I wrote a brief description of the Dune universe original point:
Dune science fiction idea is a space society run by people, withouth computers. To cope with the limits of that, they have special education chapters that do some very advanced human training. It helps that they have access to some drug that enhance perception and extend lifespan. Space travel is very risky, almost a gamble. Their space navigators can handle the outcome of space travel to select the outcome where the ship don’t crash into a moon thanks to that drug. Society has devolved into a medieval world with noble houses and a few specialized worlds, … others just pure gardening or agriculture.
Past generations weaponiced religion to control new wild colonies.
So we have some people (navigators) that routinelly predict the future. And religions. And special interests. Nobody likes everyone else much, but theres something like a calm peace where everyone need everyone else. House Atreides is becoming too popular among the other noble clauses…
Huh. Well, I happen to have HBO Max at the moment so I guess I’ll take a look at it, but I’ve long held that Dune is unfilmable and it would take a lot to change my mind on that point.
Not my favorite book, but it is a a good conclusion to the saga which fits in with the first three books. Would be very interesting to see someone trying to do justice to this book.
It’s been a long time since I read this one, so maybe I should go back to reread. I recall it being weird and trippy, but still very much of a piece with the previous books - as compared to the last two books, which felt like they belonged in an entirely different universe at times.
One thing I loved about God-Emperor on a relatively recent reread was that Leto was in every single scene. Obviously other things happened throughout his empire and palace, but he only saw them directly, foresaw them (though he was trying to swear off looking down that Golden Path ability), heard about them, or deduced them. If they did ever get to making this one into a movie, I would hope that it would be like Birdman – long shots would look like oners, even though not every moment would be directly temporally adjacent. It would give the sense of that psychic and physical weight of Leto’s long rule and bulk.
I wanted to expand on a thought I had, during the discussion with @DarthMasta in the Villeneuve Dune movie thread, which probably makes more sense to have in the book thread instead and not further derail discussion over there. We were discussing the machines, which ties back to the Butlerian Jihad, and the threat that Leto II perceives in God Emperor that spurs him down the Golden Path.
My problem with thinking of the machines as the “big bad” of the Dune series is that it seems like a misunderstanding of how Frank Herbert presented the machines, and why the Butlerian Jihad happened. In my opinion, it was never presented in the style of some kind of Terminator armageddon sort of situation, but that mankind had turned over so much of their day to day existence to the machines that they had left themselves open, ripe even, to being subverted - Leto’s fear though, is that this subversion will be done by other humans with their own machines:
What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.
That presents to me as a loss of control over one’s life, but done willingly, while the jihad was more about taking back that control, destroying the machines so that the temptation to turn over so much of yourself was no longer there and less about overthrowing the evil robots who had tried to destroy humanity. It’s why there are mentats in the first place, putting that computational power back in the hands of humanity. But that’s my interpretation, which I’m not presenting as the only one or even the correct one, just how I always read the Dune series and why I have difficulty with the direction Brian Herbert took the stories. Which, I’ll fully admit I’ve never read, just read about.
It’s not even the machines, it’s prescience. I don’t think Herbert was all that worried about AI, at least it doesn’t look like it in the books, his “worries” at least at the start, was superpowered people.
By the end, dunno where it was going, but by Emperor, Leto got his superpowered counter, and it was cool again, there might be “Terminators” coming, but they’re not going to be able to end the species.
Well, again, I admit I haven’t read Brian Herbert’s books. But from reading synopses about the books that he wrote intending to finish Frank’s original story from Heretics and Chapterhouse, he did kind of go all-in on the whole terminator thing. Which maybe wasn’t where you were going with all that, that’s cool, but I just never got the impression that Leto felt all that threatened by the machines. In the discussion with Siona that I pulled the quote from, she is even shocked that Leto is a client of Ix and is using their thinking machines, which leads to the discussion about their dangers, specifically on human reliance on thinking machines.
My impression from the time I read the last books (and I haven’t read anything from Brian, was thinking about it, but reviews weren’t good), things had gone much more “standard” sci-fi, that I really don’t know what Herbert was planning.
But sure, there could be some super advanced Terminator race out there, same as there were super Face Dancers by the end, and super a bunch of other things that nobody could quite know because the human race had spread out so far and tried so many different things, that your unbeatable Terminators in Area A are “Who?” in Area W.
But IMO, things went from sci-fi that had a point, the dangers of charismatic leaders, religion, all that, advanced to much more of an exploration of “I’ve introduced superpowers into this world, how does that change things” to “People love this setting, let’s keep going and explore the ramifications of the previous books”.
Well, Dune the book has one of the best quotes on “AI”:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
So, I wouldn’t say his view was particularly positive.
As for the T-1000 thing, it is actually part of the (real) books. It is well-known that the Ixians break the precepts of the Jihad and experiment with thinking machines. One of the things that is hinted at in God Emperor, is the possibility of the Ixians developing self-replicating hunter-seekers, capable of prescience. Leto foresees that the Ixians eventually lose control of their creations, with predictable results. Siona sees one of the visions in her testing:
“The seeking machines would be there, the smell of blood and entrails, the cowering humans in their burrows aware only that they could not escape… while all the time the mechanical movement approached, nearer and nearer and nearer…”
His answer to that is the Golden Path, specifically Siona - a breed of human that prescience cannot see, spread out across the Universe so that humanity can never be hunted to extinction.
At the end of God Emperor, he tells her and Duncan: “Do not fear the Ixians. They can make the machines, but they can no longer make arafel (i.e., ragnarok/doomsday/darkness). I know. I was there.”
So I don’t have difficulty believing that Frank intended the final battle to be between advanced humans and some rogue machine-intelligence race. But I’m also pretty sure he would have written something way more interesting than what Brian turned out (haven’t read the books, just the synopsis, but that was bad enough on its own).
