If they needed spice for FTL travel, how did they reach Arrakis in the first place?
Was this explained in one of the latter books? I only read the first and was not impressed enough to continue, but I'm wondering what the deal with this was
>>7893401
not read it for some time, but were they not transported in colossal Guild ships?
>>7893421
Wasn't the guild created by humans?
The guild ships needed spice to navigate at warp speeds afaik
Arrakis orbits a far off sun, basically it came close to Earth one time and everyone got in a boat and used a ladder to get onto Arrakis and then it flew off back to deep space
>>7894149
lol
Thinking machines.
>>7894211
oh yeah that's what it was
>>7893401
before the spice they used thinking machines to plot courses, but even then there was a high chance of choosing a shitty course that would kill the crew so they primarily sent out many smaller ships so they had a higher chance for at least a few ships to make it, rather than a very high chance to lose a huge expensive ship
from what i read in the Dune Encyclopedia, space travel pre-guild was still FTL but was a lot slower, taking months or even years to reach other systems.
>>7894149
Lmao
>>7893401
As I understood it, they don't strictly need spice for FTL travel, but cannot perform effective FTL navigation without it. Thus, one must assume that before discovering Arrakis, humans either utilized poorly calculated jumps with high & deadly error rates or spent centuries (subjectively, only weeks) on sublight voyages.
Am I the only person who thought the "politics" and "economy" of dune to be entirely shallow and one dimensional?
>>7895249
nope
>>7894149
go to bed, italo
>>7895249
you are. do you even understand how the Landsraad coordinates with the Sysselraads? jesus, what do they teach kids in school these days, how to reply to lolcat pics with "LOLOLOL"?
>>7895568
i know they coordinate being dumb lol
>>7895592
you do that so well. i feel your talents are wasted here. reddit calls you.
>>7893401
The better question is why would anyone give a shit. Dune was terrible, and trying to find logic here is like questioning the plausibility of Warhammer 40k fanfic
>>7895249
No.
The entire story was 'good natured magic child suffering tragic loss vs evil murderer who literally rapes children for sport in a fight for the only substance of value in the galaxy'
It would have been so much better if both families were shitsheels in their own way and there was some way to sympathize with both of them to make the outcome less predictable and forced, but that would be too difficult to write apparently
>>7895901
">good natured magic child"
Are you referring to the one that created space al qaeda and unleashed them on a gigantic space jihad in a campaign of space rape and space genocide? That good natured child?
>>7896539
I feel like a lot of people never read past the first book
>>7896560
that much is blatantly obvious
Dune Messiah is betterblind Paul seeing by predicting everything anyway is based af
>>7896560
Admittedly Paul wasn't some mustache twirling villain i was just trying to make the point that the situation wasnt nearly as black and white as the previous poster thought.
>>7896578
right after the explosion was the coolest part.
>>7895901
>if both families were shitsheels in their own way
> and there was some way to sympathize with both of them
that'd be a good trick if you could pull it off.
i symapthise a little with Vladimir, only because the Dune Encyclopedia explains his fucked-up family.
>>7893401
They used to have "Thinking Machines" for FTL.
But the machines turned on them. The war with the machines is when Spice was discovered.
It's why making Thinking Machines is a sin in the Orange Catholic Bible.
Also, why haven't they mapped out safe routes for common destinations?
How do shields work with no computers determining and regulating their size?
Why is Kynes apparently the only person ever to wonder where the moisture comes from on a desert planet?
There's FTL and weather satellite technology but they can't figure out how to combine atoms to make water so they need dew collectors?
Sorry, just read the book and so many things make no sense to me.
>>7893401
Guild doesn't do FTL travel, they do foldspace, it's basically teleportation. Humans used slower FTL travel with computer navigators prior to the machine revolt. After the machine revolt they had suicide pilots do scouting runs to find routes until the guild was established. The routes would be put into a simpler machine that could only store data.
thinking machines were technically banned but a lot of workarounds existed, Ixans frequently verged on getting exterminated for experimenting too much with near-thinking machines.
>>7896539
Paul was good natured basically, he didn't want the Jihad but got swept up in his own vision. He eventually wandered off into the desert to escape his fate because the golden path was too terrible for him.
His son, who had a pseudo-plural personality, was enough of a cunt to do it though. One of the best parts of the books was when the Ixians engineered a guy to try to rhetoric Leto into killing himself because their genetically engineered Kwizatz Haderachs would kill themselves before living out their visions like Paul did. The guy tried to convince Leto that what he was doing was hurting and killing people and Leto just said "I know, lmao, so fucking what?"
>>7896598
This. Best part of the whole series
>>7900647
They could have used unmanned drones to plot courses.
Unrelated to that: Leto II is one of the best characters in fiction
>>7900647
fuck I need to read this series again. I read it as a teenager and loved it. but I feel like I would get more out of it now. I just can't bring myself to reread books when I have so many I haven't read. I totally forgot about Pauls son.
>>7900679
It was a short period of time that they used human driven ships, really only about 30-40 years since Serena Butler's daughter or some shit, I barely remember, had a feverish vision and went on an anti-technology rampage. Humans actually used thinking machines well after the machine revolt until her and her cult got the O.C. Bible commandment about making machines in the likeness of a human mind.
>>7900679
Both Leto and Paul are key figures in what message Herbert is making in the books: Don't trust heroes. And he's not just telling this to the everyman, he's telling heroes that they shouldn't trust themselves. Leto and Paul are tragic heroes in many ways, Paul is too kind to do what must be done to prevent the extinction of man, he begs his son Leto to turn away and to live a simple life. But Leto says no, Leto has the will to dominate humanity for 4,000 years, being as huge of a bastard as humanly possible to make all of humanity wish to scatter to the four corners of the universe to evade extinction.
Leto's entire plot was just bizarre but in a good way. I honestly think that God Emperor of Dune was the best book in the series from an artistic standpoint, it's the most philosophical of the books in terms of dealing with the moral dilemmas of a sci-fi god.
>>7900726
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that in the prequels, right when foldspace tech was discovered, they used it with computer navigators and had about a 10% attrition rate per jump.
It was too unsafe to use, but the machines were about to mount a brutal offensive so the humans engineered the final solution, where they'd just build a massive fleet full of ships loaded with nukes, use foldspace to travel between worlds faster than machines could, and glass them with atomics. This is what happened to Earth in Dune. Between mass casualties from attrition in jumping and the slaughter of all of the human slaves of the machines hundreds of billions of people are killed.
Really, this was the only point of those books where the message of Herbert shone though, there were some excellent scenes where the humans on these planets were rising up against the machines when they saw human ships approaching and engaging orbital defenses, they cheered before they got wiped the fuck out.
>>7898333
>if you could pull it off
GoT does it
Unfortunately, heroes are a part of the human psyche. We have a desire to be saved, to believe there will be a hero or messiah that comes to save us. It's why superheroes are so popular now.
People will worship heroes forever.
>>7893401
Maybe the people from Arrakis started the guild. Planet has a long history and it is quite possible that guild navigators evolved on Arrakis and started it.
>>7900674
I thought Messiah was alright, loved the explosion scene and the whole cabal plot, the Ghola stuff was great too but it was lacking what made the original Dune great.
Is God Emperor worth my time if I already felt like Children of dragged on a bit too long?
>>7900827
Which explosion scene is this?
>>7900844
One where Paul loses his eyes.
I haven't read Children yet but I'll probably re-read Dune and Messiah before I delve into Children and the other books Herbert wrote.
>>7900864
Don't bother with the 5th and 6th, and especially with the ones after that. Just read children and god emperor
>>7900901
your fucked the last 2 were just as good as the rest. they are all good for different reasons
>>7893401
According to the prequel books, they used sub-light speed travel to get from planet to planet. which took months to get anywhere. Then, during the machine crusade, foldspace engines were invented. These engines required an advanced computer to use properly, but since there's a concurrent jihad against such things computers, humans were forced to navigate manually, yielding a high rate of passing through a sun and exploding.
Shortly after the end of the jihad, the same chick who invented the foldspace engine was heavily addicted to spice, and submerged herself in a tank of the spice gas, thus becoming the first navigator.
TL;DR sub-light speed travel
>>7901215
Are prequel books worth reading? Considering I did not feel it was Dune-like for the 7,8th books.
>>7893401
Slowly. /thread
>>7900763
No it fucking does not. The second a "good" character walks in you think "they're dead and/or raped" and everyone else is a shithead.
Game of Thrones is nothing but a fat old man's incest/torture porn.
>>7894149
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>>7901219
To me they felt like they were written more like Star Wars than they were Dune. I kinda got the vibe that they were written for a slightly younger audience than the rest of the series, though they do dive into how a bunch of the stuff we see later on came to be, which is kinda nice. Don't go in expecting a masterpiece or anything.
As for the prelude series (House Atreides, House Harkonnen, House Corrino), they're a lot more 'tame' and straightforward than the original series (read: less religious prophecy stuff and more political drama), but they do explore a lot of the characters from the original books that didn't get a lot of showtime (Piter, Fenring, Leto I, Kynes, ect.).
Travel for the lose? What the hell?!
>>7901231
was Leto Atreides good? trying to raise an army capable of taking on the Sardaukar, threatening the peace that the Lion Throne had maintained since the Battle of Corrin?
>>7901219
(wearily) no, they are not good. i have never seen anyone say anything good about them.
i bought three of them, read them, managed to avoid vomiting and then left them on a park bench in Frankston for seagulls to shit on.
I just finished God Emperor of Dune. Should I keep going with the last two of the series or is there not much left worth reading? It felt like a good end to me. I know to steer clear of his son's work.
>>7893401
Is this good for someone who generally hates sci-fi/fantasy? I've always been fond of the Dune Worm tbqh
>>7902354
If you don't like the theme of sci fi you won't like it.
It is however a lot better than most genre fiction but reading Dune by itself really only builds up power struggle and themes of religion and politics.
The actual world and character development begins in the second book Dune Messiah.
>>7900835
God Emperor is totally different in a very good way.
>>7900610
>Also, why haven't they mapped out safe routes for common destinations?
The Guild has a monopoly on space travel IIRC.
>How do shields work with no computers determining and regulating their size?
The Butlerian Jihad is against "Thinking Machines" so things that resemble AI, although it would extend to computers in some extent. They didn't want people to outsource their decision making or thinking to machines, so stuff like computerized Wall St. stocks would be out as well.
However things like a microchip would not need any thinking or decision-making to keep a shield at a static size.
>Why is Kynes apparently the only person ever to wonder where the moisture comes from on a desert planet?
I think that it's more of his job to do that. The other people are either Fremen who already know about it in a limited extent or the Baron who was the Duke of that planet previously, he didn't really care too much about that now did he?
>There's FTL and weather satellite technology but they can't figure out how to combine atoms to make water so they need dew collectors?
Actually this part makes the most sense to me, the composure for water is oxygen and hydrogen, not really stuff you might find in such abundance that it would be possible to strip a large portion of the oxygen out of the atmosphere. Also hydrogen doesn't really exist at a large scale in an ocean of sand.
>>7900835
>>7902223
Yes, just make sure to finish it.
>>7901221
Nice palindrome.
>>7901302
You dolt, they needed to reach Arrakis from Earth before they had spice to enhance space travel. Even when they got to Arrakis they didn't know about the spice at first.
>>7902696
>>There's FTL and weather satellite technology but they can't figure out how to combine atoms to make water so they need dew collectors?
>Actually this part makes the most sense to me, the composure for water is oxygen and hydrogen, not really stuff you might find in such abundance that it would be possible to strip a large portion of the oxygen out of the atmosphere. Also hydrogen doesn't really exist at a large scale in an ocean of sand.
whenever any free water appears, the little makers encyst it deep underground.
