The Terrible Duo

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/539275/ref%3Damb%5Fright-1%5F119563%5F3/104-2776689-2093529 http://tinyurl.com/ay68n

Amazon.com: “Did Frank Herbert leave any notes or an outline that you’ve used to write the prequels?”

Brian Herbert: “Years after my father passed away we got a call from the attorney who handled his estate, saying that they’d found two safe-deposit keys. We were thinking maybe there were some jewels in there or something. But it turned out that there’s nothing of value in there… but the notes for Dune 7.” [laughs]

K.J. Anderson: “Then Brian was cleaning out his garage to make an office space and he found all these boxes that had ‘Dune Notes’ on the side. And we used a lot of them for our House books.”

Brian Herbert: “Dad always called my mother a ‘white witch’. Then, after Kevin and I met, I got the call about the safe-deposit boxes. Then I found the notes. I felt that my mom was making sure Kevin and I got along and was watching over me.”

…K.J. Anderson: “There was a lot of reaction. ‘How can you do this?’ There was a fan group on the Internet that decided we shouldn’t do this. There were 60 of them on Amazon and they put 60 one-star reviews up saying, ‘We don’t even have to read them.’ I was the Dummy of Dune and Brian was the Anti-Christ.”

…Amazon.com: “Would Frank Herbert have enjoyed the prequels?”

Brian Herbert: “It’s not as good as Frank Herbert writing the story, but it’s as good as anyone can do right now. We’re not going to milk this. We’re not going to carry on too far. We still feel the great passion, the great energy for the story.”

Skepticism

Look here: http://www.dunenovels.com/FAQ.html

“The Leto/Jessica meeting scene in HOUSE HARKONNEN was actually written by Frank Herbert himself and found in his notes. The events shown in HOUSE HARKONNEN are consistent with the original notes.”

http://www.frankherbert.net/news/genesis.html

Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.

So no notes? On the other hand, arguably the prototypes and drafts for Dune, as seen in things like The Road to Dune anthology, are ‘notes’.

John… we’ve argued about this before: just because Herbert did not keep notes when he was developing the first novel, Dune, does not mean that he didn’t keep notes for the later ones and after Ch:D. He was getting on in years at that point, and perhaps in his collaborations he picked up the habit of keeping notes.

John- I never said that there might exist notes for the prequels- if FH had left notes, the core ideas and plot for them would have been a hell of a lot better than they are. But i still think there is a good chance of notes for Dune 7, since that ending might not have satisfied Herbert. Besides, Dune 7 would finish out a second trilogy, and trilogies usually require notes.

further evidence against notes is the many apparent inconsistencies. Why on earth are the sequels Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune? Dune is toast! Charred to dust! Not even ashes! And our only familiar characters are uncounted universes away from what was Arrakis! Stinks of crass commercialism to me.

You’re assuming he did [intend Omnius in Dune 7]. Given that CH:D says that Daniel & Marty were super face dancers, but BH/KJA have instead made Daniel & Marty Omnius and Erasmus instead. This seems, to me, to cast some doubt on whether or not Omnius and co. were ever part of FH’s vision as it strikes me as a blatant & irreconcilable contradiction. If you drop your assumption, the answer is easy: the fanatical machine enemy is a hoary shopworn sci-fi cliche which comes naturally, in the same way rain comes from the sky. There’s a koan I read once in The Fall of Hyperion:

[Once Ummon asked
a lesser light//
Are you a gardener>//
//Yes// it replied\\
//Why have turnips no roots>\\
Ummon asked the gardener\
who could not reply\\
//Because\\ said Ummon//
rainwater is plentiful]

Butlerian Jihad

I had proposed to FH that he and I collaborate on a prequel to the Dune saga called “Prequel to Dune: the Butlerian Jehad” or some similar title. FH and I had discussed writing it together and he agreed with my general plot outline, completed first chapter, and so on but his untimely death prevented us from continuing. He had been living in the LA area at the time and we often discussed it by phone, but I have no written notes from him about it, unfortunately. The prequel would have followed in general terms the story as outlined in the DE - sketched in my notes - which I still have - and written in final published form by one of my colleagues at Cal State.

* Willis McNelly

What we have paused to discuss right now is probably the single most important barrier to the widespread useful development of individual computers. It involves a lot of people blathering about their “computer intelligence.” According to this scare story, “computer intelligence will win out someday over human intelligence and then we’re all going to be in deep trouble. That makes good science fiction drama, but it ain’t gonna happen.”

Frank Herbert - _Without Me You're Nothing_. P. 33

We definitely do not want to call them [computers] electronic brains That is the most misleading name to come along.

Frank Herbert - _Without Me You're Nothing_. P. 44

We are saying that it is not our tools that are at fault, it’s how we use those tools and the beliefs we invest in them.

Frank Herbert - _Without Me You're Nothing_. P. 73

We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.

Frank Herbert - _Without Me You're Nothing_. P. 73

“Scytale glanced at the old Reverend Mother, seeing the ancient hates which colored her responses. From the days of the Butlerian Jihad when”thinking machines” had been wiped from most of the universe, computers had inspired distrust. Old emotions colored the human computer as well.”

“This was a human computer, mind and nervous system fitted to the tasks relegated long ago to hated mechanical devices”

“His gods were Routine and Records. He was served by mentats and prodigious filing systems. Expediency was the first word in his catechism, although he gave proper lip-service to the precepts of the Butlerians. Machines could not be fashioned in the image of a man’s mind, he said, but he betrayed by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the faraway general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.”

The Reverend Mother closed her eyes to hide his face. Damnation! To cast the genetic dice in such a way! Loathing boiled in her breast. The teaching of the Bene Gesserit, the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad – all proscribed such an act. One did not demean the highest aspirations of humankind. No machine could function in the way of a human mind. No word or deed could imply that men might be bred on the level of animals.

(Note that the “act”, going against the “lessons of the Butlerian Jihad” is “demean[ing] the highest aspirations of humankind”. The lesson of the Jihad was that ‘man should not be demeaned’, not that ‘man should not get killed by a rogue AI’.)

The Butlerian Jihad tried to rid our universe of machines which simulate the mind of man.

Not machines which killed men, which would be the more relevant point if that was what they did.

One moment he felt himself setting forth on the Butlerian Jihad, eager to destroy any machine which simulated human awareness. That had to be the past – over and done with. Yet his senses hurtled through the experience, absorbing the most minute details. He heard a minister-companion speaking from a pulpit: “We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program!” He heard the voice clearly, knew his surroundings – a vast wooden hall with dark windows. Light came from sputtering flames. And his minister-companion said: “Our Jihad is a ‘dump program.’ We dump the things which destroy us as humans!”

(Leto II remembering genetically. This is a funny kind of speech to be giving if the machines are trying to eradicate you - why talk about how they “negate us as humans”? That we must “set our own guidelines”? Did anyone in a zombie movie ever rally the survivors saying “zombies cannot set our guidelines for us”? Would you, acting in self-defence against an assailant shout for help because you are being “destroyed as human”?)

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

(“Turned their thinking over” - mankind was not coerced, put in slave pens or routinely eradicated. They turned their thinking over. Themselves.)

Then came the Butlerian Jihad – two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”

(“The god of machine logic”, not “the hegemony of the evil Darth Grievous, Skynet, Omnius”. Even the ban on “replacing mankind” would make no sense if the problem was a murderous AI - a ban on autonomous AIs would be more than sufficient to deal with that problem.)

JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) – the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Its possession was the shibboleth of this age, but it carried also the taint of old immorality. Once, they’d been guided by an artificial intelligence, computer brains. The Butlerian Jihad had ended that, but it hadn’t ended the aura of aristocratic vice which enclosed such things.

(About a fencing machine - which is the closest thing to a robot in the Dune universe. Note that humanity was “guided”, not “led into slave-pens for extermination”. With the danger on “going Godwin” on this one, if this happened in the same universe as Omnius, it would be like a historian saying the Nazis “governed” the Jews during the Third Reich. A slight understatement, in other words)

The human-computer replaced the mechanical devices destroyed by the Butlerian Jihad. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind! But Alia longed now for a compliant machine. They could not have suffered from Idaho’s limitations. You could never distrust a machine.

Trusting the machine was never the problem. Note that Alia has Other Memory and hence, rather specific knowledge of the Jihad. She desires a ‘compliant’ machine to give her advice and generally do the work of Duncan Idaho, a mentat. This would be an intelligent computer, and completely non-sensical if she remembers how one such machine enslaved and almost killed all of humanity.

1. Alia has memories from the time of the Jihad and knows details regarding Omnius et al.

2. She is wishing for a machine to give her advice on the level of a mentat’s capabilities.

3. She characterises such a machine as ‘compliant’ and trustworthy.

4. A machine with capabilities re. political advice on the level of, or beyond, a mentat is a powerful artificial intelligence.

5. Omnius was a powerful artificial intelligence.

6. Omnius enslaved and tried to kill mankind.

7. Omnius was an AI which was not compliant or trustworthy, to a catastrophic degree (from 5 and 6).

8. Alia knows that a powerful AI can be untrustworthy and non-‘compliant’ the level of genocide or human extinction (from 1 and 7).

9. Alia believes a powerful AI would be trustworthy and ‘compliant’ (from 3 and 4).

10. Alia both believes, and does not believe, that a powerful artificial intelligence is ‘compliant’ and trustworthy (from 8 and 9) - Quod Est Absurdum.

They [Ixians] made their devices in the image of the mind the very thing which had ignited the Jihad’s destruction and slaughter.

(There is no way this sentence makes sense if the beginning (“They made their devices in the image of the mind”) is not the cause for the later part, ie. the Jihad. So the Jihad was started because of this ‘image of the mind’, either its creation of the thing itself. The abhorrence of the thing, not its abhorrent actions.)

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

(Leto II again, telling us the reason behind the Jihad - our loss of self-determination. No mention of slaughtering innocent humans, one notes…)

Odrade was suddenly aware she had touched on the force that had powered the Butlerian Jihad - mob motivation.

People do not need motivation for survival, they need it to start a bloody, ideological revolt. The battle against Omnius was not “powered” by mob motivation, it was done out of a need for survival.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Then came the Butlerian Jihad – two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”

JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) – the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

(About a fencing machine - which is the closest thing to a robot in the Dune universe).

Its possession was the shibboleth of this age, but it carried also the taint of old immorality. Once, they’d been guided by an artificial intelligence, computer brains. The Butlerian Jihad had ended that, but it hadn’t ended the aura of aristocratic vice which enclosed such things.

The human-computer replaced the mechanical devices destroyed by the Butlerian Jihad. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind! But Alia longed now for a compliant machine. They could not have suffered from Idaho’s limitations. You could never distrust a machine.

(So trusting the machine was never the problem).

One moment he felt himself setting forth on the Butlerian Jihad, eager to destroy any machine which simulated human awareness. That had to be the past – over and done with. Yet his senses hurtled through the experience, absorbing the most minute details. He heard a minister-companion speaking from a pulpit: “We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program!”

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

(Leto II again).

Odrade was suddenly aware she had touched on the force that had powered the Butlerian Jihad - mob motivation.

(People do not need motivation for survival, they need it to start a bloody, ideological revolt).

Scattering over Multiple Universes

“No Ixian machine can do what we, the descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, have done. How many universes have we populated? None can guess. No one person will ever know.”

“Think of the uncounted genes out there! Think of the potential talents floating free in universes where they might be lost forever!”

Waff fought to conceal the turmoil these words created. “Infinite universes, infinite time – anything may happen,” he said.

He spoke sadly. The no-ships had, indeed, seeded those other universes with rot.

“There is time to complete our bargain. God alone in His infinite mercy has given us infinite universes where anything may happen.”

Projections Of Dune 7

• http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Dune7.html

• http://juleswellesley.blogspot.com/2010_14ya/10/frank-herbert-dune-7-reconstruction.html

My Own Analysis

Why is Paul forced into the Jihad? Off-hand, I’m working with two theories. One, his early prescient visions on Caladan and the exact alignment of forces and social tensions forced him into it, and two, his son Leto reached backwards into time and forced him to engage in the Jihad, as that was the only way Paul would survive, his first son would die, and Leto II would rule universe and bring about the Golden Path. This latter theory is supported by the failure of Paul’s otherwise perfect prescient vision in DM, the codicil to Dune which says that users of power are always controlled by greater powers, and players/users are frequently manipulated or controlled for another purpose than the one they perceive, and that that is doubly so for prescient users. There are a few quotes that support this as well, but I don’t have them handy.

I seem to remember in Heretics of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, when Leto II is on the path to becoming the Worm, that he alludes to his Father Paul not having the strength to follow through with this path. I’ve always found this interesting as it forced me to re-evaluate everything that Paul did. Perhaps Paul chose the Jihad as he could not bear the thought of becoming the Worm / God Emperor.

One of the single most interesting bits of the 6 novels is Appendix III of Dune. On the surface, it seems simply to point out that the Bene Gesserit ignored obvious clues that a cataclysm was coming. But if you read it carefully, it seems to say that the Bene Gesserit were made to ignore them and cooperate with Paul’s rise:

The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled “Kwisatz Haderach,” a term signifying “one who can be many places at once.” In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.

They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. … The Lady Jessica was ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was to inbreed this daughter with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron Vladimir, with the high probability of a Kwisatz Haderach from that union. Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son.

This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their scheme. … 5. When the Arrakis Affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild made overtures to the Bene Gesserit. The Guild hinted that its navigators, who use the spice drug of Arrakis to produce the limited prescience necessary for guiding spaceships through the void, were “bothered about the future” or saw “problems on the horizon.” This could only mean they saw a nexus, a meeting place of countless delicate decisions, beyond which the path was hidden from the prescient eye. This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher order dimensions!

(A few of the Bene Gesserit had long been aware that the Guild could not interfere directly with the vital spice source because Guild navigators already were dealing in their own inept way with higher order dimensions, at least to the point where they recognized that the slightest misstep they made on Arrakis could be catastrophic. It was a known fact that Guild navigators could predict no way to take control of the spice without producing just such a nexus. The obvious conclusion was that someone of higher order powers was taking control of the spice source, yet the Bene Gesserit missed this point entirely!) In the face of these facts, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit behavior in this affair was a product of an even higher plan of which they were completely unaware!

If you read this even more carefully, a thought may occur to you. If we say that the ‘even higher plan’ was merely that caused by Paul’s very earliest visions on Caladan, then there are still some mysteries here. How could Paul influence as a child his mother’s decision to bear a son and not a daughter? If the master plan was Paul’s, why was he forced into exile and death? Paul tells us all throughout Dune and Dune Messiah that he is as trapped as anyone else.

Whose master plan was it? Whose vision locked everyone into the Duneverse’s history?

Another quote for your perusal from Dune Messiah:

Without melange, Paul-Muad’dib could not prophesy.

We know this moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction is lethal.

Other histories say Muad’dib was defeated by obvious plotters – the Guild, the Sisterhood and the scientific amoralists of the Bene Tleilex with their Face-Dancer disguises. Other histories point out the spies in Muad’dib’s household. They make much of the Dune Tarot which clouded Muad’dib’s powers of prophecy. Some show how Muad’dib was made to accept the services of a ghola, the flesh brought back from the dead and trained to destroy him. But certainly they must know this ghola was Duncan Idaho, the Atreides lieutenant who perished saving the life of the young Paul.

Yet, they delineate the Qizarate cabal guided by Korba the Panegyrist. They take us step by step through Korba’s plan to make a martyr of Muad’dib and place the blame on Chani, the Fremen concubine.

How can any of this explain the facts as history has revealed them? They cannot. Only through the lethal nature of prophecy can we understand the failure of such enormous and far-seeing power.

Hopefully, other historians will learn something from this revelation.

-Analysis of History: Muad’dib by Bronso of Ix

There’s an interesting little sub-project I try to keep an eye on: I’m trying to figure out how far back is Paul trapped? Is he trapped by prescience even before the book starts? Was his vision of Chani asking Paul to tell her about the waters of his homeworld a full prescient vision, and in a twisted way directly responsible for the Atreides getting Arrakis with all that ensues?

That’s one of the possibilities, but by no means sure. Here are some quotes from Dune Messiah:

Ravenous hunger seized her [Chani] as she sat up. She fed on the food kept by the bedside – spicebread, a heavy cheese.

How much spice could be in a diet of spicebread & cheese? And even Paul doesn’t know why the twins were awake:

Paul sagged against the wall in a spasm of dizziness. He felt that he’d been upended and drained. His own life whipped past him. He saw his father. He was his father. And the grandfather, and the grandfathers before that. His awareness tumbled through a mind-shattering corridor of his whole male line.

“How?” he asked silently.

Faint word-shapings appeared, faded and were gone, as though the strain was too great. Paul wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth. He remembered the awakening of Alia in the Lady Jessica’s womb. But there had been no Water of Life, no overdose of melange this time . . . or had there? Had Chani’s hunger been for that? Or was this somehow the genetic product of his line, foreseen by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?

On a side note, reading through DM, I find again hints of something that perplexes me: could prescience work backwards?

“There was no choice,” Paul said. “You understand that, Duncan?”

“I understand.”

“There are some things no one can bear. I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me.”

But that remains a mystery to me.

I do not think there is any “ideal society”. R. A. Lafferty would be quick to point out that an ideal society is a “utopia”, and we all know the literal meaning of More’s coining. Consider- if there was a perfect society, then why was it mentioned baldly to us during the events of the Honored Matres that there were paradises settled during the Scattering, and that their inhabitants grew soft and mentally died?

Thus the “old empire” is a constant entity in terms of its populace, which brings in the oft-quoted phrase of the final two novels: “rot at the core spreads outward”.

Yes, it was quite deliberately that way; none of the power groups wanted it to changes- they had too much to lose and not apparently anything to gain. Why else did the Guild curtail exploration and colonization?

Stagnation was a tool that Leto II used to inspire the Scattering, which ultimately lead to the survival of the species beyond the ever-stagnant old empire. Thus we take as fact that the “ideal society” in Frank Herbert’s Dune is one that has within it the seeds of its own propagation, rather than, as Marx stated, the “seeks of its own destruction”.

Why not both? Aside from purely Herbert/General Semantic metaphysical assertions and bromides like “we all see only part of the truth”, we also have the consideration that both could well be true- haven’t we all seen flowers or mushrooms which sort of explode or shatter- destroying themselves but casting adrift their seeds?

I’ve sometimes wondered whether the BT and BG were supposed to be a dyad like the Atreides and Harkonnens; you could interpret the BG as “training” the mind to the point where the body follows its lead and becomes awesome, and the BT as “training” (in a very loose sense!) the body to the point where the mind follows its lead and becomes awesome. This is partially supported by the fact that the BT and BG do some similar things in different ways. Have you ever considered serial gholas to be a physical method of a Reverend Mother’s memories? Or the trained dwarf Bijaz to be marginally equivalent to Feyd-Rautha’s implanted conditioning? Re: HMs… the irony there is the corruption of the Reverend Mother i.e. “Revered Mother” ~ “Honored Matre/Mother”.

“…They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way of this–the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad.” (Berkeley PB, movie cover edition)

More interesting is who unleashed the Dune Tarot to muddy the currents of time, and most prominently the Emperor’s vision?

I believe it should be ascribed to the BG. They would have preserved the Tarot from our time, could have made use of it throughout the millennia (I doubt the Spacing Guild would see any use for it; they would be more attracted to I Ching divinations, IMO), and are known to adapt old powerful religious myths for more modern consumption. So they have means, and they certainly have motive: they were part of the conspiracy, remember.