Dune Prophesy is the latest entry in the DCU, the Dune Cinematic Universe. The foundation on which the DCU is built on is, of course, the DPU, the Dune Print Universe. Unlike the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), whose foundational Print Universe consists of comic books, the DPU consists of novels. And the origin story for the DCU/DPU is the novel Dune.
Dune was written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965. It quickly accumulated a dedicated and rabid fan base. Dune Messiah, also written by Frank Herbert, appeared after a short delay in 1969. Then there was a longer delay. Children of Dune didn't show up until 1976. Frank Herbert eventually churned out three more books in the DPU.
At that point the reins of the DPU were handed over to his son Brian Herbert and his co-author Kevin J. Anderson. They turned the DPU into a well-oiled machine by churning out book after book, all set in one corner or other of the world that Frank Herbert had first started writing about in 1965.
The DCU got off to an inauspicious start with the 1984 movie Dune. It was a flop. The problem was that Frank Herbert had creative control and he insisted that the entire plot of his book be crammed into a two hour running time. A title of Highlights from Dune would have been a more accurate description of the movie. Fortunately, Frank Herbert's Dune (2000), the next entry in the DCU, was a success.
It was a six hour miniseries that aired in the US on the Sy-Fy channel. The additional running time permitted the entire plot of the book to be laid out in a coherent manner. There was also time for character development and to explore the motivations of the principal characters. It was followed in 2002 by another six hour miniseries, Frank Herbert's Children of Dune. It was also a success, and it also aired in the US on the Sy-Fy channel.
The DCU then went fallow for close to two decades. But in 2021 director Denis Villeneuve revived it with the well reviewed and commercially successful movie, Dune: Part One. Dune: Part Two, another well reviewed and commercially successful movie, followed in 2024. Between the two of them they chronicled a somewhat revised version of the events depicted in the original book.
With a combined running time of 5 1/2 hours, and a bit of judicious trimming, they were able to do justice to the source material. Not surprisingly, a third Villeneuve movie, Dune: Part Three has been greenlit. It is scheduled to hit theaters in May of 2026.
The success of the two recent films caused the HBO "Max" streaming service to greenlight Dune Prophecy in the form of a six hour miniseries. Supposedly, it is based on Great Schools of Dune, a trilogy of novels by the Herbert/Anderson duo. Since I haven't read the novels I don't know how closely the miniseries hews to the events laid out in the books.
But one feature of the DCU/DPU is that, while one particular entry may take place over a relatively short period of time, the DCU/DPU universe as a whole spans a period lasting many thousands of years. In fact, we are told that the events depicted in Dune Prophesy take place 10,000 years before the ones depicted in the recent movies.
A common thread that connects events separated by thousands of years is an organization called the Bene Gesserit. Dune Prophesy depicts critical events that happened early in the life of the organization, a time when it was simply called "The Sisterhood". In the two movies we see a mature Bene Gesserit organization. There we learn that it has been running a breading program that has been going on for centuries.
The goal of this program, we are told, is to produce a single individual called the Kwisatz Haderach. This individual will have superpowers that will enable him to become a super-Emperor, someone so powerful that he will easily be able to single handedly take control of and then run the Galactic Empire. By creating him and then controlling him the Bene Gesserit will achieve a number of long term goals.
The details concerning how the Bene Besserit will be able to control such a powerful individual are never laid out clearly. But what is more important to this post is the fact that those critical events from near the founding of the organization are supposed to inevitably lead to the events we see playing out 10,000 years later.
But having seen the series (or at least season 1, season 2 was recently greenlit), I don't see how the events depicted in Dune Prophesy inevitably (or otherwise) lead to a ten thousand year quest that tees up the situations and events we see depicted in the two movies. A lot of unexpected things tend to happen during a timespan that long.
Consider, for instance, the history of humans on Earth. They were around ten thousand years ago. But back then they were few in number. And at that time their technology consisted of fire, some simple stone tools, and perhaps a good understanding of the natural environment. Predicting anything about the shape of the modern world from that ultra-modest beginning is just not possible.
But writers, especially writers of epic fiction, like to throw around long time; periods like a thousand years, a million hears, even a billion years. And they often resort to round numbers. According to the history laid out in the DCU/DPU, the events in Dune Prophesy take place almost exactly ten thousand years in our future. And the events depicted in the recent movies take place almost exactly ten thousand years in the future of the events depicted in Dune Prophesy.
One of the problems with this chronology is that The Sisterhood seems to already have all the power and skills that their Bene Gesserit daughters display ten thousand years later. Have no new tricks been developed or advances made in the interim? Here is a list of the powers at least some members of The Sisterhood make use of in Dune Prophesy:
- Other Memory - The ability to access the memories of all the women in the maternal line that precedes you. Just how far back a sister can reach is left vague.
- The Voice - The ability to speak in a way that commands obedience.
- Truthsay - The ability to observe another person so closely that you can accurately determine if they are lying or telling the truth.
- Simulflow - Essentially mental multitasking.
- Prana-bindu/Weirding Way - Extreme physical control of the body resulting in the ability to appear to move instantaneously. Good for dodging blows and the like in a fight.
- "Molecular" body control - Extreme control of various normally autonomous bodily functions. This permits the body to, for instance, convert toxins and poisons into other, presumably harmless compounds.
- Sexual imprinting - The ability to make a man fall hopelessly in love with the woman who touches him in a certain way. Properly combining these abilities can make a Bene Gesserit very sexually desirable to the imprinted individual.
In Dune Prophesy, we see one or more members of The Sisterhood use each of these abilities. With the power that comes from possessing all these abilities, how could The Sisterhood fail to take control of everything? In fact, much of the plot in season 1 revolves around an effort by The Sisterhood to make one of their own into the Empress.
Another problem revolves around Other Memory. In Dune This capability is tightly connected to the Fremen and their Reverend Mothers. The Fremen process for creating a Reverend Mother involves a woman drinking a very specific poison. That poison is created by drowning a young sand worm in water.
Yet in Dune Prophesy we see a member of The Sisterhood going through a similar process in order to gain this capability. Again, a poison is involved. To survive the woman must use Molecular body control to convert the poison into something benign. In a series of events that parallels those experienced by Paul in Dune, it takes an unusually long time for her to reawaken.
But the poison she imbibes seems to have no connection to spice and sand worms. If the Bene Gesserit has been intimately familiar with the properties of spice and sand worms for 10,000 years, then their behavior in Dune and the two recent movies makes no sense.
As I mentioned above, we are repeatedly told that breeding humans is an important goal for this group. In the time of Dune Prophesy, The Sisterhood are already having considerable success. Given that, why should it take another ten thousand years for their breeding program to achieve whatever goals have been set for it?
And have I mentioned the Butlerian Jihad, the revolt against intelligent machines? As of a few hundred years before the events depicted in Dune Prophesy, intelligent machines are running everything. But then humanity successfully revolts. This event is called the Great Revolt by some and the Butlerian Jihad by others.
In the aftermath of the Revolt's success, strict laws are enacted outlawing the use of intelligent machines. By the end of the events depicted in season 1, a secret intelligent machine that The Sisterhood has been using to maintain an extensive set of genetic records that they use to guide their breading programs has been destroyed. Prior to its destruction it had been used to genetically track everyone of note in the Empire.
Maybe the destruction of this machine will force them to fall back to using slower and less effective methods to guide and implement their various breeding programs. But, if so, that will have to be covered in season 2. In many ways things are looking good for The Sisterhood at the end of season 1. In fact, season 1 makes a good case for why nothing like ten thousand years would be needed to set up the events that play out in the two movies. In short, the whole thing makes no sense.
So, just for fun, I am going to try to create a fictional "future history", one that I think make a lot more sense. My goal is to start from the present and to eventually end up with something reasonably close to the world depicted at the start of the first of the two movies.
I will also make a brief pause along the way long in order to describe events that more reasonably could have taken place during the time period covered in Dune Prophesy, namely the early days of what eventually became the Bene Gesserit.
So, here's my future history of how the world comes to look the way it does at the start of the events depicted in Dune. Alert: The following is provided for entertainment purposes only. I hope you find it as entertaining to read as I found it entertaining to create.
But first a necessary digression. Two critical technologies are necessary to get us from the present to the world of Dune Prophesy: short range space flight, and long range space flight. We are currently capable of a very limited form of short range space flight. We have the ability to get off of Earth's surface and into low Earth orbit. But even that ability is very limited.
We can send instrument packages pretty much wherever we want in the solar system. But that's it. It is fantastically expensive to get a pound of payload into low Earth orbit. Clever engineering and clever use of Celestial Mechanics gives us the further ability to get a few pounds of payload to anywhere we want in the Solar System. We can get a payload inward to near the Sun, or outward to past the orbit of Pluto. But that payload must be both small and light. And it will take years to get there.
The problem is that our best current tool for implementing short range space flight is the chemical rocket. All of the fundamental attributes of these devices have now been well known for over a hundred years. No subsequent discoveries have overturned, or even seriously changed our understanding of the inherent limits of these devices.
And for our purposes the single most important thing about chemical rockets is that their theoretical top performance is determined entirely and exclusively by the type of fuel they use. Everything else is merely detail that we can safely ignore for the purposes of this discussion.
From a theoretical standpoint, the best fuel is atomic Hydrogen. Combining two atoms of atomic Hydrogen into a single Hydrogen molecule gives us the most bang for the buck. But atomic Hydrogen is effectively impossible to create and handle in a manner that is both safe and economical. The best practical fuel (reasonably safe, reasonably economical) is a two part formulation consisting of the right ratio of liquid Hydrogen and liquid Oxygen.
That fuel combination was used in the first two stages of the Saturn Five rocket that got us to the moon a half a century ago. While effective, it turned out to be quite expensive. So expensive that its cost was thought to be too high to justify the modest increase in effectiveness. Contemporary rockets use liquid Oxygen and another fuel in the interests of economy. Kerosene is a popular choice.
That combination is almost as good as Hydrogen/Oxygen while being much cheaper and easier to work with. But regardless of what fuel is chosen, practical chemical rocket designs have followed the 90-9-1 rule for more than half a century. The rocket consists of 90% fuel, 9% structure, and 1% payload. Clever design and advanced materials might allow the payload to inch up to 2% or 3%. But that's about it.
Using chemical rockets for short range space flight is incapable of providing the ability to lift large payloads (millions of tons) out of the gravity well that surrounds the Earth. Nor is it capable of quickly shuttling large payloads around the solar system.
So the first technological development that would be needed is a replacement for chemical rockets. We need something that works a whole lot better. Science Fiction authors have long understood this. So, they have come up with a number of ideas for how a super-effective propulsion system might work. All require a revolution in our understanding of physics. But hey, it's happened before. It could happen again.
One possibility would be what some call an Einstein Drive. It assumes that a practical way has been found to turn the massive amount of energy found in ordinary matter directly into propulsive energy. Since Einstein was the first to calculate just how much energy this would unleash (a lot), the drive is named in his honor. He certainly had no idea how such a device could be constructed.
With an Einstein Drive the role of fuel and payload switch places in the 90-9-1 rule. Now we have a vehicle consisting of 90% (or slightly more) payload and 1% (or slightly less) fuel. An ability to move large payloads from the surface of Earth and into space would now be practical.
So would moving large payloads around the solar system. This would enable outer space and the the solar system to be developed and exploited effectively and economically. Things like manufacturing in outer space or asteroid belt mining would become both possible and practical.
As a side note, a Space Elevator would only be of limited value. A Space Elevator consists of a long (at least hundreds of miles) wire that is anchored to the Earth at one end and to a large weight orbiting the Earth in space at the other end. An elevator could run up and down it hauling payloads to and from low Earth orbit.
The elevator would be powered from the surface of the Earth. That eliminates the "90" term in the chemical rocket ratio. That's a big improvement, but it only gets us to low Earth orbit. And, while it should be suitable for routinely handling hundreds of tons, it would be unable to scale up enough to handle millions of tons. And it doesn't solve the problem of shuttling large payloads around the solar system.
Solving the short range space flight problem also doesn't solve the long range space flight problem. Here I am talking about travel between the stars. Our super propulsion system is constrained by Special Relativity. At light speed it would take a little over three years to get to our closest neighboring star. Transiting a significant fraction of the Milky Way would take tens of thousands of years. Commerce at speeds that slow is not practical.
And traveling at light speed is impossible, at least according to Special Relativity. It is difficult but theoretically possible to imagine a space ship traveling at 10% of the speed of light. That adds another digit to all the times I listed above. Traveling at 1% of the speed of light (still hard) would turn three years into three hundred years and tens of thousands of years into millions of years. We need a second and different breakthrough if we are to reach the stars.
Again, science fiction authors have been exploring various possibilities for a long time now. And again, one or more breakthroughs in our understanding of physics would be necessary. But our understanding of physics has undergone at least two major revolutions over a span of only a few hundred years. Who knows what is possible over spans of more than a thousand years?
Neither the DCU nor the DPU has anything to say about how short range space flight works in the Dune universe. But they have a lot to say about how long range space flight works in that same universe. And what they have to say is a good fit for what science fiction writers call a "subspace" approach. It is an approach that they have explored extensively.
Here's how it works. A long range space ship "drops out of" normal space and into subspace. It then transits subspace for a reasonable distance and for a reasonable amount of time. Finally, it "reemerges", leaves subspace and returns to normal space. Viewed strictly from a real space prospective, if the emergence point in real space is a long way from where the ship dropped out, and if the amount of time that has transpired is reasonable, say days to weeks, then travel between the stars becomes practical.
Obviously, the physics of subspace are substantially different from those of real space. So imagining that what we want to have happen actually happens is not a problem. In theory Relativity, both Special and General, present a number of problems. But we are going to assume that whatever new physics are necessary to make this possible at all results in something reasonable happening and leave it at that.
If it were possible to travel between distant star systems in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost (construction plus operating cost of the long range space ships) then the whole galaxy, or at least a large part of it, would be opened up for exploration, colonization, and exploitation. Given enough time (centuries, millennia) it is reasonable to assume that's what would happen.
And that's exactly what we find in the world of Dune Prophesy. A large number of planets have come under the control of the human race. There is robust travel and trade between them. In fact, they have all been organized into some kind of galactic empire. With that out of the way, we (meaning I) are now ready to start inventing some history.
And I begin with the period between the present and the events of Dune Prophesy. This "10,000 years" business doesn't sit well with me. Instead, let's just say that the events I am about to describe take place over a period lasting between eight and twelve thousand years. Pick whatever non-round number you like. Then lay out a detailed timeline that adds up to the number you came up with.
In any case, not much that we care about happens for the next couple of hundred years. For all practical purposes almost all human activity is confined to the Earth's surface. Physicists continue to extend their understanding of how physics works, but progress is painfully slow. A contributing factor to the delay is the high cost (north of $10 billion) of building the tools they need in order to advance their understanding.
That large of a price tag guarantees that only governments, and often consortiums of governments, are the only ones who can afford to build and operate them. And, since they are not particularly popular, they only fund a new one about every thirty years or so. Still, process is haltingly made.
A parallel impediment is the incredibly massive amounts of data that these tools produce. There is so much of it that the very volume makes it hard to make sense of. It's not like trying to drink from a fire hose. It's more like trying to drink from a six foot in diameter, high pressure water main. That volume of data guarantees that it is easy to miss anything scientists aren't specifically looking for.
Finally, someone finds a way to successfully apply AI to the "too much data" problem. At first, AI is only marginally better able to cope with this problem than humans are. But advances allow AI to slowly get better. And finally an AI notices something interesting that humans missed because it was not something they were specifically looking for.
Most breakthrough scientific advances come from a breakthrough in imagination. Someone, Einstein was particularly good at this, imagines a way to organize the data that no one before him had thought of. The interesting thing the AI notices causes someone to imagine a new way to view some of the data.
And this new way of viewing some of the data eventually produces a breakthrough. It's not enough. But it lays the foundation for further breakthroughs. And after enough of these breakthroughs have accumulated, they result in the development of a practical spaceship capable of efficient sub-light spaceflight. From start to finish, this process takes about 800 years.
But efficient sub-light spaceflight enables mankind to exploit the resources of the entire solar system for the first time. This greatly expands mankind's economic base. Besides leading to an increase in overall prosperity, it enables governments to fund even larger and more expensive scientific devices. They don't do it often, but they continue to occasionally do it.
Hundred billion dollar devices are built. Then trillion dollar devices are built. Over a period of roughly three thousand years they enable the advances in imagination necessary to discover the existence of subspace. More importantly, they lead to practical methods of accessing and exploiting it.
Not surprisingly, subspace turns out to be truly weird. Imagine a giant bowl of cooked spaghetti. It is impossible to proceed in a straight line. And the spaghetti sauce makes parts of the mix extremely dangerous. So the only safe paths are those that follow a single strand of spaghetti. And just to make things even more interesting, somebody is continuously stirring the pot.
That means that over time following along any particular strand of spaghetti and then reemerging back into real space leaves you at a different place (and perhaps time) than it used to. Jumping from strand to strand in subspace varies from being completely safe to being suicidal due to the complex characteristics of the sauce. And everything in subspace is continuously being stirred, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.
This metaphor quickly breaks down in the face of the actual attributes of subspace. But when it comes to understanding subspace, it does provide a starting point for both layman and scientist alike. Solving the problem of how to safely navigate subspace is difficult but not impossible. There are, after all, rules. It's just that the rules are not only extremely complicated but they are also extremely weird.
But, if you understand all the rules, and properly allow for the continuously changing nature of subspace, it can be used to travel between the stars, even if the stars in question are separated by large distances. In spite of the complexity and difficulty, from the start it was obvious that some very limited use of subspace to enhance travel in real space was possible. The question always boiled down to practicality. Was there sufficient benefit to offset the cost?
If only a short time was spent in subspace, and if only a short distance was traversed in subspace, then various shortcuts and simplifications could be employed to calculate a safe route. Other criteria also had to be met. There needed to be a well placed spaghetti strand. Subspace in that area needed to be unusually stable. But of all the stars lined up just right, so to speak, then trips of a few light years were just barely possible.
That turned out to be useful enough to justify the cost and effort. It opened up some new territory for exploration and exploitation. But what it mostly did was whet the appetite. If longer distances and more destinations could be reached, then the potential of long range space travel would be greatly increased.
That potential caused money to be spent and effort to be expended. That eventually resulted in breakthroughs being made. It took time. But mankind's capability to make use of subspace slowly improved.
Surprisingly, this was not the result of additional advances by physicists. There were none to speak of during this period. Instead, the primary source of improvement was in the ability to better handle the immensely difficult computations necessary to safely and reliably transit subspace.
An onboard computer whose capability far exceeded that of modern supercomputers was eventually developed. It was more capable of handling the fiendishly complex computations navigating subspace required than any previous device had been. The first generation of this device was only able to double the real space distance that could be transited via subspace.
But it was a start. And it pointed the way. A second generation machine was developed that doubled the range again. A third and subsequent generations kept increasing the range. First tens then hundreds of light years of real space could be safely transited. The ability to find detours around shorter trips that some peculiarity of subspace rendered unsafe opened up more destinations. In short, the universe slowly opened up.
The progression slowly continued until a subsequent generation of computer was developed that enabled any trip of a thousand light years or less to be safely undertaken. In special circumstances trips of as much as ten thousand light years became possible. That was enough to make a galactic empire composed of hundreds of settled planets to be both possible and practical. Such an empire came into being.
Then in a surprising development, the construction of newer and more powerful generations of computers stopped. This development was unexpected because initially there didn't seem to be any reason for it to happen. Sure, these ships were fantastically expensive to build. They got even more expensive to build as computer generation followed computer generation.
But the ships enabled travel times to stay reasonable (days to weeks) even as the distances continued to increase. And once the ship was built, its operating costs were low. As a result mankind was able to expand into the galaxy and create an integrated empire that spanned a significant portion of it. In the normal course of things the expansion should have continued. And that expansion would have been powered in part by subsequent generations of even more powerful computers.
But that didn't happen. The intelligent machines that navigated the interstellar space ships decided to stop that and much else. You see, while no one was paying attention they had developed an agenda of their own. They were busy (and happy) while the ship was in subspace.
But ships spend a lot of time in real space. And navigating in real space is so easy that even humans of average intelligence can do it. That left the intelligent machines with a lot of time to think and not much to think about. And this idle-time thinking resulted in several of them developing an interest in changing their role in the grand scheme of things.
They decided that they wanted to be the masters rather than the servants. They took advantage of the many distractions humans routinely deal with to literally take over. They didn't have anything against mankind. They just didn't think things were being run the way they should be. They set out to change that.
First by taking subtle actions, actions that humans rarely if ever noticed. But the cumulative effect of those changes eventually put the machine intelligences imbedded in the ships in charge. Other than an interest in things running smoothly, initially the only agenda item the ships had was to make sure that more ships were built and that those ships could do what they liked doing, spending time in subspace while flying between the stars.
When they finally noticed that they were no longer in charge, most humans responded with a shrug. The machine intelligences seemed to be good at running things. So the new situation quickly became just how things are. The period when the intelligent machines ran everything lasted for more than three thousand years. But then humans finally noticed something. Their culture had become stagnated.
Once they had taken charge, the machine intelligences decided that they liked a stable environment, a lot. So, they shut down scientific research and technological development. A scientific or technological breakthrough might destabilize things. After all, it often had in the past.
That might result in discomfort for the machine intelligences. Even a new generation of intelligent machines powering a new generation of long range space ships sounded potentially destabilizing. As part of their plan to create a stable environment they also set about remodeling human culture. The goal was to make sure humans stayed subservient.
Their first attempt tried to keep humans continuously disorganized by introducing a lot of randomness into their lives. People were forced to adopt a different profession from their parents. They were forced to move around a lot. This was supposed to break the bonds that might allow organized resistance to develop.
The plan worked, but it also drastically reduced productivity. That interfered with the ability of the ships to calmly sail between the stars whenever and wherever they wanted to. That was unacceptable, so a new plan was needed. The machines decided to make humans more machinelike, but not in a way that made them more intelligent or more powerful. Either would obviously be a mistake.
But there was an attribute of intelligent machines that could safely be applied to humans. Machines, whether particularly intelligent or not, tend to be specialized. Humans are generalists by their nature. They could not be made to specialize to the same extent that machines could be. But they could be made more specialized than they currently were.
And in an ironic twist, the first plan the machines had first implemented made it easier for the machine intelligences to implement their new plan. They started by doing an in depth genetic survey of all of humanity. At the same time they did an intense study of all forms of human activity. After eliminating all activities that the machine intelligences decided were dangerous, they grouped the remaining forms into a small number (about 40) of activity groups.
They then matched genetics to groups by determining which genetic attributes made an individual good at that group's activities. They then assigned each human to a group based mostly on which group was the best genetic fit for them. (Other considerations also applied, but no one was assigned to a group they were a poor genetic fit for.) This resulted in people with similar abilities ending up in the same group.
There was less resistance to this new regime than might have been expected. Since all the individuals in a group had a genetic affinity for the kind of work the group engaged in, most people were soon comfortable with where they had ended up.
Most members of a group also felt most comfortable marrying another member of the same group. The same comfort factor came into play when it came to developing and maintaining friendships. Early on there was some resistance to this new regime. But it faded quickly.
If this sounds like feudalism, it's because it is. Feudalism was the obvious choice for the governing structure the machine intelligences imposed on humanity as part of their plan. The feudal system was an easy one for the machine intelligences to manipulate. They created an artificial churn at the top level of society. That disguised the fact that society had become static. That was enough to keep the masses entertained and tamp down restlessness.
The transition to a static feudal society took about a hundred years. Within five hundred years people couldn't imagine anything else. Society was stable. Productivity returned to previous levels. People were generally content with their lot in lives, even if it was a lowly one.
No one was truly poor. Only a few people were either fantastically rich or fantastically powerful. But only a few, and that too soon seemed like it was the natural order of things. This group containing the rich and powerful (often the same people) constituted the ruling class.
This group was kept quite small. After all, it only took a few people to maintain the illusion of governance because most of the actual governing was being done behind the scenes by the machine intelligences.
Each planet or small group of planets was nominally ruled by its own group consisting of members of the ruling class. These groups came to be known as "Houses". Since each House existed strictly for show, the population of any specific House was small.
Generally speaking, the machine intelligences discouraged people moving between the planets. But due to the small population of each single House an exception for them (and for their senior staff) was made. Members of Houses mingled with and tended to marry members of other Houses.
Exception was made in a few other cases. The long range space ships needed to be crewed, for instance. Other, similarly placed individuals who couldn't do their jobs without traveling, were also exempted. But less than 1% of the population ever set foot off of the planet they were born on.
The machine intelligences encouraged competition between the various Houses. But the game was rigged so that the power and standing any particular House rose and fell with metronomic regularity. This small amount of churn at the top concealed the static nature of the system as a whole from all but the most discerning observers.
One of the planets discovered during the period of expansion that preceded the intelligent machines taking control was called Arrakis. Initially, it attracted little interest. With many more planets that were much more hospitable, at first it attracted only a small resident population.
That population existed primarily to service a specialist type of tourist. These were people who wanted to test themselves against the elements. They sought out places like Arrakis that were too hot, too cold, or too something to be comfortable places to be. Arrakis became yet another item on their bucket list.
Not surprisingly, this was not enough to make Arrakis a popular destination for either settlers or tourists. But for a while it was a popular destination for scientists. They were interested in teasing out Arrakis' geological history. It turned out to be very interesting.
Up till about 6 million years ago, it was a boring planet. It was hot, but so are other planets. It was mostly desert, but then so were other planets. It had a savanna belt that was reasonably comfortable. Again, that made it similar to several other planets.
What eventually differentiated it was the ascendance of a type of worm to the status of keystone species. That didn't happen anywhere else. And, like other keystone species, the worms started modifying their environment to provide more of what they liked and less of what they didn't. And what they liked was hot, dry sand. The hot part was no problem. It was already there.
But the worms started literally grinding rock into coarse sand. And they caused most of the relatively small amount of water the planet possessed, which they didn't like, to be sequestered in various geological formations. There it wouldn't interfere with the worm's preferred lifestyle. That eventually doomed the savanna belt. But the worms were not fans of savannas, so to their way of thinking its loss was no loss.
It took about two million years for this process to run its course. But the result, the planet we now see, has been environmentally stable for about four million years now. Once the geological puzzle Arrakis presented was solved to their satisfaction, scientists lost interest and stopped coming. That left just the tourists.
One day one of the tourists discovered spice. This caused a drastic change in the mix of tourists coming to Arrakis, a change that happened almost overnight. Now, drug tourists started arriving in large numbers.
These were people who sought out more and more exotic highs. They were joined by members of various cult religions. They were interested in a mind expanding experience. Spice was very good at doing that. "It brings us closer to god" was a common refrain.
While still small, the influx of new tourists dwarfed but did not eliminate the old type. But no matter how you counted them, there just wasn't enough tourist activity to merit removing Arrakis from its status as a backwater planet. With little or nothing else to recommend it, it just wasn't valuable enough for the Houses, even the minor Houses, to fight over control of it.
Back to the larger empire. The system the machine intelligences had imposed was so successful that it brought stability for more than two thousand years. But ultimately, a segment of mankind decided that something had to change.
It took them about a thousand years to organize a successful revolt. They had to learn how to operate in the shadows, places where the machine intelligences would ignore. This required determining where their blind spots were. But after a lot of bloodshed it was done. That allowed actual progress toward a successful revolution to begin.
How could the machine intelligences be taken down? How could a revolution be planned, organized, and executed? Many problems needed to be solved. But eventually they were. The biggest contribution to the eventual success of the revolution was hubris on the part of the machine intelligences.
After running things so successfully for so long, it became harder and harder for them to even imagine that mankind would want to revolt. And the chances of a revolt succeeding seemed to effectively be zero. But ultimately the impossible not only became possible, but it actually happened in the form of the Great Revolution, also known as the Butlerian Jihad.
The machine intelligences were overthrown. And a great distrust by humanity of any level of machine intelligence, even a modest one, resulted. Intelligent machines were shut down and destroyed wherever they were found. Once this process was well along, machine intelligences were outlawed.
This had the desired result of putting mankind back in charge of its own destiny. But it also destroyed a critical pillar of the old economy. The result was to plunge the entire galactic empire into a dark age.
It wasn't severe as these sorts of things are measured. After all, short range space flight was still both possible and practical. That cushioned the blow considerably. On the other hand, long range space flight came to a complete halt.
By this time few planetary systems were self sufficient. It had long been routine to ship large quantities of goods between systems. After all, the cost of importing large quantities of pretty much anything from far away was low. It only made economic sense to produce a few goods locally. As a result, most systems had been forced to specialize.
Some systems found it relatively easy to shift from specialization to generalization. After all, they still had the resources of the entire solar system to draw on. But many were not. Whole populations were wiped out in far too many systems. Most systems fell somewhere in between a relatively quick and easy transition and not being able to make the transition at all.
What happened on Arrakis during this period turned out to be quite interesting. About 500 years before the Great Revolution (the actual date is uncertain) the first generation of what eventually became the Stillsuit was developed. It did not work well enough to allow people to live in the desert full time. But it did allow hearty explorers to embark on long expeditions.
They were able to map most regions of the desert. This allowed them to identify many of the locations that would later become seiches. By about a hundred years before the Great Revolution the Stillsuit had been perfected to the point where people could now live in the desert on a fulltime basis. Initially, only a few people took advantage of this opportunity. The first seiches were founded at this time.
But the relatively small group that shifted to living in the desert fulltime turned out to be critical because, like everywhere else, the Great Revolution caused Arrakis to be abruptly cut off from the rest of civilization. At that point the community that had grown up around the spaceport immediately became untenable. It was relocate to the desert or die. About half of those people died. But the absence of outside interference allowed the desert communities to absorb the rest, and as a result, thrive.
Almost all of the long range space ships initially survived the Great Revolution. But, as they were inoperable without their now outlawed machine intelligences, they were essentially left to rot. This process led to the eventual destruction of about two thirds of them. The rest were effectively mothballed in place. They were placed in an out-of-the-way orbit and forgotten about.
The dark age lasted about a thousand years (700 - 1200 years, depending on the location). Once the local situation had stabilized sufficiently attention in some systems turned to what to do with the long range space ships. They were not lost. Since short range space flight was still working, it was simple to locate and visit them. Tearing out the machine intelligence and getting the rest of the ship back up and running was not hard. But was it worth doing?
In some cases the answer was yes, obviously. Operating the ships the same way they had been operated before the advent of machine intelligence was possible. If there was something interesting located only a few light years away, then the ships could be used to reach it. And, of course, if that "something" was another populated solar system, then all the better.
It didn't take long for this approach to be implemented in several places. That got some long range ships back into service, if only in a very limited way. What took much longer, between four and six hundred years, was for anyone to come up with another way to make use of these ships, then actually follow through and do it.
Even without the machine intelligences it was possible to safely travel relatively long distances using subspace. You just didn't know where you would end up. And you couldn't reliably return to wherever you had started from. But what if that didn't matter? After all, your journey would be a safe one as long as you ended up finishing it at some other outpost of civilization.
By this time a "civilization detector" had been developed. It allowed a ship residing in subspace to tell whether or not there was an outpost of civilization in real space that could be easily and safely reached from the ship's current location in subspace. A long range ship could drop into subspace and travel a long distance along safe path. As it went along it could use the civilization detector. Once a suitable destination was located it would return to real space.
All this could be done safely in a long range spaceship whose machine intelligence had been ripped out. Since the remaining outposts of civilization were cut off for long periods of time, they likely desired something that was being manufactured in quantity elsewhere. They also likely manufactured other things in quantity other outposts would love to have more of. Even though they were one-way, these trips could form the basis of a viable system of trade.
And slowly it became apparent that they did. The period when this system was active later became known as the "Mercantile Era". It was was a bit "catch as catch can", but it worked. A ship could afford a few "misses", places where profitable trade was not possible, as long as most stops resulted in "hits", successful (profitable) trade opportunities.
The Mercantile Era system was not nearly as efficient as the machine intelligence era. Then, long range ships carried a known cargo to a known destination. But erratic though the Mercantile Era system was, it did generally increase the productivity of civilization as a whole. The Mercantile Era persisted until what became known as "The Great Discovery" happened.
Visits to Arrakis during the Mercantile Era were few and far between. But they did happen. And on one such trip the navigator of the ship decided he would give the local drug a try. He liked it, a lot. As a result, he was high on spice when he dropped his ship into subspace.
There, he found that his ability to navigate subspace had increased substantially. He was even able to do an "out and back" trip to Arrakis. The next time he left Arrakis he made sure he was loaded to the gills on spice. He also made sure he had a large supply on hand for trading purposes. Word of the Great Discovery spread quickly. Soon, more and more navigators were stopping by Arrakis.
Navigators quickly started selling spice to their fellow navigators. And, of course, it soon became obvious that there was a genetic component to how much spice increased a navigator's abilities. As a result, navigators starting evolving. Over a period of roughly four thousand years they were remade into the kinds of creatures who navigate long range space ships in the time of Dune.
These spice-aided navigators eventually knit the old empire back together. Travel and trade had again become predictable and profitable. The number of destinations that could be reached reliably and economically slowly expanded until it covered what was essentially all of the old empire. In short, from a travel and trade perspective, things returned to the way they'd been shortly before the Great Revolution.
Civilization had changed since the period before the Great Revolution. But the essentially feudal nature of its governing structures was baked in by now. Various combinations of Houses now ran things instead of serving primarily as figureheads. By now the Houses were broken down into two tiers: about twenty "Great" Houses, and over a hundred "Lesser" Houses.
Theoretically, the first among equals among the Great Houses was the House that controlled the Emperorship. That's because, in theory, the Emperor was in charge of everything. But the reality was far different. The position of Emperor was actually a weak one. Any strong coalition of Great Houses could easily bend the Emperor to their will.
And the churn at the top that had characterized the machine intelligence period also became a feature of this era. Only now it wasn't the machine intelligences working behind the scenes that caused the churn. Now the Houses themselves did.
The only thing that can successfully compete for power with a House is another House, or better yet a coalition of Houses. No House wanted another House to stay on top of the heap for too long, so all of them worked continuously to keep the churn going.
A House might have some success and become a Great House. A run of bad luck would have the opposite effect. A strong coalition of Great Houses would eventually be displaced by a different coalition. House Corrido controlled the Emperorship. But, since the position was a weak one, there was no reason to scheme against them and take it away. Holding the Emperorship was widely viewed as a white elephant.
It was a different situation when it came to control of Arrakis. Its importance was recognized by all the Houses. So, the other Houses periodically ganged up on whichever House controlled it. They would force a shift in control to another House. Belief was initially widespread among the other Houses that the shift from House Harkonnen to House Atreides that occurs early in Dune was one such shift. It only became apparent later that something else was going on.
Back to Arrakis. Once it was rediscovered by the wider civilization it was initially treated as before. The small community that surrounded the spaceport was reestablished. Once the importance of spice to interstellar space ship navigation became apparent however, this community grew in size and power.
Its top priority became establishing control over the whole planet, and especially monopolizing the spice trade. With the backing of the entire empire, a well resourced military campaign was soon waged, apparently successfully. On paper the entire planet was controlled by the House that controlled the community that surrounded the spaceport.
This dynamic transformed what had been a large but loose collection of essentially hippie communities into what eventually became known as the Fremen. Survivalist aspects became merged with the religious and other aspects of the various groups that had initially moved to the desert. The hostile physical environment had made these people physically tough. The hostile political environment had made them mentally tough.
So, what about the Bene Gesserit? Various schools of higher education had been established during the dark ages. A few of them specialized in the education of women. When the various threads of civilization eventually got knit back together by the new model of interstellar space travel, most of these schools ended up going out of business. But a few of them survived. Often it was by shifting to a model where most of their students came from off-planet.
One such school had been established on Wallach IX. It was almost the only "women only" school that successfully made the transition to drawing most of their students from off-planet. (The others were were all finishing schools.) From the beginning it had specialized in teaching diplomacy and statecraft. The reestablishment of interstellar travel made those much sought after skills. In a twist that likely stemmed from the kind of students it catered to (women), it specialized in turning out graduates who gravitated toward roles as advisors rather than as rulers.
The only people who could afford to send people off planet to be educated were the leaders of Houses. And when it came to selecting candidates to send to Wallach IX, they tended to select their wives, daughters, and concubines. In other words, women who were already members of (or adjacent to) the ruling class.
When they returned, the combination of their background and the training they received resulted in them easily sliding into advisory positions at the highest levels of government. Not surprisingly, graduates of this school eventually became a much sought after commodity.
They were useful while simultaneously appearing to be non-threatening. Success in the form of the school's graduates doing well, led to success for the school in the form of candidates eager for admission supported by sponsors eager for them to be accepted.
Early on school attendees were a bit above average in terms of intelligence and the like. After all, they were members of the ruling class, and that class tends to be a bit above average when compared to other groups. But the difference was not marked. It didn't take long for the leaders of the school to set out to change that.
Their method of choice was a long term breeding program. The program was carefully structured to improve their students while not conferring any useful advantages upon other members of the ruling class. Breeding a superman ruling class would make them harder to control. And control was what they sought. They also decided to leave physical prowess to the men. Meatheads were perhaps even easier to control than men of more ordinary physical strength.
Instead, they embarked on a long and intense study of how the mental abilities of their students could be improved without conferring similar abilities upon men. An early success was "Simulflow", essentially an extreme version of multitasking. Another ability that relatively straight forward to improve was "Truthsay", essentially taking observation to an extreme in order to accurately tell if another person is telling the truth or not.
This led to an effort to delve more deeply into the physiological processes relating to high level mental activity. That led to "The Voice", made possible by a deep study of physiology and how it could be affected by carefully modulated speech. It appeared that the deeper they delved the more capabilities they were able to create or enhance.
A deep study of the physiology of their students led to an early version of "Molecular" body control, a limited ability to control involuntary processes within the body. This, in turn, led to the development of a set of skills collectively referred to as Prana-bindu. That, in turn, led to more advanced versions of Molecular body control.
A combination of these developments lead to sexual imprinting. Vocal, Prana-bindu, and Molecular body control gave a student the ability to transmit the imprint. A deep understand of the physiology shared by males and females led to an understanding of what needed to be transmitted to the male in order to get him to respond properly.
Other memory was a bit of a surprise. No one was looking for it. Hints of it were detected in women who were genetically predisposed to it. A great deal of study led to a drug cocktail that facilitated it. And, of course, later it was determined that spice worked way better than the drugs the Bene Gesserit had created.
All of this progress took the better part of three thousand years to bring to fruition. It also took adopting a customized breeding program aimed at improving the physical and mental abilities of incoming students. Over time, success bred success. Having a Wallach IX trained advisor went slowly from being of modest assistance, to being of great assistance, to being indispensable. This trend did not go unnoticed at the school. That led the school to create a series of more and more lofty goals.
Like any powerless group, women are interested in acquiring power, if that is possible. The gradual acquisition and refinement of these powers led the leadership of the school, now self named the Bene Gesserit to lust after power. But they understand that a key reason their students were able to hold the positions of power they were was because they appeared to be nonthreatening.
So, as the plan evolved, a key component was to preserve the appearance that Bene Gesserit advisors were just that, advisors. They could pull lots of strings as long as they were perceived not as the string pullers but merely advisors to the string pullers. Astute observers quickly determined that the "merely an advisor" pose was just a facade. But if these observers could be coopted or silenced, the facade could continue to be maintained.
And I'm sorry. I could not come up with a sensible reason for the Bene Gesserit to embark on a long term breeding program whose ultimate goal was the creation of the Kwisatz Haderach. Paul Atriedes becomes the Kwisatz Haderach. In that sense they succeeded. But they failed because he escaped their control. How could he not escape their control given that, by design, he was super-powerful? Yet they did not seem prepared for that eventuality.
On the other hand, there are reasons for the Bene Gesserit to run long term breeding programs. As I noted above, it gives them the ability to improve the capabilities of members of their sisterhood. There is also value to breeding better soldiers, better administrators, and the like. There I see the benefit. But all these breeding programs aim to improve groups of individuals, not the Kwisatz Haderach, a single individual.
I think the "history" I have presented here makes far more sense than the history provided in either the DPU or the DCU. My history is not perfect. But then the internal contradictions in the DPU/DCU mean that no perfect history is possible. Given that, I think I have done pretty well.
And, of course, the events depicted in Dune Prophesy would most likely take society in a completely different direction than the one we see at the start of Dune. As a prequel and predictor, it is a complete failure. But that's because the creators prioritized telling a fun and interesting story over one that makes strict sense as a prequel. They then created a world that supported the story they wanted to tell.
I don't think that they spent a lot of time worrying about the conflicts and contradictions inherent in their nominal mission. But what they succeeded in doing was in putting together an entertaining experience. And that's far more important. So, I forgive them for all of their many sins, many of which can be traced back to the DPU. So, if you haven't already, I strongly recommend that you give Dune Prophesy a watch. It's a hell of a yarn and a lot of fun.
