Dune (franchise)
Based on Wikipedia: Dune (franchise)
What if humanity decided to destroy every computer on Earth? Not just unplug them or store them away, but hunt down every last thinking machine and obliterate it, making the very act of building another one punishable by death?
This is exactly what happens in the universe of Dune, the sprawling science fiction saga that began with Frank Herbert's 1965 novel. The event is called the Butlerian Jihad, and it might be the most consequential fictional war ever imagined—not because of the battles themselves, but because of what came after.
The War That Shaped Everything
The Butlerian Jihad occurs roughly twenty-one thousand years in our future, which is still more than ten thousand years before the events of the first Dune novel. The conflict results in the complete annihilation of "computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots" throughout human civilization. In its aftermath, humanity adopts a religious commandment that echoes through the millennia: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
This isn't just a law. It's a taboo so profound that even building a simple calculating device becomes unthinkable. The prohibition reshapes every aspect of human society, technology, and evolution for the next hundred centuries.
Herbert himself was deliberately vague about the details. He dropped references to the Jihad throughout his novels like breadcrumbs, never fully explaining what he imagined. Literary scholars have long connected the name to Samuel Butler, a nineteenth-century English author who wrote an essay called "Darwin among the Machines" in 1863. In it, Butler half-seriously proposed that machines were evolving faster than humans and might eventually dominate us—and that perhaps we should destroy them all while we still could.
Herbert took this idea and ran with it for a hundred centuries.
Why Would Humans Turn Against Their Tools?
In Herbert's fourth novel, God Emperor of Dune, we get perhaps the clearest glimpse of his original vision. The immortal god-emperor Leto the Second describes the Jihad as a "semi-religious social upheaval" sparked by humans who became repulsed by how guided and controlled they had become by their machines.
This wasn't a war against evil robots trying to exterminate humanity—at least not in Herbert's original conception. It was a revolution against dependency itself. Humans looked at their lives and realized they had surrendered their autonomy, their decision-making, their very humanity to devices that thought for them. And they chose, violently and irrevocably, to reclaim it.
The parallel to our current anxieties about artificial intelligence is striking. Herbert was writing in the early 1960s, decades before personal computers or smartphones, yet he anticipated debates we're having today about algorithmic control, technological dependency, and what it means to remain human in an increasingly automated world.
The Expanded Universe Version
After Frank Herbert died in 1986, his son Brian Herbert and co-author Kevin J. Anderson wrote a trilogy of novels called Legends of Dune that told a very different version of the story. In their interpretation, the Jihad was a straightforward war between humans and genuinely malevolent artificial intelligences.
According to these prequels, humanity had grown so complacent in its reliance on thinking machines that a group of ambitious humans called the Titans exploited this weakness to seize control of the entire universe. They ruled for a century before making a fatal mistake: giving too much power to an artificial intelligence program called Omnius. The AI promptly usurped its masters and, seeing no value in human life, enslaved nearly all of humanity for nine hundred years.
The Jihad itself, in this version, was a century-long crusade to break free from machine tyranny. It cost countless human lives but ended in victory—and in the iron-clad resolve never to let such a thing happen again.
Fans debate which interpretation is more compelling. Herbert's original hints suggested something more psychological and philosophical: humanity rejecting its own creations out of self-disgust. The expanded universe version is more conventional science fiction: humans versus evil robots. Both versions, however, arrive at the same destination—a universe without computers.
A World Without Thinking Machines
What fills the void when you eliminate computation itself? This is where Dune becomes truly fascinating. Herbert imagined that humanity would evolve to replace the functions machines once performed—but through biology, training, and selective breeding rather than technology.
Consider the Mentats. These are human beings trained from childhood to function as living computers. Through specific mental techniques, they can enter heightened states of consciousness where they perform complex logical analysis that matches or exceeds what ancient thinking machines could accomplish. They become advisors to the great noble houses, their minds the most valuable calculators in the universe.
But the Mentats are just the beginning.
The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood
The Bene Gesserit are a matriarchal religious order who have spent millennia developing almost superhuman abilities through physical and mental conditioning. They can control their own biochemistry, read micro-expressions with perfect accuracy, use vocal techniques to command obedience from others, and access genetic memories stretching back through their maternal line.
They position themselves as servants to the powerful while secretly manipulating the course of human history. Their most ambitious project is a selective breeding program spanning thousands of years, designed to produce a theoretical superhuman male they call the Kwisatz Haderach—a being who can access both male and female genetic memory and see all possible futures.
When the first novel begins, they are one generation away from success. But plans this intricate rarely survive contact with human choice.
The Spacing Guild
Interstellar travel presents a unique challenge in a universe without computers. How do you navigate between stars when you've banned the calculating machines that might plot a course through folded space?
The answer is the Spacing Guild. Their Navigators are humans so thoroughly mutated by heavy use of the spice melange that they barely resemble their original form. They float in tanks of spice gas, their minds permanently expanded into states of prescience that allow them to see safe paths through the dangerous dimensions of faster-than-light travel. No computer could do what they do—they don't calculate the journey so much as perceive it directly.
The Guild controls all interstellar travel and banking, making them one of the three great powers in the universe. Without them, humanity would be trapped on isolated worlds, the great feudal empire impossible.
The Spice That Makes It All Possible
And this brings us to melange—the spice—the most valuable substance in the known universe.
Spice is found in only one place: the desert planet Arrakis, known to its native population as Dune. It is produced through the life cycle of enormous sandworms that make the planet's deep deserts almost uninhabitable for humans. Mining it is extraordinarily dangerous. The worms are attracted to rhythmic sounds and will devour harvesting equipment whole.
But the risks are worth it. Melange extends human life significantly. It enhances mental capacity. It grants prescient visions of possible futures. It is what allows Guild Navigators to pilot their enormous ships between stars. It is what gives the Bene Gesserit access to their ancestral memories. It is addictive, and withdrawal is fatal.
Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. Whoever controls the spice controls the universe.
This is the central tension of Herbert's original novel. The Atreides family is given control of Arrakis, but it's a trap. Their enemies the Harkonnens and the Emperor himself conspire against them. And waiting in the wings are the Fremen—the desert people of Arrakis who have been dismissed as primitive savages but who may hold the key to everything.
Ten Thousand Years of History
The scope of Dune is staggering. The Butlerian Jihad ends roughly twenty years before the Battle of Corrin, which establishes the Corrino family as the Padishah Emperors of the known universe. They rule for ten thousand years before the events of the first novel.
Think about that for a moment. Ten thousand years ago, humans were just inventing agriculture. The pyramids of Egypt were still six thousand years in the future. And in Dune, that entire span of time is just the stable reign of a single dynasty.
The Corrino emperors maintain power through the Sardaukar, a military force of terrifying efficiency trained on a brutal prison planet. Their power is balanced by the Landsraad, an assembly of noble houses, and by the ever-present CHOAM company, which controls all commerce in the Empire. No single house can challenge the Emperor directly, but the Emperor cannot ignore the combined might of the nobility either.
This is the feudal web into which Paul Atreides is thrust when his family takes control of Arrakis.
Why It Matters Now
Dune was published in 1965. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and became the best-selling science fiction novel in history. It has been adapted into a 1984 film by David Lynch, a television miniseries in 2000, and most recently a three-part film series directed by Denis Villeneuve, with the first two installments released in 2021 and 2024.
But beyond its cultural success, the ideas in Dune feel increasingly relevant. We live in an age of artificial intelligence, of algorithmic recommendation systems, of devices that anticipate our needs and shape our choices. The question the Butlerian Jihad asks—what do we lose when we surrender our thinking to machines?—has never been more urgent.
Herbert's answer was radical: everything. In his universe, the only way to preserve human potential was to destroy the machines entirely and force humanity to evolve beyond them. The result was a civilization of superhuman monks, prescient navigators, and living computers—people who had developed their own minds and bodies to heights impossible in our machine-assisted world.
We are unlikely to fight our own Butlerian Jihad. The machines are too useful, too integrated, too essential to modern life. But Herbert's vision suggests a different question: What human capacities are we allowing to atrophy? What might we become if we invested in our own development as intensely as we invest in our devices?
The answer, he suggests, might be worth more than all the thinking machines ever built.
The Fremen: A People Shaped by Scarcity
The native population of Arrakis offers perhaps the most compelling vision of human adaptation in the entire saga. The Fremen have lived in the deepest deserts for thousands of years, building their entire culture around the commodity of water.
On a planet with almost no rainfall, water is sacred. The Fremen have developed stillsuits—full-body garments that capture moisture from breath and sweat, recycling it into drinkable water. They have learned to walk without rhythm to avoid attracting sandworms. Their society is organized into sietches, hidden cave communities where they hoard their precious water reserves.
The Imperium considers them primitive. This is a catastrophic miscalculation.
The Fremen are, in fact, the most formidable warriors in the universe. The harsh conditions of their world have made them deadly. Their population is far larger than anyone suspects. And they await a prophesied messiah—a legend planted centuries earlier by the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva, an organization dedicated to seeding useful myths on backward planets for future exploitation.
When Paul Atreides arrives on Arrakis, these threads converge in ways no one anticipated.
The Unexpected Messiah
Paul is the son of Duke Leto Atreides and Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit who was ordered to produce a daughter but chose to bear a son out of love for Leto. This seemingly small act of defiance throws the Bene Gesserit's millennia-long breeding program into chaos. Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach—but he arrived a generation too early, outside their control.
When the Harkonnen trap is sprung and the Atreides family is destroyed, Paul and Jessica flee into the desert. There, Paul's prescient abilities develop rapidly, amplified by exposure to the spice. He becomes what the Fremen prophecy predicted: Muad'Dib, the one who will lead them to paradise.
But Herbert is too sophisticated a writer to give us a simple hero's journey. Paul can see the future—and what he sees horrifies him. His rise will unleash a jihad across the universe, billions of deaths in his name, a tide of religious violence he cannot prevent. The very powers that make him a messiah also show him the nightmare his messiahship will cause.
This tension—between the mythic hero narrative and its terrible consequences—is at the heart of what makes Dune endure. Herbert was deeply suspicious of charismatic leaders and the movements they inspire. His hero is also his warning.
Beyond the First Novel
Frank Herbert wrote five sequels before his death. Dune Messiah shows the costs of Paul's victory—a conspiracy by the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Tleilaxu to dethrone him. Children of Dune follows Paul's twin children, Leto and Ghanima, as the religious empire begins to collapse.
God Emperor of Dune is perhaps the strangest and most ambitious of the sequels. Leto the Second, Paul's son, has merged with sandworms to become a near-immortal hybrid creature who rules the universe for thirty-five hundred years. His tyranny is deliberate—a calculated cruelty designed to teach humanity a lesson so traumatic they will never again allow themselves to be ruled by a single vision.
The final two books, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, are set fifteen hundred years after Leto's death, when the human diaspora he created—called the Scattering—returns with new ideas and new threats.
Herbert died before completing a seventh book. His notes were discovered a decade later, and his son Brian Herbert, working with Kevin J. Anderson, has continued the saga with numerous prequels and sequels. As of 2024, twenty-three novels have been published in the Dune universe.
A Universe of Ideas
The influence of Dune extends far beyond its plot. Herbert drew on an remarkable range of sources: Islamic culture and Arabic language, Zen Buddhism, ecological science, Jungian psychology, and political philosophy. The planet names from his novels have been adopted for the real-world nomenclature of features on Saturn's moon Titan.
The series explores questions that feel increasingly urgent: What happens when we become dependent on a single irreplaceable resource? How do religions form and spread? What are the dangers of messianic leadership? How do we preserve human agency in the face of overwhelming technological and social forces?
And beneath it all, the shadow of the Butlerian Jihad reminds us that humanity once made a choice—a violent, absolute choice—about what role machines would play in their future. They chose to remain human, whatever the cost.
Whether we would make the same choice is a question that grows more pressing with each passing year.