Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

This may have been discussed before but...
I was reading the Dune Appendices and in Appendix II: Religions of Dune - SPACE TRAVEL Frank Herbert wrote:

The major dams against anarchy in these times were the embryo Guild, the
Bene Gesserit and the Landsraad, which continued its 2,000-year record of
meeting in spite of the severest obstacles.

This was immediately after the Butlerian Jihad. And then the Landsraad was already 2000 years old.
But in BH/KJA's Legends novels, there is no mention of the word Landsraad. Only the 'League of Nobles'.

In Dune Appendix II there IS one time the Landsraad is called the 'Landsraad League'. But why is the word Landsraad never used by anyone in the BH/KJA's jihad novels? Weird.

because they never can remember how to spell it?

Whatever it was called, the Landsraad had been around for 2,000 years.

The Imperium consisted of something like 13,000+ planets. (At least that was the number with sufficiently large populations or wealth or political clout or whatever to warrant having a representative in the Landsraad. There was no doubt a periphery of newly settled or slow growing planets as well.)

Given the distances involved, you have to assume some form of vroom-vroom (yawn) or space-folding before the Jihad.

The Legends are so unimaginative on so many levels. Brian must have left the Dune appendices out of his "concordance".

SandChigger wrote:you have to assume some form of vroom-vroom (yawn) or space-folding before the Jihad.

David Lynch / prequel alert.

dunaddict wrote:

SandChigger wrote:you have to assume some form of vroom-vroom (yawn) or space-folding before the Jihad.

David Lynch / prequel alert.

Miles Teg knew his history well by then. Guild Navigators no longer were the
only ones who could thread a ship through the folds of space -- in this galaxy
one instant, in a faraway galaxy the very next heartbeat.

Forgot about that. Was this something Frank Herbert "borrowed" from the Lynch movie?

dunaddict wrote:Forgot about that. Was this something Frank Herbert "borrowed" from the Lynch movie?

Could be, its not used before HoD.

Obviously there was meta-level development over two decades in Frank Herbert's conception of how the Holtzman engines worked. But does it make any sense in-universe to think they worked differently at different periods?

If not, then why refrain from applying a useful name to the thing at all periods?

If so, then what do you suggest it be called before the Heretics period?

I think we've already had this argument... fastest guild ships vs. folding space.

Quite.


I keep hoping to catch Mastah B here some day and ask him about getting me one of those new Ixian/BT/Richesian miniature Holtzman engines. Imagine what I could do with one of those babies up me backside instead of these thunder-jets!



(That'll make a lot of sense after the next time I change my avatar! )

SandChigger wrote:Quite.


I keep hoping to catch Mastah B here some day and ask him about getting me one of those new Ixian/BT/Richesian miniature Holtzman engines. Imagine what I could do with one of those babies up me backside instead of these thunder-jets!

SandChigger wrote:(That'll make a lot of sense after the next time I change my avatar! )

Guldur hoping.

SandChigger wrote:

Obviously there was meta-level development over two decades in Frank Herbert's conception of how the Holtzman engines worked. But does it make any sense in-universe to think they worked differently at different periods?

Could be -- after all, even Isaac Asimov completely changed the overall time-scale for the chronology of his Foundation Universe; from around 50,000 years in our future (back in the 1940s and 1950s), to around only 25,000 years (or thereabouts) by the early 1980s. Also, as far as the Holtzman engines themselves go, there'd probably be a vast number of adjustments and refinements to them over twenty or thirty millennia...certainly enough to maybe account for a few of the inconsistencies mentioned in the Herbert novels.

Asimov alos evolved the function of his FTL drives, and developed new drives as time went on.

And the period we're talking about is not "twenty or thirty millennia", but only about five, from Dune through Chapterhouse.

Right, yeah...I was going more by the Dune Encyclopedia's timeline, which put Ibrahim Holtzman's developments much further back, but in a certain sense, even he too was largely building/improving on what had come beforehand, from the early days of human spaceflight.

The DE isn't canon... legal or otherwise.

Never said it was. Yet it presents a far more realistic, better-paced picture of humanity's journey into space than the hugely-compressed, massively-contrived KJA/BH chronology we've recently gotten. It makes for a much more effective point of reference when having a discussion like this, in either event.

On some entries, yes. Others are just way out there.

True. A few of them you have to take cum grano salis, but most of them seem pretty workable, on the whole. At any rate, this is the version of Dune history I usually tend to pimp in conversations whenever the subject comes up, as opposed to the "other" one...

Here's the way I see the whole canon question:

FH's six books and the short stories in Eye are canon (I always forget something here).

The DE is written as an in-universe document based on the discoveries at Dar-es-balat so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. The fact that it wasn't written by FH and that he penned his reservations about some of it allows you to take it or leave it.

The new books contradict FH so much that they cannot be seriously considered as anything other than poorly written, young-adult fan-fiction.

Agreed -- that's pretty much my own "personal canon" credo, right to the letter.

The DE might be sorta "iffy" in-universe, but it's definitely streets ahead of the barfulous prequels/interquels (and is a book I've lent out too many times to count, now...still have both copies on my shelf after all this time, amazingly).

Lionel Horsepackage wrote:cum grano salis

Oooh ... Latin! Sling some more at us! The other lawyers around here are stingy with it.

The way I see it, unless it was with Ix's help there is simply no way they'd be tweaking anything. That kind of tech would almost certainly have required computer assistance to develope and fine tune, so I would guess that it was in effect before the Jihad, then when the Jihad wiped out the computers they just switched over the navigation systems. From that time forward they were almost certainly just blindly copying the original designs, I would assume (note the word assume) that the mechanics that go into folding space would be far to complex to decypher and understand for someone un-aided by a computer.

Maybe mentats would be an exception, but still, I'm guessing that very little tinkering would have taken place post-Jihad.

Just my opinion.

SandChigger wrote:

Lionel Horsepackage wrote:cum grano salis

Oooh ... Latin! Sling some more at us! The other lawyers around here are stingy with it.

"You mean, coitus?"

Freakzilla wrote: The new books contradict FH so much that they cannot be seriously considered as anything other than poorly written, young-adult fan-fiction.

At least DE is sort of fun to read.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:Maybe mentats would be an exception, but still, I'm guessing that very little tinkering would have taken place post-Jihad.

Is there any mention of Ix employing Mentats, I can't think of one.