Dune Part 14 - Appendix and Final Thoughts

We finish our read through of Dune by looking the appendixes, where Herbert lays out some of the hard details behind Arrakis's ecology, religion, politics, and the history of the empire. 

We also give some of our final thoughts on this foundational work of science fiction.

Transcript

Morning Intro And Final Dune Leg

Michael Kentris 0:06

Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Brothers Reading Books. We are your host, Michael Kentris, and as always I'm joined by my dear brother. Will Kentress here. Will, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good considering it's eight o'clock in the morning. Pretty early. That's right. This will be released later, obviously. But uh yes, we are recording it on a chill November morn, and uh it's cold out there, so I'm happy to be inside where it's nice and toasty. Thankfully not as cold as it was earlier this week, but yeah, definitely a mark cooler than it has been. Yes, winter is coming. So today we are wrapping up our excursion to the desert planet Arrakis, and uh we have, at least in my edition, what they are referring to as the appendixes, not appendices, appendixes. Just it's a minor irksome tick. I'm sure this is one of those things where it's like either is acceptable, but you know, I I grew up the way I grew up, and appendices is is what I say. So I think it sounds better. It's got a yeah, a little more Latinized. But um anywho, so we have we have these appendixes here, and then uh, you know, like a little glossary essentially. So just kind of running down the categories here, we have the ecology of Dune, the religion of Dune, Report on Bened Gesserit Motives, The Almanac and Ashraf, selected excerpts. And then we've got the terminology of the Imperium. Sounds sounds nicer than glossary. But um I mean these are kind of some of the big themes that show up through the book. And I suppose it's important to remember what what an appendix should be, right? It's something that's perhaps beneficial, but not necessarily needed for the function of the work as a whole. And I think I think this does that. You could certainly read the entire book, skip this part, and have a very enjoyable experience. Absolutely. Do feel like some of it at the very least could have been easily inserted into the main story and it would have flowed naturally, like the ecology of Dune was essentially just like a chapter from the perspective of uh Dr. Leah Kynes' father, Pardo Kines, and it kind of explains his motivation behind their their dream of turning Arrakis into a flourishing planet. Yes. And yeah, just jumping right into it. That scene or some of that information is like, I think, explicitly brought to us during that final scene with Leah Kynes, where he's been left in the desert and he's kind of having those fever dreams right before he dies in the sand dunes. Hashtag spoilers as always. But if you're listening this episode, spoiler, spoiler announced now, right? You uh probably should have gone back a few episodes. But um But yeah, so a lot of this information was brought forward here, and I think they're just like you said, giving us a little bit more of a flashback. And you know, thinking back on it, we don't really get much past flashing in in this book. Which, again, just a stylistic choice, but I think I think you're right, it could have been done, but it may have been just thought to be more of a disruptive to the narrative. And I think it's also important for us to remember as you know modern readers in 2025, when this book came out 60 years ago, this would have been right, there's a reason why it's considered, you know, a pillar of the genre is because it broke so many of these rules. And you know, we'll talk a little bit about it later, but after the appendixes in the glossary, uh, there is an afterword by Brian Herbert, where where he talks about this a little bit here and uh has some of his like kind of first hand commentary growing up with his father as he was writing this book and kind of the challenges with publishing it when it first came out. Perhaps that would have been too much even for that point in time. So us as modern readers, we're like, yeah, sure, give us give us all the info dump. But uh it might have been uh perhaps a uh bridge too far back then as far as getting it published. Right. Yeah, I obviously have no experience with the editing process, but it feels like leave more on the floor is kind of the the general thought. Like, hey, we don't need this. This is extraneous, it's not really adding anything, it's slowing things down so it gets cut and then yeah, potentially added into the appendixes. Right. So so I think that's it's always important to remember, right? There's like the the ideal, and then then you can't just self self-publish as easily back then as you can these days. So you definitely have to make some concessions, perhaps. But but yeah, it was it was very interesting to to get this backstory, I thought, and there there were certainly were some interesting narratives here. But our opening quote for this section is not from the Princess Arulin. It is in fact from Pardo Kynes himself, the first planetologist of Arrakis, which I thought this was interesting, right? He is the father of Leak Kynes, who is just, you know, relatively he is concurrent to our story. So does that mean that Arrakis, before, like one generation prior, did not have a planetologist? It just kind of gives me questions as to, you know, like, well, they found this spice. How long has the guild been using spice as their navigation, like mental enhancing drug? I don't know. It just it does bring some questions. Not all questions need to be answered, but it it does, to my mind, bring more questions. And perhaps those are answered later in other books, but just working with what we have in front of us, right? Right. No, I definitely had very similar thoughts, like in gar regards to the chronology of everything. You know, if uh you know the Space Guild has has a sort of monopoly on space travel because they're able to do their kind of similar uh nexus of time path seeking to avoid, you know, colliding into debris or planets as they go faster than light, I assume. Yeah, that seems like it would have been around more than just say like a hundred years at this point. Right. So I always enjoy reading the the opening quotes from these books. So so which, you know, it's it's kind of does have that flavor of an actual ecologic principle, you know, all it's all about energy and space and so on. So it sounds, right, and this is kind of part of what we've been talking about through this whole book, is that you get these things that are very grounded in what seem like plausible scientific principles, maybe just wrapped in a little bit of flavor language. And it really enhances the versatilitude of the work as a whole. So, as you said, we kind of get this narrative of Pardokines coming to Arrakis, and uh, as they say here, the effect of Arrakis on the mind of the newcomer usually is that of overpowering barren land. To Pardokines, the planet was merely an expression of energy, a machine being driven by its sun. Which it is like that is a theory of like ecologic systems, in as much as like energy density. So if we look at, say, like the tundra, to take an extreme example, versus the rainforest, so we've got a lot of m a lot more solar energy coming in to a rainforest, obviously, than we do at the tundra. And so you get this more this increased density of life forms and what they might call like more multi-tiered ecosystems in terms of like, you know, prey, predator, apex predator, you know, so on and so forth. And so I think this is this is very in keeping with what we would consider basic ecologic principles, even in our own world. So so we get this picture painted of Pardokines, and he he has this single-minded focus on ecology and ecologic systems, and every action he takes is to that effect. A direct and simple man in many ways. He wanted to evade the hearkening restrictions. Excellent. One marries a freeman woman. When she gives you a freeman son, you begin with him. So he's talking about like educating the people, turning the people into a tool for ecologic change. And like everything in this story is is about that essentially. Even to the point and he does, you know, he talks about he does have some degree of honor, so he finds some freeman youths in a village being about to be killed by some Harkinan Bravos. And so he he steps in here. I like this phrase here, to Kynes, it was a ding-dong battle, more slapstick than real, until he focused on the fact that the Harkinans intended to kill the Freeman. By this time one of the youths was down with a severed artery, two of the bravos were down as well, but it was still four armed men against two striplings. He wasn't brave, merely single-minded and cautious. So I like this. The Harkinans, the Harkinans were killing Freeman. They were destroying the tools with which he intended to remake a planet. Unacceptable. Right. No, I I definitely love that phrase there because again, it's it's more of like they are impinging on what it is that he is trying to ultimately move the people, the planet towards, you know. It's less of a humanist approach and more of a, I don't know, almost Marquis rebellion or just like yes, right. It's very utilitarian. So I like this. You know, you kind of get a flavor, right? That he is an imperially trained, right? He he slit the man's throat with a neat entree, which I assume is some sort of fencing move, is what it sounds like. You know, I should have. But it's like, you know, you got this like brawl going on here, and it's just like, uh la la la. And uh I don't know. It just it gives you a flavor for again this kind of character. So now we have a debt of honor that these freemen owe to Kynes. They take him to the siege, and he's like, There's this debate, he's an imperial servant, but we have, you know, a debt. And so, you know, the the towel of a siege tells its members what they must do, even the most brutal necessity is known. So they send a guy, an experienced fighter, to kill Kynes, with two watermen following to collect the body. So Kynes is giving a lecture, essentially, to a crowd. You know, he's telling them about the ecologic needs of Arrakis and what they can do. And uh what happens essentially is this this person sent to execute him falls on his own knife. And it goes on here about like what was going through this man's mind. Did he finally listen to Kynes and believe? Who knows? But uh yeah, so basically it's just this bizarre series of events that you get this imperial servant being taken in by the Freeman, who changes the Freeman, and uh it talks about basically that all of the things he's doing are organize them, right, to collect moisture, and we kind of get a little more backstory on these ground catch basins, the wind traps, that he you know, he's mad, but just mad enough. And they consider him one of the ummas, these brotherhood of prophets. So so yeah, they they consider him essentially a holy man because of his single-minded madness, if you will. Yeah, I do like that. And then Yeah, we get that kind of timeline of like, how long will that take? It's like three to five hundred years. Right. They just kind of accept that. And you know, I found this a little bit challenging here. When they were talking, you know, they kind of then we get into some real brass tax ecology, core samples, climate degrees, degrees, latitude, blah, blah, blah. Um they talk about in the wide belt contained by the 70 degree lines north and south, temperatures for thousands of years hadn't gone outside the 254 to 332 degrees absolute range. And so I was like, well, what does that mean? And because what I think absolute, I usually am thinking Kelvin, at least you know, in our modern parlance, which would go from negative two point six Fahrenheit or negative nineteen Celsius for our international listeners, up to 137 Fahrenheit or 59 Celsius, which is quite a range. And I guess we do know that deserts can get quite cold in the evening. So I suppose it makes sense, but it's quite a swing. So that does mean that it's you know challenging to find life forms that can tolerate that whole span of temperatures. At least that was my my perspective on it. That's fair. No, I my eye is kind of glossed over a little bit. I don't know how to interpret any of this necessarily. Yeah. So, you know, my my undergrad degree is in biology. So I I do have some uh I did take some ecology classes many moons ago. But I thought it was it's it's interesting, it makes sense. Um, and you know, he's like, how long will it take? Three to five hundred years. And so they like buckle down, like, all right, let's do it. And so we get this emphasis, this sentence here again, right? The concern on Arrakis was not with water, but with moisture, which I always think of that uh that one in the Doctor Who reboots in the one of the first seasons there. There's this character who's like, she's this person who's had so many plastic surgeries that she's like a spread out skin on a what are those things that you called a draw? Draw hides out. But she just screams like, moisturize me. And she has like an attendant who sprays her with a water bottle. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, that's my visual image whenever I can see the word moisture, unfortunately. So now you have that too. But yeah, we get a lot of information here about hydrogen, oxygen, energy costs, you know, various percentages. And a lot of this is very similar, right? Like this 23% oxygen, 75.4% nitrogen, 0.023% carbon dioxide. Uh at least the nitrogen-oxygen content is very similar to Earth. You know, ballpark. We get some talks about different plants, and uh we get this surprise, these giant salt pans. And we get this like epiphany from Kynes. Salt. Now he was certain. There'd been open water on Arrakis once. So he's like, Where? Where where is the water? So I like this. We get this lovely word here, limnologist, which is uh a lake specialist. So which is a Freeman limnologist, right? It's like, you know, it'd be like someone who in our world studies something that doesn't exist on our world. I don't know, giant gas storms like on Jupiter's surface. It's like, well, that's a very esoteric field. So this is where we get this phrase, sand trout. So these sand trout are like these fictional kinds of things, and there's a little bit of reference in them in the glossary as well. But it's essentially like a fictional folk story kind of thing. And so they find these leathery scraps of matter after the spice blowouts, and we find more and more about these water stealers. And so, you know, things that we already know, water is poisonous to Shai Halud. They had long known about the drowning of the rare stunted worm of the minor erg to produce the awareness spectrum narcotic they call water of life. So now they have their circular relationship. Little maker to pre-spice mass, little maker to shai halud, shai halud to scatter the spice, upon which fed microscopic creatures called sandplankton. The sandplankton, food for shai halud, growing, burrowing, becoming little makers. So I love the idea of sandplankton. I found that very I don't know, satisfying. Because everyone who's been listening knows that I've been harping on like he draws so many parallels between the desert and the ocean here. And, you know, plankton obviously just seals the deal as far as uh, you know, the microscopic life forms. Right. It's definitely an interesting idea that these sanplankton are the I assume primary food source for these worms, kind of a similar scale as like how you know obviously some whales will eat plankton. Oh, the baline whales, yeah. Yes. But uh these worms are much bigger. Right, right. It's large, larger than a crawler.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Right.

Syncretic Faith And Space Travel Mysticism

Butlerian Jihad And AI Parallels

Michael Kentris 16:35

And uh we get a little bit of talk here about the sand itself. Sand of Arrakis is mostly a product of worm digestion. Dust, the truly omnipresent problem there is produced by the constant surface creep, the saltation movement of sand. And so we get a lot of talk here about sand and wind. So they they're talking about, right? So one of the things that we that we see, and you you actually you see this in like you know the desert out west, is that um you get this these dunes, and so you need to fix the earth in place so you don't kind of get all this movement and erosion. And so how do we prevent erosion? Well, we need grasses that are hardy, right? So you start with like these different like scrub grasses. Uh and they give specific examples here. You know, some of these I recognize, like amaranth, you know, that is an ancient grain. Um, I don't recognize the other ones, like chinopods and pigweeds, might be real. I don't know. I sh I didn't look it up, my apologies. But some of these are definitely real, and that's always the tricky part here is that he mixes in just enough things to make it make you wonder like, is this real? Is this not real? Like we get stuff here like alfalfa and creosoapbush, right? Those are very obviously real things. Then you get other things here like uh the smoke tree and sandverbena. Might be. I don't know. I didn't do the reasonable and I'm sorry. But anyway, right, so it kind of this this is like if if you're not familiar with with ecologic systems, this is kind of just like a very basic primer on a fictional ecologic system. Where it's like you have the plants, right? Plants are always at the foundation of any ecologic system, right? They are what take solar energy and convert it into biomass. And you can't have animal life without something to convert the solar energy into organic structure, right? Because we are all consumer, you know, whether you're an herbivore, carnivore, so you need something at the base of that pyramid to sustain those things which are higher up in the consumption pyramid. So, and that's I guess I kind of this is what Kynes says here. The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem 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. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences. And so they talk about, you know, like what are the goals, these palmeries down south, so on and so forth. And this is where we get that number that they mentioned earlier. 3%. If they could get 3% of the green plant element on Arrakis involved in forming carbon compounds, they'd have their self-sustaining cycle. How long? About 350 years. So they continue working. And so then we get uh Leah Kynes introduced here, building, planting, digging, training the children. Then Kynes, the Uma, was killed in the cave in at Plaster Basin, and then we get Leah Kynes, who then takes over his work. And I like this little end here. Leah Kines had only to watch and nudge and spy upon the Harkonens until the day his planet was afflicted by a hero. Capital H. So what are your thoughts on that ecology lesson there, Will? Both nicely informative and too informative for the layman such as myself. Uh obviously, you know, it I I assume there's some moderate amount of research that went into some of those figures or at least references to kind of what is known on Earth's own kind of sort of situation as far as ecological sustainability. Yeah. But uh for me, I I feel like the part that was most informative was kind of this initial planning by Pardo Kinds for how you know a lot of this infrastructure had been in place for some time already. So yeah, and as someone, you know, certainly not an expert, but I have some slight education in it, I would definitely say it it it seems plausible. So for again, right, something that's entirely fictional, it it has enough of a, you know, enough roots, if you will, to give us again that sense that like this is this is something that they were really working towards that they're again, like there's a reality to it, even if it is only internal to this universe. So, appendix two, the religion of Dune. So as as you might guess, Well uh I found this to be very interesting. And a lot of this, I think, you know, other than the historical part of this, there was a lot that was brought out by kind of our our research into like various phrases and things like that that were brought up over the course of the book. And again, right, it's an appendix. It should not be necessary to the comprehension of the story as a whole, but it's it's there for those who are interested, right? So this I think might be the first section that does not have a quote at the beginning of it. I think you're right, yeah. So which is fine, right? It's an appendix. But uh I still did highlight the first sentence here. Um Before the coming of Muaddeb, the freeman of Arrach has practiced a religion whose roots in the Mao Meth Sari are there for any scholar to see. Um Hymn to water, a direct copy from the Orange Catholic Liturgical Manual. So there's there's all these right interactions. It is a it is really emphasizing the syncretic nature of this. And we get this story of the uh of like the creation of the Orange Catholic Bible in here, which I'll be honest, even for me, was a bit on the long-winded side. But we kind of get these these different things, these major forces which shape those beliefs, and they kind of lump these into four or five different things here. So we get the fourteen sages from the Orange Catholic Bible, we get the Bene Gesserit, there is an agnostic ruling class, including the Guild, for whom religion was a quote, kind of puppet show, uh, or two, I guess, what was it? Was it Marx who said uh it's the opiate of the masses? Or maybe it was Lenin, I forget. It's one of those one of those uh 19th century people. Then we get the so-called ancient teachings, the Zen Sunni wanderers, uh, from and they talk about first, second, third Islamic movements, and then a lot of other, right, like again, they're just it's almost like he's shoving words together here, right? Uh we get like Buddhist Islamic uh Nava Christianity, like all these kinds, I mean, very obviously rooted in real words, smooshed together in different ways, quite literally. And then the fifth thing is, and I love this. In the book here, it is in its own paragraph, all capitals, exclamation point, space travel. Formatting is also an important part of writing a book. Yes. Yes, it does create, it draws the eye in. It draws the eye. So universal and profound it deserves to stand alone. I like this. The first space experiences poorly communicated and subject to extreme distortion were a wild inducement to mystical speculation. All through religion, the feeling of the sacred was touched by anarchy from the outer dark. It was as though Jupiter in all his descendant forms retreated into the maternal darkness to be superseded by a female imminence filled with ambiguity and with a face of many terrors. Right. Fear of the poetic. And yeah, so so I like this uh a little bit later here. It was a time of struggle between beast demons on the one side and the old prayers and invocations on the other. There was never a clear decision. During this period, it was said that Genesis was reinterpreted, permitting God to say, increase and multiply and fill the universe and subdue it and rule over all manner of strange beasts and living creatures in the infinite airs, on the infinite earths, and beneath them. It was a time of sorceresses whose powers were real. So, yeah, I think that that is an interesting thing. And you you get some people who do comment, you know, in in like say modern Christianity or you know, quote unquote modern, um, within the last century. Um about what if what if aliens show up here on Earth? What would that mean from like a like I say, a Christian perspective? And there's a lot of debate about this. This is not uh dogmatic by any stretch. But there are some uh people who have written about, you know, these would be demons, right? Inasmuch as, you know, spirits from an outer realm, so to speak. Abominations. I mean, maybe. Yeah, I mean very Warhammer-esque, right? But uh but it's a it's a it's a question. So I do wonder in the uh in the book of Genesis here, I need to look back. That's a problem, right? I don't speak Hebrew whatsoever. But I do wonder in the in the Septuagint, that's the Greek translation here. Oh I I would have to take a moment, I apologize. I wonder if it does say something like cosmos or something like that, which would imply, like, you know, the world, like K U W, like as an universe. Because sometimes it's interpreted as ages, worlds, things like that. But that's a translation of a translation, so grain of soul. Anyhow, we next move into something that's been hinted at in the past books as well, the Butlerian jihad. Yes. Two generations of chaos. The god of machine logic was overthrown among the masses, and a new concept was raised. Man may not be replaced. Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind. Men looked at their gods and the rituals and saw that both were filled with that most terrible of all the questions, fear over ambition. So I like this for a couple reasons here. So man may not be replaced. I think this is very different than what you see in a lot of modern science fiction, which really explores a lot of themes of transhumanism, right? So this is kind of the inverse of that, saying that there is something unique about humankind specifically. And um, yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts on that, Will? I mean, that definitely was kind of one of the issues are being brought up again and again anytime this but Larry and Jihad was referenced was, you know, you may not create a thinking machine. So it it does seem to be at the very least that, you know, they were sentient to some degree, but maybe, you know, not necessarily human or human-esque in their depiction of how they were created, hence why there was probably this ultimate confrontation between humans and machines. But uh yeah, I I feel like you know, it's it's something we see again, again in fiction and in real life, uh, just where you know advancements in technology threaten to kind of supplant humans to some degree, and you see that right now with the prolific use of artificial intelligence in you know replacing working jobs that people need. So, you know, it's not quite to the degree as we're seeing here where it's like, oh hey, we don't need all these thinking people, these educated people, but you know, it's it's very easy to draw a parallel there. Right. Yes, I don't think we're at the singularity just yet. No. I don't know. This is more your area than mine, Will. Do you think we're we're coming up on it? No, no, I don't. Is AI is AI overblown? I mean, I certainly think we're at a point where we're kind of reaching our current plateau of performance. You know, at the moment it's it's very much kind of plateauing. It's just how much hardware can we throw at the solution to make it run better. So I mean what what we've been able to achieve, but we as a collective, of course, not we as a and I I should say for our listeners who don't know, my brother Will is actually a computer scientist who does work on uh correct me if I'm wrong, you do work on AI and big data models. Is that correct? Yeah, that's accurate. So have some expertise in the field, I would say. Right. I I I am well versed enough to know the specifics of how some of it works. Yeah. And again, from my again, my layman status on this particular subject, I've heard some people writing about it say that like the large language models are our current quote-unquote AI, are limited in some fashion that they believe that general AI will never arise from this particular modality of trying to create it. Right. Because ultimately all they're all that we're doing with these current models is token prediction. You know, they've read an inhuman amount of media, of texts available on the internet that you know they're able to more or less predict on what comes next based on a pattern. So, you know, there there isn't a unique thought happening there. That's why a lot of it is prompt based in that, hey, I want this, and now I need you to go ahead and from that prompt go ahead and generate something that fulfills that that purpose. It's not it's not any unique thought going on there. Right. Yeah. That's I think well, we keep seeing people online talking about quote unquote AI slop. Absolutely. Yeah, right. Like uh, and I'm sure you're very familiar with this idea, like the dead internet theory where you were just feeding like like more AI garbage into more AI, and it keeps drifting further and further from truth. Right. Garbage in, garbage out. Just like everything in life. So, yes, I really like this sentence here. Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind. So this language, it gives me a lot. I I mean, I know he comes later, by like a couple decades. It very much gives me flavors of William Gibson and the way that he writes, like with this very like visceral kind of like you just put words together that they shouldn't work, but they like just give you such a flavor of things.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 31:00

But anyway, uh thalamic pause for those who don't know, thalamus is one of the it's like the grand central station at the center of our brain. We got two on one on each side. And um a thalamic pause, like in say an absinthe seizure, that's what happens, actually, is that you get this misfiring from like the way the thought the thalamus and the cortex you know interact with each other, and so people pause, right? They literally pause for due to electrical uh misfiring. So for me, that was a I don't know, I found a very pleasant sentence. But because it made a lot of sense to me. But again, right, our own respective backgrounds. Absolutely. So we get now these religious leaders who are starting to meet up and we get this uh these ecumenical meetings, these ecumenical councils. And now I'll ask you, Will, since I know my my reading interests diverge from yours on this subject. Yes. When you think of ecumenical, what do you think? I d I don't. Right. Okay. So there's nothing I can really draw to that's like, oh, that stem reminds me of no. Yeah. So so ecumenical or ecumenism is the idea of trying to bring like different sects or divisions within a religious tradition together. So, like in Christianity, we will have there will be ecumenical councils, which will include, you know, like the the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, various Protestant denominations, and they're all meeting together to try and find common points of agreement so that they're able to, you know, in an ideal world, right, they would all merge back together. There would not be these divisions within the organization. And you see this in different, you know, kinds of religions, greater and lesser, right? Sometimes like within, let's say, like Lutheranism, right? There's like different divisions in terms of synods or you know, what we call ecclesiastical or ecclesiagical ecclesiological structures and things like that. So trying to bring splits back together essentially on either smaller or larger scales. Okay. So we get here like very vast, very very vast divisions being brought together here. So they came with two major developments. So one, the realization that all religions had at least one common commandment, thou shalt not disfigure the soul, and two, the commission of ecumenical translators. So, and I will say here, you know, part of this for those who are, let's just say, a practitioner of a religion in our current age and day, ecumenism can sometimes be a little bit of a dirty word, right? Because it's uh it's an idea of compromise to an extent, also. So if you believe that your religion holds the complete and accurate truth and the other person doesn't, and you're being asked to compromise on that, that in and of itself is in many denominations a betrayal of your statement of faith. So you can see why this would be a problem as far, and why most modern-day ecumenical efforts typically fail. So at least on a larger scale. So anyway, uh I would say thou shalt not disfigure the soul. Sure, that makes sense, right? If we consider, again, I'm speaking from a Christian perspective, that uh, you know, like the Ten Commandments, right? These are things that if you do them, you disfigure your soul in a manner of speaking, right? You bring yourself closer to sin. Um So anyway, and that's kind of what he says here. We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant religions, that weapon, the claim to possession of the one and only revelation. So, again, that's that whole problem of like, you know, are there multiple paths to God, to enlightenment, to heaven, you know, whatever your denomination says the afterlife or the good capital G is. So I like this. They sign this agreement, and jubilation at this sign of profound accord proved premature. Because uh let's just say that uh people were upset. And um so they were trying to, you know, they had this commission of the translators, and so they're trying to bring everything together to create, as they were saying here, producing an instrument of love to be played in all ways, Capital L. Many consider it odd that this statement provoked the worst outbreaks of violence against ecumenism. Twenty delegates were recalled by their congregations, one committed suicide by stealing a space frigate and diving it into the sun. It's a heck of a way to go. Historians estimate the riots took eighty million lives. So, yeah, a lot of a lot of things brought here, right? People are against it, so on and so forth. So you get these different things here. They go into a little bit of like the Lanz Run, the psychological effects, give a couple songs here, mocking the delegates to this commission. And so eventually, we also get you know some mention here that this is when we had the missionary protectiva and the litany against fear from the Ben A. Jesserit is conceived, and also the Azar book, the bibliographic marvel it preserves the great secrets of the most ancient faiths. And then on the seventh anniversary of this council, they unveiled the Orange Catholic Bible. So it's kind of interesting here. With the OC Bible, the ecumenical translator conference presented also the liturgical manual and the commentaries, in many respects a more remarkable work, not only because of its brevity, less than half the size of the O.C. Bible, but also because of its candor and blend of self-pity and self-righteousness. The beginning is an obvious appeal to the agnostic rulers. Men, finding no answers to the Sunan, the ten thousand religious questions from the Sharia now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of religion to fit man into this lawfulness. I don't know. I I definitely write I understand this is like a historical thing, but there is obviously a what do I want to say? A cynicism about religion that I think comes through a little bit from the author uh during this section. I don't know what your thoughts were, Will. Potentially. I mean, certainly, you know, it's not depicted in the most best light there where, you know, we we discuss, you know, millions of people rioting and dying in protest of this effort to try and consolidate uh people's general beliefs into a unified system. Um I feel like I feel like it's yeah, potentially. Yeah. And we get this uh again, some couple quotes here. So they uh have this uh God and that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known. So there's some stuff in there that I think I would agree with, and other things that I think I would disagree with, to be honest. Uh, inasmuch as, you know, why do we know something is good? Well, I mean, there's there's some things that are only good because of the culture that we're raised in, right? Like, you know, why is slavery wrong? Why is it bad to kill somebody, right? So if you look at humanity, there are cultures where, you know, they were, like, like in Roman culture, like a persona non grata, where you're considered subhuman if you were you were a slave. And there would be no real consequences except maybe, you know, financial if if you killed somebody. Absolutely. Why are those things different? Well, in in the West at least, is because of Christianity and the the value that we place on human life. One thing that really caught my eye here is that the proper teaching is recognized with ease. This really has echoes of kind of like Martin Luther saying that you know, in in some of his uh works he talked about how interpretation of scripture is is obvious, you know, self-interpretable. You know, I'm I'm vaguely mischaracterizing him, but uh that's okay. So but but it definitely has a lot of these kind of flavors around here. Knowledge without action is empty. I mean, that's a pretty common thing as far as a lot of religions I would say. Teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. I don't know that I disag I I agree with that entirely. Because some people say, you know, what is like if we look at um in the Old Testament in Christianity, what does God say? You know, it's like, well, what is love, right? Like loving someone. Like, oh, we think of it today as like I love that person, like with a intense emotion. So if someone says, like, oh, love your neighbor, well, well, I'm supposed to go out and be like, oh, I love this person so much. No, that's not really what it means. It's like what God says, like, if you love me, you will keep my commandments, right? So do these things. It doesn't matter necessarily how you feel, but do, right? So it is the action to an extent. And some people have written about how by doing these actions, it will kind of you know wear a groove in your soul and hopefully engender those feelings over time. By doing the thing, you change yourself. And that's, I think, part of religion is especially like we compare like more traditional forms versus more modern forms. It's not about changing God to fit our ideas, it's about changing us, ourselves, to fit with God's plan for us. Does that make sense? In a convoluted way, yes. Well, fair enough. But yeah, that's I mean, that's kind of the idea, right? It's like uh or I should say like prayer, right? Like we pray to God for lots of reasons. And the idea isn't necessarily that uh, you know, oh God's gonna make everything good for us, but it's to like make us capable of accepting God's plan. Again, that is one perspective. There will be people who disagree with me. I am well aware of that. But from a kind of a traditional Christian perspective, I think that would be fairly non-controversial.

SPEAKER_01 41:43

I think that's fair to say.

Michael Kentris 41:46

Anyway, so these people put out these statements. 18 of them were lynched within two months, fifty-three recanted within the year. Everyone's running away from this thing. It's a hot potato. The O.C. Bible was denounced as a work produced by the hubris of reason. It was said that its pages were filled with a seductive interest in logic. So, which I think is pretty typical of a lot of works that have been on religion and you know, different traditions in the past. Um, especially we get like kind of like the Neoplatonic kind of stuff in the Enlightenment period, all that sort of thing. So they kind of are talking about different symbols, things that will sound familiar, cross, crescent, featheretle, the twelve saints, the thin Buddha, etc. Holloway's labels, I like this. For the seven-year effort, galactophasic determinism, abbreviated G D or God damned. So there's a lot of, let's just say, skepticism about this whole endeavor. And this goes on for a while. I would say this is the longest of the appendix is.

SPEAKER_01 42:46

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 42:48

And oh, I mean, there is a little bit here. Uh so there's this one person here, Tup Tupile, Tupile. I keep wanting to say Tupelo like the honey. But um He says uh he reportedly died or uh Bamoko was on Tupile, and his last words were Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, I am not the kind of person I want to be. It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied. So I think that's probably a more succinct way of saying what I was trying to say. And then we get, again, right, more history, we get the you know, the Beni Gesserit talking about the Quis as Hatarach. And this is a quote, I think we saw this in one of the introductions here. When law and religious duty are one, your self-dom encloses the universe. Um I think they were saying something to the effect of there is a lessening of self when law and religious duty are one, if I remember correctly. Yeah, uh that does sound familiar. And then uh of himself, Muadib said, I am a net in the sea of time, free to sweep future and past. I am a moving membrane from whom no possibility can escape.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Except for uh Mr. Count Fenrang. Right.

Michael Kentris 44:06

A little premature there, perhaps. Yes. These thoughts are all one and the same and they hearken to twenty-two Kalima in the OC Bible, where it says whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and has powers of reality. I I put a cool quote in here as like question mark manifesting? Uh manifest Are you familiar with manifesting, Will? Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. It's it's some real kooky nonsense. Oh yeah. Uh I recently listened to a podcast, If Books Could Kill, that talked about the book The Secret, which which talks on this quite a bit about manifesting. And it it is Yes. I'll leave it there. Right. Yeah, and you get like, you know, some branches of Christianity, like, you know, quote unquote uh Christianity, like uh like Joel Austin, if you're familiar, right, with like anyone ever seen any of his clips and he's like, just speak it into existence. God wants this for you. And just like, I don't know. It doesn't doesn't sound quite right. That sounds a little like magic. A little bit. You know, if I do the ritual and say the words and do the thing, I get the result. That that is exactly what magic is. So, uh yes. And we get another quote from Muaddib jumping forward a little bit. I'm jumping around a little bit here just because, like, you know, if you it's a bunch of quotes here. It it gets really dense. But some of this here is um I think they're nice quotes. Mu'adib, kindness is the beginning of cruelty, which I think we saw during the text itself. We get a quotient from the Freeman Kitab al Ibar. The weight of a kindly God is a fearful thing. Did not God give us the burning sun a lot? Did not God give us the mothers of moisture, Reverend Mothers? Did not God give us Shah Hulut, Iblis Satan? From Shaitan, did we not get the hurtfulness of speed? This is the source of the Freeman saying speed comes from Shaitan. Consider, for every one hundred calories of heat generated by exercise speed, the body evaporates about six ounces of perspiration. The Freeman word for perspiration is Baka or tears, and in one pronunciation translates the life essence that Shaitan squeezes from your soul. Very, very vivid.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Mm-hmm.

Bene Gesserit Goals And Blind Spots

Noble Houses And Imperial Decline

Michael Kentris 46:16

But I like this, the weight of a kindly God is a fearful thing. So I thought that was interesting. Because you do see that, right? A lot of our ancient religions that are more prominent have come from like desert cultures. Um and I I'm always reminded of um the the one statement from the book of Isaiah where he like sees the angels around the throne of God and he's like, Woe is me, I am undone. Um, you know, in the uh King James-y type English, which is basically like I'm so screwed. Um, at least that's how I've been explained to me that the Hebrew is a little more emphatic than we might take it from that. Yeah, sure. Sure. It hasn't been. Like whenever they say woe in the Bible, it's like let's just say stronger language than what we typically get in our English translations. Love that. Yes, just like crap. But yeah, it's just kind of amusing to me. Where it's like, whoa, whoa. Anyway, they get some talk here about mysticism. A mysticism isn't difficult when you survive each second by surmounting open hostility. You know, in the desert, obviously death is on every side, very harsh environments. And they talk here about the freedom from guilt. And it's likely closer to the mark to say they cleanse themselves of guilt easily because their everyday existence required brutal judgments, often deadly, which in a softer land would burden men with unbearable guilt. Interesting. And it I think it is, right? You kind of see this with maybe honor cultures and things like that, where there is a harsh environment, right? Like maybe in a more research resource-rich environment, we would say imprison somebody for a period of time or things like that. But that takes resources and time and effort from other people, and that cannot be spared. And so, you know, death sentences and things like that might be handed down more often. For the better of the collective. Any thoughts on on that chapter? I know I was rambling a bit there. No, no. Um, it I feel like explains a little bit about kind of yeah, how we see this uh combination of religion of religions manifesting in the book itself. Obviously, you know, it seems like there's a lot of Muslim-oriented verbiage that's thrown in there, but you know, we do see Christian references as well. Obviously, we know with the name being the the Orange Catholic Bible that Dr. Yui gives to Paul there in the first part of the book. Right. So yeah, it's it's interesting kind of seeing a little bit of how these religions kind of started to merge. I don't think I don't think we got to see here necessarily what happened eventually, just that people were very resistant to those merging of religions initially. Yes. As I think would be expected. Oh, for sure. So, appendix three. Report on Ben A Jesseret motives and purposes. Uh uh again, just I think there's a little bit here. Uh here follows an excerpt from the Summa prepared by her own agents at the request of the Lady Jessica immediately after the Arrakis affair. The candor of this report amplifies its value far beyond the ordinary. The thing that really caught my eye here was what they called the Summa, which for some of our listeners, they may be a bit of a perk their ear up moment, right? We could think of the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas, uh, which was like this very long theological work, uh, right? It was supposed to be the complete, you know, theology. When was that written back in the 13th century? And uh yeah, it's still considered, you know, especially in uh Western Christianity, like a kind of a fundamental work. So I just thought it was interesting they carried that terminology over to the Benin Gesseret here, right? Again, that that syncretism that we keep seeing uh over and over again with these different belief systems in Dune. So basically, we get some background here on like what were they trying to do? And we we have, I think, the outline of most of this from the text itself, but they specifically have they talk about the program, its target of this breeding program they leveled, labeled the Quisatz Hatteratch. Um, and I like this part. This kind of goes to like almost exactly what you were saying. They were breeding for a super mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in guild navigators. So uh I think you I think you mentuited that yourself earlier, Will. Thank you. And what can I say? I was constantly taking in the details and facts. That's right. The minutiae of the story being processed. So and we get, again, right, kind of the the background of the bloodlines for Paul here, and then we get some factors that things that should have alerted the Benny Jesseret to what was going on, but did not. So we get one, as a youth, Paul had these prescient uh dreams that were accurate. Two, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim, when she did the pain test, which that's still one of my favorite lines in the box, what's in the box? Pain. He s he was able to tolerate more agony than any other human of record, yet she failed to make special note of this in her report. When they first moved to Arrakis, they hailed Paul as a prophet, as the voice from the outer world, the Lisan al-Ghaib, and uh the fact that the Freeman reaction and that they were, you know, high on spice all the time uh was overlooked by the Bene Gesserit. Then the fact that Paul and his mother disappeared after the Harkinans attacked, and there was immediately a man called Muaddeb, again hailed as the voice from the outer world, and the Rev Bene Gesserit is the woman who bore him, you know, all these the Reverend Mother of the Cyadina, right? So all these things, right? Like it's there were a lot of misses as far as like the observers outside of the Freeman, as far as this. And then the um the spacing guild itself, they had this nexus, right? They were bothered about the future, quote unquote. Which again, we have the uh the two guild navigators in the later part of the story itself kind of talking about this. And so this implies that there was an agency interfering with higher order dimensions and kind of blocking their foresight. So, in the face of these facts, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit behavior in this affair was a product of an even higher plan of which they were completely unaware. Sounds like a convenient excuse to explain away their incompetence, is what I'm hearing. You know, yeah, it's like because we don't know that much necessarily about the like internal structure of the Bene Gesserit, other than, you know, Reverend Mothers are more senior than the general Bene Gesserit. Right. It's it's easy to pinpoint these things after the fact, be like, ah, here is an obvious, clear, linear plan of what was going on. But you know, in the chaos of what was going on spread out across how large of a space, you know, how much information is actually getting into the hands of each of these, you know, individual Bene Gesserits who can mend to it or Bene Jezerit to it. Right. So now we have Appendix 4, the Almanac and Ashraf, selected excerpts of the noble houses. And so we have first an em an entry here on Shadam IV. This is the Palashah Emperor from the story. And uh we get you know a little more explicit here. They talk about House Carino, which we know again from some of these entries, both by the Princess of Rulin as well as some of the conversations with Thufer and the Baron, where House Karino was the house that was established on Seleucus Secundus initially, right? And I think we get more of that in the glossary as well, where they talk about kind of like the origin of that house specifically. So this was an interesting little bit here where they they talk about, you know, his eldest daughter Arulin, uh his other daughters, but many people blame the Arrakis Revolt on his dalliance with court functions and the pomp of office. They also say appropriations for startakar training went down steadily in the final 30 years before the Arrakis Revolt. So this is, you know, I think this is a common thing that you see, right? Spending gets diverted away from infrastructure and military security, put into things that are right, it's kind of like the classic decadent culture kind of trajectory. And so we also get some talk later on, and I'm jumping around a little bit, but they talk about how the the Sartakar themselves had this impressive reputation, but that at the time of the Arrakis conflict, it was largely thought that much of their reputation was based on the past and not necessarily on the current fighting abilities of those units. Resting on their laurels, I suppose. Literally, right? So uh we get some other people here, right? Leto Atreides, he's a distaff cousin, which if I remember correctly means it's like from the, you know, the non-inheriting side. The remains of Duke Leto occupy the quote skull tomb on Arrakis. Would you want to be entombed in a skull tomb? I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it, you know. I kind of think of like you see this more in certain parts of Europe where they they call them reliquaries.

SPEAKER_01 55:59

Mm-hmm.

Glossary Gems And Weird Terminology

Michael Kentris 56:00

Right? So when you die, you your body gets laid out on a shelf in a you know a mausoleum essentially, and your body decomposes, bones are left, then the bones are taken and placed in the ossuary. So I would be okay with that. You know, it's kind of pretty traditional burial. So I I um I'm taking us off course here just a little bit, but I just I just watched uh Guillermo de Toro's Frankenstein this past weekend. And so when the when Frankenstein's parents die, they have these very impressive, very decadent like iron caskets where like their face is visible, and then there's like a kind of like a shroud that they put over it. And I was telling Megan, my wife, or for the listeners, who I was like, I want to be buried in that. That's what I want. She scoffed the air. Cast iron. That's right. I know. Yeah, my my wife and I sometimes talk about this. And we're so like, I think uh, you know, we're we're in Ohio, um, again for the listeners. But uh I think they recently had passed some law saying that you can bury yourself on your property if it's not within so many feet of a uh another person's home. We might have enough land where we are to bury ourselves in the backyard. Well, nice away. It's like one of those pine boxes. Yeah, start a family, uh graveyard, you know, something to think about. Anyway. Yes. God willing. Let's see here how we get uh there's entries here on a lot of people, Lady Jessica, Lady Aliyah Atreides, Saint Aliyah of the Knife, Huntress of Abillis, um, you know, a lot of stuff here. Vladimir Harkinin, the Baron. Um, which is what interesting. I think this probably ties in to um the what you call it, vendetta between the Atreides and the Harkonens, is that he is so he is a descendant of the Bashur Abulurd Harkonen, who was banished for cowardice after the Battle of Korin. Right. So Korin is where you know House Corino comes from. That's where they kind of got their prominence. And uh so yeah, I think that is kind of where all of that traces back to, if I had to say. It's interesting here how they mentioned uh the return of the house Harkonen to power generally is ascribed to adroit manipulation of the whale fur market. It's like, huh. It's you know, might as well have just said like space whale fur or whatever else. Yeah, I don't know. Yes. Who knows what the universe holds out there. Right. Let's see, we get a little entry on Rabin, whose first name is Glossu. Just a little thing there. That's that's the end of that one. Yep. Uh then we have our terminology of the Empyrean, or our glossary. So, as as you said, Will, uh, probably would have been good to know. And I'm sure back in the 60s in particular, uh, without the internet, right, there would have been a ton of phrases in here that I would have no idea what they meant, especially not speaking Arabic. Sure. So having these here would be super, super important. You can pick up a lot of it from context, certainly, but uh but it would be very helpful. And I just I enjoy this here. In studying the Imperium, Arrakis and whole culture which produced Muadib, many unfamiliar terms occur. To increase understanding is a laudable goal, hence the definitions and explanations given below. And um I wanted to mention this. There's a book out there from I think the 50s or so called How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. I don't know if you're familiar with this one. No, I haven't heard of it. It's a good book to read, ironically, but it's like, how should I read a book to increase my understanding? And it talks about different levels of reading. But one of the sections is about reading the foreword and the table of contents, knowing what is in your book before starting your book. And I'm certainly not one to read appendices before the story itself, right? There's a definitely a lot of spoilers in here if you were to read these before the actual story. So, but you know, the the appendix would have been good for us to have uh realized was here in the course of the reading, perhaps. Absolutely. No, I I always yeah, I always have uh mixed feelings when I'm like presented with general information before at the very beginning of a book, like say with several maps or a breakdown of like a hierarchy system. None of this is relevant to me right now, so I just need to remember that this is here if and when I need to reference it. Right. Right. And you know, we do get like uh here the Battle of Corin, like uh we were talking about, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:40

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 1:00:41

The space battle from which the Imperial House Corino took its name, fought near Sigma Draconis in the year eighty eight BG, settled the ascendancy of the ruling house from Seleuce Segundus, right? Things that we can kind of infer, but you know, there's a little more details there. And I like this here. The Cialaga, which we talked about, like kind of these like psychic bats that they use as messenger birds essentially on Dune. And I like this. Any modified Chiroptera of Arrakis adapted to carry distrans messages. And so Chiroptera, for those who are not familiar, is just the order of bats. So it literally means just hand wing from the from the Greek. So uh cheri and tera. Anyway, just kind of a fun fact. And then distrans pops up later in D's. Yes, that is why I wanted to mention that. So I I thought, like, oh, distrance, what does that even mean? And it's yeah, a device for producing a temporary neural imprint on the nervous system of Chiroptera or birds. The creature's normal cry then carries the message imprint, which can be sorted from that carrier wave by another distrans. Okay. Kind of like taking the difference to, I don't know, sinusoidal waves or something to Yeah, like doing um four-year transformation on it or something. Right. Some sort of like wait, we got what we know we should be, and we know what this one is, what's the difference? Extract that message. Right. So seems a little convoluted, you know. Whatever happened to just tying little little scrolls to legs. Right. Is that too primitive? Well, I think there was that one scene early on in book one where they found the uh the messenger who had the micro microfilm or something like that on it. Yeah, the Harkinen person, messenger. Well, let's see. I mean, there's a lot of different things here, you know, some more interesting than others. A phrase that I couldn't find initially, uh Fauferluches, Faufrellukes, very German sounding. Rigid rule of class distinction enforced by the Imperium, a place for every man and every man in his place. Very strict sounding. Let me get to your feel free, jump in any words that caught your eye, will. Another one that caught my eye was Galak with a CH at the end there. The official language of the Imperium, hybrid Anglo Slavic, with strong traces of cultural specialization terms adopted during the long chain of human migrations. Uh so I thought it was interesting. Basically they're imperial common, if you will. Like it's like what's that meme that it's sci-fi if the common language is trade, and it is fantasy if uh the common language is common. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Um, let's see. Uh we get the little thing about Gom Jabber, the high-handed enemy, which, yeah, nice phrase. And we get the it is tipped with meta cyanide, not just cyanide, metacyanide. You'll be aware it's super poor. Right, yes. See here, they talk about the great mother, which was hinted at a little bit with one of the early appendices, the horned goddess, the feminine principle of space, commonly referred to as mother space, the feminine face of the male, female, neuter trinity accepted as supreme being by many religions within the Imperium. A little strange, but that's fine. Another one that I thought was the Holtzmann effect, the negative repelling effect of a shield generator. And I couldn't find anything on Holtzmann specifically, but I do know there is a physicist named Boltzmann, if you're familiar with. But he did a lot of work about entropy, heat, and thermodynamics and stuff like that. So I don't know. Maybe it was just a you know, sounded vaguely German science-y kind of sounding. Ooh, Inkvine, a creeping plant native to Getty Prime and frequently used as a whip in the slave cribs. Victims are marked by beet colored tattoos that cause residual pain for many years. Okay. Makes sense to be grimacing all the time. Right. Let's see. We've got another entry on the Butlerian jihad. The Crusade Against Computers and Conscious Robots. Canley. Yeah. A little bit. The Canley, right? Which again from context we kind of suspected. A formal feud or vendetta. Something from the book itself here. The Kitab al-Ibar, a survival handbook slash religious manual developed by the Freeman on Arrakis. And again, right, you get a lot of entries here on different planets that are kind of talked about in the Freeman migration over the centuries that they kind of talk about in one of their rituals. I do like this. We have Melange, the spice of spices. So I like, in particular, here, um, its price on the imperial market has ranged as high as six hundred and twenty seven six hundred and twenty thousand solaris, the decagram. I don't know how much the solari is, but it sounds expensive. Let's check. Let's go to S. Solari, official monetary unit of the Imperium. It's purchased. Purchasing power set at quatracentennial negotiations between the Guild, the Lanzrod, and the Emperor. Alright, well that doesn't provide much clarification on it. It's worth as much as we say it is. Right, right. It's like how many solare would I need to purchase like a ship? Like right. Let's see. We've got the Panoplia propheticus. This is a term covering the infectious superstitions used by the Bene Gesserit to exploit primitive regions, also related to the missionaria protectiva. Oh, I thought this was nice here. Pyretic conscience. So called conscience of fire, the inhibitory level touched by imperial conditioning. So I was wondering, like, right, they keep referencing imperial conditioning. Does this mean that like if your thoughts go to certain things, it literally like burns your mind? Ooh, we got semuta, which is that one drug that the captain of the Harkadans was addicted to. The second narcotic derivative by crystal extraction from burned residue of a laccawood. The effect described as timeless sustained ecstasy is elicited by certain atunnel vibrations referred to as semuta music. Okay. Makes sense why you listen to all that music. Yes. Let's see here. We've got also an entry on Seleuce Segundus.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:20

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 1:07:21

The Imperial Prison Planet. After the Aurora Court moved to Caetane, the homeworld of House Carino, second stopping point in migrations of the wandering Zensuni. Freeman tradition says they were slaves on SS for nine generations. Which is kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:43

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 1:07:44

Chaitan literally just says Satan.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:47

Yes. Succinct.

Michael Kentris 1:07:50

We do have that entry here on the Sartakar where it talks about the their strength had been sapped by overconfidence, and their mystique of their warrior religion had been deeply undermined by cynicism. I like this one here, just because it's something I was like, what is that? Shiga wire. It's a metallic extrusion of a ground vine, Narvi Narvium, grown only on Seleucus Segundus and three Delta Kaizene, noted for extreme tensile strength. And that was like the Garot wire, is that? Yes. It's also used in, I think, uh a couple different things as well, like construction-wise. But yes, I think, yeah, the Shiga wire in their hair was yeah, for the Sardacar. Oh yeah. This was something that I think was unnecessarily convoluted. So in that scene with the Emperor and Aliyah and the Reverend Mother, he says TP. I'm like, what the hell is he talking about? And here we get TP, idiomatic for telepathy. I'm like, why couldn't they have just said telepathy? Like that one that one bothers me because that is not helpful, and it was not referenced before or after in the entire narrative. And so I'm like, it sounds like mind reading is what they're talking about, but like I don't know. It just seemed unnecessary. Oh yes. Here's this this two-pile or two peel, right? This was referenced. That one member of the conference creating the Orange Catholic Bible is a so-called sanctuary planet, probably several planets for defeated houses of the Imperium, locations known only to the guild and maintained inviolate under the guild piece. If the guild is the only way to get from planet to planet, and they won't take people to the sanctuary planets, then you know it's essentially unknowable where it is, I suppose. Right. Got kind of like our exile, similar to like Napoleon. Yeah. So people know where where Elba was. Yes. And he got off. Right. Right. Let's see, we got the truth of France here. You know, taking our awareness spectrum narcotics. Let's see. The War of Assassins, a limited form of warfare permitted under the Great Convention and the Guild Peace, aimed to reduce involvement of innocent bystanders. Rules prescribe formal declaration of intent and restrict permissible weapons. Okay. We got weirding, idiomatic, that which partakes of the mystical or witchcraft. So yeah, very similar to how we how we use it, yes. And then the last part was the yeah, they kept saying Zen Sunni throughout this, followers of a schismatic sect that broke away from the teachings of Maoeth, the so-called third Muhammad, about 1381 BG. The Zen Sunni religion is noted chiefly for its emphasis on the mystical and a reversion to the quote ways of the fathers. Most scholars name Ali ben Ohashi as leader of the original schism, but there is some evidence that Ohashi may have been merely the male spokesman for his second wife, Nisai. End of glossary. So this part is probably the most ridiculous thing. Cartographic notes. And you literally get like coordinates and like geography. I mean, it's nice if you're into that sort of thing. Then you get a map on the next pages there. So yeah, it's it's good. But it's definitely like I need to know everything about everything. And I wouldn't necessarily say that Dune is hard sci-fi in as much. There's there's certainly some hard elements of it with the ecology and things like that, but overall I would say it's not not super duper hard. Right? Yeah, it's not limiting itself by kind of the specifics of the system that's established. You know, it's especially with Paul, I would say it's very much He does what needs to be done in the moment by the powers granted to him by the author. I believe he says that uh when asked if he should be doing something like, I am here, and that is enough, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:47

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 1:11:50

So yeah, uh we after all of this, we get an afterword by Frank Herbert's son, Brian Herbert. And I I just highlighted a couple things in here. I like this, well, I I thought this was insightful. Publishers expressed concern about the complexity of the novel and all the new exotic words that the author introduced in the beginning, which tended to slow the story down. And, you know, I know you and I have talked about that meme out there about uh reading science fiction novels where by the end of the clip you just like hibbide-bibity bobbity. Like, I'm sure it'll all make sense eventually. One editor said he could not get through the first hundred pages without becoming confused and irritated. Another said that he might be making a huge mistake in turning the book down, but he did so anyway. Some of this is things that we have hit on here, Dune Universe is a spiritual melting pot and a far future in which religious beliefs have combined into interesting forms. Discerning readers will recognize Buddhism, Sufi mysticism, and other Islamic belief systems, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism. And I would say that we saw most of those things as we were talking. I probably missed the Sufi mysticism, but that's probably because I'm less familiar with it just individually. Yes. He was a boy of eight, so he was, you know, they tried to raise him Catholic, and he resisted, and this became the genesis of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. So kind of interesting. Paul Atreides was modeled on Lawrence of Arabia, uh, who led British a British citizen who led Arab forces in a successful desert revolt against the Turks during World War I, and that kind of led him to that idea. Muaddib, based on themes in a variety of religions, used lore and bits of information from people of the Gobi Desert, the Kalahari, the Aborigines of the Australian Outback, all people who survived on very sm small amounts of water in environments where water is more precious resource than gold. Talks about massive piles of books he read to research Dune. He recalled reading somewhere that ecology was the science of understanding consequences. Like this quotes from Ezra Pound here, uh made it new. A technique of enormous detail in which he studied and prepared notes over a four-year period from 1957 and 1961. Wrote and rewrote the book from 1961 to 1965. Can you imagine? That's what eight years just spent initially preparing the first book. Right, putting all his eggs in one basket there.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:23

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 1:14:24

But yeah, uh, very interesting. I I do recommend reading the afterword. I think it was uh a lot of insights into the author's character and his process, which is, I think, always interesting when you talk about a work like Dune, which has, as Brian Herbert wrote here, once I asked my father if he thought his magnum opus would endure, he said modestly that he didn't know and that the only valid literary critic was time. And I would agree with that, right? When we talk about the classics, these are things that the years have filtered out for us, flash in the pan, popular works, things that have endured, that teach us things about the human condition, provide lessons. And I think this is this is a work that, you know, it's only been only been, quote unquote, 60 years, which in the the world of literary time is pretty short, right? We still have we have works of fiction that are over 2,000 years old. I shouldn't say fiction, works of philosophy. I mean some are fiction in terms of like some of the plays and things like that that have come down to us from the you know the ancient Greeks. But uh yeah, it's it's definitely one of those things where that's why we're focusing our efforts, at least at this point in time, on these classic works of the genre. So not necessarily the hot new stuff per se, but things that have defined the genre and have spawned right uh imitators. There's a quote from from Oscar Wilde that I think most people are familiar with. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but uh they often leave off the second part of that quote, which uh imitation is the most sincere form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. So Oscar Wilde being who he is, uh that shouldn't surprise anybody, you know, shitlord par excellence. But uh but it's it's definitely one of those things where it like this this book has spawned a yeah, a host of of copies over over the decades. And it it really does, I think, define kind of modern science fiction. You know, we talked in the past about um, like you were saying, right, you know, Frankenstein and Jules Verne and all these other things from like the 19th century, are kind of like the proto-science fiction. And then we we get kind of our more modern science fiction kind of from the 50s and sixties onwards. And uh I think this is you know kind of definitely a a pillar of that genre.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:40

I 100% agree.

Michael Kentris 1:16:42

Uh obviously, you know, it's been around for sixty years and has been relevant, I would say, that whole time. And you know, we've seen multiple individuals trying to adapt that to the screen, some succeeding better than others. But, you know, it's it's it's the idea that, hey, this is something that people enjoy. Let's try and reinterpret it another way so that we can, you know, keep it uh keep it going a little longer. So, as many of our listeners are probably aware, this is the first book in a very lengthy series of books. I think it's the first six were written by Frank Herbert, and then after he passed away, his son kept writing a number of novels. And there's definitely a lot of variance in terms of quality of these novels. So some people won't say, like, you know, the first three is like a nice wrapped-up trilogy, of the first six if you really want to go into it, and if you're just like a glutton for punishment, there's over a dozen, I think. I don't have the number off the top of my head. So what do you think, Will? Will we return to the world of Arrakis in this podcast in the future? I think at some point there's certainly plenty of other books out there that we should visit beforehand, but I I think this was certainly a great book that merits, yeah, kind of at least finishing up the story of Paul. Yeah. Yeah. And this is this is my third time reading this book. And I would say this is definitely the the first time that I I came away with a better comprehension of the themes of it. And I've said this before on this podcast, going through this with you, Will, and yeah, with you, our dear listener. I have really felt that it it was much more comprehensible to me at this point. Maybe it's the time of my life that I'm reading it. Maybe my mind is just ready for that. I remember reading it a few years, less than five years ago, and really thinking that book two just drug, and I really struggled to get through that. And this time I I didn't feel that. I don't have any reason why necessarily, other than like paying attention to themes, you know, perhaps being more of an active reader rather than just trying to get through it quickly. I would 100% agree.

unknown 1:18:55

Yeah.

Why Dune Endures And What’s Next

Michael Kentris 1:18:55

The fact that, you know, we were only reading about three chapters a week, so we could talk about it, remember what we read. Right. Made it made it a lot easier to be like, okay, yeah, this is what's going on, this is what's happening, this is why this is important. So it's it's definitely a lot different than the way I usually read, where it's like, hey, I'm gonna read this 500-page book in like three days. Right. And yeah, it is one of those things, right? The returning to books is an important thing. And uh as we've talked about previously, like on our, I think I was on our introductory episode, you know, some of these books we'll be reading together. One of us will have read, both of us may have read, maybe neither of us have read. It's it's always good, right? The work remains the same, but you as the person have changed. You have new experiences, new knowledge, changes in your own life. There are always in in these great works, ideally. I mean, we're hoping these are great works mostly, um although this isn't a classics podcast. But we're looking for those things that are edifying and you know, what makes a good story and why is it a good story? And I think we've talked about that in this podcast, but perhaps just to wrap that up, um, I mean, the things, right? Like there's a lot of religious overtones here, the the depth of the world building. I mean, we've talked about that several times. It's just been excellent in terms of really making you feel like this could be a real place, uh, you know, other than the you know, the the mile-long sandworms. But uh but otherwise, you know, it's it's very convincing. You you you know, always a little bit of suspension of disbelief, but uh you can really get into the internal consistencies of that world. And a lot of the themes are really more about, you know, religion, the abuse of religion, the manipulation of people, politics, things that are kind of universal and very relevant to our own experiences. I agree. Now, uh going into this, I had no idea how much of a role religion was going to play in the text as a whole. And that kind of is one of the things that I wouldn't say necessarily is lost in the visual adaptations, which is what I am more familiar with or had been more familiar with up to this point now, of course. But uh, it's definitely much more prominent in the text, and I feel like explains a lot more like kind of why certain things happen the way that they do. Yeah. Yeah. Like the it really spends and that's I think always something that they struggle with when they're transitioning a written work into a like a play or a movie or what have you, is the internality of a character, right? We get these internal monologues, these thoughts, and that's a lot harder to convey without like having some sort of kind of cheesy, like you know, overdub spoken audio. So so I think you know books and you know other written formats, they certainly have a place in terms of communicating thoughts, not necessarily actions, but like why motivations occur. Um yeah, there's always that writing device, show, don't tell. But I mean sometimes you need to tell things. But yeah, I I very much enjoyed this. And uh, in for terms of next direction, so you know, Will and I have talked about this, and you know, we've talked to this as a sci-fi fantasy. So we are going to go fantasy next. And uh Will, where are we going next? We're going to Conan, Conan the Barbarian. Right. So this is something I I feel ashamed to say this, that uh I only read I've read maybe half of the Conan stories just in the last couple of years, and they're surprisingly good. I I think we all have this idea that uh Conan the Barbarian, right? And this kind of falls into the sword and sorcery sort of subgenre of fantasy. But but we'll talk more, I think, in our next recording about kind of the background of the author and some of the milieu into which he was writing at that point in time. And it's very interesting, I think. It's it's a lot more depth than what we think of with the Conan the Barbarian movies. There's a lot more subtlety to this character. He's not just a muscle-bound bruiser. Um I think there's a lot of very interesting stuff here, and anyone who I think skates by Conan the Barbarian is really, you know, doing themselves a disservice in terms of reading some some very excellent fiction. Yeah. And again, it's similar to kind of how Dune was. My experiences with Conan have only been through film with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular. Right. So I do have a one-dimensional view of Conan currently. Yeah, yeah. I I'm really looking forward to it. Uh, you know, I had been reading through, right? And I these are, you know, mostly short stories. So I think we'll be able to maybe, you know, we'll decide how we're going to format that out in terms of you know how many we'll cover in an episode, whether it's one or two, you know, some are longer, some are shorter. But um but I think it's going to be a lot of fun, and I think there's going to be a lot of interesting conversations. The the background of the world, it's it's also very good. And I know I've mentioned it to you, Will. You know, he was a the the author was a correspondent with HP Lovecraft. So you definitely get some stories that have some Lovecraftian vibes there, which you certainly don't think of typically with like a cone in the Barbarian story. Absolutely. So I I'm looking forward to it. It'll be fun to switch gears here, right? We're going kind of like the the exact opposite as far as like a theme, still kind of within that overarching genre of speculative fiction and things like that. But but it should be a lot of fun, and I hope our listeners will stick with us. And you know, Will, any final thoughts before we wrap it up? If you've not been convinced to read Dune up to this point, I would encourage you once again to give it a shot. It has been a great read. And yeah, it's it may seem intimidating, but honestly, if you just take your time with it and go slow and think about what it is that you're reading, I feel like it'll go very well. Agreed. Yes, good books benefit from rereading and slow reading. And you know, that's always the problem. We always in our modern day want to rush-rush rush, get through as many, you know, all these things you see online where people are like, 20, 20 books I read this this month, or you know, some of they're all garbage books. So, you know, quality over quantity. That's that's our goal here. It's a marathon, not a sprint. That's right. That's right. So thank you again for sticking with us through our exhaustive discussions about Dune. What did we miss? What did we get wrong? Let us know. Give us a five-star review if you if you like it. What were some of your favorite terms in the glossary? That's right. Yes, leave a comment with your favorite terms from the glossary. You can always reach us on X at Brothers Reading, or you can find us on our website at brothersreadingbooks.com, and you can always email us at brothersreadingbooks at gmail.com. Thank you again, and we will see you next time as we get into some sword and sorcery. Take care.