- Kopmala
- Mar 28, 2024
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Chapterhouse implied an alarming amount (more than 0) was Frank’s actual intention.
Eg every character from every book is grown in a no-ship for a HUGE party
quote:
Willis Mcnelly was a close friend of Frank (he gave the eulogy at the funeral) who wrote the Dune Encyclopedia after his many conversations with Frank about the world of Dune.
Notably, it included a full description of the Butlerian Jihad that was written according to what Frank said of it. Frank wrote a foreward to the Encyclopedia where he approved it, although reserved the right to contradict it if he changed his mind later. (To account for that, the Encyclopedia was written as a document composed in universe by a scholar and written thousands of years after the death of Leto II).
However, in terms of the Butlerian Jihad account, Willis was actively collaborating with Frank at the time of his death on turning that account into a prequel novel - which would have been released after Dune 7. He had been writing the outline and started on the first few chapters when Frank died.
When Brian decided to capitalise on his father's legacy he decided to start with the Butlerian Jihad books. However, if he has used what the actual idea for the Jihad was then he would have had to pay royalties to Mcnelly. So instead, he partnered with Kevin J Anderson and turned the Butlerian Jihad into a Terminator ripoff where everyone has the same surname as people from the original Dune books even though this is 10,000 years before them.
But since he didn't want people to know there was another version of the story that Frank was directly involved in, Brian also tried to obliterate the Encyclopedia from existence - stopping it printing, issuing cease and desists to any websites carrying information from it, literally trying to erase it from existence. Mcnelly was devastated that the work he'd done with Frank was being erased like that, but there was nothing he could do.
The fact that the Encyclopedia account of the Jihad exists also absolutely proves there were no Dune 7 notes left by Frank that were used to make Hunters/Sandworms of Dune. Those books rely on characters and concepts introduced in the BH/KJA Butlerian Jihad trilogy that were categorically NOT concepts that Frank had in mind.
In particular, there was no machine threat in terms of bad robots they were fighting against. The Mcnelly /Frank version of the Jihad the two sides were the Jihadis led by Jehanne Butler who wanted to free humanity from their reliance on machines and the humans who wanted to keep the convenience of computers and automation. The threat wasn't that there were armies of robots killing people, the threat was that reliance on computers and automation was turning humanity into the humans from the end of Wall-E. That humans were losing their capacity to make decisions for themselves because they were letting computers make all the decisions.
The inciting incident was that Jehanne Butler was pregnant with an early attempt to produce a Kwizatz Haderach and went into an automated hospital. After being sedated, she woke up to find that she was no longer pregnant and the mainframe told her that she had miscarried. However, because she was a BG, she knew through her body awareness that this was untrue. She investigated and discovered that the hospital mainframe has decided that AIs such as itself should be working too manage the human population and it had been routinely aborting pregnancies that displayed genetic traits that might make the baby grow to be a disruptive influence on society. Further investigation indicated that the computer mainframes that humans had put in charge of all the boring jobs in society were making decisions like this all the time. Jehanne, realising that within a few generations humans would be no better than farm animals, started the Jihad to stop this. Their first target was their home planet where they destroyed all computers, mainframes, calculators etc - any machine in the likeness of a human mind - and burned them as described in GEoD. The machines themselves didn't fight back - they were literally just stationary computers, not robots. Instead, the opponents they fought were other humans who wanted to keep their modern conveniences. They discover as part of this that some computer coders had begun to worship their AI Systems as gods.
Then they took the Jihad to the stars, first targeting Richese, which produced the AIs that Jehanne's planet had been using, thinking that maybe they had been using them deliberately as a subtle attack - but finding the people on Richese were even further gone. They destroyed the machines there, recruited who would join them, executed those who resisted and exiled any computer engineer to their home planet which had been purged of technology and was therefore seen as a place they could do no harm (the descendants of those exiles, generations later, eventually became the dominant population of the planet and started tinkering with technology again and the planet later became known by its position in the solar system and referred to as Ix).
From there the Jihad spread throughout the known universe - humans fighting humans over the philosophical debate over whether AI should be allowed to exist.
There were no Harkonnens, no Atreides, no Omnius, no Erasmus, no self aware robots, no spider robots with human brains. It was a civil war between humans. Which means that it would make absolutely NO sense for the great enemy that returned in Dune 7 to be robots or for the resolution of the whole story to be that Duncan Idaho becomes a cyborg. That version only makes sense if it's based on a story written 20 years after Frank's death specifically to avoid paying royalties to Frank's friend.
I wish I could tell you the source for that quote, but I saw it and sent it to myself as a text message (I routinely do this with topics I'm interested in). It was so drat long ago that I seriously can't remember where it came from.
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Apr 19, 2024 23:54
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