no standard for evidence, and therefore no possibility of coming to any sort of agreement. You can simply arbitrarily discard any evidence that contradicts your viewpoint.
To be clear, you CAN discard SOME textual evidence in a discussion like this without breaking the necessary foundation of such a discussion. If you can provide evidence that the characters or narrator are lying when they say these things, or are mistaken, we can dismiss them. A great example is early views of the axlotl tanks–pretty much everything anyone says about them in the early books can be dismissed because it’s speculative and wrong. I see no evidence that this is the case with IX or Giedi Prime. In fact, I would argue that Frank Herbert’s style precludes such interpretations. At least in terms of plot he’s very up-front, such as having the Baron lay out his precise plan early in “Dune” (the philosophy is more obscure). And there’s simply nothing in the text to justify arguing that everyone is lying about manufacturing in the Empire.
For my part, when LITERALLY EVERYONE in the story is describing IX as heavily industrial, and the products (which, remember, include mutli-kilometer starships) require an industrial facility. You can’t manufacture starships via an artisanal model, for several reasons. First, scale: Artisanal production is small-batch, not 50,000,000 parts per lot. Second, consistency: Artisanal production is typified by a high degree of variance. Give two crocheters the same pattern and they’ll produce different end products. That doesn’t work with advanced machinery, which requires consistency in order to deal with the mechanical stresses the machine will inevitably encounter. And while you can argue that every ship, even today, is fundamentally artisanal in nature, the stuff going into the ship (the physical materials, the armor and wires and bolts and rivets and such), and the stuff making the ship (the cranes and welding machines and haul trucks and all the rest) is going to be factory-made.
As for people, again, literally everyone says the same things. IX pushes the limits of the Butlerian Jihad’s prohibition against thinking machines, as well as providing extensive equipment for other Great Houses throughout the series. Giedi Prime is actually worse for your argument–in later books we see the after-effects of the heavy industry, the cleanup efforts and the social impacts of thousands of years of stratified industry. All of this is consistent; these are planets with large-scale industrial economies. (We directly see these in the posthumous books. While these are generally not considered cannon, they ARE based on Frank’s notes, and thus can serve to indicate general ideas, even if we discard the details.)
There’s also the fact that in “God-Emperor of Dune” the characters specifically point out the return to an artisanal culture as a flaw in Leto II’s empire. Duncan Idaho doesn’t object as strongly as his companion, but the loss of large-scale industrial manufacturing was felt by many in the Empire.
Ships were built on a relatively artisanal model for most of history (Venice’s Arsenal was considered exceptional!). Starships are bigger, yes. But you could probably do things that way too.
I think in general with fiction we should assume the normal and standard unless otherwise specified.
If Herbert didn’t mention how industrial processes worked in the Dune universe, we can assume it’s more or less like in reality.
Otherwise you can just fill in anything outlandish. They could produce stuff by casting spells. Or by growing products through crystallized psychic energy (see WH40K Eldar). Or using nanomachines. Or using artisanal workshops
Is it possible that that’s what Herbert had in mind? We cannot know, as the text doesn’t provide any evidence.
Robert, he literally does tell us that explicitly. He tells us that Fremen make their own stillsuits entirely from products of the desert, using entirely portable facilities, and that these stillsuits are nonetheless much higher quality, more reliable, than the equivalents made in the settled lands. If tolerances are better with the shittiest conditions and tools imaginable, making them artisanally, then the competition must not be benefitting from industrial processes.
Those examples are also both expressly in violation of Butlerian norms. Ix is constantly testing the edge of what they can get away with in a Butlerian society and have been for centuries; nearly every mention of them through GEoD notes this. The Tleilaxu are similar, heavier on secrecy and ambiguity about what they’re doing, and also are very much artisanal rather than industrial – a single “axolotl tank” (one human female body) is capable of making geopolitically-relevant quantities of spice in Chapterhouse: Dune, and the viewpoint chapters for the Tleilaxu master show him to consider it a sacred calling to be done personally, not farmed out.
I think in the Dune encyclopedia it was mentioned that there are monomolecular weapons in Dune. Crysknifes are monomolecular. Shigawire is monomolecular. I think it would be strange if the Great Houses didn’t have monomolecular blades as well.
But if there are monomolecular blades, then that negates the usefulness of armor entirely. It’s just extra weight.
Also knives might be preferred over shields since shields don’t actually care if you are moving slow if the other person is moving fast. Speed is relative. A long weapon could be slapped away with impunity even with a bare hand.
Grappling might also be difficult if shields are frictionless.
I think a lot about hand to hand combat in Dune might be explained with monomolecular blades. Crysknives are monomolecular if I remember correctly. Shigawire is monomolecular. I don’t think it’s out of the question that the Great Houses would have monomolecular blades as well. But with monomolecular blades, armor is just dead weight and shields are the only truly effective protection.
Shields also probably don’t care about the speed of your weapon. Only the speed relative to itself. So it doesn’t matter how slow you’re moving a weapon, an unshielded hand moving fast is going to be enough to parry it. That would probably make long weapons less useful.
Shields being frictionless would explain a lack of grappling as well.
In Chapter 4 when Gurney Halleck and Paul were sparring it is mentioned that “He (Paul) felt the field crackling as shield edges touched and repelled each other …”.
Since shields repellend each other that would work against grappling. The passage also shows them fighting with rapier and knife.
It would certainly make grappling more difficult, but it might still be viable to use that force to grapple with. You’d effectively be using the repelling of the shields to force your opponent into a position they can’t escape from.
It might take multiple people to restrain another person, but I expect it would still function.
Huh. That might make sense of why imperial troops fight in groups of three (which always seemed arbitrarily weird to me). You need one guy in back to keep each of your front guys from being wedged between two enemies.
I think you could view all epic science fiction as an exercise in using made-up future technology to take a huge, multi-planet conflict and narrow it down so that our individual heroes, making human-scale choices in human-scale fights, can meaningfully resolve it. Star Wars has Jedi, Foundation has psychohistory, Starship Troopers has Mobile Infantry. Battlestar Galactica had everyone else being killed in the pilot. Even 2024 Hugo-award-winner Some Desperate Glory, which was mostly a deconstruction of the space marine trope, still finds a way to make the fate of the galaxy come down to a handful of fighters.
Star Trek is an interesting one because on the surface it doesn’t seem to have this — our intrepid crew comprises ordinary humans (and a few pretty-human-looking aliens) and they’re part of a much larger society. And yet: the nature of the threats encountered each week is such that entire planets live or die based on the actions of one ship.
Each of these uses some combination of a) explicitly justifying the small scale of conflict with advanced technology, and b) narrative misdirection—just don’t call attention to it and keep the audience focused on other things. One bit of misdirection I see done almost ubiquitously is not looking too hard at the propulsion mechanism of space-faring warships. Because, if you’re able to manipulate energy densities of the magnitude you need to accelerate a warship to orbital velocities (which are tens of thousands of mph) it’s hard to see why you can’t use the same tech to accelerate a much smaller body (say a couple of pounds) to a much smaller speed (say 3000 mph) and send that crashing into a shielded human, whose shields are still presumably bound by conservation of energy and momentum. And that’s just the surface; that kind of power density (an order of magnitude beyond what can be done with fuels that rely on chemical reactions to store and release energy) would presumably revolutionize war in a similar way that moving from muscle power to stored chemical energy revolutionized war in the past. So the usual solution in sci-fi stories is… just don’t think about it. Don’t spend too much time describing how the engines work, don’t encourage readers to wonder about what else those energies could be used for, for the love of god don’t imply that at any point in time the rebels could have strapped simple droid pilots to hyperspace drives and send them crashing into imperial cruisers.
I’m a bit off topic here, but what I’m trying to say is that this trope — small-scale interplanetary warfare — is baked into the genre. It’s part of the bedrock that science fiction is built on. I think it’s interesting to look at how the shielding and training lead to these small-scale conflicts, but it’s incomplete without acknowledging that this is the genre. So it’s not just a question of, is the scale here realistic, but a broader question of why do we insist on this type of story in science fiction.
This is why I liked the Honor Harrington books. They work hard at technologically consistent world-building. And — shocking! — they still end up focusing on a few commanders.
While I don’t argue your point, Foundation (at least the original stories) are mostly the *opposite* of that. (*Foundation and Empire* of course being the most extreme version)
Foundation *claims* to be the opposite of that, sure. The background for the story is explicitly that huge societies move according to emergent laws that are far beyond any individual choices.
And yet: the upshot of Hari Seldon’s manipulations is that we’re following a small society, small enough that individual people can have meaningful say in how Terminus is run. And Terminus, we are told, is the most important planet in the galaxy, since the rest of the galaxy is doomed to fall into barbarism by the forces of history but Terminus is going to be the nucleus of a renewed galactic civilization. Azimov has done a bait-and-switch here, and the end result is that we’re following human-scale conflicts that, through science fiction technology, are determining the fate of the galaxy. And that’s before we even get to the Mule or R. Daneel Olivaw!
” and the end result is that we’re following human-scale conflicts that, through science fiction technology, are determining the fate of the galaxy.”
Except that they’re *not* determining the fate of the galaxy. (well, until the Mule at least) They’re just doing their thing while history trudges along in its predetermined path. They do their own things, and in doing so allows us to observe the big stuff, but none of the individuals are significant.
“Except that they’re *not* determining the fate of the galaxy. (well, until the Mule at least) They’re just doing their thing while history trudges along in its predetermined path. They do their own things, and in doing so allows us to observe the big stuff, but none of the individuals are significant.”
Except they *are* determining the fate of the galaxy. The whole point of Seldon´s Plan was that if Seldon hadn´t founded Foundation, no piece of Empire forming by the predetermined path of history could have restored civilization in next 30 000 years.
Foundation getting destroyed in the early Crises would have had effects similar to Foundation never being founded at all. And the individual actions of Salvor Hardin were vital.
Also, note how none of the four Seldon Crises was (actually) predetermined. For the First Crisis, neither was the result.
This is pedantic, but—you seem not to have read Asimov’s story, “Spell My Name With an ‘S’.”
fwiw, I’ve always assumed that Herbert’s goal in Dune was to answer the question: “What would a feudal society look like if transplanted into a science fictional future?” As you note, he did a reasonable job, at least from a storytelling perspective, where entertainment value has equal or greater weight than plausibility.
One thing I’ll be interested to see is how you handle logistics. I don’t think we need to accept the criticism that Arrakis is a marginal *ecosystem* (it isn’t if you look at what Herbert actually wrote about the large areas outside the desert latitudes). But we do need to explore the implications of it being marginal agriculturally (if memory serves, we don’t hear a word about any farmer class, other than some small-scale Fremen food production). Maybe the food is grown in vats in industrial factories, but if so, that should be mentioned prominently, and it isn’t.
Which raises the question: Where are the Harkonnens going to get enough food to feed hundreds of thousands of combatants for the months required to defeat a guerrilla insurgency? Sure, they could ship a couple months of food on Guild Highliners (at an additionally mind-boggling cost), but those ships aren’t going to just sit around waiting for the conflict to be over. So food and other essential military items will have to be transported down to the planet’s surface, where they become highly vulnerable targets: destroy the food supply, and even the Sardaukar aren’t going to fight effectively for very long. Sure, they could take all the inhabitants’ food in the short term, but then they’ll destroy the planet’s economy in a few months. Doubly so if they indulge in cannibalism. (“Soylent green is Fremen!”)
“Maybe the food is grown in vats in industrial factories, but if so, that should be mentioned prominently, and it isn’t.”
Leto mentions this, actually. Specifically, he mentions that because water is so scarce all food process–from the growth vats to food prep stations, plus some others–is carefully and rigorously monitored. So we can assume that a lot of food for the common folk is grown in vats (yeast, algae, that sort of thing) and then manufactured into something edible. This is in contrast to planets like Caladan, which was wet enough to allow large-scale farming (pundi rice). The rich can afford off-world foods, as seen in the banquet scene.
The specific scene is discussing how Dune made the House moral, because they had to work with people instead of poisoning them. It’s one of Leto’s discussions with Paul.
Pardon me if the text contradicts me (it has been a long while since I read Dune), but I always assumed that the Legions of the Emperor/Great Houses are more or less a form of a Retinue for that House; a mobile force tailor-made to be transported by the guild heighliners, and which are under the direct command of the House itself. Meanwhile most planetary troops are Levied from the populace/the richece to essentially defend themselves as subjects of the empire, but formally at the behest of the great house which Stewards them according to the faufreluches.
With that in mind, It becomes completely logical why the Baron and the Emperor gave Arrakis to Leto as a trade for Caladan; it completely uproots the Atreides from the relationships and loyal troops of the planetbound population+richece which kept them safe from a direct Harkonnen/Imperial attack. Without any time to build up similar relationships on Arrakis, House Atreides falls easily.
That certainly fits with the following two observations:
1. The importance placed on the ‘propaganda corps’ by the Duke.
2. The priority with which they attempted to gain the loyalties of the Fremen.
One thing that I thought was a miss, in terms of military technology, in the entire series was dropping rocks on planets from a long way away. If hitting earth with an asteroid can wipe out the dinosaurs, it can’t be very healthy for humans. Surely, if using atomics is forbidden, that also ought to be.
I don’t think the spaceships the Great Houses control are capable of more than surface-to-orbit. They’d need Guild cooperation.
But that’s after 10 millennia of the guild. The books that are chronologically earlier have non-spacefolding ships moving between stars in less time that light would take. Presumably, you could just stick an engine on an asteroid. In fact, one of the Titans does so to make an asteroid her home! It crashes into an inhabited planet, wreaking devastation. So, it was done
Reminds me of a codex entry in one of the Mass Effect games, which lists various weapons of mass destruction by the level of their risk for use by terrorist groups. The familiar nuclear and biological weapons were present, but the highest-risk weapon was simply de-orbiting satellites.
I read a fun article a while back on weaponized asteroids that points out that with the sheer amount of energy it would take to slow down the asteroid from wherever it’s going, redirect it to your target, and push it fast enough to have a significant impact, you’re better off doing virtually anything else. What makes asteroids so dangerous isn’t necessarily the size, it’s that they’re already traveling at such an astronomical speed.
That’s fair unless you have technology that allows you to teleport from one place to another. Then all you have to do it out a Holtzman generator on an asteroid and wait for it to have the right angle to smash into a planet after it folds space. Since you would presumably be moving it within a single solar system, there’s less likelihood of something going wrong with an unguided translation and it doesn’t much matter if it does because it would have no passengers.
I think the answer has to be that (a) the only call for that kind of thing would have been in the Butlerian Jihad, which was before the technology was really figured out and (b) before long, the guild had an effective monopoly on the technology. So there would have been a window when it was feasible, but humanity was not riven by interstellar conflicts at that point.
At the risk of spoiling a twenty-year-old novel, this was used in (rot13) Arvy Nfure’f “Cenqbe Zbba”.
At the risk of spoiling an even older novel — though in this case it’s more a throwaway line than a key plot point, so I won’t bother with rot13 — it’s also used in Iain M. Banks “The Algebraist”. The line, actually more of a paragraph, goes something like,
“Just when they’d thought bygones were bygones, a planet would show up in their system, accompanied by a fleet of moons (it goes on in this vein for a bit, basically describing a planetary-scale shotgun blast), the whole thing traveling close enough to lightspeed that even a particularly wary civilization would only have time to say ‘What the fu–‘ before disappearing in a blaze of radiation.”
Yeah, in the Honor Harrington books, there’s a unilateral declaration by a seemingly capable power that it will exterminate anyone who actually uses the equivalent mechanism. (Attach put an inertia-defeating drive on just about anything, accelerate it to 99% of the speed of light, and let it hit a planet.) and that’s to say nothing of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
My joke rule is that whenever a fantasy or sci-fi story starts talking about centuries and millennia, I mentally divide by ten.
A lot of these stories try to have it both way, where you’ve got to have the mythical grandeur of very long-lived and stable political orders (or sometimes of the same dynasty, if not the same ruler if they happen to be immortal), but also this status quo will typically be upended during the course of this particular story. It’s like an exaggerated take on “living in interesting times”.
It’s a common tension in speculative fiction: does the setting exist purely to serve as background to the actual story (and so the rest of its history isn’t that important), or does it ambition to be plausible enough that the complexity and messiness of real history get reproduced?
Of course, you can handwave a lot of it if you assume that the given history is simplified, or unreliable in some way. But this becomes less of an excuse the more details are mentioned.
I tend to prefer approaching stuff through the lens of the unreliable narrator, even when it’s not explicitly intended. It helps the old suspension of disbelief.
“You know what, of course it would suit the Emperor and the broader Faufreluches to say that they had been a stable political arrangement for ten thousand years. They’re a deeply oppressive and broadly fairly dysfunctional system. The illusion of unassailability would be valuable to them to maintain their tenuous grip on power.”
Yes you have the multi-generational breeding programme of the Bene Gesserit, but they never actually say how long that’s been going on for, and there’s no reason it couldn’t have been started under some previous political order.
Also, between the Bene Gesserit religious indoctrination and the propaganda corps of the Great Houses it sounds like the political system might have a fairly tight grip on what information is available to their populations. I suspect it wouldn’t be beyond their capability to embed a widespread belief that the current system has been around for 10,000 years when it’s actually been much less than that.
Leto II, the God-Emperor, AFAIR never disputes the fact the Corrino reign lasted that long. If there was such a huge conspiracy (which is very difficult to maintain for many years among many people anyway), I think he would have mentioned it.
I’m not certain it’s such a huge conspiracy. Multiple polities throughout human history have exaggerated their longevity to build a sense of legitimacy. It seems like a fairly standard practice when no-one really has much ability to fact-check people.
I admit it’s more head-canon than canon, but it still achieves its purpose: easing my suspension of disbelief.
It’d need to include the Reverend Mothers and Alia and Leto II; they have the memories from all their ancestors so they’d be able to call bullshit from their memories of the founding.
My personal take is that we should take the numbers as given but there’s no reason to assume there weren’t a ton of past crises that threatened to destabilize the system.
To me, the big problem with viewing the setting through the lens of the priorities of the terribly oppressive governing system is the problem I have with the narrative as a commentary on humanity; we actually see so very little of what life in the Imperium at large is like that there’s no firm sense of how anything is experienced by the populace. Everything is too top down, too much focused on the people governing at large from a distance. Actual people are shrunk to the point of abstraction.
“A story intended to criticize Great Man history just ends up reproducing it.” Many such cases.
“I tend to prefer approaching stuff through the lens of the unreliable narrator….”
If there’s evidence for this, sure. But if there’s no evidence in the text, this is just arbitrarily making stuff up. If you’re going to simply assume that anything you don’t like doesn’t exist, you’re not really commenting on the book anymore.
I will also suggest that anything that boarders on the Phantom Time Hypothesis probably isn’t a good idea.
“Yes you have the multi-generational breeding programme of the Bene Gesserit, but they never actually say how long that’s been going on for….”
Not specifically, but they do mention having evidence–both Other Memory and Archival–for how long it was. You also have the Spacing Guild and House records that extend back that far. And I’m reasonably certain the Mentats would be able to identify such a gap.
“…and there’s no reason it couldn’t have been started under some previous political order.”
In “Dune” we are specifically told that the Bene Gesserit and Spacing Guild arose out of the chaos that followed the Butlerian Jihad. We are told directly that it was the loss of the thinking machines that forced humanity to produce schools for human development (Paul’s deduction that the B.G. were for politics was one of the hints of what he was). Further, in later books it’s shown that the drug taken to awaken Other Memory is a product of the spice; it’s how Leto II controles them. This implies that the B.G. couldn’t have started their long-term breeding process until around the Butlerian Jihad.
“Also, between the Bene Gesserit religious indoctrination and the propaganda corps of the Great Houses it sounds like the political system might have a fairly tight grip on what information is available to their populations.”
Sure–but we don’t see the universe through the eyes of the general population. We see it through the eyes of the Great Houses and, in later books, the Bene Gesserit. Unless you think that the Mother Superior of the B.G.s is going to be duped by the Phantom Time Hypothesis–and remember, she has Other Memory to rely on as well as full access to the Archives–this line of reasoning doesn’t work.
There are also scientific publications–Irulan is a historian, Kiens is an ecologist who writes monographs (he offered one to the Duke), and the premise of “God-Emperor of Dune” is that the book is the translation of discovered writings from much later. I could relatively easily prove if something is 10,000 years old today, multiple ways–I’ve done it, in fact–so the idea that you can fool the entirety of the scientific community is a non-starter for me. The Empire isn’t going to have lost the capacity for optically-induced luminescence, lead-lead dating, biostratigraphy, and the like. And it’d actually be FAR easier for them, because the academic publications we see are dated consistently (which itself speaks to an enduring social order).
The number of people that would have to be involved in this conspiracy, merely based upon the textual evidence and the necessary corollaries thereto, would be in the trillions and range across every strata of the Empire. Such conspiracies can exist (the Bene Gesserit are one, the Bene Tlelaxu another), but there is textual evidence for them. This idea directly contradicts every scrap of evidence we have in the text.
“If there’s evidence for this, sure. But if there’s no evidence in the text, this is just arbitrarily making stuff up. If you’re going to simply assume that anything you don’t like doesn’t exist, you’re not really commenting on the book anymore.”
This isn’t what I meant by ‘approaching through the lens of the unreliable narrator’, though it is often a strawman that’s raised against it (usually unintentionally, I don’t think you’ve raised it in bad faith).
What I meant was as simple as ‘if we’re told something in-universe that doesn’t quite stack up with other things we’ve observed in-universe, consider that the person who’s telling us may be unreliable. This person may, on occasion, be the author’.
We may come to the conclusion that no, they are not unreliable. But as far as I’m concerned it’s always a consideration to be walked through at any potential immersion-breaking realisation. Whether the author intended it or not.
But then again, I do tend to lean towards the ‘death of the author’ view of literary interpretation, although I’m not completely wedded to it.
“I will also suggest that anything that boarders on the Phantom Time Hypothesis probably isn’t a good idea.”
I was less thinking about the phantom time hypothesis, and more how multiple historic societies have fabricated origin myths that extend the genesis of their particular culture/people/society significantly further back in time than we know is true (and, especially, assume the way they organised their society is universal and unchanging throughout time). As far as I’m aware none are quite as egregious as 10,000 years, but it’s a fairly widespread phenomenon.
On weight of evidence I think you’re probably right, though considering there are other conspiracies that have lasted for 10,000 years in the Dune universe I’m not sure it’s quite as far-fetched as you’re suggesting. Especially considering as this conspiracy would make the other conspiracies more believable. Though, as you say, we are provided textual evidence of the BG and BT.
” ‘if we’re told something in-universe that doesn’t quite stack up with other things we’ve observed in-universe, consider that the person who’s telling us may be unreliable. This person may, on occasion, be the author’.”
But the timeline we’re told DOES stack up against other things in-universe. The only evidence you’ve brought to bear to support your Phantom Time Hypothesis is personal incredulity. You’ve quoted not text, referenced no scenes, and provided no textual evidence to support this–only personal belief that such longevity isn’t possible, and “Maybe this group could sort of function in this way if my idea is correct” style reasoning.
The burden of proof is on you in this case–you need to demonstrate that Herbert lied about the longevity of his institutions. You have yet to provide any actual textual evidence, and speculation and personal incredulity don’t rise to the level of evidence.
“I was less thinking about the phantom time hypothesis…”
Whether you’re thinking about it or not you are formulating a version of it. That’s what the idea that a huge chunk of history is simply made-up is called. And the arguments against the real-world PTH apply equally here.
To be clear, a speculative fiction setting where such a thing occurred could be written. I’m not saying it can’t. I’m just saying that there’s no reason to believe this happened here and every reason–including people literally remembering the events of the time you say doesn’t exist–to believe that the timeline given in the books is true in-universe.
“…though considering there are other conspiracies that have lasted for 10,000 years in the Dune universe I’m not sure it’s quite as far-fetched as you’re suggesting.”
The problem is the nature of those other conspiracies. The B.G. succeed precisely because of their advanced training and the fact that they keep themselves in the shadows. They succeed because they don’t need other people to hide what they do–they need their cooperation at specific points (Leto having a child with Jessica, for example), but they don’t need to rely on planetologists knowing about the conspiracy and simply going along with it. Likewise, the Bene Tlelaxu conspiracies work because they are an almost totally insular society that forbids outsiders from seeing the vast majority of it–it’s not until thousands of years after the God-Emperor died that the B.G. figured out the B.T. religion, which is a major indicator of how sealed off the B.T. society is. The Harkonen conspiracy worked because it was relatively small and a normal part of Imperial politics–and even there, everyone knew there was something going on, they just didn’t know what.
Basically, when the conspiracies work they work because they are secret and information is tightly controlled. You know, like real-world conspiracies work.
A Phantom Time conspiracy doesn’t function like that. Pretty much every educated person in the entire Empire would have to be in on that conspiracy–at which point there’s not much point in HAVING such a conspiracy. You’d have to have massive amounts of manufactured evidence that everyone simply accepts, for reasons you have yet to articulate. You’d have to have the B.G. go along with it–and remember, this includes Truthsayers who can detect falsehoods (rather, people saying things they don’t believe are true). The Spacing Guild, every Great and Minor House, every scientist, the Mentats, the Swordmasters, EVERYONE–most of whom hate each other–would have to be involved. It’s simply not plausible.
@Ynneadwraith, I don’t think what you are describing would be possible in the Dune Imperium because they don’t have computers and the Internet 🙂
I’m sorry but Dinwar is right to describe it as a “Phantom Time” hypothesis, because of the sheer scale.
Sure, in the past there were various fabricated origin myths and other political documents. The history of Britain by Geoffrey Monmouth for example. But said history only really affected Britain, it didn’t matter whether people in Germany or China believed it or even knew about it.
On a larger scale, the Donation of Constantine had political implications all across Catholic Europe. But again, large chunks of Eurasia didn’t care, let alone the rest of the world.
Even within the zones of influence, so to speak, they were challenged and eventually debunked as soon as the societies in question had enough educated people and resources to do so. By the Renaissance both were widely acknowledged as fakes, although there had been published skeptics even earlier.
Rewriting the history of the entire Dune Imperium would require the cooperation, or at least non-opposition, of the entire Imperium. That’s several orders of magnitude above “we’ve always lived in this island”.
We in the westernised early 21st C live in a so far unique time in which it is easy to spread conspiracies around the world at incredible speed, and get people all around the world believing in them. I think this makes us unusually willing to accept that such conspiracies are possible even when not believing them ourselves. Thanks to the Butlerian Jihad, the otherwise massively imperfect Dune Imperium at least doesn’t have that problem.
(And right now, much as I appreciate the existence of ACOUP, yeah maybe a Butlerian Jihad might not be the worst thing that could happen.)
Broadly I think Dinwar’s right as well, I was talking more about a general approach to the use of unreliable narrator in maintaining suspension of disbelief.
I hadn’t thought it necessary to reference textual points considering that Brett had outlined how unlikely the political system we see in Dune was to be stable even over the short-term, let alone the 10,000 years we’re told it’s lasted (which, to be clear, is 4000 years longer than the entire history of civilisation to date). It’s nearly as long as the entire history of agriculture.
For some people, the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit and the monopolies of the Guild and CHOAM are enough. But for me personally, I’m not sure which is more believable. That that the society we see in Dune is effectively unchanged since the rise of ancient Sumer to 4000 years in our own future, or that Dune’s scientific community are either mistaken or incentivised not to investigate the longevity of their civilisation.
Personally I’m quite good at suspending my disbelief, but I can see how people might struggle to believe one or the other of those propositions, or even both.
“…I was talking more about a general approach to the use of unreliable narrator in maintaining suspension of disbelief.”
If that’s how you personally want to view the books, that’s fine–I’m not going to tell anyone how to enjoy art, I’m firmly of the belief that the audience participates in the act of artistic creation.
This view creates problems when trying to discuss the work with others, however, because it removes any criteria for evaluating statements. If you can dismiss any statement by the author on the grounds of “I personally find this hard to believe”, there’s not much point in any discussion. I’ve demonstrated why I find it hard to believe that the author is unreliable in this case, which means that our views on the text are incompatible. We literally can’t discuss the books because we fundamentally aren’t interacting with the same literature–you’re working with a heavily edited document that I don’t have access to.
It’s only by accepting the text as valid (unless, again, there’s textual evidence to suggest otherwise) that we have any basis for any sort of discussion about the text. The text is the only common ground and reference point for such a discussion. Without that, we’re just saying opinions at each other, which isn’t any sort of conversation.
“… or that Dune’s scientific community are either mistaken or incentivised not to investigate the longevity of their civilisation.”
A surprisingly long-term civilization is FAR more likely, by at least several orders of magnitude.
We actually don’t need to speculate on this, a relevant test has been run. The Alvarez Hypothesis (that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs) was essentially a PTH. The iridium concentrations argued for a very long time to deposit a very thin amount of sediment, and the entire geological community accepted that this had to be the case (Uniformitarianism dominated). The Alvarez team argued that the iridium was deposited quickly, essentially saying that a few tens of thousands of years didn’t happen. The result was a decades-long debate, intense study of the relevant information, the creation of new statistical methods and field methods in paleontology and geology, and an overthrow of the then-current geological paradigms. Careers were destroyed, but others were made. And now it’s generally accepted that an asteroid ended the Mesozoic (too accepted, for a while EVERY extinction was being tied to asteroid impacts).
Even if you convinced every scientist for a generation to go along with a PTH in the Empire, the next generation would see the radiological data, the thermoluminescence data, the missing dates in reports, and all the rest, and would overturn the idea. Maybe the concept would last twenty years IF we assume the B.G. and Great Houses devoted tremendous resources to it (a pointless waste). When the next batch of grad students graduates (and remember, this is a universe that values education) it would all be undone.
Suffice to say that I disagree with your assessment that we cannot discuss the book if one person is approaching it through the frame of an unreliable narrator and the other is not. Partially because we are, in fact, discussing it right now. Though I do find people sometimes find it frustrating if they are used to arguing from a point of belief in a hard ‘canon’ in fictional works. I expect it feels like arguing from a foundation of sand, or with someone occupying an alternate reality, which can’t be terribly pleasant. But it’s not fundamentally impossible, especially when viewed through the ‘death of the author’ perspective when what we are discussing are two respective visions of Dune.
I’m not dismissing it ‘just because I find it personally unbelievable’. At least, not in any way that fundamentally differs from the way Brett or yourself have argued above, considering that the entirety of this conversation is about how believable each of us find theories about a fictional work.
10,000 years is a really, really long time. My argument is that I do not see the evidence in the text that supports an unchanging civilisation for that long, considering that we know a lot about how humans function, and they change a lot over much shorter periods of time. Especially developed civilisations approaching that found in Dune.
“A surprisingly long-term civilization is FAR more likely, by at least several orders of magnitude.”
That’s the assessment that you have made, and you’re perfectly fine to hold that view. We are, after all, debating fiction. It’s not an assessment that I find particularly convincing considering just how ‘long term’ we’re talking about here.
I will reiterate. We’re expected to believe a civilisation has remained effectively static for the same time span as between the first stone age bod in the levant to adopt farming to the birth of Christ, across hundreds of worlds that are only relatively tenuously connected to one another, and are often in open competition. All held in stasis by the actions of a relatively small number of concubines (who themselves are not entirely united, as evidenced by Lady Jessica going rogue), and the navigators of the Spacing Guild (who although can predict the future in a limited fashion, only have a specific number of levers to pull to control it…none of which are sufficient to halt hundreds of near-individual cultures in stasis for the timespan between the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the founding of Google). Especially considering Brett’s points about the apparent weakness of the state capacity evident in Dune, which I have found at least reasonably convincing.
Neither are particularly believable as far as I’m concerned (which I will conceded is a personal belief, as your beliefs about it being more believable are as well). Not that I find my disbelief hard to suspend, Dune’s an excellent book and an excellent piece of worldbuilding as far as I’m concerned.
As evidence that I think you might be among the people who find debating respective visions of a work through the lens of an unreliable narrator uncomfortable, stating that I am accusing Herbert of lying is a little emotive I think.
I’m not accusing him of lying. I’m saying he may not necessarily have thought these things through fully. It happens. Quite a lot really. Authors are fallible, and have a finite amount of time that must be divided between getting their worldbuilding nailed down perfectly and actually writing the damn book. I know, I’m a worldbuilder and writer myself.
Stating that we can’t discuss the books because we differ in our opinions on the believability of one specific not-particularly-pivotal point of the text is also a little extreme. Even though I personally find it more believable that the civilisation in Dune lost track of how long it had been rolling on for, doesn’t mean I’m somehow denying that Herbert wrote that it didn’t (and that because Herbert wrote that it didn’t, that will probably be the default vision of Dune for the majority). It goes like this:
1. We raise point A about Dune
2. Having raised point A, I then hold that up to my vision of Dune and see if it fits, and you hold it up to yours.
3. We come back to discuss point A, at which point I am capable of holding my vision of Dune and the ‘default’ position of Dune in my head at the same time during that discussion. This is possible from the other perspective as well. Along the lines of ‘Dune is like this, but if it was like that point A would have this implication’.
4. We then leave the discussion, having evaluated and incorporated what the other person has said into whichever vision of Dune we prefer, enriching both of our experiences of it.
I apologise if I’ve come across as a dick in any of that. I’m thinking it might come across as an ad hominem, but that really wasn’t my intention (which was more like a frame challenge than anything else). I just experience this sort of difficulty a fair bit when speaking to people about fictional works and it bugs me a little. Primarily about 40k I must say, which is bonkers considering that is explicitly written through unreliable narrator and without an official ‘canon’ approach.
I generally don’t like to bring in unreliable narrators unless there’s specific textual evidence, generally in the form of direct internal contradictions. This is especially the case for 3rd person and even moreso 3rd omniscient. Characters can be wrong about things, but the narration is (usually) an out-of-universe perspective. Partially this is because I feel that when you don’t have textual evidence there’s no real way to get to ground truth; all participants in the narrative could be gholas cloned last week and none of the background is true.
Anyways, for lost time in particular I don’t think it works because we have quite a few main characters with unbroken genetic memory stretching back to the mists of prehistory. If multiple civilizations had been erased from history it would surely have come up. I do think it reasonable to assume there’s been multiple crises and attempts to break the system; for instance efforts to transplant sandworms or synthesize spice have almost certainly been near-constant.
“As evidence that I think you might be….”
No. Absolutely not. I have repeatedly told you precisely what evidence I would accept to conclude that the narrator is unreliable, and you have yet to either provide such evidence or provide a reasonable alternative. In point of fact some of my favorite books are built around unreliable narrators–the Amber books only work because the narrator has limited knowledge, LOTR is an interestingly subtle version of an unreliable narrator, Gibbon didn’t try to be one but he should be treated as one (history has advanced since his day). I’m perfectly comfortable with unreliable narrators IF THE TEXT SUPPORT THAT CONCLUSION.
The ONLY evidence you have is personal incredulity. This is not evidence, and I am in no way obliged to alter my opinion about anything based on your personal biases and unsubstantiated assertions. You are free to interpret the work in any way you like, but if you make up nonsense and insert it into the text I am not obliged to consider those personal additions in my interpretation. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without consideration, and you have yet to present anything resembling evidence.
I have tried to remain civil and reasonable in this discussion, focusing on the logic and evidence and reasoning. You, on the other hand, have abandoned such niceties, attacking when you can’t convince via mere assertion. As such I see no point in continuing the discussion.
@Dinwar Hey, that wasn’t the intention. Honestly. I probably worded it shoddily, but it was intended more as an olive branch to explain my perspective than an attack. If it came across as an attack then that’s my own uncareful wording, and for that I apologise.
Ultimately, I think I’m a little confused as to why we’re discussing the believability of a particular facet of a fictional work (which involves holding it up to evidence both textual and from the real world, because that’s how believability is assessed), in the comments section of an article that’s discussing the believability of a particular facet of a fictional work based on comparing it to real world evidence…and my providing real-world evidence for the unlikeliness of the longevity of Dune’s society is being interpreted as ‘personal incredulity [lacking any evidential basis]’.
I’ll tell you what. I will change my mind instantly if you can provide one single example of a real-world society of Çatalhöyük complexity or higher that has remained culturally static for one tenth as long as Dune’s society.
Here’s the assumptions I’ve baked into that:
1. Dune’s Spacing Guild are able to predict the future to some extent, which no real-world society is able to. I have, fairly reasonably I think, accounted for this by assuming that if a non-future-predicting society can maintain stasis for 1000 years, the Spacing Guild may reasonably be expected to do so for 10x longer. Ditto for the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit.
2. Dune having hundreds of worlds within its Imperium is another factor accounting for the Spacing Guild’s ability to predict the future. I’ve asked for a single example from a single world, whereas Dune implies their culture has been effectively static across hundreds of worlds simultaneously.
3. I have chosen Çatalhöyük as the first evidence of complex proto-urban social structures emerging within humans. Evidence suggests that as technological sophistication increases, the pace of cultural change also increases. Dune’s society is orders of magnitude more complex than Çatalhöyük, providing another factor to account for the Spacing Guild’s ability to predict the future.
If you think any of that is unreasonable I’m very open to persuasion.
@guy Yeah I understand that position, and it’s certainly the position most people seem to take. If that’s what people prefer, who am I to police how they enjoy engaging with fiction? I don’t even particularly think it’s wrong in any way.
“all participants in the narrative could be gholas cloned last week and none of the background is true.”
This, however, is what I was arguing against specifically. Whenever I open the discussion about unreliable narrators (that expands to the author as well, in a manner that is intended to help them out by providing more wiggle room for suspension of disbelief), this argument gets raised, and it’s textbook Appeal to Extremes fallacy.
There is an enormous middle ground between ‘maybe we shouldn’t take every single detail the author presents to us as gospel truth unless explicitly told otherwise’ and ‘everyone is a ghola cloned last week’.
It is in this wiggle room that we can choose to be kind to authors by accepting that they, themselves, are fallible human beings, and that what we are reading is fiction.
If that doesn’t work for you, or anyone else…fine! I’ve spoken to lots of people who end up getting pulled out of the immersion by the secondary thought-process hovering outside of the text about it being a fiction that someone else has written. Again, I’m not here to police how anyone approaches fiction.
“we have quite a few main characters with unbroken genetic memory stretching back to the mists of prehistory”
…and we are taking that unbroken genetic memory as infallible in a universe where a eugenicist cult has been able to manufacture a universal interplanetary religion across hundreds of worlds via intergenerational indoctrination (demonstrating a frankly mind-boggling ability to shape the beliefs of enormous numbers of people). Where that same eugenicist cult has been able to breed an individual who experiences regular visions of events that we know for certain have not happened (because they are future possibilities), and that prior individuals along this eugenicist pathway have proportions of that ability (and that nearly the entirety of the leadership of Dune’s civilisation is part of that eugenicist experiment).
Look, I’m quite happy to take Herbert’s word for it. He did write the books, after all. His opinion about how the whole thing works is more important than mine. But, contrary to what has been suggested, I am not arguing this without basis in the text.
We are provided with evidence of colossal widespread deep manipulation of beliefs. We are provided with evidence of the fallibility of humanity in the face of powers beyond our ken (prescience, The Golden Path etc.). We are provided with the strong importance of propaganda to the leadership of the civilisation in question.
I am not arguing simply from ‘personal incredulity’ (as if that alone is of no importance, when the thing we are talking about in this entire article is suspension of disbelief).
Perhaps I’m getting a bit defensive about it all. That’s certainly a possibility.
@Dinwar Having re-read my comment, yes it did come across as a personal attack. That was poorly worded by me, and not my intention. I apologise.
Just a note confirming Legion size. At the end of at least some editions of DUNE there are a number of appendices. The one labeled Terminology of the Imperium inclùdes:
“LEGION, IMPERIAL: ten brigades (about 30,000 men).”
I just came by echo checking out The Sabres of Paradise: Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus (1960) by Lesley Blanch, which I think will be very much up Bret’s alley. Dune (1965) owes a lot to it, if you search for “Dune Vs Sabres of Paradise” you can see various comparisons of lines that very directly reference (or lift?) passages in Blanch’s work. But, per the topic at hand, it’s not just the language, it’s the whole nature of the setting. The Caucasus is this rugged mountainous area surrounded by agrarian empires, and with specifically a history of dagger fighting vendetta!
A few notes;
1. The Atreides are wealthy on an objective scale but they’re actually pretty poor on the scale of Great Houses. Leto’s stature comes from history and that he is a cousin of the Emperor. Vladimir is effectively a merchant upstart who’s ancestors bought their way into the aristocracy. Beyond political maneuvering it is why Arrakis is great bait for the trap – the Duke’s looking at being able to make a huge amount of money!
2. Idaho doesn’t train the whole army personally – he is *Paul’s* tutor. But the Atreides become considered a real threat to the Emperor when they are finally able to use Bene Gesserit teaching (weirding, and I assume this comes from Jessica) to train ‘a small number’ of their soldiers to almost the level of the Sarduarkar – not the whole army. The Emperor is thinking way ahead and wants to end this before it becomes a real threat.
3. A big weakness of the writing is that there’s actually little thought into how the society works. House Atreides is a major player, has one Duke who has one child (Leto), who has one child (Paul) and no extended family. But on the other end the Harkonnens are described with two nephews and a ton of extended family (off-handedly referenced and only seen as spectators of Feyd’s birthday fights and by inference – parents of Feyd and Rabban). Its really just a sketch.
4. I am pretty sure you have put more thought into the structure of the Imperium in this single article than Herbert had;)
The Great Houses are colonial governments. Small military elites, often with little or no connection to the place they rule. Primarily concerned with export trade and foreign/imperial affairs, leave domestic affairs to local elites with a “don’t make us come over there” clause. Frank Herbert may have been hinting at this deliberately, since the Empire’s core governing structure is the East India Company, er, CHOAM Company.
After a few generations, the ruling House on any given planet is going to be intermarried to some extent with the highest ranking locals. That is highly unlike the historic colonial empires in which the governor was always someone from the metropolis, with a family and career there, for whom the governorship was just a brief term of office, precisely so he would not have a power base there. He certainly would not have an army that was entirely locally recruited, or loyal to him personally.
I don’t think so. The Houses seem to marry within each other — Duke Leto and Baron Harkonnen are cousins. We don’t see them intermarrying with commoners. And in the real world, you have the Spanish colonial system which creates “creole” and “mestizo” classes but excludes them from positions of power (so they all wound up leading independence movements). But you’ve also got the British model in which there is little or no intermarriage at all, and I expect that was what Herbert was thinking of.
This. And their marriages and childbirths seem to be fairly tightly controlled by the Bene Gesserit breeding programme.
“The Houses seem to marry within each other — Duke Leto and Baron Harkonnen are cousins.”
In 1914 the reigning monarchs of Britain, Russia, and Germany, were all grandsons of Queen Victoria. They were all cousins. Does that prove that the royal families in those countries did not intermarry with their own country’s aristocracies?
No, but they were not part of an intergenerational eugenics programme (or, at least, not so explicitly).
A more comparable example would be whether the Habsburgs meaningfully intermarried with their own country’s aristocracies. And the answer to that is ‘not nearly enough’.
Perhaps a better historical model is the successor states of Alexander the Great. They were extractive states that depended on a powerful but limited resource – Macedonian settlers and their descendants – for their armies.
Re: the airspeed consideration. I’m not sure what the threshold velocity would be, but air velocity is distributed as a Gaussian – *some* is moving slowly and should make it through.
My hunch is that with a zero width bounadry collisions between air molecules are so frequent it shouldn’t be much of a problem.
The slower a molecule is moving, the less likely it is to cross the boundary in a given time interval. Therefore, the amount of air getting through decreases even more sharply than the Gaussian distribution as you decrease the threshold.
The feeling I was getting as I read this was: even with the strong impact of military training, the massive size difference between tiny Great Houses and the mass of the population, combined with cheap bladed weapons being effective against very expensive shields, should make the Great Houses extremely vulnerable to revolution on any given planet.
With, which the Fremen (who are also ‘highly trained’ by their environment) is I guess what happens. It’s mostly surprising it didn’t happen sooner on at least a planetary level.
If only forces loyal to the Great House have access to lasguns – reasonable in a world with shields where every lasgun is a potential nuclear IED – it is no longer 2 armies with knives but an army with knives and no shields versus an army with knives, shields and lasguns.
Yeah, good point.
It is great to see Dune analyzed like this. I thought about social and military systems in this setting many times and I agree with most of what is said here. I am late to the party but here are my additional thoughts and observations:
1) Lasgun and shield interactions are highly unpredictable in the first book. This would much limit its usefulness as a weapon, since you can not predict how much destruction you cause. It would still be somewhat usable, but perhaps not worth the cost. In the last books interaction seems to be better understood and is used to create variable yield pseudonuclear mines for space combat.
2) There is actually body armor mentioned in the third book where one character uses thin armor under his clothes as trump card in a fight. Why is this not widespread I have no idea.
3) My headcanon is that one of the reasons we do not see close order infantry in books are flamethrowers. Basically flamethrower at least partially bypasses both shields and basic armor and is ideal for disrupting close formation of infantry. However this is purely conjecture. In the books it is assumed that knife fighting is pinnacle of warfare and that’s it.
4) Much of bureaucracy that would be function of state for us seems to be outsourced mostly not to richece but to Guild and CHOAM company. CHOAM specifically is main source of wealth and it seems to run both trade and taxation for the empire. Richece might therefore have less influence than you model here.
5) There is also imperial state apparatus that seems to exist. There is mention of teams of mentats in emperors employ (for accounting and auditing) while great houses only have one. Emperor also employs and presumably pays people like planetologist Kynes and other functionaries. However in Children of Dune the fact that imperial Central Ministry for Information, Auqaf and Hajj is interfering with lives of ordinary people seems to be new and somewhat unprecedented phenomenon.
Of course by the time of God Emperor poor Moneo just runs entire galaxy alone with just handful of aides while also having time to deal with Leto’s ramblings, Sionas rebellion and Duncan being Duncan all of this being like 200 years old. Some people in Dune truly are just superhuman.
6) One of the reasons why imperium stays feudal is Bene Gesserit. They support Great Houses against richece and or emperor and keep the system balanced, because it benefits their control in general and breeding program in particular. Breeding program itself and Spice also helps. Ruling class in Dune is generally healthier, stronger, faster, smarter and longer lived than lower classes to a much greater extend than in real history. Bene Gesserit also handles their education and helps them to be less decadent. It still does not work forever and by the time of Dune some sort of collapse is ineviteble.
I was originally going to write this as a reply to a separate comment, but it got a bit out of hand as a thing – it’s entirely possible that the estimates here are based off the weirdly common assumption that Arrakis is entirely composed of sub-tropics, which seems… unlikely to be true (the hottest places on a planet are the very wet ones). When the Atreidies move to Arrakis they are notably moving to a planet with 3 big constraints. Firstly ‘it has no water, and cannot get any, unless you all like suffocating’ (the oxygen cycle relies on the worms, who are easily and rapidly poisoned by atmospheric water vapour, faster than the expansion of vegetation). Secondly, they lack FTL-capable communications (honestly much in the way of comms at all). Thirdly, the Guild Navigators are implicitly in on the fix, given, in the books, 2 Sardukar legions arrive disguised as Harkonnen soldiers, and the navigator certainly remembers the weird route he had to take to make them all arrive on the same ship.
The Guild Navigators maintain the spice monopoly on Arrakis, which maintains their power to construct obscenely vast ships and control all trade in ‘known space’. They can do this because the guild navigators were the ones who discovered that the spice melange can be used to predict the future, allowing you to fold space over larger distances without a lack of complete data throwing your navigation off. As well as how to fold spaces over shorter distances without using a calculator, something they immediately used their knowledge to help ban. Everyone in Dune knows that the Guild is a massive power and monopoly in known space, and committed to keeping their monopoly intact, which is why ‘guild transport costs’ are cited as an issue etc.
From all this I make a point – The Atreides may have been limited by deliberate coercion on the part of the Navigators, who’re at least aware of, and participating indirectly in, the Corrino plot. The navigators may well just have an estimate of how many people you can import to Arrakis per year for sound ‘this is the amount of soldiers we allow anyone to import’ reasons, have low-balled it to Leto, then made up a very high number for how much sending messages would cost. Leto, unaware that he is falling for a trap orchestrated by the Emperor & Guild goes ‘well, I guess, yeah, we’re not allowed to bring my full army, just the household guard, and that’s going to leave no room for the admin staff, but I don’t want to take a bureaucracy if it’s possible the Harkonnen’s have left troops of soldiers behind’, sets up a vassal on Caladan and says “we’ll get back in touch when we have money from the lucrative spice trade”. We know that multiple of the people he actually did bring weren’t House Atreides, so ‘the entire house’ may simply refer to ‘me, and all my relatives’, rather than ‘the government of the state’, even if those terms are normally conflated (like how saying ‘the Ming dynasty’ both refers to all of china within a historical period and 4 individual men in particular).
At some point we are going to get a comparison of mores: the mos maiorum contrasted with mos eisley.
For what it’s worth re the oxygen point, in the book when Paul spars with Gurney they describe the air quickly going stale within the shield as most oxygen is moving too fast to cross the barrier.
Regarding “The one oddity is how precisely coordinated these fighters’ motions seem to be, but that makes sense in the context of the fiction where training in the far future can achieve things impossible to do with training now.”
I don’t think this requires far-future training. The Atreides show their preternatural coordination as the Harkonnens approach, not in combat. It makes sense to me to drill a pre-combat show-of-arms in hopes that poorly organized forces will disperse or surrender instead of actually fight.
I think it’d be interesting to interrogate the interaction of shields with explosive and incendiary weapons further; while shrapnel would certainly be stopped by the shield, saturating an enemy formation with napalm, white phosphorus, and concussive HE rounds should be devastating. Maybe instead of assault rifles and shrapnel shells, the main weapons for battles in the open are infantry grenade launchers and tube artillery with napalm filled shells.
One thing that could explain why man portable shields are expensive despite necessarily not needing a lot of material to build could be quality issues.
Maybe at the manufacturing ability in the Dune universe they make shields in batches of 100 and when they turn them on for the first time 90 of them immediately shake themselves apart.
Actually, the fact that no one is using armor seems logical. While shields make guns useless, explosives work just fine inside a shield. So if your enemy is wearing armor, the logical counter would be to replace your blade with a sharped charge on a stick. That would, like guns in the past, ensure that armor offers no protection while limiting your agility. So it would quickly disappear and everyone would switch back to blades since they are reusable.
As for lasgun-shield explosions, I would expect accidents being the main cause. Despite all training IRL accidentally discharges happen occasionally, and with shields ubiquitous, hitting one is quite likely. So in this scenario, one would expect such an explosion every few years.
Of course realistically this would result in lasguns being treated like tac-nukes IRL. They would only be issued under extreme circumstances and only to highly qualified specialists. Everyone else would use conventional weapons to avoid the risk of accidentally nuking themselves.
It occurred to me that it might be that, while lashing-shield integrations can result in a huge explosion, maybe RJ distribution of results is not equal. The books say that the interaction could be as little as killing thr shield-wearer or the lasgun user. Suppose that the odds were 90% lasgun user dies, 9% shield wearer dies, 0.9% both die, and 0.1% powerful explosion. That would explain why people don’t use mass lasgun vs shield — your own guys die disproportionately — and also don’t make interstellar ballistic missiles out of lasgun-shield warheads — one in a thousand does something useful.
One thing which makes the faufreluches somewhat unbelievable to me is that from all appearances the Great Houses have no customary right to their fiefs and no substantial personal holdings outside of the siridar-fiefs granted by the Padishah Emperor, and there are at most two planetary fiefs ruled by a single Great House, the Corrino rule of Salusa Secundus and Kaitain and the Harkonnen rule of Giedi Prime and Arrakis, and there are thousands of known planets within the Corrino empire connected via CHOAM and the Spacing Guild, but the Landsraad is small enough to convene regularly and the Atreides being able to match the Sardaukar man-to-man and draw upon a significant manpower pool makes them a threat to the Corrinos. There presumably could not be thousands of siridar-fiefs and so a substantial proportion, if not an outright majority, of planets must be outside the faufreluches, but those planets which are known to be outside of it, like Wallach IX and Tleilax, are treated as special and unusual.
Of course, the easiest way to reconcile this is to massively reduce the number of inhabited planets down to where these numbers make sense, because it’s not as if the raw number is ever relevant in published Dune…
A smaller Corrino Empire makes sense to me. Only a few Great Houses are mentioned by name and of the star systems listed by name all are comparatively close to Sol.
According to the Dune Wiki: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Stars
Geidi Prime circle Ophiuchi B which is 19.5 light-years from Earth.
Arrakis is a planet in the Canopus system 312.7 light years from Sol.
Calaban, home of House Atreidies is in the 19.9 light years from earth.
Likewise: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Planet#Known_Planets_of_the_Dune_Universe
lists about 70 planets, including star systems with multiple planets.
The siridar-fief system seems to me to be more similar to the Ottoman Timar system than traditional Eurpoean vassalage. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timar
Except I missed the passage in DUNE MESSIAH that says the Jihad conquered ten thousand worlds.
They do have armor in Herbert’s view. Quote from Dune, the Duke Leto talks to Gurney Halleck:
“I’ve taken over a council room topside here. We’ll hold staff there. I want
to arrange a new planetary dispersal order with armored squads going out first.”
Halleck stopped in the act of turning away, caught Leto’s eye. “Are you
anticipating that kind of trouble, Sire? I thought there was a Judge of the
Change here.”
“Both open battle and secret,” the Duke said. “There’ll be blood aplenty
spilled here before we’re through.”
So there are armored troops, used for the most high-intensity combat. Halleck is surprised that the handover of Arrakis is this violent; he expects assassinations and sabotages, and one wouldn’t wear full armor (whatever it looks like) for that. Unfortunately the book doesn’t describe a setpiece battle between Great Houses, but Herbert intuited (correctly) that armor would play a part.
“the velocity (and thus energy delivery) of any strike is now strictly limited, meaning even relatively thin and light armor will be effective”
This is not true for hand-held weapons. After a strike connects, the whole body (ideally) sustains the movement and pushes into it, which is why posture matters so much. Bad posture (waving the weapon around with bad alignment, “broken” joints and no sustained force generation) results in a strike that’s extremely easy to deflect, block or parry. The kinetic energy of the weapon before the strike is significant, but nowhere near the whole story.
In the context of Dune’s shield combat, the weapon moves slowly to enter the shield and then the attacker can put his whole body into the thrust. Plate should be adequate protection (although it’s heavy and has weak spots) but anything less might be vulnerable to the kind of slow, committed thrusts that shield combat would favor.
“(That said, I do think a factor in the durability of the Great Houses is likely that few houses can do as the Harkonnen did – transport a large fraction of their overall military power for an offensive operation – because of Guild costs, leading to a strong ‘defender’s advantage’ in warfare in the setting. Of course the Atreides do relocate under this same regime with – we are told directly – the entire House, but we might assume that for such an ’emergency’ measure (which is actually a trap with the Guild complicit) those heavy costs were reduced or perhaps supported by the emperor.)”
Baron Harkonnen explicitly mentions that the guild charges exorbitant rates for military operations as a “hazard” charge, so presumably moving the entirely of house Atreides to Arrakis was a fraction of the cost of transporting the Barons forces to attack
On the lasguns, the interaction between lasguns and shields is the interaction between high intensity light and shields, (as, obviously, that is what a laser is). I believe the problem may be that they never specific that causing the lasgun, or a location between the lasgun and the shield, to explode, destroys the shield (if said location is outside the shield). And nuclear explosions are primarily effective due to the production of… high intensity light (producing large amounts of both thermal radiation and gamma rays). So this explosion would, in turn interact with the shield, causing another nuclear detonation somewhere between it and the shield generator, which might cause another, which might cause another and so on and so forth essentially ad-infinitum. I’d posit that someone tried ‘displosable soldier/wire trap targeting a laser at someone from a large distance (which increases the probablity of greater recursion as every time the explosion’s centre will tend closer to the shield’s source)’, accidentally blew a hole in the planets crust, killing their enemy, themselves, plus all the trees, fish, insects and bacteria literally everything else, then no-one tried that again. This would count double in an army, as the first nuclear detonation from a lasgun interacting with a shield would cause multiple nuclear detonations per soldier in the army. 30,000 nuclear explosions in proximity, spawning 20,000 more nuclear explosions and so on is only going to prove worthwhile if you for some reason decided to fight the battle in a different solar system to the objectives of both sides.