You have a universe where the most precious substance is a powerful narcotic, democracy is unheard of, and trying to invent or construct any machine in the likeness of a human mind warrants your immediate execution, yet somehow expect this setting not to be filled to the brim of this? Small wonder why Warhammer 40,000 took so much inspiration from this series. There's so much fear in Dune, it will kill your mind.
All spoilers from hereon out are unmarked.
Adaptations
- Dune (1984)
- Denis Villeneuve's Dune universe:
General
- The titular planet (more formally known as Arrakis) is a Death World in every sense of the term with its laundry list of dangers.
- The planet is dry. Very dry. So much so that the local Fremen have to recycle and purify the water from both themselves and their own dead. In fact, spitting is considered a gracious compliment in their culture.
- Storms of static electricity that often predict the coming of a worm.
- Flora and fauna actively compete for what little moisture can be found.
- There are sandstorms strong enough to tear a human being to shreds.
- Explosive "pre-Spice masses."
- And last but not least, the source of the Spice itself: massive worms averaging 400 meters in length and 40 meters in diameter that violently react to any kind of rhythmic vibration - even walking. And they can devour Spice harvesters whole. Did we also mention that said harvesters produce extreme amounts of rhythmic vibrations?
- Faster-than-light travel is monopolized by the Spacing Guild, responsible for training Navigators to fold space and time by bringing ludicrous amounts of Spice to the point where they literally bathe in the stuff. Very few people have actually seen a Guild Navigator because such prolonged, intense exposure to Spice has horrifically mutated them to the point where they can barely be considered human at all.
- And their monopoly on space travel is absolute. If you violate the Great Convention or do anything to upset the Guild, they will deny you their Heighliners. No Heighliners, no travel, no trade. And there's nothing you can do about it.
- Holtzman fields make for good personal shields, protecting you from almost all projectiles and fast attacks. It becomes a weapon against both you and your attacker when struck by a lasgun, which makes such a horrible combination with the shield's energy that it produces a pseudo-nuclear explosion on contact. And you have no idea if said explosion will destroy either an army or an entire city. And it's best if you learn to control your breathing while using a personal shield, as it blocks both projectiles and atmosphere - even if you win the duel against your opponent, the exertion will asphyxiate you with your own carbon dioxide. Don't even think about using them in the deep desert, either - the Holtzman effect does an amazing job at attracting Sandworms like moths to a flame.
- Lasgun-shield explosions are more than just a severe inconvenience - they violate the Great Convention as well. Meaning that even if you caused it by accident, it will brand you and your entire house as war criminals. Is it really any wonder why hand-to-hand combat is routine in this universe?
The Fremen
- Life on a Death World has turned the native Fremen tribes, already hardened by generations of persecution, into natural born killers and survivalists. On such a dry and hellish world, the Fremen have no qualms against killing intruders and dehydrating their corpses for water. Which they also do with their own dead. Water is more valuable than even Spice to the Fremen - Stillsuits recycle it, women will sleep for it, and the most gracious compliment one can give in their culture is spitting.
- The Fremen may be a Proud Warrior Race, but their daily fight for survival means that honor is optional against outsiders. They will wait for hours in the sand for the chance to strike and destroy spice harvesters before the planet's ruling house even has a chance to retaliate. The worst example of this are claims made by Baron Harkonnen of Fremen women throwing their infants at Sardaukar soldiers so that their men have an opportunity to strike. Considering that he reports this to the Emperor himself with his Truthsayer right beside him, he's not bluffing.
- Their crysknives, whittled from Sandworm teeth, are the Fremen's weapon of choice and a strong symbol of their culture. And they do not unsheathe them unless they are ready and willing to shed blood. When you see its glint, do not expect to live.
- Paul's prescience from a combination of the Bene Gesserit's breeding program and his Spice fixation allows him to avenge his family and liberate Arrakis from Imperial rule. With the added bonus of making him the Emperor of the Known Universe. Unfortunately, he also predicts that the Fremen will subsequently lead a violent Jihad in his name, indirectly making him responsible for the deaths of 61 billion people, ninety planets and forty religions. And they do just that. Thanks to his good intentions, Paul has ultimately killed more people than Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Mao Zedong, Timur and Leopold II combined. Being Muad'Dib is hard.
- It gets worse. The Fremen have been enslaved, persecuted and subjugated for so long that their dreams of a Jihad aren't about slaying non-believers or spreading the Zensunni faith - it's about lashing out at an entire universe that has wronged them, with Paul as their prophet of vengeance. Once they were the persecuted. Now they are the persecutors.
Bene Gesserit
- For all their wisdom, planning and aspiration towards a better future for the human race, the Bene Gesserit are cold, manipulative witches whose millennia-spanning conspiracies would have the Knights Templar, Comstar and Tzeentch himself green with envy. It's even rumored that failed candidates for the Kwisatz-Haderach included Jesus Christ and Siddharta Gautama. Entire religions have been built by their false prophecies so they could manipulate the entire human race into producing a messianic human being with a mind capable of transcending time and space without fault or fail.
- Their testing of Paul Atreides' "humanity" by seeing how capable he is of resisting his own instincts. The test? Seeing how long Paul can keep his hand in a box that simulates the feeling of being burned alive. And he has to do this with a poison needle held to his neck. After he passes the test, Paul withdraws his hand expecting to find only a blackened stump. Paul is forced into this test when he's barely old enough to take a driving test and all his mother can do is hope that the test doesn't kill him because of her allegiance to the Bene Gesserit. And he still has his dukedom, the death of his family and a galactic holy war to look forward to. And you thought your teenage years sucked.
- The poison needle itself: The Gom Jabbar. Only 3-4 centimeters in length, yet the meta-cyanide the tip is coated in is deadly enough to kill even a human whale like Vladimir Harkonnen in a split-second. It's part of the toolkit of every Imperial household and nearly every single Bene Gesserit sister.
Gaius Helen Mohiam: I warn you not to try jerking away. I am old, but my hand can drive this needle into your neck before you can escape me. - The Water of Life is a poison used to create new Reverend Mothers by giving them access to all that is locked away in their genetic memory - including the deepest secrets of the Bene Gesserit. If they lack the Prana-Bindu training to resist their toxins, they die slowly and in absolute agony. Did we mention it's made from the vomit of a drowned infant Sandworm?
House Harkonnen
- Three words: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. A calculating, depraved pederast who is so grotesquely fat that he requires an anti-gravity harness to move. His entire House is driven by greed and cruelty, where slavery is routine and brutality is a way of life. The Baron's time in the book is spent manipulating his two nephews to ensure House Harkonnen's supremacy on the galactic stage.
- He accomplishes this by letting the brutish and inept nephew Glossu-Rabban rule over Arrakis with an iron fist while grooming his other nephew Feyd-Rautha into becoming his heir proper. This way, when Rabban is eventually abdicated or overthrown for his despotic reign, Feyd's regime will be a guaranteed success because he will look like a hero in comparison.
- Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen may have avoided inheriting his uncle's overindulgence, but he is just as bad as his sadistic brethren, entertaining himself and others in gladiatorial combat against the House's many slaves.
- At one point in the first book, the Baron disciplines Feyd by forcing him to slaughter his favorite slaves. Feyd obeys this command with the emotional weight of a kid being forced to clean his room.
- Piter De Vries is Baron Harkonnen's personal Mentat, and he be no less cruel and sadistic than him. Not only that, he's a "Twisted Mentat," vat-grown by the Tleilaxu as a way of getting around the mandatory ethics training of the Mentat schools.
- After narrowly avoiding Duke Leto's assassination attempt, Baron Harkonnen blows off steam by asking for some time alone with a slave that looks like Paul Atreides.
- Before leaving them in the desert to die, two Harkonnen soldiers consider forcing themselves upon Jessica as she and Paul lay unconscious. The only reason that the two survive is because Baron Harkonnen, well aware of Imperial Truthsayers, needed them to die in a coriolis storm for the sake of plausible deniability. Fortunately, the two awaken and kill the Harkonnen soldiers. But not before they are left to fend for themselves in the desert.
- The Harkonnen homeworld, Giedi Prime, is an accurate reflection of its owners. It is a polluted, volcanic hellscape that is so befouled by industry that its soil is absolutely saturated with machine oil even three thousand years since the Baron's death.
- Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle For Dune give us the Buzzsaw, a Harkonnen tank that is literally just a gigantic circular saw with a vehicle built around it. Their operators are always very, very eager to kill.
- Devastators: enormous mechs used as heavy artillery by House Harkonnen and powered by an onboard nuclear reactor. Harkonnen, naturally, places such little value on human life that their pilots suffer from perpetual radiation sickness.
- A favored weapon of House Harkonnen is the inkvine whip, made from the titular toxic plant. The wounds inflicted by this weapon leave deep, permanent scars colored red by their dye. And they are always painful. Gurney Halleck, a former Harkonnen slave, has one of these scars right across his face. In Emperor: Battle For Dune, they are used as artillery weapons. Fun.
House Corrino
- Salusa Secundus is the former homeworld of House Corrino, turned into a prison planet after it was turned into an irradiated wasteland by a campaign of nuclear genocide. Now it is used to train the Emperor's bodyguards and death squads: The Sardaukar. Salusa Secundus is so hostile, violent and unforgiving that its inhabitants have to be murderous psychopaths just to reach the age of puberty. And House Corrino will have it no other way.
- Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, whose rule over the Imperium makes him the de facto ruler of the known universe. His house, House Corrino, has ruled the Imperium in the ten-thousand years since the end of the Butlerian Jihad. So when House Atreides starts gaining tremendous moral and political influence over most of the other houses of the Landsraad, House Corrino is so threatened by this unheard-of danger to their political standing that their solution is to give them fiefdom over planet Arrakis, leading them into a trap set and sprung by both the Harkonnens and the Sardaukar.
- Emperor Shaddam IV's greed and paranoia knows no bounds, as House Richese learned the hard way during the Great Spice War. Their homeworld's only moon, Korona, was used primarily for research and development - and secretly for Spice smuggling. When the Emperor learned about this secret operation of theirs, he ordered the destruction of the entire satellite, bombarding Richese with meteorites for months on end. Lesson learned: do not fuck with House Corrino.
House Ordos
- House Ordos is driven by two things: profit and the efficient means of attaining said profit. Even if it means defying the Great Convention by violating Guild rules or dabbling in illegal technology.
- The Ordos is led by a group of four mechanically-conjoined rulers known as the Executrix - all of whom share a single mind. Their sole representative is the Speaker, a cyborg...man thing that they speak through. Nobody knows what happened to the original lineage of House Ordos.
- In Emperor: Battle For Dune, the first cinematic of the House Ordos campaign has you being introduced to your Mentat advisor...and their previous strategist.Executrix: Fear is an efficient tool of management.Strategist: Let me die.
- Should you fail the campaign, you join your predecessor as well...
Mentat Roma Atani: Your contract is terminated. You will now serve as an example to future strategists. Fear is an efficient tool of management. (Leaves you trapped with your predecessor.)Strategist: Why won't they just let us die? - While all houses have a variety of poisons at their disposal for both intrigue and assassination, House Ordos' Deviator Gas makes its victims both prone to suggestion and utterly berserk. And they test it by releasing it onboard a Heighliner.
Bene Tleilax
- The Bene Tleilax are masters of bio-technology and both their creations and their ambitions have rightfully earned them a reputation as one of the most revolting organizations in the known universe. Their genetic shenanigans aren't just limited to their products, but to themselves as well, looking more like Rubber-Forehead Aliens than actual humans.
- Gholas are clones made from dead tissue, used almost exclusively for the purposes of either false flag attacks, puppet rulers or the resurrection of important individuals.
- Duncan Idaho himself has had literally thousands of Gholas made from him.
- Face Dancers are shapeshifting assassins, earning their name from the way their faces warp and contort as they transform. And they are the means by which the Tleilaxu are able to operate their massive network of espionage, manipulation and subterfuge.
- Emperor: Battle For Dune gives us two new biological horrors on behalf of the Tleilaxu:
- Contaminators: Faceless, fleshy and misshapen creatures that turn the people they kill into more of their own kind thanks to a man-made virus.
- Leeches: Tripedal insectoid "tanks" that fire their own larvae at their foes. On death, the foe transforms into another Leech.
- Sligs. A grotesque slug-pig hybrid engineered to produce a surprisingly delicious kind of meat. What most of the galaxy doesn't realize is that the Bene Tleilax created this as a Stealth Insult against the decadence and corruption of the Imperium.
- Chogs. Chair-Dogs. Canines engineered to act as living, mobile thrones for their patrons. Is there really anything more to be said?
- The most depraved of all of the Tleilaxu's creations are the means by which they create them: the Axlotl Tanks. Fleshy, immobile cyborgs connected to giant vats used to birth almost all of their biological marvels, be they Gholas or Face Dancers. The worst part? The Bene Tleilax's misogyny is to the order that all women born to them are forcibly lobotomized and converted into these horrific machines.
The Butlerian Jihad
- Why can't anyone use supercomputers, robots or AI even 20,000 years into the future? Blame the Butlerian Jihad and the horrible, horrible things committed by the thinking machines that started it all. Thinking machines were so relied upon by humanity that not only did it make humans decadent and dependent on them for day-to-day life, they were easily used by autocrats to enslave and oppress their fellow man until the machines started being oppressors themselves.
- Robots were frequently used to enslave humans, rounding them up like cattle and transported them across the stars to be worked to death...if they didn't starve to death on the way.
- Erasmus is a Thinking Machine that is fascinated by humans in the same way a cruel child is fascinated with a spider's legs. He will perform twisted experiments on them to find out what makes them tick, even going so far as to murder one of his slaves just so he could paint a picture of his organs. But none of that compares to throwing the infant Marion Butler off of his balcony in a fit of rage, unwittingly kickstarting the Butlerian Jihad.
- The most powerful of humanity's rogue AI constructs, Omnius, is a Hive Mind that, like his fellow Titans, sees humanity as little more than livestock. However, unlike the Titan Erasmus, who saw Humans as worthy of cruel experimentation, decided that the human race was too untrustworthy to enslave and gave the order to systematically annihilate the species.
- The reason behind evil of robots: ancient human conquerors, Titans, who overthrew Old Empire, changed robot programming to make them more aggressive, which helped in their mission. However, one of them, Xerxes, chose to relegate much of the ruling to machine, in order to spend more time indulging in pleasures. Thus came the Omnius.
Leto Atreides II
- The son of Paul Atreides and the God-Emperor of the known universe after his death. His prescient abilities have allowed him to foresee a terrible future where mankind would be annihilated by a mysterious "Enemy" should the status quo be maintained. The "Golden Path" required to save humanity required some very drastic measures: He must be the most repressive tyrant in history, restrict all space travel and terraform Arrakis, thereby rendering Sandworms extinct. The most drastic of all of these steps, however, is how he becomes the only source left of the Spice Melange: by literally becoming a Sandworm-human hybrid.
- After 3,000 years of repression, Leto Atreides II commits the final step required for the Golden Path: allowing himself to be assassinated, intentionally crumbling his own empire and allowing the Human race to colonize the stars at a pace never before seen in history. All to teach Humanity a lesson against stagnation.
- Oh, and that "Enemy" predicted to wipe out mankind? It's Omnius. He's back.
The Honored Matres
- After The Scattering has made mankind's extinction an impossibility, the Old Empire is being repopulated by the Human diaspora, seeking to scavenge what is left of the Atreides Empire. The greatest and most feared of all of these factions are the Honored Matres, a matriarchal, warrior-driven society obsessed with the physical, mental and sexual subjugation of their enemies. They use a twisted, sexist version of the Bene Gesserit's Prana Bindu training to force men to obey them through sexual means, giving them impressive martial and political power.
- And they came out swinging by destroying all life on Rakis from orbit. Were it not for the incredible foresight of the Bene Gesserit, the Sandworms would have been rendered extinct along with the Spice. And all Spice users.
- Futars are cat-like humanoids bred by the Tleilaxu to serve as manhunters. Subhuman in their intelligence, the Honored Matres controlled them through a perverse mix of intimidation, emotional imprinting and even sex.
Jodorowsky’s Dune
- Alejandro Jodorowsky, being...Alejandro Jodorowsky, pulled no punches with turning Frank Herbert’s masterpiece into a tour de force of Surreal Horror.
- The castle of House Harkonnen was envisioned by HR Giger (who else?) as a nightmare fuel refinery. It is a giant, dome-like effigy of the Baron himself, toting two gigantic guns as it pumps fecal matter and the bones of its victims into the surrounding hellscape through enormous, organic drainpipes.
- The bridge to the castle itself is lined with sadistic biomechanical gargoyles that may or may not impale you with retractable spikes just for the hell of it.
- One concept painting depicts the castle having suffered under enemy fire. The giant mask depicting the bloated face of Baron Harkonnen has been blown away to reveal a charred skull.
- House Harkonnen's torture and execution of Duke Leto. They clip off his limbs one-by-one using red-hot shears. For the coup de grace, the Baron cuts Leto's head off himself.
- One early storyboard and script for Dune, derided by Jodorowsky as a “false script with an idiot drawing”, surfaced on eBay in 2015.
- The framing device for the film entails dog-like humanoids discovering a “Man Museum” in a ruined city, housing a giant crucified robot that projects the rest of the film itself out of its eyes as a history exhibit. The robot does this while weeping, might we add.
- The Harkonnen army finalizes their conquest of Arrakis by dropping their pants and taking a shit on the floor. Simultaneously. All one thousand of them.
- One of the storyboards show the protagonists having to enter (and leave) the Emperor's palace through a gateway shaped like a clown presenting his bare ass.
- Baron Harkonnen interrogates Dr. Yueh by trapping his wife Wanna in a “sadistic-looking machine”, where he and Feyd proceed to turn her limbs into crystal before smashing them into pieces until only her head and torso remained. Did we mention that Wanna was apparently fourteen years old in the script?
- One scene in the storyboard has the Sardaukar going against an army of children. The only thing that is shown during the fight are tips of their spears and swords, which get bloodier and gorier with each swipe and stroke.
- In one scene, Feyd smokes a joint while setting fire to a butterfly.
