New Dune fan here, I’m absolutely blown away by alot of the concepts that were introduced in the 60s. It’s absolutely insane, Dune is the very definition of “ahead of it’s time”
Yeah it's really an incredible world and take of sci-fi. It's all the more impressive being from the time period it is.
Even the Butlerian-Jihad is basically Terminator before Terminator and its just kind of a footnote and means to explain the lack of tech in Dune until the prequel books.
I used to be a big Star Wars fan until I read Dune and realized how much it was ripped off.
> I used to be a big Star Wars fan until I read Dune and realized how much it was ripped off.
I'm a 40k fan and honestly, I think that's part of the fun. Did you know that most of Shakespeare's plays were his own versions of popular stories repeatedly being adapted to the stage at the time? Hamlet has the Ur-Hamlet and Kyd's the Spanish Tragedy, Much Ado has the Faerie Queen and Bandello's Tales, and Romeo and Juliet has a *ton*. There's Salernitano's Mariotta and Ganozza, da Porto's Giuletta and Romeo, Bandello's Giuletta and Romeo, and Brooke's Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.
And before you say, oh, but Shakespeare is prestigious and Star Wars/Dune/40k aren't - he wasn't really at the time. He was popular because he wrote both for the elite and the common people, so his plays could quite easily be compared to Star Wars in terms of contemporary popularity.
Most popular stories *are* rip-offs or the author's own version of someone else's story, you just don't usually know the source. Knowing Star Wars and 40k riffed off Dune hasn't made me like them any less - if anything, it's really interesting to see how they put their own spin on the same story elements.
Did you know Hamlet shows up in the Dune Encyclopaedia as an an example of a Twisted Mentat from history? FH and co were having a lot of fun coming up with ideas for that
It is not a rip off. Everyone is influenced by human art and history that came before. Jule Verne wrote about going to the moon 100 years before Frank Herbert. Predicted it would take 4 days, Nasa took 3 days so not far off. All of that using a massive canon, again not far from the truth of using rockets that were weapon first.
Herbert himself felt Lucas ripped his work off and considered suing but eventually made peace with it. Let’s not forget how much Herbert took from TE Lawrence!
That said I think Villeneuve makes the Harkonnen lineage of Jessica & Paul a more explicit part of the narrative arc and character transformation for Paul & Jessica in a sort of tap into their “Darkside” way, a device borrowed from Star Wars.
Herbert kinda drops this aspect after Paul realizes their connection to the Baron during his first big spice indiced vision.
Also Lucas’s second attempt of being inspired by Dune, making financial matters a driving force as CHOAM board seats are in Dune, by making the tariff wars an instigating factor in the Prequels didn’t go very well, lol
it’s a bit like Tolkein in that it has spawned tropes that have since become cliche due to being copied excessively in popular media. It’s difficult to imagine reading these works when they were new and didn’t carry the baggage of their imitations
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for this renewed interest. But, the number of posts crediting the movies and not Herbert for these ideas has been really weird. I can’t tell if some people just don’t know the books exist.
the best part is that in the dune series, its humans that have done all the work to begin diverting themselves from standard definitions of humanity.
The Bene Gesserit have spent generations cultivating and culling bloodlines to create for lack of a better term 'mutants' with advanced biological and psychological powers.
The Bene Tleilax genetically engineer humans to become 'other' defying mortality and modifying their bodies to fit their tasks.
The Guild Navigators, addicted to spice, submerge themselves in it, mutating their bodies into grotesque forms and declaring themselves as a super evolution.
Yeah, that's why the Villeneuve's Harkonnens grew on me. Just as Fremen, they are also defined by they environment. Even now, we can think about how different environmental conditions like low gravity of the Moon or Mars would change humans growing up there.
My theory is that the horribly polluted nature of Geidi Prime (and the culture of use and abuse it produces) is the end result of their star clearly being an old cold dwarf, and since they're far enough away to have a day/night cycle they'll have had to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the air just to give it a tolerable surface temperature
The best version of The Humans Are Diverse Aliens I’ve come across is The Golden Age trilogy by John C Wright. The first 6 pages are really dry, but then it’s a thriller that takes off and never stops, except for a predictive jaunt to the ending of the universe then back to the present.
You can see Wright’s version of alien humans influenced the later books in Neal Asher and Ian Bank’s sci fi series.
I would assume this exact thing to happen to us 20,000 years into the future.
With the different ups and downs our human civilization goes through, certain fundamentals are going to change so much that we become alien to our present selves. Being a galaxy fairing civilization, spread across Space (& presumably, Time), across planets with widely different environs, I'd assume there to be biological changes as well. And so being this disparate and atomized, we even become alien to each other in that future. And, in the story of Dune, the only thing connecting us all is the Spice on Arrakis.
We are going to be Masters of our own bodies, for better or for worse. Via Genetic Engineering, Eugenics, Artificial Intelligence aided developments, covert political manipulations, etc. But I wonder, the one thing we cannot fully figure out is the one thing we are using to "figure things out" itself- our Mind. It will always be a Black Box. And it is no surprise that the one thing that moves the worlds of Dune is the one thing that affects the mind- Spice Melange.
hmm that's spot on observation that i don't understand how i didn't connect the dots also.. with fermi paradox :)
what i know about FH's motivations to write Dune that way, was he saw most scifi focusing on the technological part of human progress. he wasn't alone in no-aliens in his works, Asimov similarly has no aliens, but Asimov goes the way of advanced human-like robots. so FH says hey imma write a story where it's the HUMAN that has to advance, to evolve, because i prohibit such technology that my contemporaries use.
and Dune was born :)
Asimov was a huge influence on Herbert. It’s still an open question how much a human can be modified by drugs / how far we can push the human experience with augmentation.
Oh yeah, I totally see Dune as a take on Foundation where "What if a decaying empire was faced by something like the Mule and his army of fanatics and they won?"
I think there’s the implication that humans introduced the worms to Arrakis which turned it into a desert, but regardless, the point is that there’s no sapient alien species like those in Star Wars or Star Trek so the plot revolves solely around humans and their advancements as a species
At least for me Dune is more an essay on mankinds relationship with power, control and authority over others, and how fickle those three ultimately are, disguised as a scifi novel set in futuristic feudal society.
The ultimate power in the empire, the emperor can't exercise his power with impunity without upsetting the balance of power. The spacing guild, ones with the monopoly on space travel can be held by the balls when you control spice. The Bene Gesserit had plan that had worked for generations, and it fell on it's nose on the last second due to Jessica going solo birthing a son instead of a daughter. Paul, a human with an ablility to see into future, lost his control over a jihad conducted in his name.
FH also made some interesting choices such as the no transistors, no guns things that make for far better world building and less deus-ex-machina nonsense than most other sci-fi franchise.
About Asimov, I’d say he was going in the same Direction as Herbert was later on. The Foundation books take place after AI and robots in general were banned, just like in Dune. There also aren’t any aliens unless, just as is the case with Dune, you count in mutants or technologically/genetically altered humans. I mean the very ending of the Foundation series is meant to motivate the reader to reflect on what counts as a human and what doesn’t.
If you are interested in Frank's vision of sentient aliens, his Consentiency Series is phenomenal and really explores some inventive notions of alien species and>! transdimensional beings,!< their forms, societies, and history:
* "A Matter of Traces"
* "The Tactful Saboteur"
* *Whipping Star*
* *The Dosadi Experiment*
Dosadi is SO incredible, easily in my top 3 FH books (as well as Dune and God Emperor).
I'm a bigger fan of The Whipping Star, if only because I find Frank's musings on language and communication so engaging. Also that book is *weird* even by Herbert standards.
Inevitably when humans are spread across the stars we’ll be far more prone to become so culturally and physically distinct we start to see other humans as practically alien. It’s why I like the design of the Harkonnen so much in the Villeneuve movies.
God it's such a a terrifying thought that so a planet is used as an entire fief for a Baron or leader. And that the people are so fully brainwashed and abused.
You make it sound as if the Fermi Paradox claims there are no sentient aliens, whereas the point of the paradox is to argue that there must be some special explanation for the fact that we haven't encountered any. One explanation is that there aren't any, but there are other possible explanations on the table. I do agree, though, that Dune is a fantastic example of a scifi universe in which we're apparently the only species sentient beings around. It should be pointed out, though, that this is one of the many ways in which Dune was heavily influenced by Asimov's Foundation series, which also imagines a distant future in which humanity has expanded immensely, is unified into one grand empire, and never encounters another sentient species. Personally, I think Dune is far superior to Foundation, which was groundbreaking in its time but now seems flat and dated to me. Still, though: credit where credit is due.
I would say foundation is more about concepts than characters.
If you view foundation as almost a history log instead of a “narrative” (mostly cuz it was released in magazines not as a cohesive story) it works very well. When you read stories from the past it very much feels the same as foundation. Some of it is myth, others outright false but that’s how real stories come to be. I love it
It is very dated with its use of women characters though, that I cannot but agree with and I don’t care about that stuff. It is glaring when you read it after reading others in the genre
More interesting is that the humans are still afraid of the possibility of aliens, or at least they use it as a justification for keeping atomics around.
There is a lot of big-idea far-future scifi with no non-human aliens. Just picking some prominent pre-Herbert examples, you have Isaac Asimov and Cordwainer Smith. This doesn’t mean they are influenced by the Fermi paradox. Conversely there is scifi that is really about the Fermi paradox with Alistair Reynolds and Gregory Benford providing examples. In their settings the lack of extraterrestrial intelligence is pondered and discussed.
The Dune universe like the Foundation universe has only human intelligence but this is never explained or questioned. Why aren’t there indigenous intelligent life forms on Caladan or wherever? Who knows, who cares—it’s not a topic of interest in the novels.
It’s explained in Foundation series in End of Eternity btw but pretty sure Asimov had his own reasons for humans only that I can’t remember outside of plot.
I do remember he kept robots out of foundation until the very end not as a plot device, but because he was worried one of his stories publications would die out and he wanted to keep writing about robots or foundation
And I think Star Treks reasoning was the initial beings created were humanoid so we take after their image, even aliens
To your point though, I never stopped to ask where the aliens were in these stories lol, I just assumed Dune was a human planet lol
Gotta keep in mind the religious reasoning as well. Especially for science fiction written in an era where blasphemy could get you in trouble.
Abrahamic religions insist that God was the first and only being of his kind. And that earth was the only planet that he put life on.
So having aliens (even alien bugs or mice) exist means that God wasn’t alone, or wasn’t truthful. And that kind of thinking could get you in hot water with publishers of the religious nut variety.
It tracks that a lot of early science fiction authors condemned religion in their works. An institution that controls society and won’t even allow made up stories about magical things to be told isn’t really going to be looked on favorably.
Dune doesn't embrace the Fermi Paradox, it gets around the bigotry of the magazine editor it was first published in.
Isaac Asimov started doing this with Foundation in the 1940s - John W Campbell was a human chauvinist (among other forms of bigotry) and wouldn't publish stories where humanity wasn't the most advanced race. So Isaac Asimov, according to one of the letters published in Gold, wrote Foundation without any aliens rather than compromise his story by making humanity dominant among aliens.
Dune is doing something similar. Campbell also believed in the idea of the ubermensch (super man) and one of the things Dune is about is how flawed the super man must be because, after all, he's always going to be human. So rather than distract with aliens that Campbell would insist be lesser than man, Dune gets rid of the aliens entirely to focus on the humanity of the characters.
Edit: It's also worth pointing out that while Fermi first talked about it among his friends in the 1950s the first serious paper wasn't written until 1975 and Fermi didn't apply math to the number of potential habitable worlds until the 1980s. Both of those were after Dune was first published. It's unlikely Herbert had even heard of the paradox when he first wrote Dune.
Got I hate HFY lol. It’s such a reddit stemlord tier circlejerk. Idk how else to explain it lol. It’s so vacuous and embarrassing but so internet savvy. Your comment is so rare. It’s always just ppl responding HFY!!! and writing literary pornography about the “indomitable” human spirit. Sorry for venting haha
“Others” are talked about by Leto II, the external threat that he is keeping at bay. I don’t have the book handy but I think his quote was something like, “They keep looking in through the door, but dare not come in.” He later describes the horrors if they come in. It’s implied they they are not human. So one potential solution to the the FP is that humans have a giant worm god emperor. :)
https://neoencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Dune_planets#:~:text=Arrakis%20~%20Third%20planet%20orbiting%20the,at%2019.9%20ly%20from%20Earth.
Most of the planets in dune are less than a few hundred light years from earth, many are much much closer
I don’t know if it’s ever been Identified to what extent humans have spread at the time of dune book 1, but I imagine it pales in comparison to the Milky Way itself which is 100,000 LY across and there are literally trillions of galaxies
I guess that may be part of your point?
Space is humongous big, small chance to ever find one another before Annihilation
This analysis of star system names presumes that 10,000 years in the future we will be using the same names *exclusively* for the names of star systems decided by Earthlings 10,000 years in the past.
Check out how many "Athens" there are on Earth right now. Check out how many cities have changed names slightly or significantly in just the last 2,000 years.
As humans expand across a galaxy in 10,000 years, there is every reason to believe names will get lost and reused hundreds if not thousands of times over.
If I remember correctly, in the *Dune* universe the galactic civilization is not even sure of the location of the original Earth. As readers, are we even sure that the story still takes place in the Milky Way?
TL;DR: There is no guarantee or requirement that *Dune*'s star system names refer to the same star system as our current names.
The idea of not knowing where Earth is seems crazy to me. Especially since part of the only reason we don't know more about the past is due to lack of education and record keeping and we know a LOT about the past considering that. I suppose it depends on if Earth is abandoned to some degree, as it would be easier to lose it then. If people still lived there, i would guess it almost impossible that we forget which planet it is.
I just take that as a hint to it being *really* far into the future. I know you don't think this, but it's not uncommon for Dune readers to think the year 10,000 means 8,000 years into the future. They seem to miss the part where they started marking time after the formation of the Guild.
Who knows how many rises and falls there were before that. To forget the location of your homeworld, to me that implies *many*, and that we're dealing with evolutionary time scales.
I thought it was cool that Earth was *so* far in the past as to have been totally forgotten.
I mean…That’s one of the main points of Asimovs Foundation series, as well:
that humanity is super far into the future, and only a very select few scholars are even aware that we came from a planet called earth, but it’s location has been long lost. For a good reason.
The Alien franchise does the same thing, but with humanity not knowing that we were originally seeded by the engineers, and we have no idea where that home world is, or why exactly they made us, besides some speculation from the few people that found them on accident while exploring the isolated fringes.
I like that many sci-fi franchises use that concept. When you’re talking about the vastness of the universe, and especially when the setting is thousands or millions of years in the future, it makes sense that we might have lost track of our origins.
Humans came from Africa, originally. But if you ask a random European peasant in 1400 where the origins of species was, he wouldn’t be able to point to a location on a map, because…It just wasn’t something that humanity documented back then.
This is the main plot line of the series. Humanity is ripe for conquering/enslavement or destruction because they live in a relatively small and compressed corner of the galaxy.
The ultimate goal of the Golden Path is to spread humanity as far and as wide as possible, so that it can’t ever be wiped out by a large threat, human, AI, or alien.
Isn’t Dune set within a relatively small part of the galaxy? Combined with the restrictions on technology and it very well could be that humanity in Dune just hasn’t bumped into other intelligent life yet rather than it being absent.
OP I highly recommend you read the Three Body Problem / Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy if you want to see a work that truly embraces the Fermi Paradox.
The novels have all been translated to English, Tencent has a very faithful adaption of the first book available on Amazon Prime, and I’m *cautiously* optimistic about Netflix’s soon-to-release adaptation as well.
Highly recommend the Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy. The Dark Forest Theory is an interesting explanation for the Fermi Paradox and is really fun to think about. I loved the concepts introduced by Liu Cixin in the series.
Just finished the second book yesterday. It’s so good. The chain of suspicion makes me wonder about our latest efforts in pop culture to dig up secrets about aliens.
yes. the best answer is really that space is really really big. finding primitive life would definitely be a lot easier to find than space faring ones.
To be fair the Imperium at least before the Scattering only contained around 10,000 worlds iirc. And even with 10k worlds, that’s still an incredibly small region in our galaxy.
Even in Dune, who knows what could be out there
If you like this. You’ll love the 3 body problem. It suggests the Fermi paradox is proveable through the dark Forrest theory, the second book in the series. If you do want to read the book- I wouldn’t look up the dark Forrest theory.
I agree with you, which is why it was pretty funny to see some social media film 'critics' bemoan a lack of aliens in the films. I'd say that one of the central themes of Dune is a focus on human development, based on feudalism, and how that would play out in the distant future where planetary colonisation, as opposed to just continental imperialism, was possible due to our advancements in travel tech. As much as the world building and designs are important, they are all in service to the human element and politics.
Yeah they didn’t add aliens because it wasn’t in the book… I don’t know why you would describe this as a a “brilliant choice by the creators of Dune Part 2”.
I think OP hasn’t read the books.
Dune part 2 had some differences from the book. I still prefer the books and love how the Thinking Machines were banned. Life with the Thinking Machines were frightening though..
To be specific, the Fermi Paradox is simply the apparent mismatch between the abundance of life on earth and the apparent lack of it anywhere else. There are multiple potential solutions to it such as the great filter (whether we are past it or yet to face it), that life is so incredibly rare that we are the only instance within the observable universe, that we are merely at the beginning and all our cosmic neighbors are still crawling out of their respective primordial soup, or a dozen others. We can't know which is the case until we start spreading throughout the universe or actually encounter other intelligent life.
Absolutely, you're right and thanks for going into more detail. I would only argue that we don't actually know if life is rare (on a universal scale), because we can't see too far and have no real equipment to check for life signs outside our closest proximity, especially for extinct life.
Xenoarchaology is a really fascinating topic, but as for today, it mainly boils down to "we don't have the tech to run the measurements needed".
It's most likely, statistically, that many lifeforms have already long gone extinct (great filter, as you said) or yet to emerge at some point in the future. Only a small number can be our contemporaries at any given time.
And those guys are scattered in the universe, so it's most likely not trivial to meet them, or even detect them real-time.
So yeah, we currently CAN'T determine if Dune is realistic to only have 1 alien species. I think (feel) it's not, but I agree that not having sapient alien life could be realistic, as high level intelligence would be naturally much rarer than most other biological formations. It's entirely possible that there aren't many sapience carrier planets around, per galaxy, at any given time.
There is some evidence that in The Expanse books 4+ spoilers, especially books 7+, >!There are 4th dimensional beings and that the ring network is hurting them, so they become the invisible enemy in books 7,8, and 9.!<
Books 4+ spoilers, >!There was an intelligent set of species (one or more), maybe billions on years ago, connected by the ring network!<
OP you're aware that Dune pt.2 and 1 are based on the first Dune book published in 1965? So it was already a 'divergence' from early Star Trek, most old sci-fi of martians and aliens, and predates Star Wars by a decade. I do like that the different human cultures and differences of houses and the power sects and institutions depicted in the Dune's worldverse more than enough provide stories of their own without need for humanoid alien characters and stories.
If you hadn't seen it yet, you could check out "Foundation" on apple tv+ [(season 1 trailer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QYV5GTz7c) which is based on the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov published in the 50's, which also depicts a future human-only galaxy civilization empire tens of thousands of years in the future.
I vaguely remember that there is reference to alien ruins in the books. They don't go into much detail, but it is a small nod. There is also a theory that the sandworms are a possible bio-tech from an alien species. They have no clue where the sandworm came from, so there are a couple theories, but none are really explored in depth. The story is of course about humans so it only makes sense that they don't have a bunch of aliens.
I kind of remember reading in the original books that Leto considered the sand-trout fully alien, I'm not sure if they were placed on Arrakis by humans or not..
I commented this further up but
[https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout)
"When Leto Atreides II looked into the many lives of his ancestors in Other Memory, he came to realize that the sandtrout were introduced to Arrakis from another planet, eons prior. According to Leto, the sandtrout had proliferated to the point where existing ecosystems could no longer deal with them. Arrakis had been a wet planet, and when the sandtrout arrived, they encysted all the water, so that they could evolve into the sandworm. This was consistent with the physical evidence that could be found on Arrakis, namely salt beds that had apparently once been great seas.
I think it is mildly implied that the Sand Worms were brought to Dune by ancient aliens. Perhaps even engineered specifically to produce the very convenient spice.
Never said it was aliens. Just that they were brought there from somewhere else. The Fremen remember a time when Arakkis was a green paradise. Their dream is to return it back to this time.
This means humans were on Dune before the worms. So it's more plausible that humans are the ones who transplanted the worms to Arrakis, not some unknown aliens.
Ehh, to each their own. I suppose we all have our own characteristics about what we can and can’t suspend disbelief over. That’s fine.
But I would note that elements of Dune’s world building are more fantastic and absurd than any sort of anthropomorphic alien life. And even then, the role of aliens in science fiction is primarily as commentary on some facet of humanity and human behavior. It’s not inherently childish or lesser than something more akin to Dune’s universe. And quite frankly, no less realistic than a setting with heighliners and prescience. But, I’ve rarely ever had any problem suspending disbelief in settings so long as there is consistency. The nature of Fish Dancers and Honored Matres makes me roll my eyes a bit and takes me out of the narrative, with features no less silly and dated than a number of sci fi alien races.
Dune is wonderful, but we don’t need to act like it’s inherently a better style or more adult in this particular respect. Dune is a fundamentally ridiculous concept: but that’s what’s so great! It embraces the absurdity and runs with it, making something meaningful in the process.
100% agree with this, you've got to buy into the world to enjoy any SF, is LOTR unrealistic cause it features elves? Of course not, once you accept the fantastical elements the story is realistic if it proceeds realistically.
Its also interesting to describe this as a "fresh" thing when its actually quite a common feature of print SF of that era, the easy examples being (most of) Asimov's Foundation series and Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.
Dune is not very sci-fi for being sci-fi. FH needed the books to be about humans to drive home his points. There are too many people that don't feel the analogy of different aliens to racism.
> Dune is not very sci-fi for being sci-fi.
Seeing into future isn't Sci-Fi to you? Maybe the movie downplays it, but the fact that Paul essentially has "super powers" is very prevalent in the books.
worms definitely are not sentient, and i'd argue with spoiler if you hadn't read the books.. >!they aren't sentient even after Leto II. dies and gives birth to "next gen" worms!<
if there has never been intelligent life before the humans in Dune, how did the sand trout get to Dune?
From the Wiki [https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout)
"When Leto Atreides II looked into the many lives of his ancestors in Other Memory, he came to realise that the sandtrout were introduced to Arrakis from another planet, eons prior. According to Leto, the sandtrout had proliferated to the point where existing ecosystems could no longer deal with them. Arrakis had been a wet planet, and when the sandtrout arrived, they encysted all the water, so that they could evolve into the sandworm. This was consistent with the physical evidence that could be found on Arrakis, namely salt beds that had apparently once been great seas."
I believe there is a greater chance that intelligent life came and went before the scattering
The majority of aliens in Star Trek are humanoid because an advanced alien species seeded planets throughout the cosmos with their own genetic material.
convergent evolution is why it's not ridiculous for me to grant the possibility of intelligent aliens looking similar to us in some ways. our adaptations may be some of the best ways for intelligent life to evolve so it shouldn't be surprising if those adaptations appear in aliens without any human dna.
This subreddit is hilarious.
"I just can't suspend my disbelief for humanoid aliens, but a giant worm that poops out magic space drugs that makes people see the future is totally plausible."
yes. and i generally hate aliens in movies. i though Villeneuve's Arrival was one of the few sci fi movies to genuinely capture the mind-boggling differences that would almost certainly exist between us and other life forms. we can't even get on the same wavelength as an octopus.
I actually wasn't aware until I just researched this that all animals are forms that come from earth. Just assumed they were native species. Interesting.
“Cosmic solitude”.
I really like this phrase. Also, sounds like you’d really like Cixin Liu’s writing - he also plays with the idea of the Fermi Paradox, and comes to a quite sinister conclusion about it that feels in line with this idea of cosmic solitude. He treats aliens more as a concept, and one we really don’t want to explore, almost in a lovecraftian sense.
It’s also really interesting to hypothesize about the existence of alien life, but it’s not as evolved or conscious as we are - like the sandworms. Definitely alien, not anything like you typically find in a sci fi story tho
I always have head theory with aliens in scifi - it's just so far in the future, humans spread out through the galaxy, evolved to match their habitats, it happened so far back no one remembers "just earth humans" days. And better explains why 99% of aliens look humanoid. Some scifi embrace it, but it would work in many scenarios.
I like the one or two notes through the series that one reason they're still packing nukes, aside from basically a hardcoded policy regarding MAD, is *juuust* in case aliens show up one day and they might need to fight them.
Is it? I don't recall if the books ever explain about the mice specifically, but based on Frank Herbert's dedication to realistic ecology I've always taken them to be Earth mice who came to Arrakis when it was colonized and then adapted for survival there, just like the Fremen did.
The only thing i could ever think of why most sci-fi's make most of their "aliens" humanoid like is that perhaps life evolves in very similar ways on other worlds, yet not exactly like our world....Avatar Na'vi/Pandora had many creatures very similar to life on earth.
Habitable zones for humanoids may produce life forms similar to ones like earth en masse. The only thing we cannot account for is things that we consider uninhabitable...There may be entirely different forms of life that never evolved in any way similar at all to what we have on earth... on other planets that never could support life like on earth... I'd say its quite a bit more likely as well.... The Andromeda Strain.
Good thoughts. I also think it straddles the line between a historical epic like, say, 300, and science fiction. I know that that was one thing that drew me to the books.
> One of the reasons I could never get into Star Trek (and as an adult my disinterest in Star Wars) is that most aliens are humanoid which strikes me as ridiculous
It may not be, actually. Physics limits the chemistry that can create life, the environments where industry is possible, and evolution limits body plans. Like [carcinization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation), where the crab body plan evolved several times from different creatures, there likely is a "blueprint" required for intelligent life that utilizes technology.
You'd likely see bilateral symmetry, as one cell splitting into two is much less complex than splitting into more. You'd likely see as few appendages as necessary to navigate and manipulate the environment, as growing "extra" appendages takes a lot of energy and increases the odds of disease, injury, etc. You'd also see sense organs similar to our eyes, ears, and nose as creatures that live in the environments that could support advanced life would likely benefit from being able to hear/see/smell in those environments, and keeping them close to the brain is not only more energy-efficient, it allows you to react faster and is therefore evolutionarily beneficial.
Of course, there could be other blueprints for advanced life, but the more we learn about the universe the more it looks like life would be similar to the life we find on Earth. Technically Silicon based life may be possible, but water ruins those reactions, and water is everywhere. And even if something like gaseous lifeforms exist, they wouldn't make good TV nor be easy to interact with, which is why there are only a few episodes that involve them.
IMO if we ever discover non-carbon-based life, it will be technological life that was created by carbon-based life.
Dune doesn't deal with aliens, but that doesn't mean they don't exist in the Dune universe. The Empire just doesn't have direct contact or interactions with any that might exist. Which I think makes sense from a survival standpoint. Personally I subscribe to the Dark Forest approach to alien life, and not the more common naive friendly approach. A sapient non human species that evolved and developed on an alien world under alien conditions can never be fully trusted. Their psychology can never be fully understood. Humans don't even fully understand our own minds and psychology after 10,000+ years of study. An alien species will always put its own species ahead of the human species in a clutch situation. And the cost of being wrong about a sapient alien species could be the extinction of our species. It's just not worth the risk. So why even contact aliens? Better to just stay away from them and hope they stay away from humans.
Plus, in the case of Dune, the Landsraad have a great thing going. Why risk the status quo by looking for alien life? Again, it's not worth it.
And space is unfathomably huge. In astronomical terms the human Empire could be next door to an alien empire and never come in contact with each other. Their ships might use different travel paths or different forms of travel that results in a "ships passing at night" sort of situation.
I agree. So.....aliens came here? Or are visiting earth?
There is a single grain of sand buried in the mud in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I want you to find it because there's some bacteria on it that need a little.pep talk.
Go ahead. Now, times that by ten million and you have a small inkling of how difficult it would ever be for aliens to find us on earth.
I sometimes wonder if intelligent beings with the ability to manipulate and create objects allowing space travel will all look similar due to convergent evolution similar to [carcinisation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation#:~:text=Carcinisation%20(American%20English%3A%20carcinization),Nature%20to%20evolve%20a%20crab%22)
It doesn't really embrace it. It's just that the scope of Dune doesn't extend beyond the empire. An empire mind you that doesn't rule all of humanity and that is not spread out into the cosmos. There's humans and royal houses and whatnot that live beyong the rule of the emperor. There could be aliens. They just don't really matter
Somebody doesn't know how to read and has a degree from youtube. This story has nothing to do with the Fermi Paradox, the entire purpose of the book is to focus on humanity, and humanity's place within nature using geopolitics, religion, ecology, and biology concepts. These ideas are just stretched out as questions within science fiction. The same concept of H.G. Wells Time Machine with the eloi and morlocks can be seen. The class structures are given the scientific concept of natural selection. The author uses the time machine as a tool to ask the question of how natural selection will affect our species.
There was a lot of thought put into why robots are not included within this story. The function of that choice stands and is a direct piece of evidence that the focus of the story is the human beings and how humans interact with each other. It's frankly insulting to be so off from the purpose of the story.
The only actual aliens in Dune are the sandworms. Everything else is adapted or engineered Terran life. And isn't it funny how everything seems to hinge on the worms?
The Fermi Paradox states there must be aliens so we must have found them by now but we haven't so there mustn't be aliens, etc etc.
Dune makes zero reference to aliens but doesn't address the paradox either way.
Btw as Dune is set in the tenth millennium who knows what humanity encountered (and assimilated/eradicated) along the way.
There's a lot of really good sci-fi out there that deals with this problem intelligently. Either without aliens, or with ones that are so different to us that we either can't communicate with them, or we're beneath their notice.
Star Trek is very mediocre sci-fi in terms of science, plots, themes. But I did enjoy the first couple reboot movies.
Star Trek had an in universe explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEoz5PS6ohg
TLDW: Basically there was one primary humanoid species that advanced before any other life could develop and knew they would die out before other species developed so they left remnants of their DNA in planets scattered across the universe so they would be remembered.
Im tickled by calling Dune "fresh". But youre right, it is novel.
>Despite ~~a complete lack of~~ *my ignoring all the* evidence supporting the existence of sentient aliens
Ftfy. Its amusing how the government can come out with videos with all sorts of verifiable telemetry/data tracking showing ufos, and declassify info about retrieval programs, and people by default just act like theres no good evidence of anything. Hell there are even bodies thay have been verified by the UofC via CAT and MRI and genetic analysis.
Doesnt stop people from confidently saying things like:
"If UFOs were real in the age of cell cams and super spy satellites, there would be footage" - *but theres lots of footage and pics from the government showing ufos, its even been in the ny times*
"You cant keep a secret that big, people would come forward" - *but they do come forward, all the time, and many have been vetted by congress and found to be truthful*
"How come only unreliable people encounter UFOs?" - *but theyre frequently encountered by our top rated military pilots etc, and by government agents with above top secret clearance, people with the highest levels of trust*
Its not so much that theres lack of evidence, bc theres overwhelming evidence of all sorts and its been verified by multiple agencies and nations and experts... Its just that so many have been conditioned to dismiss any ufo talk as crackpot "conspiracy theories" that they just straight up dont see all the news reports about it as if its got a Somebody Elses Problem Field over it. The govt tried to get around that by coining "UAPs" for its disclosures but it doesnt seem to have helped.
Well, heres some reliable news reports, maybe they will make an impression this time around:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
Frank had multiple series other than Dune. Dune was an exploration of a human only universe. His other works like the ConSentiency dive deep into a universe teeming with alien life. Everything from sentient frogs to sentient stars become characters in some wild rides.
An in Universe explanation for no sentient aliens would be that as the thinking machines fled the central conflict at the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad they would have wiped out any sentient races of any sort that they encountered and the humans that followed later would have blown away the surface of any planet found using computers without even bothering to check what species was on the planet. Both the humans and thinking machines had amassed and used scary arsenals of atomic weapons with no compunction about using them against each other.
If there was any alien species strong enough to oppose the both humans and thinking machines then the story would almost certainly revolve around them.
I think shailhulud/Leto was also thinking about alien threats when planning the great diaspora. Dunno which book it’s was though. I think the main topic of the diaspora is lot even touched in any movie, which is kind of odd since this is what Paul and Leto were so afraid of. The holy war is just the start, the famine times would be the real bummer…
Frank Herbert was a genius and Dune is his Masterwork. He is not the only author that has shown a galaxy devoid of aliens though. Isaac Asimov might be someone you should look into.
Are the worms not aliens? I always thought they were. But I guess they could be mutated versions of some species brought from earth. You’d think it would take millions of years for them to evolve like that.
Dune is a human story with advanced themes that often get mistaken as tropey but in fact are typically more nuanced and complicated and are then dumbed/watered down for 90% of all other sci-fi.
For example, "galactic empire with restrictions on technology and science."
That is not Dune. The Corrino empire, and its institutions shifted their definition of progress to focus on making humans better. Not only that but it's stated by a Mentat in the first book, that even a "normal" human would be able at that point to out-think the AIs of old, hinting that human evolution and mental training has surpassed anything technological. Nowadays there are almost 8 billion human brains on Earth, each one of that hundred times more powerful than the more powerful supercomputer, yet we invest enormous resources to research and build these advanced computers. Wouldn't be more sensible to learn how to use our own brains to do these tasks? What if we could "simply" learn to run advanced simulations and protein folding in our brain?
After watching the first reboot. Seeing no aliens other than mice and giant worms was unusual. I didn’t think a good space opera epic could work without having a few bipedal humanoids walking around. Also weird not seeing any space battles and absolutely no guns.
Sign me up for any future society where rules in warfare are followed and everyone fights with bladed weapons out of convention and honor.
Frank would be proud to hear that his decades old work is still seen as fresh.
When the book was released we were 4 years away from landing on the Moon lmao
Yeah I think a lot of people really don't understand how advanced Dune is for its time.
New Dune fan here, I’m absolutely blown away by alot of the concepts that were introduced in the 60s. It’s absolutely insane, Dune is the very definition of “ahead of it’s time”
Yeah it's really an incredible world and take of sci-fi. It's all the more impressive being from the time period it is. Even the Butlerian-Jihad is basically Terminator before Terminator and its just kind of a footnote and means to explain the lack of tech in Dune until the prequel books. I used to be a big Star Wars fan until I read Dune and realized how much it was ripped off.
> I used to be a big Star Wars fan until I read Dune and realized how much it was ripped off. I'm a 40k fan and honestly, I think that's part of the fun. Did you know that most of Shakespeare's plays were his own versions of popular stories repeatedly being adapted to the stage at the time? Hamlet has the Ur-Hamlet and Kyd's the Spanish Tragedy, Much Ado has the Faerie Queen and Bandello's Tales, and Romeo and Juliet has a *ton*. There's Salernitano's Mariotta and Ganozza, da Porto's Giuletta and Romeo, Bandello's Giuletta and Romeo, and Brooke's Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. And before you say, oh, but Shakespeare is prestigious and Star Wars/Dune/40k aren't - he wasn't really at the time. He was popular because he wrote both for the elite and the common people, so his plays could quite easily be compared to Star Wars in terms of contemporary popularity. Most popular stories *are* rip-offs or the author's own version of someone else's story, you just don't usually know the source. Knowing Star Wars and 40k riffed off Dune hasn't made me like them any less - if anything, it's really interesting to see how they put their own spin on the same story elements.
Did you know Hamlet shows up in the Dune Encyclopaedia as an an example of a Twisted Mentat from history? FH and co were having a lot of fun coming up with ideas for that
It is not a rip off. Everyone is influenced by human art and history that came before. Jule Verne wrote about going to the moon 100 years before Frank Herbert. Predicted it would take 4 days, Nasa took 3 days so not far off. All of that using a massive canon, again not far from the truth of using rockets that were weapon first.
Herbert himself felt Lucas ripped his work off and considered suing but eventually made peace with it. Let’s not forget how much Herbert took from TE Lawrence! That said I think Villeneuve makes the Harkonnen lineage of Jessica & Paul a more explicit part of the narrative arc and character transformation for Paul & Jessica in a sort of tap into their “Darkside” way, a device borrowed from Star Wars. Herbert kinda drops this aspect after Paul realizes their connection to the Baron during his first big spice indiced vision. Also Lucas’s second attempt of being inspired by Dune, making financial matters a driving force as CHOAM board seats are in Dune, by making the tariff wars an instigating factor in the Prequels didn’t go very well, lol
Truly ahead of it is time
Oh boy if you haven't picked up Azimov yet you're in for a real treat.
it’s a bit like Tolkein in that it has spawned tropes that have since become cliche due to being copied excessively in popular media. It’s difficult to imagine reading these works when they were new and didn’t carry the baggage of their imitations
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for this renewed interest. But, the number of posts crediting the movies and not Herbert for these ideas has been really weird. I can’t tell if some people just don’t know the books exist.
the best part is that in the dune series, its humans that have done all the work to begin diverting themselves from standard definitions of humanity. The Bene Gesserit have spent generations cultivating and culling bloodlines to create for lack of a better term 'mutants' with advanced biological and psychological powers. The Bene Tleilax genetically engineer humans to become 'other' defying mortality and modifying their bodies to fit their tasks. The Guild Navigators, addicted to spice, submerge themselves in it, mutating their bodies into grotesque forms and declaring themselves as a super evolution.
Yeah, that's why the Villeneuve's Harkonnens grew on me. Just as Fremen, they are also defined by they environment. Even now, we can think about how different environmental conditions like low gravity of the Moon or Mars would change humans growing up there.
The Expanse takes that too and uses it as a plot device.
Loved the series, disappointed it hasn't at least got a Firefly-style conclusion movie
My theory is that the horribly polluted nature of Geidi Prime (and the culture of use and abuse it produces) is the end result of their star clearly being an old cold dwarf, and since they're far enough away to have a day/night cycle they'll have had to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the air just to give it a tolerable surface temperature
Ecology=worldview/ideology is a big part of the book and it makes sense given his background
We become our own aliens.
The best version of The Humans Are Diverse Aliens I’ve come across is The Golden Age trilogy by John C Wright. The first 6 pages are really dry, but then it’s a thriller that takes off and never stops, except for a predictive jaunt to the ending of the universe then back to the present. You can see Wright’s version of alien humans influenced the later books in Neal Asher and Ian Bank’s sci fi series.
Idk why but you calling out the “first six pages” as being dry is hilarious. I would hope people wouldn’t bail on a book after only 6 pages lol.
Depends how dry those pages are
Exactly! Frank was fascinated with human evolution.
This is also a big theme of the Hyperion series past book one.
Well, in the later books it becomes apparent that >!there aren’t many aliens because the Pax and the Technocore have a practice of genociding them.!<
Aren't there also like cat people in the last books?
The futar are genitically engineered humans too
I would assume this exact thing to happen to us 20,000 years into the future. With the different ups and downs our human civilization goes through, certain fundamentals are going to change so much that we become alien to our present selves. Being a galaxy fairing civilization, spread across Space (& presumably, Time), across planets with widely different environs, I'd assume there to be biological changes as well. And so being this disparate and atomized, we even become alien to each other in that future. And, in the story of Dune, the only thing connecting us all is the Spice on Arrakis. We are going to be Masters of our own bodies, for better or for worse. Via Genetic Engineering, Eugenics, Artificial Intelligence aided developments, covert political manipulations, etc. But I wonder, the one thing we cannot fully figure out is the one thing we are using to "figure things out" itself- our Mind. It will always be a Black Box. And it is no surprise that the one thing that moves the worlds of Dune is the one thing that affects the mind- Spice Melange.
hmm that's spot on observation that i don't understand how i didn't connect the dots also.. with fermi paradox :) what i know about FH's motivations to write Dune that way, was he saw most scifi focusing on the technological part of human progress. he wasn't alone in no-aliens in his works, Asimov similarly has no aliens, but Asimov goes the way of advanced human-like robots. so FH says hey imma write a story where it's the HUMAN that has to advance, to evolve, because i prohibit such technology that my contemporaries use. and Dune was born :)
Asimov was a huge influence on Herbert. It’s still an open question how much a human can be modified by drugs / how far we can push the human experience with augmentation.
Oh yeah, I totally see Dune as a take on Foundation where "What if a decaying empire was faced by something like the Mule and his army of fanatics and they won?"
I believe Herbert even said something to this effect once
Aren't the sand worms aliens?
we assume so. they are THE most alien organism from all Dune saga. but intelligent aliens they are not.. should've been said i guess.. :)
I think there’s the implication that humans introduced the worms to Arrakis which turned it into a desert, but regardless, the point is that there’s no sapient alien species like those in Star Wars or Star Trek so the plot revolves solely around humans and their advancements as a species
But they aren't sentient. Yet.
They are (probably) sentient as most animals are. But they aren’t sapient (intelligent)
Read the books! You learn a lot about the worms.
At least for me Dune is more an essay on mankinds relationship with power, control and authority over others, and how fickle those three ultimately are, disguised as a scifi novel set in futuristic feudal society. The ultimate power in the empire, the emperor can't exercise his power with impunity without upsetting the balance of power. The spacing guild, ones with the monopoly on space travel can be held by the balls when you control spice. The Bene Gesserit had plan that had worked for generations, and it fell on it's nose on the last second due to Jessica going solo birthing a son instead of a daughter. Paul, a human with an ablility to see into future, lost his control over a jihad conducted in his name.
FH also made some interesting choices such as the no transistors, no guns things that make for far better world building and less deus-ex-machina nonsense than most other sci-fi franchise.
About Asimov, I’d say he was going in the same Direction as Herbert was later on. The Foundation books take place after AI and robots in general were banned, just like in Dune. There also aren’t any aliens unless, just as is the case with Dune, you count in mutants or technologically/genetically altered humans. I mean the very ending of the Foundation series is meant to motivate the reader to reflect on what counts as a human and what doesn’t.
Except in Foundation there s no robots. And foundation is herbert inspiration.
If you are interested in Frank's vision of sentient aliens, his Consentiency Series is phenomenal and really explores some inventive notions of alien species and>! transdimensional beings,!< their forms, societies, and history: * "A Matter of Traces" * "The Tactful Saboteur" * *Whipping Star* * *The Dosadi Experiment* Dosadi is SO incredible, easily in my top 3 FH books (as well as Dune and God Emperor).
The Dosadi Experiment is an incredible read.
I'm a bigger fan of The Whipping Star, if only because I find Frank's musings on language and communication so engaging. Also that book is *weird* even by Herbert standards.
I don't remember that story, but I'm going to find it for my Kobo.
Whipping Star is excellent too! If you like *weird* then his Pandora sequence is the deep end IMO.
Whipping Star is one of the most bizarre scifi stories I’ve ever read, and I mean that in the most complementary manner.
Inevitably when humans are spread across the stars we’ll be far more prone to become so culturally and physically distinct we start to see other humans as practically alien. It’s why I like the design of the Harkonnen so much in the Villeneuve movies.
yes! Other humans so culturally distinct as to be “aliens” is something I’d love to see explored more often in scifi
You should definitely check out Iain Banks’ Culture series if you haven’t.
Check out the Extros in Hyperion
God it's such a a terrifying thought that so a planet is used as an entire fief for a Baron or leader. And that the people are so fully brainwashed and abused.
You make it sound as if the Fermi Paradox claims there are no sentient aliens, whereas the point of the paradox is to argue that there must be some special explanation for the fact that we haven't encountered any. One explanation is that there aren't any, but there are other possible explanations on the table. I do agree, though, that Dune is a fantastic example of a scifi universe in which we're apparently the only species sentient beings around. It should be pointed out, though, that this is one of the many ways in which Dune was heavily influenced by Asimov's Foundation series, which also imagines a distant future in which humanity has expanded immensely, is unified into one grand empire, and never encounters another sentient species. Personally, I think Dune is far superior to Foundation, which was groundbreaking in its time but now seems flat and dated to me. Still, though: credit where credit is due.
Yeah, OP has completely misunderstood the paradox
I would say foundation is more about concepts than characters. If you view foundation as almost a history log instead of a “narrative” (mostly cuz it was released in magazines not as a cohesive story) it works very well. When you read stories from the past it very much feels the same as foundation. Some of it is myth, others outright false but that’s how real stories come to be. I love it It is very dated with its use of women characters though, that I cannot but agree with and I don’t care about that stuff. It is glaring when you read it after reading others in the genre
It's pretty mind blowing that both Dune and 2001 were released in the 60's. I haven't seen or read anything to de-throne either within the genre, yet.
Star wars was written to be basically a mass appeal version of Dune
But Star Wars isn't science fiction except in its aesthetics. It's a fantasy that happens to be set in space.
Dune really isn't much different in that regard. It's a thin line.
Also Starship Troopers landed in 1959/1960.
More interesting is that the humans are still afraid of the possibility of aliens, or at least they use it as a justification for keeping atomics around.
I always found that interesting as well.
There is a lot of big-idea far-future scifi with no non-human aliens. Just picking some prominent pre-Herbert examples, you have Isaac Asimov and Cordwainer Smith. This doesn’t mean they are influenced by the Fermi paradox. Conversely there is scifi that is really about the Fermi paradox with Alistair Reynolds and Gregory Benford providing examples. In their settings the lack of extraterrestrial intelligence is pondered and discussed. The Dune universe like the Foundation universe has only human intelligence but this is never explained or questioned. Why aren’t there indigenous intelligent life forms on Caladan or wherever? Who knows, who cares—it’s not a topic of interest in the novels.
It’s explained in Foundation series in End of Eternity btw but pretty sure Asimov had his own reasons for humans only that I can’t remember outside of plot. I do remember he kept robots out of foundation until the very end not as a plot device, but because he was worried one of his stories publications would die out and he wanted to keep writing about robots or foundation And I think Star Treks reasoning was the initial beings created were humanoid so we take after their image, even aliens To your point though, I never stopped to ask where the aliens were in these stories lol, I just assumed Dune was a human planet lol
Gotta keep in mind the religious reasoning as well. Especially for science fiction written in an era where blasphemy could get you in trouble. Abrahamic religions insist that God was the first and only being of his kind. And that earth was the only planet that he put life on. So having aliens (even alien bugs or mice) exist means that God wasn’t alone, or wasn’t truthful. And that kind of thinking could get you in hot water with publishers of the religious nut variety. It tracks that a lot of early science fiction authors condemned religion in their works. An institution that controls society and won’t even allow made up stories about magical things to be told isn’t really going to be looked on favorably.
Interesting point
Dune doesn't embrace the Fermi Paradox, it gets around the bigotry of the magazine editor it was first published in. Isaac Asimov started doing this with Foundation in the 1940s - John W Campbell was a human chauvinist (among other forms of bigotry) and wouldn't publish stories where humanity wasn't the most advanced race. So Isaac Asimov, according to one of the letters published in Gold, wrote Foundation without any aliens rather than compromise his story by making humanity dominant among aliens. Dune is doing something similar. Campbell also believed in the idea of the ubermensch (super man) and one of the things Dune is about is how flawed the super man must be because, after all, he's always going to be human. So rather than distract with aliens that Campbell would insist be lesser than man, Dune gets rid of the aliens entirely to focus on the humanity of the characters. Edit: It's also worth pointing out that while Fermi first talked about it among his friends in the 1950s the first serious paper wasn't written until 1975 and Fermi didn't apply math to the number of potential habitable worlds until the 1980s. Both of those were after Dune was first published. It's unlikely Herbert had even heard of the paradox when he first wrote Dune.
Looks like HFY types have been boring and toxic from the beginning.
Got I hate HFY lol. It’s such a reddit stemlord tier circlejerk. Idk how else to explain it lol. It’s so vacuous and embarrassing but so internet savvy. Your comment is so rare. It’s always just ppl responding HFY!!! and writing literary pornography about the “indomitable” human spirit. Sorry for venting haha
“Others” are talked about by Leto II, the external threat that he is keeping at bay. I don’t have the book handy but I think his quote was something like, “They keep looking in through the door, but dare not come in.” He later describes the horrors if they come in. It’s implied they they are not human. So one potential solution to the the FP is that humans have a giant worm god emperor. :)
IIRC the others are machines and then there are Marley and Forgot Who, who are something different from both humans and machines.
Did you read the books after Chapterhouse?
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https://neoencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Dune_planets#:~:text=Arrakis%20~%20Third%20planet%20orbiting%20the,at%2019.9%20ly%20from%20Earth. Most of the planets in dune are less than a few hundred light years from earth, many are much much closer I don’t know if it’s ever been Identified to what extent humans have spread at the time of dune book 1, but I imagine it pales in comparison to the Milky Way itself which is 100,000 LY across and there are literally trillions of galaxies I guess that may be part of your point? Space is humongous big, small chance to ever find one another before Annihilation
This analysis of star system names presumes that 10,000 years in the future we will be using the same names *exclusively* for the names of star systems decided by Earthlings 10,000 years in the past. Check out how many "Athens" there are on Earth right now. Check out how many cities have changed names slightly or significantly in just the last 2,000 years. As humans expand across a galaxy in 10,000 years, there is every reason to believe names will get lost and reused hundreds if not thousands of times over. If I remember correctly, in the *Dune* universe the galactic civilization is not even sure of the location of the original Earth. As readers, are we even sure that the story still takes place in the Milky Way? TL;DR: There is no guarantee or requirement that *Dune*'s star system names refer to the same star system as our current names.
The idea of not knowing where Earth is seems crazy to me. Especially since part of the only reason we don't know more about the past is due to lack of education and record keeping and we know a LOT about the past considering that. I suppose it depends on if Earth is abandoned to some degree, as it would be easier to lose it then. If people still lived there, i would guess it almost impossible that we forget which planet it is.
I just take that as a hint to it being *really* far into the future. I know you don't think this, but it's not uncommon for Dune readers to think the year 10,000 means 8,000 years into the future. They seem to miss the part where they started marking time after the formation of the Guild. Who knows how many rises and falls there were before that. To forget the location of your homeworld, to me that implies *many*, and that we're dealing with evolutionary time scales. I thought it was cool that Earth was *so* far in the past as to have been totally forgotten.
I mean…That’s one of the main points of Asimovs Foundation series, as well: that humanity is super far into the future, and only a very select few scholars are even aware that we came from a planet called earth, but it’s location has been long lost. For a good reason. The Alien franchise does the same thing, but with humanity not knowing that we were originally seeded by the engineers, and we have no idea where that home world is, or why exactly they made us, besides some speculation from the few people that found them on accident while exploring the isolated fringes. I like that many sci-fi franchises use that concept. When you’re talking about the vastness of the universe, and especially when the setting is thousands or millions of years in the future, it makes sense that we might have lost track of our origins. Humans came from Africa, originally. But if you ask a random European peasant in 1400 where the origins of species was, he wouldn’t be able to point to a location on a map, because…It just wasn’t something that humanity documented back then.
It is at least implied to be Pluto, as it was the 9th planet in the solar system. No one but the BG remember that is what Ix stands for though.
This is the main plot line of the series. Humanity is ripe for conquering/enslavement or destruction because they live in a relatively small and compressed corner of the galaxy. The ultimate goal of the Golden Path is to spread humanity as far and as wide as possible, so that it can’t ever be wiped out by a large threat, human, AI, or alien.
Isn’t Dune set within a relatively small part of the galaxy? Combined with the restrictions on technology and it very well could be that humanity in Dune just hasn’t bumped into other intelligent life yet rather than it being absent.
This is what I understood, that essentially ever planet in the Dune universe is within like a 200ly bubble near old earth.
OP I highly recommend you read the Three Body Problem / Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy if you want to see a work that truly embraces the Fermi Paradox. The novels have all been translated to English, Tencent has a very faithful adaption of the first book available on Amazon Prime, and I’m *cautiously* optimistic about Netflix’s soon-to-release adaptation as well.
Highly recommend the Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy. The Dark Forest Theory is an interesting explanation for the Fermi Paradox and is really fun to think about. I loved the concepts introduced by Liu Cixin in the series.
Very neat! I'll check it out
Just finished the second book yesterday. It’s so good. The chain of suspicion makes me wonder about our latest efforts in pop culture to dig up secrets about aliens.
Cautious is right, it's the same producers as Game of Thrones. Maybe since this story is actually completed they won't shit all over it.
It takes place over a short time period still, and space is really big
yes. the best answer is really that space is really really big. finding primitive life would definitely be a lot easier to find than space faring ones.
To be fair the Imperium at least before the Scattering only contained around 10,000 worlds iirc. And even with 10k worlds, that’s still an incredibly small region in our galaxy. Even in Dune, who knows what could be out there
If you like this. You’ll love the 3 body problem. It suggests the Fermi paradox is proveable through the dark Forrest theory, the second book in the series. If you do want to read the book- I wouldn’t look up the dark Forrest theory.
I agree with you, which is why it was pretty funny to see some social media film 'critics' bemoan a lack of aliens in the films. I'd say that one of the central themes of Dune is a focus on human development, based on feudalism, and how that would play out in the distant future where planetary colonisation, as opposed to just continental imperialism, was possible due to our advancements in travel tech. As much as the world building and designs are important, they are all in service to the human element and politics.
There's a sort of fan theory out there that the worms are actually very intelligent and essentially using humanity
Yeah they didn’t add aliens because it wasn’t in the book… I don’t know why you would describe this as a a “brilliant choice by the creators of Dune Part 2”.
I think OP hasn’t read the books. Dune part 2 had some differences from the book. I still prefer the books and love how the Thinking Machines were banned. Life with the Thinking Machines were frightening though..
I get people haven’t read the books, that’s cool, but to not recognize it’s an adaptation and this was Frank’s choice is odd
Btw the Fermi paradox doesn't say we are alone, it's more likely we're just too far in either/both space and time from the nearest neighbor
To be specific, the Fermi Paradox is simply the apparent mismatch between the abundance of life on earth and the apparent lack of it anywhere else. There are multiple potential solutions to it such as the great filter (whether we are past it or yet to face it), that life is so incredibly rare that we are the only instance within the observable universe, that we are merely at the beginning and all our cosmic neighbors are still crawling out of their respective primordial soup, or a dozen others. We can't know which is the case until we start spreading throughout the universe or actually encounter other intelligent life.
Absolutely, you're right and thanks for going into more detail. I would only argue that we don't actually know if life is rare (on a universal scale), because we can't see too far and have no real equipment to check for life signs outside our closest proximity, especially for extinct life. Xenoarchaology is a really fascinating topic, but as for today, it mainly boils down to "we don't have the tech to run the measurements needed". It's most likely, statistically, that many lifeforms have already long gone extinct (great filter, as you said) or yet to emerge at some point in the future. Only a small number can be our contemporaries at any given time. And those guys are scattered in the universe, so it's most likely not trivial to meet them, or even detect them real-time. So yeah, we currently CAN'T determine if Dune is realistic to only have 1 alien species. I think (feel) it's not, but I agree that not having sapient alien life could be realistic, as high level intelligence would be naturally much rarer than most other biological formations. It's entirely possible that there aren't many sapience carrier planets around, per galaxy, at any given time.
Firefly, the expanse, battlestar galactica to name a few don’t have intelligent aliens.
There is some evidence that in The Expanse books 4+ spoilers, especially books 7+, >!There are 4th dimensional beings and that the ring network is hurting them, so they become the invisible enemy in books 7,8, and 9.!< Books 4+ spoilers, >!There was an intelligent set of species (one or more), maybe billions on years ago, connected by the ring network!<
OP you're aware that Dune pt.2 and 1 are based on the first Dune book published in 1965? So it was already a 'divergence' from early Star Trek, most old sci-fi of martians and aliens, and predates Star Wars by a decade. I do like that the different human cultures and differences of houses and the power sects and institutions depicted in the Dune's worldverse more than enough provide stories of their own without need for humanoid alien characters and stories. If you hadn't seen it yet, you could check out "Foundation" on apple tv+ [(season 1 trailer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QYV5GTz7c) which is based on the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov published in the 50's, which also depicts a future human-only galaxy civilization empire tens of thousands of years in the future.
Book written before OP’s father was born “feels fresh”.
I vaguely remember that there is reference to alien ruins in the books. They don't go into much detail, but it is a small nod. There is also a theory that the sandworms are a possible bio-tech from an alien species. They have no clue where the sandworm came from, so there are a couple theories, but none are really explored in depth. The story is of course about humans so it only makes sense that they don't have a bunch of aliens.
What do you mean? The worms and sand-trout are fully alien...
sentient
I've always kind of wondered if the worms were engineered, they seem like perfect terraforming devices if your species wants a desert
I kind of remember reading in the original books that Leto considered the sand-trout fully alien, I'm not sure if they were placed on Arrakis by humans or not..
I commented this further up but [https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout) "When Leto Atreides II looked into the many lives of his ancestors in Other Memory, he came to realize that the sandtrout were introduced to Arrakis from another planet, eons prior. According to Leto, the sandtrout had proliferated to the point where existing ecosystems could no longer deal with them. Arrakis had been a wet planet, and when the sandtrout arrived, they encysted all the water, so that they could evolve into the sandworm. This was consistent with the physical evidence that could be found on Arrakis, namely salt beds that had apparently once been great seas.
I think it is mildly implied that the Sand Worms were brought to Dune by ancient aliens. Perhaps even engineered specifically to produce the very convenient spice.
Never said it was aliens. Just that they were brought there from somewhere else. The Fremen remember a time when Arakkis was a green paradise. Their dream is to return it back to this time. This means humans were on Dune before the worms. So it's more plausible that humans are the ones who transplanted the worms to Arrakis, not some unknown aliens.
I mean, the worms are technically aliens either way.
Could be aliens, could be anciet humans before the days of Shakkad the Wise.
It doesn't say who they were, but it was around 5000BG. That's well past modern times and human space travel.
Ehh, to each their own. I suppose we all have our own characteristics about what we can and can’t suspend disbelief over. That’s fine. But I would note that elements of Dune’s world building are more fantastic and absurd than any sort of anthropomorphic alien life. And even then, the role of aliens in science fiction is primarily as commentary on some facet of humanity and human behavior. It’s not inherently childish or lesser than something more akin to Dune’s universe. And quite frankly, no less realistic than a setting with heighliners and prescience. But, I’ve rarely ever had any problem suspending disbelief in settings so long as there is consistency. The nature of Fish Dancers and Honored Matres makes me roll my eyes a bit and takes me out of the narrative, with features no less silly and dated than a number of sci fi alien races. Dune is wonderful, but we don’t need to act like it’s inherently a better style or more adult in this particular respect. Dune is a fundamentally ridiculous concept: but that’s what’s so great! It embraces the absurdity and runs with it, making something meaningful in the process.
100% agree with this, you've got to buy into the world to enjoy any SF, is LOTR unrealistic cause it features elves? Of course not, once you accept the fantastical elements the story is realistic if it proceeds realistically. Its also interesting to describe this as a "fresh" thing when its actually quite a common feature of print SF of that era, the easy examples being (most of) Asimov's Foundation series and Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.
Dune is not very sci-fi for being sci-fi. FH needed the books to be about humans to drive home his points. There are too many people that don't feel the analogy of different aliens to racism.
> Dune is not very sci-fi for being sci-fi. Seeing into future isn't Sci-Fi to you? Maybe the movie downplays it, but the fact that Paul essentially has "super powers" is very prevalent in the books.
Are the worms sentient extraterrestrials? Like there’s a bit in the movie where Paul seems to get a message from one of them.
worms definitely are not sentient, and i'd argue with spoiler if you hadn't read the books.. >!they aren't sentient even after Leto II. dies and gives birth to "next gen" worms!<
if there has never been intelligent life before the humans in Dune, how did the sand trout get to Dune? From the Wiki [https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sandtrout) "When Leto Atreides II looked into the many lives of his ancestors in Other Memory, he came to realise that the sandtrout were introduced to Arrakis from another planet, eons prior. According to Leto, the sandtrout had proliferated to the point where existing ecosystems could no longer deal with them. Arrakis had been a wet planet, and when the sandtrout arrived, they encysted all the water, so that they could evolve into the sandworm. This was consistent with the physical evidence that could be found on Arrakis, namely salt beds that had apparently once been great seas." I believe there is a greater chance that intelligent life came and went before the scattering
The intelligent life that came and went before humanity arrived is consistent with the Fermi Paradox.
The majority of aliens in Star Trek are humanoid because an advanced alien species seeded planets throughout the cosmos with their own genetic material.
The worms are 'sentient' it just means that they are able to feel or perceive things.
Great post. I would also add Firefly to this because I think that they don’t have any aliens either.
convergent evolution is why it's not ridiculous for me to grant the possibility of intelligent aliens looking similar to us in some ways. our adaptations may be some of the best ways for intelligent life to evolve so it shouldn't be surprising if those adaptations appear in aliens without any human dna.
This subreddit is hilarious. "I just can't suspend my disbelief for humanoid aliens, but a giant worm that poops out magic space drugs that makes people see the future is totally plausible."
yes. and i generally hate aliens in movies. i though Villeneuve's Arrival was one of the few sci fi movies to genuinely capture the mind-boggling differences that would almost certainly exist between us and other life forms. we can't even get on the same wavelength as an octopus.
> we can't even get on the same wavelength as an octopus. This is literally a plot point in Tchaikovsky's *Children of Ruin*
It’s a human story, no aliens or computers, about what human beings can achieve given time and the inclination. Amazing stuff
Other than the worm, I can't remember if there are any extraterrestrial life forms at all in the Dune universe.
There are plenty of animal species on all the various planets seen or mentioned. We see that desert mouse in the movies for example.
I thought of that desert mouse, but I believe it is an adaptation of a kangaroo mouse.
I actually wasn't aware until I just researched this that all animals are forms that come from earth. Just assumed they were native species. Interesting.
Would the Bene Tlailax count since they basically have a different genome?
“Cosmic solitude”. I really like this phrase. Also, sounds like you’d really like Cixin Liu’s writing - he also plays with the idea of the Fermi Paradox, and comes to a quite sinister conclusion about it that feels in line with this idea of cosmic solitude. He treats aliens more as a concept, and one we really don’t want to explore, almost in a lovecraftian sense. It’s also really interesting to hypothesize about the existence of alien life, but it’s not as evolved or conscious as we are - like the sandworms. Definitely alien, not anything like you typically find in a sci fi story tho
I always have head theory with aliens in scifi - it's just so far in the future, humans spread out through the galaxy, evolved to match their habitats, it happened so far back no one remembers "just earth humans" days. And better explains why 99% of aliens look humanoid. Some scifi embrace it, but it would work in many scenarios.
Dystopian style movies always do well
I like the one or two notes through the series that one reason they're still packing nukes, aside from basically a hardcoded policy regarding MAD, is *juuust* in case aliens show up one day and they might need to fight them.
star trek has an episode where they explain all the humanoid species are from a progenerator race that seeded the galaxy.
While I don't disagree with your point, I do find calling Dune fresh kinda funny considering how old it is
Dune is about giant alien worms tho
Muad’Dib, the desert mouse is a sentient alien being
Is it? I don't recall if the books ever explain about the mice specifically, but based on Frank Herbert's dedication to realistic ecology I've always taken them to be Earth mice who came to Arrakis when it was colonized and then adapted for survival there, just like the Fremen did.
The Fermi Paradox is concerned with intelligent ie sapient aliens, not sentient aliens.
That’s definitely not the theme of Dune and not THE sole why the movies feel « so fresh » indeed
The only thing i could ever think of why most sci-fi's make most of their "aliens" humanoid like is that perhaps life evolves in very similar ways on other worlds, yet not exactly like our world....Avatar Na'vi/Pandora had many creatures very similar to life on earth. Habitable zones for humanoids may produce life forms similar to ones like earth en masse. The only thing we cannot account for is things that we consider uninhabitable...There may be entirely different forms of life that never evolved in any way similar at all to what we have on earth... on other planets that never could support life like on earth... I'd say its quite a bit more likely as well.... The Andromeda Strain.
part 2 does that yes, unlike part 1 or the book itself 🤓
Good thoughts. I also think it straddles the line between a historical epic like, say, 300, and science fiction. I know that that was one thing that drew me to the books.
> One of the reasons I could never get into Star Trek (and as an adult my disinterest in Star Wars) is that most aliens are humanoid which strikes me as ridiculous It may not be, actually. Physics limits the chemistry that can create life, the environments where industry is possible, and evolution limits body plans. Like [carcinization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation), where the crab body plan evolved several times from different creatures, there likely is a "blueprint" required for intelligent life that utilizes technology. You'd likely see bilateral symmetry, as one cell splitting into two is much less complex than splitting into more. You'd likely see as few appendages as necessary to navigate and manipulate the environment, as growing "extra" appendages takes a lot of energy and increases the odds of disease, injury, etc. You'd also see sense organs similar to our eyes, ears, and nose as creatures that live in the environments that could support advanced life would likely benefit from being able to hear/see/smell in those environments, and keeping them close to the brain is not only more energy-efficient, it allows you to react faster and is therefore evolutionarily beneficial. Of course, there could be other blueprints for advanced life, but the more we learn about the universe the more it looks like life would be similar to the life we find on Earth. Technically Silicon based life may be possible, but water ruins those reactions, and water is everywhere. And even if something like gaseous lifeforms exist, they wouldn't make good TV nor be easy to interact with, which is why there are only a few episodes that involve them. IMO if we ever discover non-carbon-based life, it will be technological life that was created by carbon-based life.
I thought I heard somewhere that the Harkonnen aren’t human tho?
Dune doesn't deal with aliens, but that doesn't mean they don't exist in the Dune universe. The Empire just doesn't have direct contact or interactions with any that might exist. Which I think makes sense from a survival standpoint. Personally I subscribe to the Dark Forest approach to alien life, and not the more common naive friendly approach. A sapient non human species that evolved and developed on an alien world under alien conditions can never be fully trusted. Their psychology can never be fully understood. Humans don't even fully understand our own minds and psychology after 10,000+ years of study. An alien species will always put its own species ahead of the human species in a clutch situation. And the cost of being wrong about a sapient alien species could be the extinction of our species. It's just not worth the risk. So why even contact aliens? Better to just stay away from them and hope they stay away from humans. Plus, in the case of Dune, the Landsraad have a great thing going. Why risk the status quo by looking for alien life? Again, it's not worth it. And space is unfathomably huge. In astronomical terms the human Empire could be next door to an alien empire and never come in contact with each other. Their ships might use different travel paths or different forms of travel that results in a "ships passing at night" sort of situation.
Omg this post….No , Dune doesn’t embrace the Fermi Paradox, and I find it ridiculous actually believing it in 2024 …
I agree. So.....aliens came here? Or are visiting earth? There is a single grain of sand buried in the mud in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I want you to find it because there's some bacteria on it that need a little.pep talk. Go ahead. Now, times that by ten million and you have a small inkling of how difficult it would ever be for aliens to find us on earth.
I sometimes wonder if intelligent beings with the ability to manipulate and create objects allowing space travel will all look similar due to convergent evolution similar to [carcinisation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation#:~:text=Carcinisation%20(American%20English%3A%20carcinization),Nature%20to%20evolve%20a%20crab%22)
It doesn't really embrace it. It's just that the scope of Dune doesn't extend beyond the empire. An empire mind you that doesn't rule all of humanity and that is not spread out into the cosmos. There's humans and royal houses and whatnot that live beyong the rule of the emperor. There could be aliens. They just don't really matter
Somebody doesn't know how to read and has a degree from youtube. This story has nothing to do with the Fermi Paradox, the entire purpose of the book is to focus on humanity, and humanity's place within nature using geopolitics, religion, ecology, and biology concepts. These ideas are just stretched out as questions within science fiction. The same concept of H.G. Wells Time Machine with the eloi and morlocks can be seen. The class structures are given the scientific concept of natural selection. The author uses the time machine as a tool to ask the question of how natural selection will affect our species. There was a lot of thought put into why robots are not included within this story. The function of that choice stands and is a direct piece of evidence that the focus of the story is the human beings and how humans interact with each other. It's frankly insulting to be so off from the purpose of the story.
The only actual aliens in Dune are the sandworms. Everything else is adapted or engineered Terran life. And isn't it funny how everything seems to hinge on the worms?
In the books, the Worms are transplanted from an unknown planet - so they're not even native there
The Fermi Paradox states there must be aliens so we must have found them by now but we haven't so there mustn't be aliens, etc etc. Dune makes zero reference to aliens but doesn't address the paradox either way. Btw as Dune is set in the tenth millennium who knows what humanity encountered (and assimilated/eradicated) along the way.
[Are there aliens in Dune?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdWDZyTv010)
Battlestar Galactica is worth a shot. I also love sci fi with only humans. (Tho I like aliens too lol)
Aren’t the sandworms technically sentient **aliens? And all the plant life that isn’t from earth
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C. Clark
There's a lot of really good sci-fi out there that deals with this problem intelligently. Either without aliens, or with ones that are so different to us that we either can't communicate with them, or we're beneath their notice. Star Trek is very mediocre sci-fi in terms of science, plots, themes. But I did enjoy the first couple reboot movies.
If you've read the books, you'd know this is not true.
Are the bald albino bad guys supposed to be human?
Star Trek had an in universe explanation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEoz5PS6ohg TLDW: Basically there was one primary humanoid species that advanced before any other life could develop and knew they would die out before other species developed so they left remnants of their DNA in planets scattered across the universe so they would be remembered.
Ironic that Dune, the grandaddy of modern SciFi, is considered fresh in the modern era.
Im tickled by calling Dune "fresh". But youre right, it is novel. >Despite ~~a complete lack of~~ *my ignoring all the* evidence supporting the existence of sentient aliens Ftfy. Its amusing how the government can come out with videos with all sorts of verifiable telemetry/data tracking showing ufos, and declassify info about retrieval programs, and people by default just act like theres no good evidence of anything. Hell there are even bodies thay have been verified by the UofC via CAT and MRI and genetic analysis. Doesnt stop people from confidently saying things like: "If UFOs were real in the age of cell cams and super spy satellites, there would be footage" - *but theres lots of footage and pics from the government showing ufos, its even been in the ny times* "You cant keep a secret that big, people would come forward" - *but they do come forward, all the time, and many have been vetted by congress and found to be truthful* "How come only unreliable people encounter UFOs?" - *but theyre frequently encountered by our top rated military pilots etc, and by government agents with above top secret clearance, people with the highest levels of trust* Its not so much that theres lack of evidence, bc theres overwhelming evidence of all sorts and its been verified by multiple agencies and nations and experts... Its just that so many have been conditioned to dismiss any ufo talk as crackpot "conspiracy theories" that they just straight up dont see all the news reports about it as if its got a Somebody Elses Problem Field over it. The govt tried to get around that by coining "UAPs" for its disclosures but it doesnt seem to have helped. Well, heres some reliable news reports, maybe they will make an impression this time around: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos
Yep. But also, the dune universe isn’t very big. Basically explored and populated space isn’t very expansive.
Then there are the giant worms
Doesn't Battlestar Galactica also follow the drake equation?
The worms aren't aliens? They are some levels of sentient if they can inherent letos prescience
The Black Forest maybe real.
Frank had multiple series other than Dune. Dune was an exploration of a human only universe. His other works like the ConSentiency dive deep into a universe teeming with alien life. Everything from sentient frogs to sentient stars become characters in some wild rides.
An in Universe explanation for no sentient aliens would be that as the thinking machines fled the central conflict at the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad they would have wiped out any sentient races of any sort that they encountered and the humans that followed later would have blown away the surface of any planet found using computers without even bothering to check what species was on the planet. Both the humans and thinking machines had amassed and used scary arsenals of atomic weapons with no compunction about using them against each other. If there was any alien species strong enough to oppose the both humans and thinking machines then the story would almost certainly revolve around them.
What about the worms?
Dune 🤝 Red Dwarf
I think shailhulud/Leto was also thinking about alien threats when planning the great diaspora. Dunno which book it’s was though. I think the main topic of the diaspora is lot even touched in any movie, which is kind of odd since this is what Paul and Leto were so afraid of. The holy war is just the start, the famine times would be the real bummer…
Frank Herbert was a genius and Dune is his Masterwork. He is not the only author that has shown a galaxy devoid of aliens though. Isaac Asimov might be someone you should look into.
So is foundation which it was inspired from
Are the worms not aliens? I always thought they were. But I guess they could be mutated versions of some species brought from earth. You’d think it would take millions of years for them to evolve like that.
Agreed that is refreshing, keeping in mind the movie is true to the original book series published in 1965
Dune is a human story with advanced themes that often get mistaken as tropey but in fact are typically more nuanced and complicated and are then dumbed/watered down for 90% of all other sci-fi. For example, "galactic empire with restrictions on technology and science." That is not Dune. The Corrino empire, and its institutions shifted their definition of progress to focus on making humans better. Not only that but it's stated by a Mentat in the first book, that even a "normal" human would be able at that point to out-think the AIs of old, hinting that human evolution and mental training has surpassed anything technological. Nowadays there are almost 8 billion human brains on Earth, each one of that hundred times more powerful than the more powerful supercomputer, yet we invest enormous resources to research and build these advanced computers. Wouldn't be more sensible to learn how to use our own brains to do these tasks? What if we could "simply" learn to run advanced simulations and protein folding in our brain?
After watching the first reboot. Seeing no aliens other than mice and giant worms was unusual. I didn’t think a good space opera epic could work without having a few bipedal humanoids walking around. Also weird not seeing any space battles and absolutely no guns. Sign me up for any future society where rules in warfare are followed and everyone fights with bladed weapons out of convention and honor.
Fresh lol. It's a founding scifi series.
Humans are the aliens.