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Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

> How Is ‘Dune’ So Prescient About Climate Change?

It isn't. Arrakis suffered desertification before humans ever arrived, before the book even began. The only climate change that occurred thereafter was a direct result of Pardot Kynes convincing the Fremen they could terraform Arrakis and, after Paul Atreides defeated the Emperor Shaddam IV Corrino and seized control of the Imperium, and subsequently began a deliberate effort to accelerate the terraforming effort until, by the time of God Emperor of Dune, the desert has been pushed back to just a tiny portion of the planet.

TL;DR The entire article is someone with an axe to grind trying to use Dune to do it. Scroll on.

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The prescience of the book in regards to climate change doesn't lie in the fact that it's some sort of literal retelling of the climate science of earth (hint, it's an allergorical piece of fiction) it lies in the fact that the book recognizes three key aspects.

Firstly, the immense influence of humanity on climate and the ecology of a planet and the intertwined nature between social activity and ecology, the motivation for negative impacts on the ecology lying in the exploitation and overuse of the planets resources, and third the disproportionate impact of this on native populations, and the inability of people to understand the consequences of disturbing complex systems. (no surprise given that Herbert was intellectually close to systems thinkers from Santa Fe)

You think Dune does not address climate change because in the story the planet was already deserted? Do you think Animal Farm is a book about pigs?

> lies in the fact that the book recognizes three key aspects.

They weren’t central to the story. FH didn’t waste a lot of ink on them. They formed a backdrop to the story because they should be uncontroversial ideas to anyone with an understanding of ecology.

If FH really wanted to write about ecology he could have spend a much greater proportion of the brook talking about it, when all we have on Sandworm ecology from FH himself is a handful of paragraphs spread across six novels.

As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin - people who swept to power seemingly out of nowhere and established their own sprawling Empire.

Lastly, if we’re looking at FH books on the human impact on ecology, we should start with The Green Brain which was explicitly about ecology.

>As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin

.. which are the native population of Arrakis as nomadic desert people are the native populations of their respective region, being caught in the feud of great colonial powers of the empire? The inspiration for this are indeed Bedouin, some people argue Berber and of course Arab people and FH explicitly stated that Lawrence of Arabia was an inspiration for the book, which seems pretty obvious.

I’d debate the extent that they were ‘caught’ in the feud. The imperial powers barely ventured into the desert. They had barely any contact with the true Fremen. Most of Arrakis was unexplored and considered uninhabitable.

Similarly it’s difficult to see the Bedouin and Berber tribes as being oppressed . The Romans, Persians etc mostly stuck to the coasts and rivers and avoided the deep desert. The same is true on Dune.

When the Muslim armies swept out of the desert they didn’t throw off oppression, they came out of nowhere to crush the Persians and nearly end the Romans, establishing one of the world’s largest empires. They did plenty of colonisation of their own. And their cultural and scientific impact on the world continues today.

Similarly the Fremen were grossly underestimated by the Empire. They were barely aware of their existence, but as it turned out they were far more numerous, culturally sophisticated and technology advanced than anyone knew.

> They weren’t central to the story. FH didn’t waste a lot of ink on them. They formed a backdrop to the story because they should be uncontroversial ideas to anyone with an understanding of ecology.

I've never been able to find this quote again, but IIRC after one of his friends/editors read some of his early work on Dune, they told him something to the effect of, "Dammit, Frank. People want to read stories about people!"

It may be that he doesn't spend much ink on them because it didn't make for a captivating story.

> As for the effect on Native populations; this wasn’t in the book at all. The Fremen are clearly based on Nomadic desert peoples like the Bedouin - people who swept to power seemingly out of nowhere and established their own sprawling Empire.

They're very heavily based off of the people who lived in the Caucasus. Herbert basically lifts phrasing used in the book The Sabres of Paradise to describe the Fremen word for word

> Do you think Animal Farm is a book about pigs?

I read many books in the "Freddy the Pig" series, and picked up Animal Farm when I was 8. I thought it, too, was a book about pigs and read it as a book about pigs. I can vouch that it works as a story about pigs. I didn't realize it was an allegory until maybe a decade later.

I also read Dune as a teen, and took it at face value, too. It was a moderately good scifi book, but not good enough to tempt me to read the sequels. I didn't really think much more about it. I've read a lot of scifi books.

It also seemed to be much more based on Saharan desert culture than Native American culture.

I confess to being out of step in not seeing it as a great story :-/ I've seen all 3 movie versions, thinking "what am I missing" and not finding it.

I think the thing with Dune is that it has a really strong litmus test to it i.e. if you find the setting interesting then it's a really interesting world, whereas if you don't it can seem quite arbitrary and (I guess) odd.

I'm not sure exactly what to put my finger on but the melting pot of culture and religion explicit throughout the book, wrapped in a psychedelic haze is definitely a draw for me. It's definitely more of a below-the-neck type of experience vs. (say) a Dick novel.

Wrt to the new movie I'm just glad that Denis Villeneuve is getting funded. His sci-fi movies are some of the only big movies in and around the genre (especially if you compare (say) Dune to star wars) which seem to be actively trying to tell a story at their own pace. He's a very smart and unpretentious person too, any interview with him is a much watch for me.

Until about a third of the movie, I was thinking "This is how they should have made a Star Wars film! Why couldn't they make one like this?"

...and then of course I stopped thinking of Star Wars altogether. :)

Just wait for the Dune Cinematic Universe

I guess we'll be having the adventures of Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck and someone is going to try and adapt the sad Brian Herbert prequels/'sequels'?

Well, all civilizations are full of stories of men waging war on oceans, burning down forests to reclaim lands, breaking mountains and all the wageries of such things.

Dune was neither the first nor is the last and linking it with climate change is purely some kind of bias.

The desertification of Dune was caused by ancient settlers introducing the sandtrout.

> "The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase."

This is from Children of Dune.

So Dune itself was not prescient but Children of Dune was, however that was probably written at nearly the same time.

That said, what purpose did the sandtrout serve in that other place it was introduced from, I guess the early settlers weren't looking at the planet and thinking "nice place, but too wet."

Hypothetical: The original planet had more natural barriers for the sandtrout and sandworms so that they wouldn't spread globally, or they had natural predators. A too wet world that could (for the settlers) benefit from aridification of a region isn't outrageous, think about constructing dams and levies to create more dry land.

Or could just be someone being stupid, like how kudzu has spread throughout the US Southeast.

They say the vine is eating the south, but...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_powder

...Maybe Southeastern US chefs are creative enough to come up with a truly unique and delicious way to bite back?

The sandtrout were overrunning the place they came to Arrakis from as well, IIRC from Children of Dune.

The real answer to the GP’s question is that if you squeeze a sandtrout you get basically a concentrated dose of the spice.

We don't really know because the sandtrout have been all but outright confirmed to be alien in origin - probably the only known example of alien life in the Dune universe.

Maybe this was expanded on post-Chapterhouse but I don't count those as canon.

It's been some time since I've read Children of Dune, but the author was expressly referring to Dune, not Children of Dune.

I haven't read the biography, but Herbert gives the impression of someone who had at least a LOT of things planned out well in advance. Or at least that is the impression I get as I'm making my first read through of Frank's Dune books (I'm on God Emperor now).

Does HackerNews have any rules against Spoilers? This message will spoil a lot of fans who just started the series after watching the movie.

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