There is literally zero visible vegetation on the entire planet, and almost no animal life. There is no rainfall, either, and yet apparently there is groundwater in sparse amounts? Nothing really makes sense here ecologically.
In all seriousness - what do they eat?
Beduins have lived for over 30 centuries in the Sahara, how did they do it ?
they do not live in the sahara
just the deserts in the middle east
dates and camel milk and they get the dates from cities that were either coastal or built around an oasis
That's the point of the book. It's about how even areas we consider "barren" are in fact home to beautifully diverse ecosystems. Everything else in Dune is just window dressing for Frank's ecology fetish.
So what do they eat in the book?
Sand
>with dessert
>kvetch
>was a the place
could we get some quotes from the book?
>He thought of the filmbook Yueh had shown him —"Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station." It was an old filmbook from before discovery of the spice. Names flitted through Paul's mind, each with its picture imprinted by the book's mnemonic pulse: saguaro, burro bush, date palm, sand verbena, evening primrose, barrel cactus, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush... kit fox, desert hawk, kangaroo mouse...
>Paul stood beside Chani in the shadows of the inner cave. He could still taste the morsel she had fed him — bird flesh and grain bound with spice honey and encased in a leaf. In tasting it he had realized he never before had eaten such a concentration of spice essence and there had been a moment of fear. He knew what this essence could do to him — the spice change that pushed his mind into prescient awareness.
>She took the coffee and sipped it, smiling at herself. In what other society of our universe, she asked herself, could a person of my station accept an anonymous drink and quaff that drink without fear? I could alter any poison now before it did me harm, or course, but the donor doesn't realize this.
thank you. I'm too lazy to look it up on my own.
the real question is what the Fremen ate before Pardot Kynes introduced an ecosystem of plants, animals and insects, and after that, then
>date palms, cotton, melons, coffee, medicinals—more than 200 selected food plant types to test and adapt.
Are the worms edible?
short story, no. there is this, however:
>Fremen had lived with the strange creatures [sandtrout] for generations, knowing that if you risked a bit of water as bait, you could lure them into reach. Many a Fremen dying of thirst had risked his last few drops of water in this gamble, knowing that the sweet green syrup teased from a sandtrout might yield a small profit in energy.
the reason one wouldn't eat the mature worms is because
>“High voltage electrical shock applied separately to each ring segment is the only known way of killing and preserving an entire worm,” Kynes said. “They can be stunned and shattered by explosives, but each ring segment has a life of its own. Barring atomics, I know of no explosive powerful enough to destroy a large worm entirely. They’re incredibly tough.”
Neat. I've seen all the dune movies and the miniseries. I really need to get around to reading the books.
you've probably heard it before, but the first four books are highly recommended, and the last two are kinda 'take-it-or-leave-it'
books 1 and 4 especially reward very careful reading; make notes where you think you see literary references—there are hundreds
what did the donkeys eat?
shit
Donkey donuts
sandwitches
This is why Villainoovs movies are shit: they leave out every single important detail from the books
THEY NEVER SHOW THE ACTUAL USEFULNESS OF THE SPICE
I honestly don't know how people followed the movie if they hadn't read the book. It's so fricking sparse.
Nothing about Deni Dune makes sense.
It isn't simply groundwater. They have special technology, called windcatches or something that effect, which takes moisture from the atmosphere and they store this underground. There is plant life, but mostly just where the fremen cultivate it. We know the spacing guild kept the fremen numbers and strength secret because the fremen supplied the guild with spice on the down low. Purely headcanon here, but I can easily imagine the guild providing more tangible resources at least occasionally. If they aren't growing their own coffee, they must get it from somewhere.
why didnt the guild just mine the spice themselves?
For the same reasons a freight line company doesn't drill for its own oil.
Although we the reader/viewer knows that the guild needs spice for space travel, people in the dune universe do not. Despite the immense power the guild has, they only truly care about exploring space. They hold onto their power purely because it allows them to keep exploring. If it was known how utterly dependent on spice they truly are, other powerful players could use that to their advantage. As we seen paul do at the end of the second movie I presume. I haven't actually seen the new movie yet, but thats how it plays out in the book.
There's no reason to assume the navigators aren't mentats themselves. Mentats aren't only in the service of the big houses, they exist all over. But more than simple calculation, navigators use the spice to literally see the future. They can know ahead of time that if they move the ship in X direction, they die. If they move in Y direction, they arrive safely. Speed of calculation hardly matters when you can literally see the future and know what to do or not do.
in the book they have secret greenhouses all over the place where they grow fruit and shit
they grow shit?
they live in hidden enclaves, not out on the open sand
They literally show you in the film. Literal shit with spice to give it flavor. They drink each other's piss so of course they share eating each other's shit.
Small animals and plants live on the rockier parts of the surface of the planet in some amount, and the Fremen have indoor farms for food and livestock in their little cave towns. but most of their meat would come from offworld trade or shit stolen from the people in the cities. They get most of their extra water out of the air with arrays of water vaporators that work on the same principle as a dehumidifier. You gotta keep in mind the Fremen arent a naturally arising people. They came to arrakis with super future tech that allows them to survive.
Does that suit you wear increase the body heat of those who wear it? They are literally in a strange desert and wear some kind of space Spandex
the stillsuits are super future tech stuff. Think of them as like space suits adapted for the desert. They're climate controlled to keep you from overheating and sweating too much, and they capture a ton of your sweat and piss and exhaled breath (the nose tubes) and recycle it into drinkable water.
no because its made of magic material that counters the very biophysical reason for sweating
it doesn't stop you from sweating, it harvests it, so you still are losing some heat from sweat
Kynes mentions it's both a water reclamation system and a cooling environmental suit in one.
Probably uses the captured water circulating around the suit to cool the body like those astronaut tube suits
why have the first people on this planet decided to stay there
they were basically israelites who were persecuted on every planet until they arrived on a desert planet and said "finally no goyim to oppress us"
But who are the israelites? Javier Bardem's group or Timothy Cahmalet's group?
Not israelites. There are actual space israelites in the later books. As in, israelites collectively survive 20k+ years in the future where no other society or culture has remained for long.
What a load of israeli jerk off, 70 AD when the Romans burned down the Temple the israeli faith changed drastically from temple ritual focus to communal Rabbi focus.
Currently israelites range from reactionary with the Orthodox israelites to liberal near atheist israelites with Reform Judaism.
the tleilaxu are later revealed to just be Muslims, not Zensunni or Zenshi'a just straight forward Muslims. it and how axolotl tanks are made are they big secret
Wrong, there's actual israelites in Dune universe who have remained almost literally the same and went full underground. Fremen are descended from Buddislamists I think.
How did humans do space travel before discovering the spice? I suppose without it they would crash onto asteroids or something
>How did humans do space travel before discovering the spice?
Machines and AI probably.
They would basically make hyperspace jumps without calculating fine details so there was a lot of money and lives being lost accidentally jumping into stars or getting off track or ending up getting merc'd by asteroid fields. the other way was literally flying through space the slow way so pre spacing guild you either made bets on really fast but really unsafe trafficking or you just loaded up some dude and told him he'll get there in a year or so
It depends on the time. To expand on the other anons, early on they used advanced AI to calculate safe routes at the necessary speed in ftl. After AI and more complex computers were banned, space travel became extremely dangerous and expensive. Something like one in ten ships would be lost at the best of times. Eventually the spice was (re)discovered and the guild used it to predict safe routes. This gave them extreme political power and made them rich, because they had the monopoly on safe space travel. This leads to the fremen, because they supply the spice secretly, so the guild keeps the fremen secret in turn.
Why can't mentats compute that shit? They're not as powerful as ancient AI?
The guild navigators were like mentats on steroids and more powerful than any computer that came before. And Paul was orders of magnitude more powerful than a guild navigator.
what's his power level?
Why not just use AI again? At least some morons thought of breaking the monopoly right? And what was the doom that Leto wanted to guard humanity from?
>And what was the doom that Leto wanted to guard humanity from?
AI hunter-killers with the power of prescience
Why did they hold a grudge against humanity? Did Herbert ever expand on why the war started?
Based innovators dabbing on druggies
There's prequel books that cover it, but basically a cabal of like 10 really smart bored dudes got together and made skynet, and then skynet thanked them by trying to kill all humans except them and they were stoked for getting to go out and kill all humans too.
The prequels are trash fanfic.
ew, the fanfic books even changed the butlerian jihad?
Yeah. Nerd Cookies did a decent rundown on it, also.
Nah. This is KJA/BH fanfic. The threat was never "AI" in the original canon.
Religion, basically. AI was overthrown in the past in a big and bloody war across the universe. Over the years since AI was defeated, it has become an extreme taboo to use anything even approaching complex computers. Thats why mentats became a thing.
In the books, there is another civilization that skirts the lines of this taboo and eventually leads to big space travel advancements.
The period of enslavement that humanity went through before the Butlerian Jihad, and the bloodbath that was required to break free from it, was enough to literally imprint the admonition from the OCB into their very genes.
The guild navigators, mentats, and Bene Gesserit were far more powerful than any AI, anyway. There would be no real point in trying to develop artificial navigators when spice was relatively plentiful. This started changing when Leto II put the entire universe on spice rationing.
>And what was the doom that Leto wanted to guard humanity from?
Future beings that achieved a transcendental form of prescience that put them at a scale/level of consciousness where it was trivial to totally enslave the entirety of humanity. Two of them appear at the end of Chapterhouse as Marty and Daniel, and they weren't able to see Sheeana or capture Idaho, who escaped their grasp into a universe of infinite possibilities.
Also, to clarify, the Butlerian Jihad wasn't to overthrow "AI." It was an oligarchy of men who controlled a human race that was overly reliant on technology to process information and function in society. Men were enslaved by the men who controlled the machines. Really eerie parallels to where we're headed now, actually.
Is this what Herbert wrote or what his money grubbing son wrote?cuz I've seen duncgays seething about the son all over the internet
Like so
That's Herbert canon straight out of his own books. KJA/BH ignored all of it and wrote their stupid terminator timeline.
as far as i know the world of dune used to have more advanced tech than what we see, they used to have advanced AI and shit and that is when humanity expanded to the stars then there was a big war against the AI, AI was banned, then spice was discovered. I think the whole feudal government came about after the AI war as well.
I mean that's just not true.
birds, bats, scorpions, and shit grown hydroponically like dates, apricots, and rice.
Mah'nig
they eat spice
Probably those bird bat things the Harkonnens were burning
Watched dune 84 again today, started reading the book after. it's been long time and it was never that good but it has its moments. There's a ton of plot holes and maguffins. Space opera isn't a very good medium. Besides legends of the galactic heroes is better in every aspect. Haaa is my capshka
>Space opera isn't a very good medium.
That's the failure of the author.
Don't they trade with smugglers and the Guild?
Dessert power
Spice
Here's my question: the shields have to be penetrable by lower-velocity objects so you can breathe, right? Why not just wear a scuba tank under a full shield?
I think it's so you can move
a shield stops your own projectile weapons after all
But if that's the case, wouldn't you constantly have body parts exposed outside of your own shield as you moved?
Recycled doodoo
YAAAG SBARRO