A Dune Book of Days: Concept and Reading Group Request


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SandChigger
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A Dune Book of Days: Concept and Reading Group Request

Post by SandChigger »

I've mentioned this idea before but I'm actually going to do it now since I realize it's high time I went back and reread the original books.

Doctor Torkos has given us a timeline for the Dune series, but I would like something with a wee bit more detail. The books do not present actual dates, of course, but there are references to amounts of time passing and I plan to note these as I read. Any help from other people reading the books would be greatly appreciated! (And appropriately noted in a credits section? ;) )
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Post by inhuien »

That's a nice idea SandChigger, I'm not reading any of them right now but that doesn'y mean I won't be at some point soon. I'll post any timeline points of note here or would you prefer them sent by PM?
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Post by SandChigger »

Posting them here should be fine, I suppose.

Dune begins on Day 1 Year 1 (= 10191 A.G), late evening Caladan time (at the location of Castle Caladan), Paul's gom jabbar test takes place on Day 2, etc.

There will be a lot of gaps and uncertainty, but it should be possible to arrive at a rough, relative chronology of events. A fun exercise, either way. ;)
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Post by Omphalos »

I think I'm due for a re-read. I think Ill pick up Dune again soon.
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Post by Nekhrun »

SandChigger wrote:Dune begins on Day 1 Year 1 (= 10191 A.G), late evening Caladan time (at the location of Castle Caladan), Paul's gom jabbar test takes place on Day 2, etc.
For some reason I read the Wikipedia page this morning and it said that Dune began at 10190. I was pretty sure it was 10191 as well, but didn't bother to do anything about it yet.
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Post by SandChigger »

I just fixed it.
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Post by chanilover »

I started Dune two weeks ago, I could have started doing this. I'll try to update the thread as I go along, I just read the part where Kynes is killed by the spice blow. There's other things I wanted to discuss here, but with so much going on in the book I keep forgetting to raise them.
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Post by SandChigger »

Cool. I haven't actually started reading yet.

(Been having too much fun relaxing and goofing off since I finished grades on Friday. :D )
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Post by Fantômas »

I was wandering :roll: Liet-Kynes is the son of Pardot-Kynes so, did Pardot-Kynes started as Planetologist when House Harkonnen took over the C.H.O.A.M. contract (80 years from 10191) or was it Liet?

What year was it when House Harkonnen started its contract to mine the Spice?
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Post by orald »

What about flashbacks to childhood? Teg's flashbacks we can roughly date since his age is known to us, but Odrade's? Murbella's(we know her age only roughly)? Etc.

Or would these things not gonna be in?

Mostly we can only do a "this comes before this" chart.
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Post by SandChigger »

Fantomas: Get back to you on that later, OK?

Orald: Right, a lot of things will necessarily be indefinite as to exact date and only placed relative to other events.

For example, when was Leto's Dar-es-Balat no-chamber built? No exact date is given, but we know it had to take place early in his reign. The period between his ascension to the throne and the beginning of Heretics is about 5,000 years (reign of approx. 3,500 yrs + 1,500 yrs). The inscription over the door to the chamber hails the discover-reader as the first to see it in about 4,000 years. That leaves us with about 1,000 years of margin within the 5,000 years. Since the discovery appears to have been made some time before Heretics (a century or two? material from the journals there has been incorporated into BG tradition), the no-chamber has to have been built before the 800th or 900th year of his reign.

Since there's no indication(?) that the Ixians had no-tech at the beginning of his reign, the chamber was probably built a few hundred years into it. So while we can't say exactly when it was built, we can at least point to a fairly narrow window of a few centuries when it probably occurred. (And since we are told that it may have been the prototype or probably not far removed from it, that the Harkonnen no-globe on Gammu is more advanced IIRC and was built during Leto's reign, we have a window for its construction as well which is narrower than Leto's entire reign.)
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Post by Rakis »

fantomas wrote:I was wandering :roll: Liet-Kynes is the son of Pardot-Kynes so, did Pardot-Kynes started as Planetologist when House Harkonnen took over the C.H.O.A.M. contract (80 years from 10191) or was it Liet?

What year was it when House Harkonnen started its contract to mine the Spice?
From ecology of Dune :

Then Kynes-the-Umma was killed in the cave-in at Plaster Basin.
By this time his son, Liet-Kynes, was nineteen, a full Fremen and sandrider
who had killed more than a hundred Harkonnens. The Imperial appointment for which the elder Kynes already had applied in the name of his son was delivered as a matter of course. The rigid class structure of the faufreluches had its well-ordered purpose here. The son had been trained to follow the father.


This seem to show that Liet took over his father a fair amount of time after the Harkonnen's arrival on Dune.
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Post by orald »

Well, yea. I think he got there(or helped the Fremen kids) around 40-50 years before Dune starts, because Liet is about 40-ish, no?
About a generation after Harko' got the fief.
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Post by Fantômas »

So as far as, Pardot-Kynes, was he the Imperial Planetologist assigned to House Harkonnen from the beginning of the contract.

Does anyone knows if Pardot was already working in Arrakis when Harkonnen got there, or not?

Does anyone knows who was mining the Spice before Harkonnen?

Is 80 years before late evening 10191 the correct time line as to when House Harkonnen got the C.H.O.A.M. contract?
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Post by orald »

80 years before the start of events in the original Dune book, so 10111 AG.

I don't remember anyone ever saying who was mining before the Harkonnens.

Pardot wasn't assigned to House Harkonnen, he was an Imperial Plantologist, owing alligence only to the Emperor.
They knew who he was, of course. No man arrived on Arrakis without a full dossier finding its way into the Fremen strongholds. They knew him: he was an Imperial servant.
- - -
The effect of Arrakis on the mind of the newcomer usually is that of overpowering barren land. The stranger might think nothing could live or grow in the open here, that this was the true wasteland that had never been fertile and never would be.
To Pardot Kynes, the planet was merely an expression of energy, a machine being driven by its sun.
This suggests he's a newcomer as his attitude is contrasted to that of the average newcomer.
A direct and simple man in many ways, Pardot Kynes. One must evade Harkonnen restrictions? Excellent. Then one marries a Fremen woman.
A newcomer but there are already Harkonnens in place.
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Post by Fantômas »

orald wrote:About a generation after Harko' got the fief.
One Generation=36.453 years, in Arrakis.
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Post by Fantômas »

orald wrote:80 years before the start of events in the original Dune book, so 10111 AG.

They knew who he was, of course. No man arrived on Arrakis without a full dossier finding its way into the Fremen strongholds. They knew him: he was an Imperial servant.
- - -
The effect of Arrakis on the mind of the newcomer usually is that of overpowering barren land. The stranger might think nothing could live or grow in the open here, that this was the true wasteland that had never been fertile and never would be.
To Pardot Kynes, the planet was merely an expression of energy, a machine being driven by its sun.
This suggests he's a newcomer as his attitude is contrasted to that of the average newcomer.
A newcomer but there are already Harkonnens in place.
Can you find somehting else?

Are you sure that Kynes was not already working as a Planetologist when House Harkonnen arrived?
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Post by orald »

Like I said, the text strongly compares between his and the average newcomer's attitude, which suggests he's a newcomer, and yet there are plenty of harko's around making restrictions.

Also, unless you want to stretch Liet's age when Dune starts to almost 80(possible with the spice, but still, 80 is much older than he seems to be), then there's no other way.
Pardot arrives, wants to use the Fremen, goes on a tour and finds the fremen youths and helps them, they take him to the sietch and after a bit of talking and "miracles" they start following him, he quickly marries a Fremen and has a son- 19 years pass and he dies.

There's never anything to suggest Pardot came to Arrakis before Harko' rule, quite the contrary.
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Post by Tleszer »

Well, if you go by the prequels, then Pardot was appointed some time after the Harkonnen got the fief, but that's if you go by the prequels. Wish I could remember more from Dune, but FH had dedicated at most 10 pages to Pardot in the original, mostly for the purpose of showing that Pardot had an idea about what the consequences of having a "messiah" could do to Dune.
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Post by Nekhrun »

Tleszer wrote:Well, if you go by the prequels,
Nope.
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Post by orald »

I'm willing to ignore the implications of the text in Appendix I and say he got there before the Harko's just so I could say the prequels have another discontinueity! :P
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Post by SandChigger »

fantomas wrote:
orald wrote:About a generation after Harko' got the fief.
One Generation=36.453 years, in Arrakis.
Based on what?

Anyway, this thread was just to discuss the general idea/concept, not specific questions out-of-the-blue like that.

The idea, again, is to read through the books and note down the information about dates and times given for the events described. If we do that properly, some (many?) of these chicken-egg?/Pardot-Liet? questions will resolve themselves.
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Post by Fantômas »

SandChigger wrote:
fantomas wrote:
orald wrote:About a generation after Harko' got the fief.
One Generation=36.453 years, in Arrakis.
Based on what? Pardot's estimate for the changing of Arrakis was 350 years. Then so...
nor in the lifetime of their grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come.
I just started reading, and I started with the Appendix.

The first time line I encountered and could not pinpoint the date is about Pardot; I thought it would be interesting to have an early Dune date, and in case it came up, to establish what a generation in Arrakis would be in years.

I used 9 divided by 350, I took other cosiderations but the 350 by 9 is the basis for that #.

At one time or another, I think you would want to know the dates that are not specified in Dune. Anyhow, I tried.

I wiil only run numbers that are specified in Dune from now on, or something.
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Post by Fantômas »

In the year 10191 Paul Atreides is 15 years old.
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Post by chanilover »

I've finished Dune and there really isn't much in it by way of time. Book I has a few references to events taking place some nights or weeks after each other, but that's about it, other than the fact that the events in Book III take place two years after Jessica transforms the Water of Life and the sietch tau orgy.
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