Dune/Headscratchers

• If Arrakis is the only source of the most vital commodity in the universe, why was house Harkonnen allowed to run it like an ordinary fiefdom? You'd think it would be jointly administered by all the major power groups as some kind of neutral ground or similar.
  • All the major power groups keep hands off to prevent a power struggle. The Emperor is forbidden from governing Arrakis, the Guild's prescient navigators know that touching it would be bad in the long run, and the Bene Gesserit prefer to keep in the shadows. Thus, the Emperor gifts it to one of the in-favour Houses, who are charged with keeping Arrakis spice supplies open. CHOAM doesn't care who is in charge, as long as the supply is kept constant, and Harkonnen maintains this by being an influential player in CHOAM dealings.
    • And presumably the Emperor changes the contract holder any time one House is making too much bank on it. Indeed, the plot of the first novel is largely the Emperor trying to simultaneously eliminate one House that's rising too high, while at the same time getting a significant blackmail lever over the other House he's secretly helping destroy the first one.
  • House Harkonnen's control of Dune is described as a 'quasi-fief' under a 'CHOAM company contract'. In other words, they didn't own Arrakis, they were simply hired to administrate its mining operations (and aside from smugglers and the Fremen, there's nothing on Arrakis but spice mining operations and the ancillary local industry to support the miners and their families). Note that Duke Leto's control of Arrakis was described as 'fief-complete', and House Atreides had to give up their control of Caladan to go to Arrakis, while House Harkonnen maintained their family seat on Giedi Prime the whole time and simply sent one of the family heirs and some troops to Arrakis to run the shop.
    • And, of course, the Emperor gave House Atreides the 'fief-complete' of Arrakis for the sole purpose of getting them off their secure base from Caladan and onto ground where he could arrange for their destruction at the apparent hands of House Harkonnen, which explains the violation of normal policy re: not letting any Great House actually own Arrakis.
• Why was the Baron even within Alia's consciousness? Wasn't Jessica, and therefore Alia only awakened to the female descendants?
  • Alia was an Abomination, and the full blooded sister of Paul Atreides the messiah of the Bene Gesserit, it is perfectly possible for her to have the powers she shows if you don't sink to the level of saying women are incapable of greatness, and assume that if she wasn't a messiah herself, being the sister of the supreme being enables her to show at least similar powers, and abilities. Finally, one could surmise the baron was simply a gestalt of her consciousness turned irrational that was driving her toward more insanity. Did the Harkonnen side of the family ever strike you as stable and well grounded?
  • It's a plot hole. In Dune and Dune Messiah, she has the abilities and limitations of a Reverend Mother. In Children of Dune, she's closer to the twins, who have the abilities and limitations of a Kwisatz Haderach. If a Reverend Mother is able to look back into male ancestral pasts, it means that the ninety generation breeding program of the Bene Gesserit has been a complete and utter wash, as opposed to, y'know, asking a sister "You know that place that frightens you? Try looking into it again real real hard this time."
  • While not explained, its not necessarily a hole. Alia was able to project thoughts into Paul's consciousness in the first book. She describes it as something "Not even [Paul] can do". She's a bit out there.
  • Alia went through the awakening while in her mother's womb. It wasn't supposed to happen that way. Without any training, she had trouble keeping her own ego above water. Harkonnen offered to shield her from the press of the others when necessary, but that gave him a lot of influence.
  • A fetus's sex isn't physiologically evident early in the pregnancy, so it's possible that Alia was exposed to the Water of Life before she truly had a gender on anything but a genetic level. As an effectively-neuter being, she would therefore have equal claim on male and female memories.
  • Girls are chromosomally female from the moment they are conceived. I don't think it's a plothole, though. Alia is a genetically half-male chimera, or the Baron Harkonnen was a cross-dressing woman with a basso voice. Neither of these are impossible, but it's probably the first, since Alia hears voices of her ancestor Agamemnon as well.
• In Heretics, it says that a "failed Reverend Mother", Geasa, took care of ghola-Idaho. If you fail, you die... so?
  • Continuity error probably. Frank made them occasionally. Think of her as more of a failed Sister.
    • Failing to become a Sister means failing to pass the gom jabbar test, which is fatal.
  • Perhaps Failed RM = Wasn't allowed to take the Spice Agony. Not "Tried and Died", but "Your tests show you'd never survive."
  • Canon. One of the Reverend Mothers (Darwi Odrade), recounted that during her training, the Night Watchwoman (don't remember her official position) was prevented from taking the agony due to heart problems, which also kept her awake at night.
  • Also remember that 'tried and died' was referring to prior Kwisatz Haderach candidates who tried and failed to undergo the Agony, something a non-Kwisatz Haderach male is genetically incapable of doing. A failed female candidate could be saved simply by having someone else give her some already 'changed' spice liquor (remember that the entire Fremen sietch takes that stuff once the Reverend Mother has catalyzed it for them, and they're fine), and as the Agony is supervised by a group of Reverend Mothers there's any number of other people in the room who could provide some.
  • Hasimir Fenring was a 'failed Kwisatz Haderach,' but his Bene Gesserit wife didn't rush to kill him or anything. Failure to pass the test of humanity carried the gom jabbar, but failure to live up to an ideal is just a fact of life.
• Stillsuits supposedly function by letting your sweat evaporate, then immediately distilling the vapors so the moisture isn't lost. But how can such a self-contained system provide for adequate heat loss, which is what the body sweats to achieve in the first place? They're described as form-fitting, with no fins or other heat-radiating accouterments.
  • Magic! Okay, let's stop being facetious. Like how lasguns or shields work, the mechanism honestly doesn't matter, only the effects. Since you're getting liquid water out of the process, the heat is obviously being dumped somehow. It's the future, stillsuits might be made from some remarkably efficient radiation material.
  • Same way that clothes that real desert people achieve heat loss. A stillsuit is simply the natural evolution of that concept. It's worth remarking that in the desert, sweat evaporates too fast to achieve adequate heat loss, and the clothes are meant to keep it in contact with the skin for longer.
  • The construction of the stillsuit is actually noted by Paul (pre-Maudhib) as evidence that the Fremen have access to very advanced technology, considering that the construction of it is incredibly complex and technologically brilliant. That Hand Wave is pretty much all we're going to get on the matter, I'm afraid.
  • The book says the sillsuit derives energy from the pumping motion of walking. This energy can be used to concentrate the heat in one point, as with standard refrigerators, where the heat can be released more efficiently than with sweat (possibly using the "thimble of moisture" still lost). The salt content of sweat or a coolant in the stillsuit itself can act as coolant, and a sufficiently advanced refrigerator would be very efficient. There would be a noticeable drag when walking or running - it would cost at least 20% more energy - but it's entirely physically possible.
• In the appendices to the first book, Dune, there's a map of Dune that shows most, if not all, the locations in the book. Its center is the north pole. It doesn't show the whole planet. So, what happened to the south pole? Why is there people only near the northern polar region ? Obviously, the closer to the equator you are, the hotter it is, so it makes sense that there would be no one between certain latitudes, but why do we never hear about the southern hemisphere? The climate in the southern polar regions of the south hemisphere should be similar to that of the northern region of the north hemisphere.
  • The south polar regions are forbidden going by what I know.
    • The book internal coherence suggests that it's the south of the northern polar region that is forbidden, not the south pole.
      • The southern hemisphere isn't forbidden, but Fremen propaganda and misinformation has caused the common belief that they're uninhabitable due to greater concentration of Coriolis storms and lack of major geographic shelters such as the Shield Wall. The Fremen keep it this way by bribing the Guild to keep the price of their orbital topographical surveys at absurdly high levels. No House-quasi-fief has had the budget to afford it.
      • That explanation does not work after the end of the first book.
        • That's where the map is, isn't it?
  • Maybe there just isn't enough people to warrant the placing of two regions that, in the end, will be separated by the almost intravesable equator. If you aren't going to run into overpopulation issues soon, it's best to just keep cities close to where you are already established. It's said in the book that there's more or less at least ten million people. That's less than most countries here on Earth.
• This pisses me off about the entire series: how the books go on constantly about little minutiae in plans and movements, and then second book was nothing but a guy angsting over his wife and deciding whether or not to fuck his sister. Why, in a series entailing very dramatic events, did all the focus go on a bunch of angsty aristocrats?
  • Did you even bother to read the book, or go any further than Messiah?
    • I did, but I just got really really bored with it. The first one was good. The second was annoying (thank god it was short), the third one was almost as good as the third, the fourth was the best (except for the Strangled by the Red String), the fifth was overly drawn out, and the sixth was a disappointment. The biggest, most awesome events in human history, and all we get to see is an old crone thinking about her childhood.
• What was Thufir Hawat's angle in working with the Harkonnens? How did he want to bring the House down? He had both the opportunities to kill Vladimir and Feyd-Rautha, however this was just maneuvering. Was it to train some Fremen loyal only to him and to use them?
  • The Atreides were dead, and he wanted revenge on Jessica (who he calculated was a traitor) at any cost, even working with his sworn enemies. It does not quite make sense, but his beloved Duke just died, so maybe he was not thinking straight (which for a Mentat must be fairly hard to manage).
  • Considering that Mentats are supposed to be the Chessmasters due to their highly advanced ability to compute outcomes of events based on variables and facts available, pretty much proves that he's either holding the Idiot Ball on this particular issue, or that he's just a failure as a Mentat. (Because the spice smuggler Tuek figures things out based on much less knowledge, and Hawit is stupid enough to be openly manipulated by the Harkonnens. I have no idea why this guy is so prized for his Mentat abilities when he's a FUCKING IDIOT! The only possible reason why he's so stupid about this is that he's so prejudiced against the Bene Gesserit that he can't see how supremely stupid he is actually being, and if he's that easily affected by prejudice then he's a waste as a Mentat anyway. And exposure to the spice is supposed to improve mental capacity, not hinder it. Hence, the most probable reason for Hawat siding with the Harkonnens? He's a prejudiced idiot who can't see two moves in front of his face (I'm still fuming over the fact that he dismissed Yeuh out of hand as the traitor... yes, because obviously the Imperial Conditioning can't be broken by a conflict of morals (because training to apply complete moral values based on saving people's lives ISN'T what the entire thing is based on, obviously). Hawit didn't even do a background check to find out his wife was a fucking bene gesserit held prisoner by the Harkonnens (he is completely stunned by this fact when JESSICA tells him). Furthermore he acts so goddamn surprised that Leto has been betrayed and killed when everyone and THEIR MOTHER knew Arrakis was a trap in the first place and he didn't have safeguards in place to deal with that (Yeuh just walked into the fucking shield room and deactivated it that easily...)). Thufir Hawat, YOU FAIL!
    • Mentats aren't quite super-duper geniuses; they're intelligent humans with a very tightly defined set of mental skills useful to the Imperium. Hawat gets sidelined because the Harkonnens make a dedicated effort to play to his weaknesses. And he isn't the only one not to suspect Yueh on account of his conditioning; it's implied that the Emperor will destroy the Harkonnens out of hand if he finds out they've suborned the only trusted medical school in the universe.
    • Also, the shield room was guarded. Yueh had killed the guard. We can forgive the dude pulling night watch on the generator room for being caught by surprise when a man everyone knows is mentally brainlocked to be absolutely incapable of physical violence suddenly pulls out a weapon and stabs him.
  • You're forgetting the Feyd vs Vladimir subplot. Hawat clearly despised the Harkonnens, and there is mention that he was still being secreted messages by Gurney (about the Fremen tactics). He played Feyd against the Baron, and visa-versa, turning them against each other, trying to bring the House down. See: Slave Boy assassination attempt.
    • Exactly. I asked the question about Thufirs angle in the first place, the reason I'm wondering is: after he proposes to the Baron to make Arrakis a Prison Planet just like Salusa Secundus, Thufir asks himself if his victory over the Harkonnen will be as complete as the victory over the Atreides had been. So how did he want to do it? I now suspect that he wanted to raise the Emperors anger against the Harkonnen, just as the Emperor did not want to let the Atreides Army get as good as his own Sardaukar.
• What I have always wondered is how can stillsuits be so efficient, and water still be a rarity. The human body produces around 500 ml of water per day from cellular respiration, yet stillsuits allow you to lose only 50 ml or so if I remember correctly. In those conditions, it should become more important to go on finding food (which can hardly grow in the desert) than water, which you already have more than enough if properly managed.
  • Maybe the suits actually release 550 ml per day. Given they say you "lose" 50 ml per day, that's probably just the net result, after factoring in any and all sources and losses of water. That's the only thing an administrator would care about anyway.
• If Duncan Idaho was the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, then how come he didn't predict the events of the whole series?
  • He wasn't the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach until the very end of the series, where he did start to predict events. Every time Duncan was revived, he kept improving his mind a little more each life. When Duncan somehow gained the memories of all his ghola incarnations, his mind functioned just like a Kwisatz Haderach's. Unlike other Kwisatz Haderach, who were bred into the role, and used their genetic memory, Duncan developed his own body himself, and used his own memories.
• Bene Gesserit. Fremen. Kwisatz Haderach. Thufir Hawat. Am I the only one who finds all this kinda alienating? I've considered reading the books for a while, but it all seems just bit too weird.
  • If you find words out of the norm weird, I don't think you should be reading science fiction at all...
  • Those words come from other languages, or from bashing other languages together. There's a good bit of Arabic.
  • It's not really calling a rabbit a smeerp. None of your first three examples are "rabbits" - they don't exist in our world at all, so they're going to need new names one way or another. I guess Herbert could have called them "That Semi-psychic Witch Cult", "Dunian Arabs", and "Messiah Prophet Emperor", but that would've been weird in a different way, and more confusing than simply giving these concepts a different name.
  • That's not my problem. I'm just worried that all the characters, settings, and overall plot are too weird. I know I put the question wrong, but I'm just worried that I'm going to end up reading some weird book where nobody says anything that isn't vague, esoteric and vaguely esoteric. In other words, I'm worried I'll end up with the Matrix Sequels in text form.
    • Oh, I see. Don't read past book one then. I'm not joking, don't. The Matrix sequels are nothing compared to the stuff Frank Herbert pulls out.
  • Also, there is a glossary of terms used in the book (even the paperback sticks it in), peruse it quickly and you'll be golden.
  • The examples listed are dog-Latin (Bona Jesuit), condensed English (Free men), Hebrew mysticism (magical bilocation), and a fairly standard Arabic name, respectively.
• Books 4, 5 & 6. 4- Author Tract. 5- We're told a lot of things, shown very little. (at least we got to see Miles Teg kick ass) 6- There's a lot of talk about a secret weapon the bad guys have only for nothing to come of it (except some dead redshirts). The Bene Gesserit are even more elf-like than ever...
• Dr. Yueh has Imperial Conditioning, which is supposed to be impossible to break. Then the Harkonnens break it by... threatening his wife. Quite possibly the most obvious way to leverage someone, and the supposedly unbreakable conditioning just snaps. Did they never consider threatening someone's family as a possible danger at Imperial Conditioning School?
  • He isn't motivated by fear of his wife's safety; the conditioning probably covers 1138.that obvious loophole. What motivates him is that 1.) he is angry enough to want to kill the Baron and 2.) by betraying his charge, he has a Hail Mary chance of using him to kill the Baron in a suicide attack. He knows his wife is dead, and says as much.
    • Knowing in his mind and being sure without a doubt are two different things. He does say that he knows she's likely dead but works on the off chance that she might not be.
      • This troper understood the leverage to be a result of whatever loyalties his Bene Gesserit wife would have used to bond him to her - given how they seem to like ensuring things go their way Wanna would have Yueh wrapped around her little finger - which would be more powerful than anything the Imperial Conditioning was designed to counter.
  • It's my understanding that the conditioning wasn't broken by threatening his wife. They tortured her in front of him - this got him pissed off enough to want to kill the Baron, which broke the conditioning. Once that was done they controlled him by saying that they'd stop torturing her + let her go if he did what he did.
• Is it even logistically possible to supply billions upon billions of people with spice on a regular basis from a single world, when you're not even sure if it's a never-ending resource?
  • Depends on how much is actually needed - is it ever stated just how much spice a Guild navigator consumes to acquire and keep their abilities?
  • If I remember it correctly, it is stated somewhere that a briefcase of spice melange can buy you a planet. It is also not clear how many people use the spice, so it is difficult to say how big the supply problem is.
• Why would the other houses, much less the Emperor, allow the rabid House Moritani to keep doing their thing? Wouldn't they want a mad dog to be put down rather than have it turn on them at the drop of a hat? Especially since their actions affect the entire Imperium, such as the destruction of the Ginaz school, which was supplying Swordmasters to all houses.
  • The books were written by Kevin J. Anderson. Based on my own experiences with another series he wrote, he probably just didn't care.
• The original books don't even bother mentioning what (if any) FTL method was used prior to the Holtzman drive. You can't maintain an interstellar civilization without a reliable method of getting from planet to planet quickly. The prequels written by his son aren't much better, just saying ships accelerate very fast. However, that's not FTL, and there's no way accelerating fast can get you to a remote star system in a month.
  • Throwing the crap prequels out, the Holtzman drive is probably considerably older than the Imperium (and thus computer-driven before the Jihad and the installation of the guild), and may have been the thing that unified the scattered human-inhabited worlds in the first place.
• My big question is "why does any noble house allow a Bene Gesserit anywhere near them?" Okay, you have a secret organization that only seems to have a token effort at hiding that it has some manner of mysterious self-serving agenda, the individuals of which are all beautiful women who are killing machines capable of mind-control voice and controlling which chromosome goes into the sperm cells that impregnate them, apparently, as well as intense control over every nerve and muscle and emotion they have as long as we're still in the narration and not the action of the book. So with this in mind, why do these noble houses all seem to be taking in Bene Gesserit?
  • They're useful. The Reverend Mother's truthsayer abilities are incredibly useful for the Emperor, even the lesser members of the Sisterhood have political skills and aptitude that are very useful for the heads of ruling Houses. And as bad as having a consort/retainer with their own agenda might be, making an enemy of them is even worse (if you're not a once-in-a-trillion genetic anomaly with prophetic powers, that is). Besides, given the "control over every nerve and muscle," some House heads may not be making the decision with the big head, so to speak.
  • It's worth mentioning that the Bene Gesserit's main goal is the advancement of the human species through genetic pairings. As a result, if you wanted to have an extremely healthy heir and didn't mind getting him/her the old-fashioned way with a mistress who can control every muscle in her body, the Bene Gesserit option is pretty damned appealing.
• So the original Bene Gesserit plan was to have Jessica bear an Atreides daughter, then wed that daughter to the Harkonnen heir (presumably Feyd-Rautha), and that union would produce the Kwisatz Haderach. Seems to me that there's a rather large flaw in this plan - what in the name of all that is holy would compel the Atreides and Harkonnens to wed their offspring? If it weren't for the Great Convention, either Caladan or Geidi Prime would have been reduced to molten slag long ago by the other side. I suppose the Harkonnens could have been blackmailed (assuming, of course, that the Baron stopped laughing long enough to notice), but I don't believe for a moment that Bene Gesserit mind control would be enough to compel Duke Leto to marry his daughter to a Harkonnen. Jessica would be lucky if Leto simply threw her on the next transport to Wallach IX! And while I know that marital alliances were common to end disputes, both in RL and in-universe, the Atreides and Harkonnen don't want peace between their houses. Of course, it's possible that the Bene Gesserit hadn't realized the true depths of the emnity between the two houses.
  • How deep does that enmity really run? Neither party is really willing to wage war against the other without some sort of clear incentive (i.e, the Sardaukar aiding the Harkonnens in the takeover of Arrakis). Every time the Duke or Baron speaks out against the other, they're in the presence of subordinates that are in various degrees of indoctrination. If it was to their political or economic advantage (and bear in mind, we're talking about a group that is a silent partner in CHOAM and powerful enough politically to deny the ruling Emperor a legal heir), they would certainly do it.
    • Presumably the plan was for the Atreides daughter to be raised as a loyal Bene Gesserit. She'd willingly seduce Feyd-Rautha much as Lady Fenring did. Leto might have an "unfortunate accident" so his daughter (read: the Bene Gesserit) could take over the house.
    • Would the Imperium tolerate a Bene Gesserit in charge of a noble house? I actually don't recall reading about any house ruled by a woman implying a heavily patriarchal system.
      • The Bene Gesserit don't care if House Atreides fails in the direct line of inheritance. Remember, Leto wanting Jessica to give him an heir and her loving him enough to agree is what kicks off the plot. In the BG's plan, Jessica only has a girl child who gets an arranged marriage to House Harkonnen, Duke Leto dies frustrated, and House Atreides gets inherited by some distant cousin or something.
      • Alternately it ends up as a 'Whoever marries Sansa Stark inherits the North' type situation from Game of Thrones... i.e., Feyd-Rautha, the hypothetical daughter's intended husband-to-be, becomes Lord of both houses.
  • IIRC, the Bene Gesserit had orchestrated that the Harkonnen house would obliterate the Atreides, but knowing the Harkonnen, the most likely scenario would have been that if Jessica would have given birth a girl, she would be most likely been kidnapped and raised as a slave to Freyd-Rautha or even the Baron.
• Is there a particular reason why the Bene Gesserit only care about noble genes? Are they naive enough to assume that authority equals good genetics? It's also surprising that their breeding program has lasted this long, given how many houses don't shy from sending assassins against the others.
  • Nobles 1.) control all the political and economic activity and 2.) are the only ones likely to breed with someone from another planet. The Bene Gesserit may in fact serve to "destratify" the genome, mating with "human" commoners and nobles alike in order to improve the species.
    • Given that the nobles are likely to have fewer children than the commoners, there is still a high likelihood of an entire family line being wiped out by a successful assassination attempt. The Bene Gesserit don't exactly try to prevent these from occuring.
    • No, but they have been shown to attempt to "save" bloodlines in danger of loss, especially when it's a key gene in their breeding program.
  • It is easier to control the bloodlines of nobles. Every royal family in the world can list their ancestors far back in time.
• One of the points of the books is that the Fremen are tough because of their environment. They also know the ways of the desert. However, how does that make them an effective army on other planets, which are not Single Biome Worlds? If anything, the local forces would be more effective in environments like plains, woods, swamps, or snow. Especially since they mostly rely on guerilla tactics, and those require intimate knowledge of the area. You can't go from a guerilla force to a conventional army at the drop of a hat. The beginning of the Children of Dune miniseries also shows them fighting on other worlds while still wearing the traditional desert robes. Not very effective combat clothing outside of the desert.
  • They're tough, but not that tough (Paul outclasses pretty much all of them at the age of 15). Remember, as far as the Arrakeen battles go, the Harkonnen military is pretty much a conscript force, the Sardaukar have declined in strength, and no one takes the Fremen seriously. By the end of the novel (and the next two books), they've been extensively trained in Atreides military tactics and Bene Gesserit infighting. At that point their main attribute is their religious fanaticism, which means that Paul and Alia can replace any losses with more well-trained, highly loyal troops. By the time all these die off, so has pretty much any resistance to Atreides rule or religious practice.