Mankind's movement through deep space placed a unique stamp on religion during the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad. To begin with, early space travel, although widespread, was largely unregulated, slow, and uncertain, and, before the Guild monopoly, was accomplished by a hodgepodge of methods.
Well...FH neither explicitly admitted FTL (except in the Byron-Merritt-level argument that space-folding gets you somewhere faster than light can travel the same distance) nor explicitly excluded it, so it will forever remain an issue open to debate.
I choose not to admit it because
(1) Real world considerations:
FTL violated our understanding of the universe when FH wrote
Dune and that fact remains unchanged more than forty years later. (But feel free to join Byron and argue for a revolutionary change in our understanding and technology.) Admitting FTL would remove one factor which for me distinguishes Dune from a lot of lesser science fiction. (Like the wonderful Legends books!) I prefer to think that FH came up with space-folding as a way of having his galactic Imperium while avoiding using more usual space-opera FTL devices.
(2) Duniverse-internal considerations:
The core of the Imperium occupies a very small volume of space. To me that implies a very slow expansion before the advent of space-folding. If FTL travel were available, wouldn't humans have probably spread out over a much larger area in those 110 centuries before the Jihad?
If FTL is possible in the Duniverse, why didn't the Ixians or someone else secretly develop alternatives to escape the Guild monopoly in the ten thousand years following the Jihad? That's a lot of time for R&D. Sure, even the fastest FTL is always going to be "slower" than space-folding, but for non-time-critical matters, why not use it?
Freakzilla wrote:It seems to me that safety and navigation were the limiting factors more than propulsion. Folding space is probably safer since you aren't moving through nearly as much space.
I don't think navigation is an issue. Why would it be, when they had computers or AI doing the navigating? It's
safety that is the problem.
At any fraction of c you're moving through (normal) space and any collision with
anything is most likely going to be catastrophic. Hence deflector shields and the like.
Supposedly you can't move through normal space at speeds greater than c, which is why we get hyperspace or subspace and similar ideas. Depends on the fictional universe as to whether you can run into things there.
Unless you have a prescient navigator, folding-space is probably the
most dangerous method of travel, even with hyper-accurate navigational models of your destination: you can't account for variables like unknown or aberrant astronomical bodies and other ships.
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I recognize that there are some problems with my interpretation. We're told that during the disturbances following the Jihad the Landsraad continued its two-thousand-year tradition of meeting. Such an organization could not exist or really function without some form of fast transportation. (To get the members together to meet, and to relay and implement their decisions.) So I assume that Holtzman lived long before the Jihad and that space-folding was discovered and used before it as well.
(This also explains how the Jihad could be waged across thousands of star systems in just 93 years.)
"But...but...Norma Cenva designed the first Guild ship, so she must have lived around and after the Jihad!"
True. So I interpret "the first Guild ship" to mean "the first foldship designed specifically with the Guild's needs in mind" or "the first foldship widely used by the Guild" for passenger/cargo transport. (I also assume that does
not mean a Heighliner. People didn't figure out how to built ships of iron and immediately undertake something like the Titanic or QE2.)
Please make no mistake here:
I am
not proposing this is the
only possible interpretation. I am
not proposing this as the
right interpretation. (I'm most certainly not claiming that this is what FH necessarily had in mind.) I'm
not trying to convince anyone to agree with me. (I really don't care one way or the other. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that there may be flaws in my assumptions or conclusions, if someone would care to point them out.) I'm just explaining the view I have come to after thinking about it (a lot) and which allows me to continue to enjoy the series, all things considered.