Chapter 30

[georgiedenbro]

That Liet carried resentment of his father? Isn't that pretty clear from this chapter? For example:

He never could stop lecturing, Kynes thought. Lecturing, lecturing, lecturing—always lecturing.

In a minute I'll get up and tell him what I think of him, Kynes thought. Standing there lecturing me when he should be helping me.

Why aren't you helping me? Kynes wondered. Always the same: when I need you most, you fail me.

This is illustrative of a conflict within Kynes, as you nicely point out below, but I don't really think it says much about resenting his father. In fact the more I think about it the more odd it would be for a Fremen-born child to resent a parent in that kind of regimented society. And more to the point, I don't think it says anything about resenting the 'Western Man' as exemplified by his father, which was what I was chiefly objecting to.

I'm reminded a bit of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in the relationship between Henry Sr. and Indiana. Any resentment there may have come from excessive lecturing, where the child is an instrument to be taught rather than a beloved child, and obedience is always required. But Indiana certainly didn't resent his father for being a scholar, since he himself went on to be one and admires study. So even if we did want to create a head canon where Liet resented Pardot for some reason, I doubt it would be for the reason of being a Western scientist.

Liet passes for an Imperial planetologist, and clearly spends part of his time living away from Arrakis.

Almost certainly not. As the Baron points out, as someone aware of the effects of spice withdrawal he would not leave the planet.

Debating this point gets into head canon, because we just don't know for sure. But I have a hard time believing the Emperor had 'his man' on Arrakis and never, ever, required his presence in court. But plenty of others have a spice addiction and go all over the place, such as the RM's and the Guild navigators. I imagine the Imperial Planetologist gets paid enough of a salary that he can afford some spice while he's off-planet. Like I said, head canon.

I otherwise like and agree with your other remarks.

The issue I've been dancing around, was Liet's vision prescience? Or was it simply logical, a moment of clarity?
[...]
Of course this is all open ended, nothing is spelled out for you so you have to make the meaning yourself. That way whatever epiphany you imagine Liet to have becomes your own. This is why Frank was a genius; expressing complex ideas with few words, as simply as possible.

You answered your own question

But I would add that it's important to remember that the hallmark of real prescience isn't predicting future probabilities for profit like the Guild do - theirs is a limited prescience - but in seeing the now. To whatever extent Liet had a vision of the realities of the present, that would seem to me to accord, in a limited way, with what an oracle can do all the time.

[the rev]

Debating this point gets into head canon, because we just don't know for sure. But I have a hard time believing the Emperor had 'his man' on Arrakis and never, ever, required his presence in court. But plenty of others have a spice addiction and go all over the place, such as the RM's and the Guild navigators. I imagine the Imperial Planetologist gets paid enough of a salary that he can afford some spice while he's off-planet. Like I said, head canon.

Yep, we can debate this stuff all day without agreeing and that's okay. Because we'll never know, because we're not Frank Herbert. Or his next of kin who I suppose could use OM to read his memories. That's an interesting idea, that Herbert the Younger is an abomination, subjected to a large spice dose while swimming around in his father's testicles. Possessed by an evil ancestor, may be worth looking into.

Anyway, on the matter of interstellar travel. I feel like we've been conditioned to accept wooshing across the galaxy in the Millennium Falcon and other franchises that make space travel fun and easy without thinking about the cost. And I need to bring this up because the KJA books have everyone stowing away every chance they get, like Guild transports are a Greyhound bus. Besides the fortune in spice it would take to keep an addict alive (remember that common citizens pay a substantial fee to obtain a tiny drop to dose their morning cup of Joe), the fee the Guild collects to ride one of their ships is huge. Paul, a duke's son, had never been off-world, and much is made of the price the pilgrims are paying to travel to Arrakis 'to die' by the time of Dune Messiah. If Kynes did travel off-world it would be for a damn good reason because the emperor doesn't have spare money to pay and I can't imagine saving a lifetime of salary to finance such a trip.

So I agree with george that Frank Herbert sees the terraforming project as essentially flawed, an approach based on a mechanistic view that with sufficient science and force we can subdue nature. (And it's worth noting that the Florence, OR anti-desertification project that inspired Dune has been given up as a flawed approach, with some of the plants used to fix the sand now seen as invasive species.)

To understand Herbert's point about the limits of science,

This is why I mention Appendix 1, it's a treasure trove of information about how the fremen plan on changing the ecology of Arrakis. ALL the plants and animals are 'invasive'. Even the sandworms were brought from off world. There's only a handful of native species mentioned, the rest went extinct long before when Arrakis' ecology was destroyed by the sandworms. Before they arrived Dune had plenty of water. He even mentions kit foxes!

There's an obvious divide in Frank's attitude about science and technology. He opposes machines that think for people, that don't require skill and craftsmanship to use. They are used by bureaucracies and totalitarian governments to enslave people, without their consent. However the fremen are 'technological perfectionists'. If their technology fails they die. They use lasers and other high-tech equipment, to great effect. All their machines, crafts, and tools are made with incredible skill and precision. Their water catchers, their plantings, their tools for the change of Arrakis are made by small groups of people, democratically. The fremen are making a democratic choice to change their world. Quote from appendix 1:

'Now they came in with deeper plantings-ephemerals(chenopods, chickweeds, amarnath to begin), then scotch-broom, low lupine, vine eucalyptus, (the type adapted to Caladan's northern reaches) dwarf tamarisk, shore-pine,-then the true desert growers....' (this is before the Atreides arrived-in the time of the elder Kynes-at this point the change had become inevitable)

'The thing that the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem, 'Kynes (the elder) said, 'is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. It something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest understanding of ecology is the understanding of consequences.....

the course had been set by this time, the ecological fremen were aimed along their way. Liet-Kynes had to only watch and nudge and spy upon the Harkonnen...until the day his planet was afflicted by a hero.'

Dune was one of the first books about changing the ecology of a planet for the better, an example of how we can repair the damage we've done to our own planet. Something that almost everyone completely ignores.

[Freakzilla]

SPOILER ALERT!

I don't know if FH really was against technology/AI. The bad ways it could be used, sure, and the way it conditions people. By HoD we discover that the BG never actually gave up their computers. I think he was more interested in telling a SF story without so much gadgetry