#dune 7

&

ghola Leto to ghola Jessica :

Will you marry me?

The Final Conclusion of the Dune Series

Credit to:  Microsoft Research

Last week I wrote a lengthy ramble on the character of Duncan Idaho (and some contrast with Gurney Halleck), and WTF happens to him over the course of the series, and I’ve been thinking about the lost potential of the series and the lack of an ending to the story begun in God-Emperor of Dune and left off with Chapterhouse Dune, i.e. the Golden Path, the Scattering, the return, and the mysterious God Dancers Daniel and Marty.

One of the few details from the sequels I believe is the ‘Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach’ thing. That seems like Frank Herbert’s work, though what the purpose was, who knows? No one ever continued that story, so we’ll just have to imagine it, or write it, ourselves. Personally I’d guess that there was something that was going to be sacrificed, bigger than anything Leto II dealt with, to deal with the threat of the God Dancer couple and whatever their ‘net’ really was, and the no-ship ghola team-up were going to be… symbolic or literal aspects of humanity that would be saved in the future that they were creating after that conflict. But that is a matter for fanfiction, and may it be better than Brian’s crappy fic.

I have just found myself with some free time, so I have been thinking about what would need to happen in Dune 7, which I’d lean toward calling Liberation of Dune:

Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach (I think this was really from Frank Herbert's notes)

breaking the authoritarian structures and leaving it recognizably democratic (as Herbert said he would)

reveal origin of Honored Matres (might or might not be from FH's notes, but pretty good, so keep it even if this is from the king’s stinking son sequels)

Face Dancer/Lost Tleilaxu politics

Daniel and Marty as super-Face Dancers (absolutely do not keep the version from the official sequels; fuck you, Brian)

making sacrifices on a scale beyond what Leto II made

make use of all the tyke-gholas in the no-ship, or at least nearly all to the point where 'this one isn't used after all' is a surprising twist

What exactly the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach is, is underspecified as far as we know - but I have an idea for what it could mean.

If the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach has precognition superior to all others, it could block any other precognition from seeing past a decision point the UKH has seen and chosen. But nothing is free, not even genetic advantages - this is a relatively consistent theme in the novels. So, maybe being an UKH is extremely stressful on the body, burning up reserves from the obvious (fat, calories) to the subtle (cell senescence, premature aging, natural reproduction) to the esoteric (Other Memory, assorted technobabble). So Final Idaho has masterful precognition and can see more clearly and further than anyone before him, but he has a time limit. And perhaps we can say that it’s so stressful on the body that the damage persists into any ghola made from his cells - so no cheating the limits.

If the story ends with precognition dead, we have come full circle, only now we’ve split up into the Scattering and we’ve broken the hold of the Spacing Guild - who rely on their own, more limited precognition. Melange is now reduced to an anti-agathic, which is still pretty cool - but no longer crucial enough that ‘he who controls the spice controls the universe’. As long as the universal political order relies on a single scarce commodity with few sources, power tends to centralize, which means that something like this is needed to break the authoritarian status quo.

Walvis Bay: Flamingos & Düne 7 • Namibia • Weltreise Vlog #143

Unsere Tage in Walvis Bay: Bei den Flamingos und auf der Düne 7! Und mit so einigen Mikroproblemen 😀 __

🌎 UNSERE WELTREISE-PLANUNG • SCHRITT FÜR SCHRITT ➸

🎒 UNSERE WELTREISE-PACKLISTE? ➸ Weltreise-Packliste • ➸ Handgepäck •

📝 UNSER REISEKOSTENRECHNER So haben wir für unsere Weltreise gespart, so haben wir sie kalkuliert und so halten wir die Kosten auf Reisen täglich fest! ➸

__

👥 WO FINDEST DU…

NAMIBIA’S DUNE 7- WORLD’S TALLEST DUNE

I thought I’d seen it all. Not that I have half a century of life or more under my belt but I thought I’d seen all that nature had to offer, on TV, online, on images.. you name it. However, the day I saw a desert under the cover of a thick duvet of fog, thats when I knew, that those who know, know and those who don’t, don’t… or as we say, “Nilijua sijui…”

In April, I was fortunate enough to…

From the reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/dune/comments/4kcr69/dani%C3%ABl_and_marty_are_not_robots/

Q: In the Legends of Dune trilogy, you introduced two characters -- Omnius and Erasmus -- who we then see neatly dovetailed into the follow-up to Chapterhouse: Dune. Was this the plan all along, or was it more serendipity?

A: No, it was the plan, and it's the reason we didn't write Dune 7 -- actually, Dune 7 turned into two novels. What Dad called Dune 7 was the grand chronological conclusion to the series. He envisioned one novel, but by the time Kevin and I started writing all the stories about The Butlerian Jihad 10,000 years before Dune and other stories, there was just too much -- we had to do it as two novels. But the two novels that we did, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, that were Dad's Dune 7 basically, we had his plot, we had his notes, so we knew exactly where he was going with it, and we wove the new events -- Erasmus and Omnius -- we wove that all in, knowing where Dad wanted to go with the series.

Source: http://www.the-trades.com/articles/2009/08/15/brian-herbert-chronicler-heir-dune

There was also an interview called "Sand in My Shoes," I think, where Brian says flat-out that Erasmus was Kevin's creation:

Herbert continued, "I usually write the first draft of the Erasmus character. Kevin came up with a character -- a Thinking Machine who was researching what it was like to be human -- and I said let's add (the Nazi medical-researcher) Dr. Mengele to him, and make him really dark and strange. Then Kevin laughed and said, 'Boy, Brian, I don't know if I can write that, you'd better do it!' He wasn't saying that he couldn't write it -- it was just a little dig that only my twisted mind could write that character. So we have a lot of fun. We riff off each other, like a musical performance."

The SandRider interviews Norman Spinrad about Frank Herbert & DUNE, January 2009 

Source: http://tau.solahpmo.com/viewtopic.php?f=617&t=1752&p=28426&sid=a40e2d17c8cf532ed43a5759e70beda8

“SR: Do you believe Frank had intentions of a "Dune7" ? Along the same lines, what do think of the claim of Brian Herbert to have found floppy disks containing the "complete" Dune7 outline in a safety deposit box years after Frank's death ? If there were notes, do you believe Brian and Kevin J. Anderson used them faithfully in their new "Dune" books ?

NS: Maybe. Frank kept going as long as the big money kept rolling in. Knowing Frank's political philosophy, I once asked him how he could keep writing this royalist stuff. He told me he planned to end the series with a novel that would transition to a fictional universe of democratic rule. Never wrote it, of course. And Brian and Kevin certainly didn't from any 7 notes.”

Analysis: Some from this interview, it could be possible that there was Dune 7 notes that Frank Herbert wrote and it could be likely that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson never followed to a “Tee.”