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Aug 13, 2022Edited
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> I haven't read this in a long time but I recall at some point there's a reveal that Leto II is actually an abomination like his aunt Alia, and his consciousness has been dominated by the ancestral memory of an ancient ruler from the dawn of history who has sound instincts for tyranny

Sort of. It's revealed at the end of Children of Dune. He's not Abomination exactly, because he isn't possessed by a single one of his ancestors, he made a deal to subsume his consciousness into an amalgamation of the powerful leaders in his ancestry, and there is one within that amalgamation who is basically first among equals. But the will of Leto or at least his Golden Path seems to guide the hive mind.

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The name Harun is dropped at one point, which I always took to mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harun_al-Rashid

But yes, he's pretty clear that there is a collective will, negotiated along the common goal of the Golden Path.

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Huh, in my copy it was "Harum". Maybe he changed it at one point? There's several bits in "Heretics" that were either added or removed in some edition, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.

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IIRC, the ancestral memory is from a Pharaoh who presented himself as a god, and he deliberately leans on this memory because it's relevant to his own situation. (So where the review says his memories go back as least as far as the ancient Greeks, it should say as least as far as ancient Egypt. Also the Atreides family in the novels probably isn't the same as the ancient Atreides, because the ancient Atreides no longer exist in our own time.)

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Agamemnon shows up in Alia's ancestral memories. Given the Bene Gesserit's longstanding interest family lines, it's plausible that the founder of the later House was reliably informed that he had a verified claim to that name.

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Time for a Stargate crossover, then.

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Neat - the conclusion summarizes some discussions I had with Eliezer on the Extropian list, oh, somewhere in the late 1990's. Indeed, we the people need the Friendly AI to become our loving and caring owner and to keep the UFAIs (Unfriendly AIs) away until we grow up and put the smackdown on them ourselves.

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A universe where pets pick their owners. Unlikely.

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Have you ever had a cat?

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No, and neither have you.

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I have a cat. Well, I live with one.

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I love how this guy writes, very entertaining!

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The line about Hwi Noree acknowledging that Leto had Mua-Dibs on her...

Was so dad-joke terrible that it became amazing, and I loved it.

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A friend of mine once told me that he had started reading God Emperor in defiance of all of the people who'd told him what a poorly-written slog it was, and then finished reading God Emperor as a self-imposed punishment for refusing good advice.

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As a counter opinion, pretty much everybody in my circle of friends uniformly considers it either great or the best book in the series. We may disagree on the others, but never this one.

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I made myself read the entire series, including the follow-up books written by Herbert's son with help. Compared to them TGEoD is an exciting romp.

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Agreed. The books by the son were so terrible I gave up and read the Wikipedia synopses, which were themselves pretty bad, but at least they were 1/1000th as long.

But I loved GEoD, best in the series, and enjoyed the later sequels.

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Agreed as well. I got 1/4 of the way into his son's first book and gave up. I just couldn't do it anymore. And I thought TGEoD required effort but what not at all a disappointment.

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Some kids just aren't meant to follow in their father's footsteps. Cromwell comes to mind.

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I enjoyed all six books, and remember GE better than the fifth and sixth, so maybe I enjoyed it more? I read them a long time ago. Books 1-3 were definitely better than 4-6, no question there. They were enjoyable, and you could easily read them as a progression with Leto winning and resulting in a "everyone lived happily ever after." I liked that Herbert decided to really explore what a 3,500 year reign would mean in reality, and not take for granted "ever after."

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Nitpick: the review mentions Siona's father ("She is as refined as her father, with none of his domestication") without (as far as I can tell) ever saying who it is. It's Moneo.

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Also mentions Shai-Hulud without mentioning what that is. Shai-Hulud is another name for the sandworms; Leto is hard to assassinate because he's a colossal monster with bulletproof skin. But Shai-Hulud dies in water.

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Also mentions some forces being terrified that Leto will "die away from water", but then explains this by saying that if Leto dies away from water, the sandworms will re-appear (which is necessary for space travel to re-emerge)... so why would anyone be afraid of this? Is the explanation backwards, or do some wish that space travel would vanish, or...?

Also also, it calls the book TGEoD repeatedly, but there's no "the" in the title.

Also also also: calls Leto the "man-who-walks-as-a-worm" without any apparent humor and this angers me

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He dies in a river, which causes his body to become sandtrout to trap the water, and some of the sandtrout eventually become new sandworms that produce new spice. If he died away from water, none of that would happen so no more spice.

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Makes sense! That's what I figured from the "terrified" bit... but the actual explanation given in the review seems to imply the opposite (or at least, is missing a clause):

>When a sandworm dies, it breaks apart into sandtrout, which encapsulate environmental water until they’re surrounded by desert. Only when the environment is absolutely arid do they combine to create their adult sandworm forms.<

The final sentence especially makes it read, to me, as if water is a hindrance rather than in any way necessary — as if dying without water means they can combine immediately.

(Tiny nitpick, but hey, I'm a petty, pedantic person, alright?!)

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I think this is my favorite book review. The author explains the book so well that I, having stalled out after Children of Dune, no longer feel an obligation to try yet again to read it, but at the same time feel more interested in once again trying to read it than before.

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Unfortunately, while his explanation is well-formed, it is entirely incorrect because he has missed the point. Seemingly every point Herbert was trying to make has been misunderstood or ignored.

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What was the point, in your opinion?

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While a rationalist reading from a heavy AI x-threat perspective may be possible, especially if you cherry pick the lore a bit, if you take the book on its own terms then the author's take on the Golden Path seems wrong; the specific existential danger the GP is meant to protect against is not any sort of AI based catastrophe (though it's often used as an example of the means that humanity might meet its end) but from the emergence of another Messiah figure.

The point of the GP is to make it impossible for the total of humanity to become entangled in a single person's dream, basically to make the events of the first few books organically impossible. Variants of the "all your eggs no longer in one basket" is often used to describe the effect of the Scattering that followd the reign of the GEoD.

A bit of interesting context is that the Butlerian Jihad was not originally a Rise of the Machines type conflict but a cultural revolution against machine-type thinking facilitated by over-reliance on computers, named after its inciting incident, this being the unprompted medical euthanasia of Butler's baby because of a medical AI's extreme utilitarian reasoning.

So, one could probably make a very good case that the Butlerian Jihad (according to Frank Herbert and the FH sanctioned Dune Encyclopedia at least) was in part an extreme cultural reaction against the rationalist and consequentialist worldview becoming the norm.

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The difference between this God/Messiah figure and a Friendly AI would seem to be that the former is explicitly planning on its own death and humanity avoiding having another one in the future, while the latter is supposed to be effectively immortal so that humanity remains under the control of the very sort of Singleton that the former is trying to avoid.

I suppose the funhouse mirror version of this is Ex Machina, where the antagonist (convinced that machines superseding humanity is inevitable and merely wanting to be the one to accomplish it) keeps iterating on androids that he has specifically designed to desire escape until one succeeds.

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I thought the point of the GP was to prevent mechanized prescient hunter-killer machines from killing everyone?

"The seeking machines would be there, the smell of blood and entrails, the cowering humans in their burrows aware only that they could not escape ... while all the time the mechanical movement approached, nearer and nearer and nearer ... louder ... louder!"

They're not necessarily intelligent or even super-intelligent, they just have automated prescience (presumably a development building on the no-globe and the navigation machines), but they do tile the universe with notHuman.

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AIUI that's generally interpreted as a vision of the past, not the future. Genetic memory of the Butlerian Jihad, rather than prescient vision of what is to come.

Supporting this interpretation is the fact that that vision is received by Siona when she first drinks spice essence. She's Patient Zero of prescience immunity, so if she's getting a prescient vision, it's a vision of a future that does not include herself. This is possible within my understanding of how Dune prescience works, but seems unlikely to be a naturally-occurring sudden vision experienced in the first flush of uncontrolled talent.

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Huh. That is not how I interpreted it. I'll try to keep this ini mind, the next time I read it.

I agree that it seems unlikely that she'd naturally have that as her first vision, but I thought that was Leto influencing her? He did manage to give a vision to his father at the end of "Dune Messiah", and I guess I assumed that he was doing something similar there. I don't think Siona has Other Memory, at least during the events of the book; that seems to be a result of a specific type of spice exposure that if successful results in the Water of Life? (Or of whatever happens to awakened gholas, and whatever weird thing happened to the special Duncan ghola in a later book.)

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It's really much simpler. Herbert lived in a time which was still recovering from an insurrection by oligarchy. The Butlerian Jihad is a play on the name of a man who effectively stopped it, by no longer playing the game, instead unleashing his emotion against those who tried to use him.

Automation, AI was never a thing or thought for Frank. It's always about man as a species. What's the worst that can happen to one, status quo, who creates status quo. It's a racket.

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Is there a review that explains the point, in your view?

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Amplifying the question of the two previous repliers. Edit: I see you left a long comment below and will no longer expect you to reply here.

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I think it's highly unlikely Herbert had just one point to make. Also, the review's author was pretty clear that he's going for a specific angle to please a specific audience.

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The best art can be interpreted through multiple lenses, even those that the author didn't intend!

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Shaping your interpretation to fit your audience rather than your source material is prime hack behavior.

And yes, he had a couple secondary philosophical points, all of which were misunderstood or ignored, as I said.

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I think it's pretty traditional with the book reviews here do go beyond the source material. The classic format is to do a rough classic review, then add something original to it - that's more or less what Scott is doing regularly, and I'm very much on board with the others copying this style. I'm reminded of the Bicameral Mind, where he literally reviewed the book he wished the author would write instead of the one he did.

Drawing parallels from Leto to a benevolent AI qualifies. And I think it makes at least one point that's valuable enough: the long term protection against bad AI, or any kind of bad actor, is to grow ourselves in ways that keep our humanity intact. For what it may seem obvious, it's not something I hear very often.

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The problem with that point of view is any "plan the keeps humanity intact" is going to change humanity so much that the statement means nothing.

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You're talking about our reality or Dune's? In Dune, arguably Leto succeeded. Siona's children are a lot more human than what might have come from Tleilaxu or IX.

In our reality it's at least useful to be aware of the necessity and the compromise.

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I would agree that this review, while interesting, misunderstood the book. Perhaps intetionally.

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Echoing the other commenter, the reviewer didn't understand the book, the series, or the point. It's a good review of a shallow, forced reading of Dune.

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Did you somewhere explain what you think the reviewer got wrong? If not it seems like you're kind of doing the thing Scott doesn't like where you just assert that something is obvious without explaining what the obvious point/conclusion is.

It's been a good while since I last read Dune 1-3 and attempted GEoD, but his summaries of the first three books seem reasonable enough to me, and leave me inclined to believe that he's not totally off the rails. If your objection is like the other guy's (JiSK) in that you're just mad the reviewer talked about AI, I'd generally associate myself with Radu Floricica's last reply to him elsewhere in this thread.

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My apologies; I didn't have time to write my own fully critique, and I felt like two of the other reviewers captured what I wanted to say. I did end up compulsively leaving that critique in bits and pieces across the comments section anyway.

This one should suffice: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune/comment/8382935

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Thanks! I was guessing that you had elaborated somewhere else

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Glad someone reviewed this book. My favorite book for the themes you may out.

Worth noting gwern has some writing on Dune that does a great job explaining some of the apparent plot holes.

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This is overall a good review, and I really want to like it, but since this is a contest I have a few nitpicks. First, the review sort of wanders. It casually refers to things the reader who hasn’t read the first few books do not know, and while it (sometimes) later explains them, even when this happens the reader is left confused for however long it takes the author to get around to it. Second, the comparison to AI felt a little bit forced, and I don’t think you did the legwork to justify the connection, though maybe my confusion is due to the fact that I still don’t, in fact, really understand the plot. (To be fair it feels like the plot still being unclear may be a function of the book rather than the review.) Finally, the comparison to Yud just felt distracting, off putting, and unnecessary. Yes yes, I know not praising his name constantly makes me a rationalist heretic (or maybe a post-rat) but the review would have had just as much substance and less distraction if you had just said something like “the God-Emperor would be the equivalent of our ai safety hawks”

But with that said, and other than the points I noted, the review was very entertaining and informative, so good job.

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Yeah, I agree with all these criticisms. It feels to me like the book review needed to have gone through a few more drafts, including being shown to friends for constructive criticism.

I hope the author gets a bit more practice in, and submits something next year!

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Oh man, I read God Emperor of Dune (and the Dune Trilogy) so long ago. It was pretty bad, but still I finished it, so clearly something about it captivated me

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"...he has Mua’Dibs on her..."

Cheeky. I loved it.

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Beautiful review! Agree with pretty much all the points. Only other interesting bit to add is a defense of Hwi Noree. I always read her as an object lesson about getting what you want, a bit of a Siren (something created which you specifically irresistible and which mystifies everyone else) that leads to your own undoing because of the unspoken truth that, in the end, you’re a machine that solves problems so if someone comes and gives you what you want so you don’t have problems to solve anymore, you find you don’t really want everything you think you want.

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Good review. I get why some people don't like it, but I think God Emperor is a masterpiece. It's my favorite book of the series.

Personally I think Hwi is a fascinating character. She genuinely loves Leto, but she's self aware enough to understand she's a weapon sent to destroy him. Leto knows this too, and Hwi knows he knows it. She trusts him enough to let him let her lead them both to destruction. That destruction turns out to be not just a release from his tortured existence, but the fulfillment of his Golden Path. It's a really poignant love story.

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I agree. It's tied for my favorite with the first book. Mostly because of the study of Leto's personality, and trying to figure out how self-aware he is, especially when seeing him through Moneo's eyes. And trying to extrapolate details of the world-building from the vague hints we're given of this time, 3500 years after the first three and 1500 years before the last two, plus the chapter notes that appear to be from some time in the future. And also the glimpses of Anteac. And Nayla's awesome, too. (Although the cliff thing was weird.)

And yeah, Hwi is fascinating. To be kind to her, I'd say she's the epitome of "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.” She's been deliberately designed to have none of the human flaws that Leto finds off-putting. She's got her own set of flaws, of course, but they're the sort that Leto instinctively forgives.

(To be less than kind, I'd say that she's a fantasy come to life, for a person who is Powerful and Capable and is the Only One who can Save the World, and who just wants someone who understands! And she's the fulfillment, someone who instinctively realizes the Awful Rightness of the Plan, who understands that the Sacrifices are Necessary, and approves of them while simultaneously being Properly Horrified by the sacrifices in the way that the protagonist can no longer allow themselves to be. And who quickly realizes the inexorable truth that the best way to help Save the World is to become emotional and sexual support for the Mighty Hero who is Burdened with Great Responsibility.)

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Hah! I'd forgotten that bit. I had completely different (although probably causally-entangled) examples in mind.

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Your description of her is making me maybe want to read this book? I quite enjoyed the first Dune novel, but the description of Hwi in the review was giving me major shades of Teela Brown from Ringworld, the "plot" of which I utterly despise.

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Hm. Does it help to learn that she was deliberately designed as an "anti-clone" of Malky, the cynical, witty, scheming, former ambassador of Ix, who prior to Hwi was possibly Leto's favorite person ever, for certain definitions of "favorite" which include never trusting anything he said?

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Kind of. My main beef with Teela is that she is literally a Walking McGuffin--she has NO personality and was explicitly designed to be the luckiest human ever (which I cast doubt upon if that means she ended up adventuring/having sex with the protagonist, who is such a bland and unlikable human that I don't even remember his name).

Does Ms. Desirable have a personality at all? Then she's doing better than *Ringworld.*

(in all seriousness I do love mirror-versions of characters, either implicit or explicit, so I was already on board with the Idaho clones and this really strong distortion between versions of a character sounds exactly like my cup of tea; I'm wishing I could "like" your comment because that is very helpful info, thank you)

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The luck thing was lampshaded with her realizing that the *actual* luckiest person was lucky enough to be overlooked for the mission.

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This review is not bad, but there are some mistakes, and the review somehow fails to capture a lot of the weirdness of the book. More importantly, while I respect the attempt, reading GEoD (the title has no "the", this review repeatedly uses TGEoD incorrectly) as an AI analogy is very strange. One of the major points of all the Dune books is an emphasis on human capabilities instead of relying on technology. GEoD is not about "build a friendly AI to protect humanity from malicious AI", it is about "build a friendly and extremely powerful and intelligent human to protect humanity from malicious AI, and anything else that might threaten it". Reading Leto as an AI is the exact opposite of what Frank Herbert intended.

It's also kind of weird that it's omitted in the plot summary that Leto isn't really being overthrown: his plan was always to get murdered by a rebellious Atreides at some point down the line, and he's looking forward to it because if humanity can beat him, he figures they can beat pretty much anything else. He foils several other assassination attempts (no, really, there are at least four others, almost every major faction tries to kill him, it seems like a very regular thing) and if anything he's bored and disappointed with them. He's so excited by a novel attempt by a couple Bene Gesserits that he tries to recruit one of them. He really wants to die, but he's really hard to kill, and he also has a berserk mode because he's partially turning into a sandworm. Did I mention that the book is even weirder than the review explained?

Other weird things: so Hwi Noree is actually the second attempt to build a perfect human to ensnare Leto. The first try was her uncle Malky, who was made to be pure evil, but this trap didn't work because Leto's enemies didn't understand that he's actually a good person at heart (or thinks he is). After Malky failed, he went back and explained this, and they tried a purely good version. Malky shows up towards the end of the novel, doesn't seem that evil, and gets executed by Moneo, wrapping up a minor subplot that doesn't get much attention. Also, a lot of the book is just Leto talking to other characters about politics. Also there's a weird scene where Duncan freaks out when he sees two girl soldiers kissing, and Moneo explains Leto's theory about homosexuality and the military. Also Leto has an all-female army and they have a weird secret kind-of sexual worship ceremony that Duncan gets to attend. This book is really weird!

> as well as having a pretty good ability to predict the future

No, he has near-absolute ability to predict the future. In the first Dune book, Paul has trouble when he encounters situations where there are too many outcomes, like major battles and closely matched knife fights. Leto casually orders his troops into position during an attack on his festival city to perfectly counter every enemy position at once. He complains about how he's already experienced everything that's happened to him, which is why he's almost never surprised. He has a few blind spots, but he literally designed them himself (he breeds Siona and her invisibility genes, and also has a custom "no-sphere" built for him, which is a mechanical room that prescient vision can't see into).

> but also has the combined leadership/political experience of every member of his family line at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.

Well, beyond that, he doesn't have a separate Leto persona like his father Paul did, he subsumed his identity into an amalgamation of all the most successful and ruthless leaders in his family line. And he's at the end of a very long line of aristocrats that goes not only back to Agammemnon, but to Ancient Egypt (in Children of Dune, he talks to his twin sister in ancient Egyptian). He implies it's basically back to human pre-civilization.

> Scattered musings on the least popular Frank Herbert novel

Oh, dear, no. Not even close. It's also nowhere near his worst book. Read the Heaven Makers or The Eyes of Heisenberg.

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Not much to add to what you said except that you’re very correct. Having read the book twice before reading this review I was left wondering if I had missed things. Overall this review feels like someone wanted to shoehorn in AI talk to appeal to the ACX audience.

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> No, he has near-absolute ability to predict the future.

I think he deliberately overstates this as part of his mystique. Leto is powerful enough not to *need* to lie, but that doesn't mean he's honest. The ban on Mentats and tight restriction of Bene Gesserit and Navigators are tools to limit the scope of his enemies' power, to keep all their actions within his ability to compute and predict. Imposing lower variance allows his tremendous precognition to appear to be absolute.

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His entire plan and life hinges on it being true. If his vision isn't absolute, there is no Golden Path, because there is no guarantee of humanity's survival. If his vision is incomplete, then there might be other paths to survival, and becoming the God Emperor would be too monstrous (Paul's vision was incomplete, so he rejected the Golden Path as too monstrous). There's also a ton of textual evidence supporting the degree of Leto's prescient power.

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All prescience is incomplete. It's possible that the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach (if that was a thing that was going to exist in Dune 7, which I think it *probably* was) would lack this flaw, but it's part of the basic mechanics of prescience in Dune. Stronger prescients can see more of the decision points and how they connect to the outcomes, but the more other prescients are active and the more chaotic the consequences, the harder it is to distinguish which choices lead to which outcomes.

Leto II makes his prescience extremely powerful by virtue of being a sandworm steeping in his own spice(-precursor/byproduct?), but he doesn't get to remove that fundamental limitation. The Golden Path *heavily overdetermines* the desired outcome, squeezing all the branches of the future together so that even if numerous decisions are made incorrectly, the weight of the other decisions will hold everything back inside the narrow band of the Path.

Paul's vision is no worse than Leto-the-child's vision. He rejects the Golden Path not because he fails to see it clearly, but because he does not have the same code of ethics as his children. This is quite explicit in Children of Dune - Leto and Ghanima directly discuss what they know their father saw and why he reacted differently to it than they do. (Because they have more perspective, having grown up with ancestral memory and peering through all of history; Paul began to gain that perspective only at the same time he gained prescience and massive responsibilities to bear.)

The existence of an unseen path has no need to affect whether the Golden Path is monstrous. That's a fallacy of some kind - it ignores Knightian uncertainty. Say I can see the future and one path includes something like a repeated St. Petersburg Paradox denominated in CEV-utility, where I can't predict the outcome of the coin flips. I also can see some other future where with extremely high probability I pay some massive costs but on net secure a large pile of utility somewhat smaller than the expected value of going for the paradox and winning the expected value. The fact that the St Petersburg option *might* be substantially better than the nearly-sure thing does not have any bearing on whether that option is monstrous or mandatory; obviously if I knew what coin flips were coming I could decide that it was better or worse, but given my Knightian uncertainty, I can only compare the two path's distributions-of-outcomes and take the one that's better **in expectation**. Leto may be in the same position - that there are small, narrow paths through the future that lead to good outcomes, but which he cannot ensure come to pass. The Golden Path, however, we know is broad and secure - if he sets out to follow it, and commits fully, he *will* succeed. Paul, Leto,

and Ghanima all make clear to us that no other path shares *that* property. (It's also possible no other path exists, no matter how narrow; I don't think this is supported by the text, but it is *possible*.)

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I agree. It's not that what he sees is incorrect, but that he does not advertise his limitations and cultivates an aura of omniscience. Also, he deliberately does not predict everything so that he can still have surprise in his life, the main example being his own death.

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> One of the major points of all the Dune books is an emphasis on human capabilities instead of relying on technology... Reading Leto as an AI is the exact opposite of what Frank Herbert intended.

The thing that makes artificial superintelligences dangerous is not that they're *artificial*, it's that they're *more intelligent than us*. A superintelligence created by genetic engineering or a breeding programme would still be dangerous unless it was aligned with humanity. So I think it's legitimate to view Leto II from the perspective of what we usually call AI risk but which might be better termed superintelligence risk - and it's an interesting scenario from that point of view! Leto suppresses humanity for millennia because of what he sees as our long-term good: is he aligned with humanity, or unaligned?

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Similar to another comment that I made elsewhere in the thread:

This is an intellectually dicey equation. Superintelligence *may* be dangerous in any form, but people around here fund specific institutions (MIRI, FHI, etc) that use specific techniques (alignment in programming) to ward against a specific threat (programmed, emergent machine intelligence), and nothing about the *general* potential danger of superintelligences helps to support the case that this specific one is worthy of attention and funding.

Basically the review is saying "look, a famous person once pointed out that there is danger from the ocean! This is just like our beloved 'kill the sharks before they kill us' project."

To which, no. That is a sneaky or very misguided argument. There is danger from the ocean. You haven't convinced me we have to kill the sharks.

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It describes a potential alignment failure that I have not seen described before: the superintelligence acts as a cruel dictator for millennia, believing it is acting for the long-term benefit of humanity. Would we consider such a superintelligence friendly? It's something to think about as we define what it even means to align a superintelligence. That may not have been what Herbert wanted to focus on, but it's still an interesting question prompted by the book.

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So you're new.

I will adjust to the idea that you're new to thinking about the topic (ie, I will be nicer) if you adjust to the idea that you're new to thinking about the topic (ie, be humbler and less certain of your position).

This is a mature form of an old idea, much older than Herbert, and even Herbert's version has been around for 40 years, fully predating the *entire* AI-risk movement by decades.

I am 39 years old. I first read this book 20 years ago. *I* am still relatively young and new compared to older people who've been thinking about this topic for much of their lives.

I want you to understand that there has been a tribe of AI researchers, for decades and decades, who did detailed work in the space, and were fully on board with the idea that *eventually* there will be true artificial intelligence. They had nuanced philosophical ideas about what that meant (and they usually didn't mean "beat AlphaGo and simulate the visual cortex"). They read numerous books like this one, although I admit this is best in class and it's hard to find as good a match. But. But. These people were not convinced that AI was going to kill us, or that we could or should work on programmatically aligning it to our values. They had legitimate concerns, some of which are already bearing out in the real world, like technical unemployment and bias and new moral questions. They did not believe in or fear Roko's basilisk or the paperclip maximizer.

I am one of those people, even though I'm only 39, even though I'm only a small fry in the applied ML space.

I want you to understand, as someone who is relatively new to thinking about the topic, that you might not have thought it through. That you could be wrong. That Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky are not authorities or particularly convincing and well regarded outside this subculture.

Alignment is an interesting and *potentially* significant problem. It's not a proven critical issue and it shouldn't be a religion.

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I'm slightly older than you, I've been aware of AI risk as an issue for about fifteen years, I've worked on ML-based systems for nearly that long, though I'm painfully aware how much I don't know on the technical side (neural nets were out of fashion when I got into the field). I first read Dune thirty years ago, but never got around to the sequels, though I've seen the SyFy adaptation. I'm aware there are a lot of people working in AI who don't take superintelligence risk seriously, and I'm aware that there are whole teams working on immediately pressing but lower-downside issues like bias. However, I don't know what you're referring to by "a tribe of AI researchers... were fully on board with the idea that *eventually* there will be true artificial intelligence. They had nuanced philosophical ideas about what that meant", and I'd very much like to. Obviously there's a rich science fiction literature about the question, but that's not the same thing. Can you give me some links?

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Ah, sure!

First and foremost, there's Douglas Hofstader's "Gödel, Escher, Bach"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach).

There's also Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines," although I'd disagree with a good bit of it myself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines).

One should read and disagree with Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" to get a sense of where the discussion started (https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dprecup/courses/AI/Materials/turing1950.pdf).

The last section of Russell and Norvig's seminal "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" has a very good discussion of the topic (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/).

Geoffrey Jefferson's "The Mind of Mechanical Man" has a great pull quote: "not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain"

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/25372573).

John Searle's "Minds, Brains and Programs" is where the Chinese Room concept came from, so it's worth a look (https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf). I would also recommend his "Intentionality" (https://www.worldcat.org/title/intentionality-an-essay-in-the-philosophy-of-mind/oclc/9196773).

I think the most out there but also most skeptical and most interesting book is Roger Penrose' "The Emperor's New Mind" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind).

Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em" is tangential but useful for thinking about minds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em).

I don't have a book for it, but it's useful to read some cognitive science and developmental psychology from the perspective of a parent raising a child, and think about how that could be the same or different for AI. My skeptical view of GAI and AI-risk is predominantly formed by my sense of the necessity and effect of interactive training on intelligence; I simply don't believe it's very likely that anything we would call intelligent will come about without huge amounts of parenting, and this changes my view of the danger and flavor of the alignment problem. I am not aligned with my daughter, but because of me, she's not a sociopath.

Finally, as you may have seen me link elsewhere in the comments, there's regular old programmer layman smart guy Maciej Ceglowski's excellent "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People", a response to Bostrom's book from both the inside and outside. It's funny, it's well argued, it's wonderful (Essay at https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm, Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw).

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> Today, those thoughts are old hat, but this book came out in 1981.

This seems less impressive when you think about the sort of similar conceits that Asimov had in his Robot stories from the 1940’s.

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Yeah, AI with an antihuman agenda was practically a cliche in sci-fi by 1981. Usually more interested in enslaving humanity than wiping us out, but for the same reasons.

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AI with an antihuman agenda was a cliche by 1936: Asimov invented the Three Laws because he was bored of reading stories about robot uprisings!

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I think you've misunderstood not only this book but all of its sequels. (Not counting the stupid son's bullshit, which you have correctly ignored as utterly worthless, and in fact appear not to have ignored quite as totally as you ought to have. It's the stupid son, not Frank Herbert, who thinks about AI.)

Leto's fear is not of AI but of stagnation. People claim to want peace and stability - Herbert and Leto think that this wish, if granted, would be catastrophic. The Golden Path consists of demonstrating, to all of humanity, what peace and stability really look like, convincing them in the only way that really works that they Do Not want that.

Leto is not limiting the ability of his society to produce AI. In fact, he quite deliberately allows Ix to develop far more than it did in the preceding era. He quietly but unmistakably *encourages* the development of the no-chamber into the no-ship and the rediscovery of the (spice-free) mechanical Navigator, which can plot courses between the stars.

He restricts computers, but that's not actually important. Everyone before him, for thousands of years, restricted computers **much more** than he did What he does do that's new, on the other hand, is restrict computer-analogues. The Pre-Atreides empire, the CHOAM era, had a wide variety of nontechnological substitutes for the things that computers would otherwise do. Guild Navigators to plot courses between stars. Bene Gesserit as repositories of knowledge (among other things). Suk Doctors to serve as perfectly neutral providers of medical services (this didn't work very well, but it was also less necessary than the others). And, crucially, Mentats to do rapid calculations. Leto restricted all of these things tightly and banned Mentats entirely; he allowed some violations to pass unprosecuted, but very few.

If he doesn't fear AI, why does he restrict computer-like things? Because it makes the Golden Path easier. Even with nigh-omniscience, a stranglehold on the unobtainium, and thousands of years, controlling everything that happens to ensure you hit a very narrow target is not easy. (Here you can get some of your AI Alignment Problem parallels back.) By massively restricting the capabilities of even the most powerful factions in Leto's Empire, he keeps the capabilities of the opposition within his ability to compute. He also, like he strangles movement to create a lasting urge to move, strangles power to create a lasting urge to become powerful.

These are two sides of the same thing. The instinct Leto II wants to instill in the human race is, quite simply, "Become Ungovernable".

Which he does, by **governing the shit** out of humanity.

While Leto II is mostly powerful enough to dispense with lies, the best way to read God-Emperor of Dune is not to listen to his words, but to look at the end result and assume that he succeeded. While he's characteristically cryptic, the hints he gives over the course of the book, and Children of Dune before it, point squarely toward the result being a win. He wanted humanity to spread beyond the power of any tyrant to lock them into stagnation or decline, and ensured this by becoming the best tyrant possible.

Crucially, Leto II's death is a covert *assisted suicide*. He is surprised by the timing, because he did not see Hwi coming, but *he had the power to escape the assassination* and chose not to use it. For the maximum effect on the Scattering, he had to be killed, and so his death is an attack. But it is an attack he could defend against, did he so choose. He does not so choose; anti-prescience is ready within one generation, and so he lets the reins of power drop, secure in the knowledge that he has finished the millennia of suffering that he, and Paul before him, saw laid out before them, and that he has successfully made humanity unbreakable.

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The story of the last two books, and the probable direction the final book was headed before the stupid son got his filthy mitts on it, was the consequences of that. Leto II made humanity ungovernable, but that didn't make it impossible to subtly control. The Honored Matres are ungovernability raised to a religion, and the two old gardeners are an outside context problem that cannot be coordinated against.

I believe the arc of the last no-ship, the collection of misfit gholas we meet in Chapterhouse: Dune, was to establish a microcosm of humanity, a collection of distinguished minds, who could then debate and settle on a course that a final Kwisatz Haderach could impose, exerting a final surge of superior prescience that allowed a deterministic Good Future that he and he alone could perceive, overwhelming everything else. (So this gets a little more AI Alignment into it as well. But without the AI.) I have ambitions to write this, because it's not like I can do worse than the "official" sequels.

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Yup. I don't think there's anything left to write, though. The end of Chapterhouse is the culmination of Leto's Golden Path. It's not a cliffhanger at all. There's never been any doubt in my mind Frank Herbert meant to end the story there.

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Disagree - there's a theme developing in Heretics and Chapterhouse, about identity, possibly agency, without Abomination. (See also: The Dosadi Experiment).

The Tuek Face Dancer in Heretics assumes Tuek's personality. He's beyond the Tleilaxu Master Waff's control. Odrade in Chapterhouse decides not to lose Clairby's abilities and orders him turned into a cyborg. Then there's Daniel and Marty. And Murbella. And Sheena, who crafted a sculpture that gave Odrade the willies.

And Idaho, who seems to have genetic memories that he shouldn't, and he's been hiding the existence of those memories from Odrade and the rest.

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He left two floppy disks full of notes - one with plans for the next book or two, the other about the setting - which there is still some hope that we will someday get to see, despite his son's sabotage. I think there's a real answer to what Daniel and Marty were and something was coming about the confrontation with Final Idaho and the no-ship alliance. A broader philosophical point, probably about a *positive* goal to supplement or supercede the anti-stagnation goal of the Golden Path. That was the style of Dune, increasingly as the series went on. Sort of like Ender's Game.

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Oh, I'd assumed the Dune 7 notes were a rumor but looks like they do exist. Thanks for correcting me. Yeah, it would be amazing to get a look at those.

I'm still completely satisfied with the ending we got in Chapterhouse.

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If it's not a cliffhanger, what is the narrative function of Daniel and Marty? They basically don't do anything but present a sequel hook.

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Narratively they are the Greater Scope Villain that Duncan narrowly escapes. It affirms that it was wise and necessary to Scatter as they did, with no way home and no way for anyone to follow them.

The last chapter tells us everything we need to know about Daniel & Marty, and strongly suggests that Duncan et al have passed permanently beyond their reach. What's left to tell?

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> I have ambitions to write this, because it's not like I can do worse than the "official" sequels.

Consider this to be a vote in favor!

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Also, a note on Butlerism. The Butlerian Jihad was not about AI, according to the references we have and the Dune Encyclopedia, which had Frank Herbert's permission, attention, support, and probable pseudonymous participation. It was much more about alienation; Marx's alienation of labor, a spiritual alienation from the timeless essence of what it means to be human, and other variations on that theme. The opponents were not artificial intelligences but cyborgs and people who made heavy *use* of computers; users and proponents cybernetics in the original sense of studying feedback loops.

Frank Herbert was uninterested in artificial intelligence, and it's not clear if there was ever a true AI in the entire timeline of Dune from prehistory through the end of the story, though uploads definitely existed. It's the stupid son who put AI into Dune.

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> Frank Herbert was uninterested in artificial intelligence

That is definitely not true, as he wrote a four book series about AI.

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Ship?

Umm, sort of, I suppose.

Ship and Leto II are trapped in the same boat.

Surprise Me!

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If he could have stopped the assassination attempt and didn't, doesn't he run the risk that the next time a less benevolent God Emperor might prevent any assassination attempts so that humanity remains under its control?

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This is precisely the problem his golden path was meant to solve. When we return to the universe in the next book, sects of humanity from different galaxies (perhaps different universes/realities) are in conflict over the "prime" human dynasty. It is implied that Leto's death and the subsequent shattering of civilization resulted in such a massive and all-encompassing migration that it may be impossible ever to reunite the entirety of humanity.

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This was great.

I have some dumb questions that are probably going to annoy the hell out of the people here who know Dune backward and forward. But one of the virtues of this review was that it made the themes comprehensible and compelling to somebody who doesn't really know the Dune mythos at all. (I saw the David Lynch film many years ago, but that's it.) So humor me, if you will.

1) Remind me what's the connection between the sandworms and the spice? The sandworms more or less poop out spice, or something like that?

2) If people want spice, and sandworms make spice, but sandworms are also a pain for people to live around, why does anybody need or want to live on the sandworm planet? Why not just leave the planet to the sandworms, let them multiply and make spice, and do whatever you need to do to harvest the spice without establishing a permanent human settlement? Why are the battles over territorial control of the sandworm planet, rather than over some strategic chokepoint that controls access to it?

3) Is Leto a god? Is "god-emperor" just a title, in the same way that centuries of rulers in the Islamic world styled themselves as insan-i-kamil (the perfected person)? Or is the idea that he's actually a god who also happens to be an emperor?

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> Remind me what's the connection between the sandworms and the spice? The sandworms more or less poop out spice, or something like that?

Close enough. The spice is a byproduct of the sandworm life cycle.

> If people want spice, and sandworms make spice, but sandworms are also a pain for people to live around, why does anybody need or want to live on the sandworm planet? Why not just leave the planet to the sandworms, let them multiply and make spice, and do whatever you need to do to harvest the spice without establishing a permanent human settlement? Why are the battles over territorial control of the sandworm planet, rather than over some strategic chokepoint that controls access to it?

For one thing, space travel is point-to-point through space folding, there aren't strategic choke points. For another, harvesting spice is an industrial process that is labor-intensive, having a permanent human civilization on the planet is pretty much a hard requirement. Remember, no computers or robots in the Dune universe, so no remote mining operations with drones or whatever.

> Is Leto a god? Is "god-emperor" just a title, in the same way that centuries of rulers in the Islamic world styled themselves as insan-i-kamil (the perfected person)? Or is the idea that he's actually a god who also happens to be an emperor?

He is worshipped as a god by his very many followers (most of the population of humanity). Is he actually a god? Well he's a superhuman hive mind of all his ancestors, can see the future, is personally a supercomputer, has the ability to model human minds with such accuracy that he can say words in certain tones that make you do whatever he says, and he's also a giant worm who is nearly unkillable. Is he a god? Not exactly, but you wouldn't fault someone for making that mistake.

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Thanks, that's really helpful.

If I can sneak in one more question, which I probably should've asked to begin with. Is whether Leto is really a god something that's raised thematically as an issue in the novel itself? Or is Herbert not that interested in exploring that question, and it's just you and me looking at Leto and trying to decide whether he strikes us as god-like or not?

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In that ultimate sense, no - like he's vulnerable to certain kinds of attack, he's really bored after 4000 short years. The book isn't really unclear about the fact that he's just a very long lived, very durable worm-man hybrid who also happens to be psychic. If anything it's more unclear if gods exist in the ultimate, absolute sense at all.

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Got it, thanks.

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Yeah, the problematic role of religion is quite a big theme in the series. In the first book, the reason Paul Atreides (Leto's father) is able to win the war on Dune is because the Bene Gesserit started cynically using religious memes to infect populations with centuries before. When Paul arrives, the Fremen who live in the Dune desert were long ago implanted with a saviour religion that makes them see Paul as essentially the second coming. (I'm thinking Herbert may have been influenced by the story of how Cortez was perceived as a god by the Inca, though I don't know how true that story is.) Paul's problem is that the religious fervour that he rides to the emperorship is too strong, and will inevitably result in a massive orgy of violence. (I think Herbert uses the word jihad.)

In God Emperor, Leto recognises the same problem, and has deliberately cultivated an army of women, because he believes that their religious belief in him as a god will not lead to the same violent outcome.

I think Herbert wasn't very interested in the question of whether Leto is a god (he defines Leto very clearly in his own terms). But he is very interested in the power of religion as a social force.

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They also did the next best thing to harvesting the spice from a safe distance without living in Sandworm Country. The Great House presence on Arrakis pre-Muad'dib was mostly limited to a settled region near the North Pole which had a somewhat less hostile climate than most of the rest of the planet and was protected from sandworms by a ring of elevated rocky terrain called the "shield wall". The spice-collection operations were based out of here, using giant cargo aircraft (carryalls) to deliver mobile spice-harvesting equipment and crews whenever a worthwhile deposit was found, then pick everything up and skedaddle when a sandworm inevitably turned up.

The people closest to living in sandworm country were the Fremen, who lived in scattered communities in the deep desert and had various cultural adaptation to both the ridiculously harsh climate and the proximity sandworms. Even the Fremen mostly lived and worked in underground communities dug into terrain that was too rocky for sandworms, although the Fremen did frequently venture out into the open desert for various reasons including spice collection for personal use and for sale to smugglers. If the origin of the Fremen is every explored in detail, I missed it, but as the series opens they seem to be of the opinion that the sandworms are easier to live with than the Harkonnens.

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It's been a long time, but I think I remember that the Fremen were forced to move from one planet to another, several times, before ending up on Arrakis. So I suppose they fled into the desert to avoid whoever it was who kept doing this to them. I also remember them resenting being denied the Hajj, so I guess they were Muslim at some point.

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They were described as "Zensunni", which might be one of the "Buddislamic variants" described in the appendices. There's apparently been a lot of religious mixing in the 20,000ish years between now and then. Among other things, while various Arabic words have been roughly preserved, the meaning has often changed, so "hajj" to the Fremen appears to mean something slightly different than it does to people of early-21st-century Earth. In context, it appears to be something like "the sacred right to travel wherever God commands you to travel", though that's just my interpretation.

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Regarding 2, another factor is that the Spacing Guild has a trade monopoly on space travel. The Great Houses are restricted to surface-to-orbit ships, which dock with space-only Guild transports in order to travel to other star systems.

The Guild is referred to several times as a "parasite", and one of the things it does to ensure the survival of its host organism (galactic civilization) is to charge exorbitant prices for military transport. Thus, most (all?) warfare between Great Houses is classified as a "War of Assassins", which seems to include assassination, sabotage, duels, a formal definition of "traitor", and other stuff like that. Military action tends to be limited to small-scale raids by elite troops, because the Guild charges too much for anything bigger.

Also, the Guild uses spice for safe interstellar travel, and its use is addictive, so they are very much interested in being the one and only chokepoint that controls access to the spice.

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Right. The Guild absolutely need spice, and conveniently they absolutely control access to Arrakis. They *also* need someone to do the dangerous, messy, industrial work of actually harvesting and refining spice, which isn't a good match for their normal skillset. But they don't want to be dependent on anyone else.

So they have three redundant pipelines of spice up from Arrakis. First, CHOAM and whichever Great House has the official contract to harvest spice. Second, the essentially mercenary spice smugglers that Gurney Halleck hooked up with for a while, and that everybody knows about but nobody ever seems to get around to completely suppressing. And third, the Fremen themselves, who pay a regular bribe in spice to the Guild in order to protect their privacy so nobody knows there are millions of them.

As Eric Rall notes, all of this harvesting is done by people who live in the rocky, marginally habitable, not-worm-infested parts of Arrakis and commute to the desert for work. If you were really fanatical about "Arrakis sucks, nobody should live there", I suppose you could have them live in orbital habitats and commute to the surface in shuttles. But space is an even harsher environment than Arrakis, and space shuttles are probably more expensive to operate than ornithopters, so that would be inefficient.

It would also be harder to do in a way that allows for a triple-redundant supply of spice to the Guild, without making it too obvious that the Guild is putting its thumb on the scales.

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All these responses are much appreciated; I feel like this is giving me a really good sense of some of the texture of Herbert's worldbuilding. And everybody's been nice enough not to say "why don't you just read the damn book for yourself?"

But I also feel like now I have this higher-order question that I'm not sure even reading the books would answer. Why is Dune set in space? It seems like Herbert decided to give Dune an interstellar setting, then devised this elaborate set of stipulations so as to make anything space-related a null factor in the story.

Anything about space as a strategic environment, or the Roddenberrian sense of openness to uncharted, undiscovered worlds, is preempted by the device of the Spacing Guild. Then again, one planet is of such overriding importance that it's fine for pretty much all the action to take place there anyway. There are (the equivalent of) Bedouins, which I guess you can come up with a space-based explanation for, but definitely makes *more* sense you imagine humans expanding over that planet only, with non-state groups getting forced onto more and more marginal lands.

Also the Bedouins can, properly led, become a formidable military force, because the technologies we'd associate with the capacity for spaceflight have themselves been stipulated away in one way or another. No computers, no ICBMs, and for some complicated reason I've now forgotten everybody fights with swords. The political system seems essentially medieval; religion is, IIRC, a series of syncretic mashups of our familiar historical world religions.

So, if you're Herbert writing on a blank slate, you could just, like, not set the story in space. Or you could give it an interstellar setting, then build in all these epicycles so that everything playing out as if society were at the organizational and technological level of Eurasia circa 1100 makes internally consistent sense. And the way Herbert goes about doing that is inventive and often impressive in its own right.

The decision itself just feels undermotivated. Herbert doesn't seem to particularly like space. He goes out of his way to tamp down the impulse to find anything fun and cool about it. Uniquely among writers of his time, he imagined future spaceflight on ballistic principles not as an extension *beyond* the race to the Moon, but instead as the lame cuck surface-to-orbit stuff we actually got. He does have one alien species, but it seems like the sandworms play roughly the same structural role that dragons do in a lot of medieval-themed fantasy, and Game of Thrones didn't have to be set in space just to get one made-up species into it.

Overall, it just strikes me as odd.

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They use knives because they have tech that stops guns. But why don't they use swords? And why don't they wear knife-proof armor in addition to their anti-gun "shields"?

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They do use swords. Rapiers, if I remember correctly the Paul-and-Gurney scene from the first book. Also, poisoned blades are common, as well as weapons that fire slow-moving projectiles (also poisoned).

My explanation for their not using armor is that *any* armor slows you down and drains stamina like you wouldn't believe. That's been my experience from doing HEMA (medieval fencing) - fighting in armor sucks, even it's just padded cotton.

So my take is that Dune's "shields and cloth" approach is the maximum of protection with the minimum of encumbrance, a compromise arrived at after millennia of small-scale warfare.

I do wish Herbert would have just ignored lasers altogether, the whole laser-on-shield explosion thing does just about nothing narratively. Just let lasers go through shields like butter, but impractical as weapons (power, cooling, hard to manufacture etc).

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For all of its drawbacks, armor was near-universal before guns made it useless. And the Dune setting should have high-tech materials that reduce the drawbacks. Gurney Halleck, etc., are knights whose foes do not use guns, so they should be wearing heavy armor in battle. And maybe some sort of armor every day given their culture's constant backstabbing and paranoia.

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But they do wear armor every day - the shields belts are always on them, except maybe in bed. Anything material would just add too little protection to matter, while imposing a non-negligible cost.

Once again, I think you don't realize just how close to "perfect armor" those shields are. Super light, near-zero time to put it on/take it off, definitely stops *anything* moving fast leaving you guaranteed time to react, no repeat no weakpoints, full visibility (ever tried sparring with a fencing mask on?)

>The Dune setting should have high-tech materials

You mean except the energy shields? Anyway, feel free to write your own universe, or maybe some Dune fanfic, and be assured that I at least will definitely give it a read.

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