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| Look, here's Dune by Mischief Maker 02/17/2013, 11:45pm PST | ||||
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| It's been a couple years, but this is one of my favorite books so I know most of it by heart.
The galaxy is held in a 3-way power balance between the imperial throne, the great houses of the lansraad, and the space guild, with the Bene Gesserit woven in between them all like the catholic church in medieval times. The great houses have nuclear weapons to maintain their power, the emperor has the mightiest army in the galaxy (the sardukar), and the guild has a near-monopoly on space travel. While the leadership of the galaxy is constantly plotting and conniving, the vast majority of humanity lives under a rigid caste system. The thread of this caste system causing genetic stagnation causes the "race consciousness" of humanity to push things toward a violent jihad that will stir up the galactic gene pool. (If you want to give an oh-so-jaded snort at any one detail of Dune, this is the one to snort at). Under the influence of the race consciousness, the Bene Gesserit Jessica bears Duke Leto Atreides a son Paul, despite strict orders from the Bene Gesserit hierarchy to produce only female heirs. House Atreides is an old house with a feud against newcomer house Harkonen ever since an Atreides commander court martialed a Harkonen for cowardice on the battlefield. House Harkonen isn't descended from royal blood, but in fact was started by a family so wealthy they bought their nobility. It is disliked but nonetheless is brutally efficient economically at the expense of its subjects. Because of this efficiency, House Harkonen has been given control of Dune for years because the spice melange is an irreplaceable strategic resource for interstellar commerce. Baron Vladimir Harkonen is brilliant and diabolical, but also has a serious inferiority complex about his esteem among old blood royalty. (This is why Yueh knew the Baron could not resist a chance to gloat over a defeated royal-blood Leto face-to-face) Duke Leto Atreides is not wealthy for a great house lord, but capitalizes on his charisma to bring some of the greatest military and strategic minds in the galaxy under his command. With their help, Leto manages to train his most elite troops to near-sardukar-levels of martial prowess. Leto does not marry his beloved concubine Jessica in hope that this military edge could give him an opening to force a marriage to the son-less emperor's eldest daughter and seize the imperial throne. The emperor realizes Leto's potential threat and sets a plan in motion to remove him. Publicly he voids House Harkonen's contract to control Dune and mine the spice, and gives it to House Atreides. Then once Duke Leto and his military are on Arrakis, House Harkonen would stage an attack bolstered by Sardukar in Harkonen uniforms and annihilate House Atreides, keeping the Emperor's involvement a secret from the other great houses. Leto and his cabinet see the trap coming, but see an even greater prize than the profits of the spice mining trade if they go along with it. They figure the edge the sardukar have over elite Caladan troops is that the Sardukar began their lives on a harsh hell world, making them already strong and ruthless before the training begins. Dune is arguably just as much a hell world as Salusa Secondus, and if they could win the loyalty of the Fremen and train them fast enough, House Atreides could become a military match for the emperor, survive the trap, and seize the imperial throne. With a choice between that prize, or exile as a renegade house, Leto walks into the trap. Aware of the danger, he tells his whole plan to his young son Paul just in case. House Atreides lands on Dune and immediately sends emissaries to the Fremen before even meeting with the water merchants or surveying the spice harvesting operation. While they make a good first impression with the fremen, Dr. Yueh's completely unexpected sabotage of the house shield leaves them open to Harkonen artillery and they are wiped out before they can capitalize on their relations with the Fremen. In order to ensure Leto's cooperation with his plan to kill Baron Harkonen, Yueh arranges for Paul and Jessica to escape to the desert and find shelter with the Fremen. In the desert, Paul is exposed to huge amounts of pure spice which awakens his latent precognition. He gets his first glimpse that the Race Consciousness has a "terrible purpose" for him: to instigate the galactic jihad. Paul swears that he will not let that happen and sets about carrying on his father's plan of gaining the Fremen's fealty, teaching them elite Caladan combat training, then using them to get revenge against the Harkonens and seize the imperial throne. The Fremen already have plans of their own, to collect dew for several centuries until they have saved enough water to terraform Dune into a more survivable planet, and Paul will have to divert them from this lofty goal to make them serve his own plans. What's more, the Fremen are batshit insane and will kill in a heartbeat. From his first meeting with sietch stilgar to his attack on Arrakeen, he is constantly facing resistance from Fremen traditionalists and constantly fighting off assassination attempts. It takes all his training and mental powers just to survive living with these maniacs. In the end Paul's sabotage of the spice supply forces the emperor and his sardukar to come to Arrakis. Paul attacks with his trained Fremen and achieves his father's dream of matching the emperor militarily and seizing the throne. But his moment of triumph is also his moment of defeat because while he defeated his individual foes, he's fallen right into the Race Consciousness' hands. His own power is hinged entirely on keeping the Fremen under his control and now that he's diverted them from their modest plans of gathering dew and given them a taste of victory, the only way to keep them under control is to let them continue fighting a bloody jihad across the galaxy. A fine self-contained novel that did not need sequels, especially sequels that said apparently the race consciousness also wanted Paul to become a half-man-half-worm freak (Matrix 2&3 anyone?) |
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