Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Mike.
And I'm Nate.
What are we smoking, Mike?
We are going to smoke one of my favorites, the CAO MX2.
Which you've never smoked before, if I'm not mistaken.
I've had these cigars many times.
I like it.
Yes, I know.
All right, let's light them up.
I will tell you, now that we're in season two, I've been a lot more diligent on making
sure that my initial light is very even and fully burning.
And it's made for a lot nicer smoke throughout and a lot less relights on my part.
Of course, being indoors helps now, but I think getting that initial light is super
important.
It is.
And my lighting technique has changed over the years to where I take a couple puffs and
then I take the lighter and I kind of circle it and get it nice and hot.
Yep, I light it, take some puffs, make sure everything's lit, take some puffs and then
look again at the end to make sure that there's no dark spots that haven't stayed lit and
then just re-kind of torch those.
So this one is nice, the first couple puffs.
It seems, I don't know if smoother is the right term, because our last stick was very,
very smooth.
Maybe a little, and buttery isn't really like not in the sense of flavor, but it just, it's
smooth.
It's smooth.
It's got a dark note, but not overpowering.
Very nice cigar.
Like I say, I don't know.
I think these are out of a box I bought a couple years ago, because I bought a box at
a cigar shop.
So I have the physical MX2 box because I really like them.
I wanted to have a good base of cigars.
So in terms of topic today, what are we doing?
We're going to talk about Dune, the books.
But the books, yes.
Yep.
Okay.
And so we both recently finished reading all eight books in the main timeline.
You did it for the third time, right?
This is my second time through.
Okay.
This is only my second.
And this is my first time through all of them.
And I have all my ratings up because I use Goodreads every time I read something so I
can keep track of like what I read and if I liked it or not.
And Goodreads does a five-star rating system.
You know, sometimes sites do 10 stars or five stars or whatever.
So I'm going to say this upfront, and then I'm sure you're going to kind of lead the
conversation for most of it because you've read it before.
And we've kind of talked off the podcast about some of the Dune stuff, but never in-depth
about the books per se.
So I rated every single Dune book, all eight of them, either a four out of five or a five
out of five.
And the ones that I liked least, meaning the four out of fives, which are still great books.
So the first Dune was a five out of five for me.
Dune Messiah, which is the second one, was a four out of five for me.
That one's quite a bit shorter, if I remember correctly.
Garden of Dune was a five out of five.
God Emperor of Dune was a five out of five.
And I feel like God Emperor of Dune was my favorite book of the entire series.
And Heretics of Dune was a four out of five.
Chapter House was a four out of five.
Hunters of Dune was a four out of five.
And the last one I gave a five out of five, Sandworms of Dune.
And just for full disclosure, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune were written by Brian
Herbert, Frank's son, and Kevin J. Anderson.
So they co-wrote both of those based on outlines and things they found in a, I think a safety
deposit box after their father had died or his father had died.
Yes.
Yes, that is the case.
And I have read most of the extended Dune universe as well.
Yes.
Did you have somewhere you wanted to start or?
Yeah, I was going to start because we just read the main timeline and there are a bunch
of Dune novels outside of the main timeline.
All by Brian and Kevin, I think.
Yeah, all by Brian and Kevin.
And I like them all.
I think they're good.
Not that everybody else is going to think the same thing, obviously.
Yeah.
And I remember when I bought the first one at the bookstore, they were like, oh, this
one's great, but ignore all the rest.
And I'm so glad that I didn't listen to that.
Right.
I was going to say that the first Dune is a classic.
And if you read the first one, you're going to want to read the second.
The first three, which is Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, that really could be
a trilogy in and of itself.
Yeah.
And there's no real reason to go past that unless you want to read a lot of Dune.
I think the divisive book in the series is God Emperor of Dune because my brother got
to that book and then he gave up the entire series because he thought it was stupid.
And it turns out that God Emperor was my favorite one of the series, I think.
So really, I think that one's divisive.
I don't know that it has to be your favorite, but I think if you enjoy that one, then you
might as well read the rest of them, at least in the main timeline.
Right.
Yeah.
If you can make it through quote unquote, if you can make it through God Emperor of
Dune, you might as well read the rest.
So it sounds like you're pretty amazed that God Emperor of Dune was my favorite.
So why don't we, should we start there?
We can start there.
So God Emperor of Dune is a transition book between the original storyline and then the
beginning of the extended Dune universe.
Everything else.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's weird for sure.
Oh man, it's so weird.
And it spans like 1500 years.
Yes.
Well, it's 5000 years ahead or 3000 years ahead of Children of Dune.
So all the people that you are invested in for the first three are all dead, including
Not all of them.
Yeah.
The original Leto was pretty much no longer there.
Right.
Like so.
He was there.
Sure.
Totally different character and all of the other, you know, I don't know how many names
we should drop just in case people want to read Dune.
Because it's a spoiler to say the one guy's name for sure.
Oh, but these books have been out for a long time.
So I think let's give our listeners our last chance right now.
And let's just say that we can't properly talk about the eight Dune books in the main
Dune timeline without spoilers.
So if you haven't read them and you want to read them and be surprised, then just stop
listening right now and come back and listen after you've read the eight or listen to them
on an audio book or whatever you want to do.
Because I don't think we can, it'd be a 10 minute episode if we can't talk about what
happens in the Dune books.
Right.
And that revolves around certain characters for sure.
And the most important character in the Dune universe is not Paul Atreides.
Or even Leto too.
Or even Leto.
No.
So all right.
Last chance.
All right.
So here we go.
One of the most interesting parts about God Emperor is that the only character you really
know is Duncan Idaho because it's the original Duncan Idaho just moved in time.
Well, Gola.
And Leto is totally as a Gola and he's totally different.
Leto is totally different and the whole universe is totally different.
And it's kind of, the first time I read it, I didn't quite understand why people were
so angry at Leto from the description of what was going on.
You know?
Yeah.
It didn't seem like that bad of a place really.
Well, basically he made them not fight.
I mean, you know, it's like a gross over summation, but that was his whole plan was to give them
so many thousands years of peace as contrast to everything else.
Because think of the upheaval in the first three Dune books with, you know, Paul overthrowing
the Emperor Shaddam and instilling his own jihad in emperorship.
And you know, him going off to be the prophet and then his kids and Aliyah or Leah.
I don't know how you pronounce it.
Aliyah.
The only reason why I know is because I listened to the audio books.
Oh yeah.
I really enjoyed.
It was hot rock.
Yep.
Which is not how I pronounce it.
I pronounce it with a lot harder H sound much like I did with our guest last episode.
Yes.
And I'm bad at pronouncing things.
Here I go again with my incredible mastery of the English language.
I pronounced it wrong.
I think Lito Lito too is my favorite character in the entire series.
He is.
I wouldn't say he's mine.
I think and this comes in later.
I think Miles tag is probably.
Oh, he's great.
He is great.
Yeah.
Because he's kind of like the culmination of the breeding program without being a quiz
us hot rock, you know?
Yep.
I hinted in the last book that he may well have been after the T probe, after the T probe.
But at first, so I want to get this out of the way.
At first I was very annoyed about Duncan, Idaho being everywhere all the time and they
kept bringing him back through the Gola program.
And I was like, okay, we're thousands of years beyond.
Like, let's just, let's please just move on.
But as a literary device, I came to enjoy him because he was kind of me, the reader,
right?
Because he had been there in the original book and he had been there through the Gola
program and everything else.
So he was kind of like the anchor point for the reader.
And of course there's huge plot points later on involving Duncan, but for the reader, he
was kind of an anchor point and they kept bringing him back and bringing him back.
And at first it was annoying, but once I kind of understood that he was kind of a guide
for me, the reader, to wrap my head around the stuff that was happening because everything
was moving so fast because the leaps in time were massive for a while there.
But I think Leto too was one of my favorite characters because of the things that he did.
And they really, in the last book, Sandworms of Dune, I really wanted them to hearken back
to this, but he basically, Leto too basically invented or bred or made, because he had his
own breeding program running counter to the Benedicessor breeding program.
And he basically made Duncan to be unseeable by the prescient visions, which led to the
no ships and led to all of that stuff, the things that couldn't be seen.
Right.
It wasn't just Duncan.
It was the Atreides line as well.
Oh yeah.
And that was the most fascinating thing is not only did Leto too take the huge sacrifice
that Paul wouldn't or couldn't, but he took it.
And the merging with the sand trout and becoming a giant.
And the book cover is one of my favorites because it's like a giant penis worm with
a little face sticking out the top.
And Sarah's like, what in the fuck are you reading right now?
And I'm like, oh man, it's great.
And she's like, okay, whatever.
But I mean, it's a huge leap, right?
He's merging with a different species and becoming something completely different.
But he laid the groundwork for all of this no ship stuff and all of these things.
And that never would have happened had he not done what he did.
And some of the scenes between him and I can't remember now who he wanted his wife to be
and who ultimately his wife was, but only in like namesake.
But she, I think her and one of the Duncan golas like got it on.
Do you remember?
I can't remember what her name was.
But it doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
I mean, she was only pertinent for that one book, The God Emperor of Dune, but she was
only pertinent for a small portion of that book.
She's kind of like a trigger device.
You know?
Yeah.
And I feel like, and she was kind of designed to be a trigger device and he knew that and
he still wanted her, you know?
So I feel like it was kind of, it was one of those tales.
I mean, almost, I mean, almost like Romeo and Juliet or something where you've got the
love but you can't be with them for some reason.
And I don't know, I feel like his character was far more complex or far more complexly
written than Paul Atreides.
Like in the first Dune book, you don't really get to know Paul a whole lot because he's
almost kind of like bustled along for most of it and just reacting to things as things
happen, you know?
Right.
He's a tool.
He was a tool that was created and he was created for the purpose that he, he was created
as a tool for that situation by the breeding program.
Yeah.
And you didn't really get to know him as a person as far as like, you know, a book goes.
So I guess I felt a lot more connection with Leto too because, you know, you get him growing
up with his sister and trying to, you know, with the whole wolf thing or I don't know
what, I don't know if they were really wolves, but they bred these like tigers or wolves.
Oh, tigers.
Yeah.
And they were kind of, they were kind of sort of abominations from the get-go, right?
Like they kind of had full prescience at the beginning.
And we kind of get to know that and the trade-offs that he had to take and the choices that he
made or chose to make for the betterment of everything.
And you know, everybody called him a tyrant, you know, the tyrant Leto too.
And I don't know that that was truly accurate.
I can see how people would think that, but I don't know.
I feel like the character is really well written and the circumstances around him were really
well written.
And maybe it was more because it was closer, the closest thing to a character study, you
know, kind of.
Well, he was even more fleshed out in some ways than Duncan Idaho, who was pretty much
the main character of Dune.
By accident, just so you know, Duncan Idaho was not supposed to be the main character
of the Dune universe, but he was very popular.
And Frank Herbert got a lot of fan mail saying that they wanted him to bring him back to
the second book.
Okay.
Yeah.
And that's how it happened.
So very interesting.
I asked what we should we lay down a groundwork for the Dune universe or?
I mean, let's let's do it.
Let's do it.
I mean, so if you've read the Dune books or if you haven't and you're not planning to,
but you want to follow along with our podcast today, let's lay down the groundwork and then
we can kind of build off of there.
I didn't really want to jump the gun by saying like Leto II was my favorite and God Emperor
of Dune was probably my favorite book of the whole series.
And I know that's kind of a very divisive statement to make because a lot of people
get turned off by God Emperor of Dune and they don't want anything else to do with the
universe.
So let's lay down the groundwork, Mike.
Right.
A lot of people are going to be watching the movies.
I have never seen the television show or the old movie.
I only watched the new movie.
Yep, I will tell you the television series is great.
I'd have to watch it again.
But that was my first exposure to Dune was that that mini series.
And I really enjoyed it.
The one the one with Sting, I tried to watch it three or four times because I tried to
watch the theatrical one and I turned it off after 15 minutes because it was it was like
the worst stuff I've ever seen.
And I've seen and you know, Mike, I've seen some stuff.
Then I tried to watch the director's cut and that was just as bad.
And then I tried to watch like a fan edit where they tried to like make it match the
book more.
And it was still terrible.
And I didn't know what the hell was going on.
So I just can't watch that movie, I guess.
Interesting.
I want to watch it, but I haven't yet.
Maybe we should watch it together.
We should.
We can watch it and do maybe we could do a live critical review.
I'm down.
Oh, I totally be down.
So something that we can do in the future.
So Dune universe, it's ten thousand years ahead of present time.
Earth is not even remembered by the majority of the population.
It's an intergalactic society that has reverted to a feudal system.
And there's various factions.
The most important faction that we're concerned about are the Bene Gesserit, which are women
that run a long term breeding program.
And they have used their knowledge to basically make themselves superior fighting machines
with semi prescient powers who can use drugs to look into, quote unquote, other memory
and recall information from past lives.
Yes.
And more so than that, and more so than that, they also have kind of complete control over
their molecular biology.
So part of becoming a Bene Gesserit is you take it's called the water of life, but what
it basically is a lethal dosage of Malange or the spice from Dune or Arrakis or later
Arrakis and it will kill you if your training has not been done to the level where you can
go into yourself and molecularly change the lethal substance to a non lethal substance,
which may sound like a chemistry bullshit, but hey, it's a science fiction fictional
book.
So we're not going to get hung up on that.
Right.
And one of the hooks is that there are no computers because they had a massive war against
artificial intelligence.
So there are people that they have trained to have computer like memories and computer
like capabilities, the Mentats and all of their ships are driven by navigators, which
are people that float about in tanks of spice gas.
Yes.
And that gives them semi-percheance to go through fold space.
Yes, which is more or less hyperspace or light speed and they don't run into planets or
asteroids.
I think the other important thing we need to mention right now, right off the bat is
this is a sci-fi series that includes zero aliens.
There is zero aliens and nearly no people who are not white.
Yeah, I guess.
But yeah, and more importantly is there's no aliens.
And so, but because of the 10,000 years in the future and everything and going out into
space, definitely there are different factions that may appear less human than others.
Like the navigators are thin bodies floating in things with huge heads that don't necessarily
look human, but they started out as human.
Like every person in this story started out as human.
Yes, and the Tlaksu are elven looking gray skinned people and the Benedjessert are largely
extremely attractive super women.
That want to breed you, but only for the program.
Right.
I wouldn't say there are no white people.
It's just it's so far in the future that society is now homogenous racially largely.
It's not mentioned a whole lot, you know, the Fremen are brown skinned because they
live in a desert, but they also have red hair, which historically is accurate because there
were red haired Mongolians back in the day.
And I'm pretty sure there's still are.
So it's not unheard of.
And you know, it's largely homogenous, but in any case, the ruling factions are all men.
All the rulers are men, but they're also men who are usually married to Benedjesserts and
who are products of the Benedjessert breeding program.
So the Benedjesserts are like the under power group running everything.
Yeah.
I mean, more so like the shadow, the shadow power group, because I think even in the first
student book, Emperor Shaddam was a Benedjessert.
Like all the great houses were part of the Benedjessert breeding program, whether they
knew it or not.
Shaddam's wife was a Benedjessert and his mother, I think, was a Benedjessert.
So these women are there all the time.
And this might be a spoiler, but I already did the spoiler alert up top, but Lady Jessica
is the daughter of the Baron Harkonnen.
So the Benedjessert breeding program doesn't really care about your last name, but they
care about your lineage and they want to take the best genetic material from each house
or each line because their ultimate goal was to create the, and you can say it because
you listened to it, the Kwiswetch Hattarach.
Kwiswetch Hattarach.
Yes.
Their ultimate goal is to create a man that can survive the spice agony, essentially.
Sometimes they say, you know, the shortening of the way, the man who can look into the
darkness that no Benedjessert can go, all this nonsense.
All it is is a man who can survive the spice agony and control his molecular processes.
But also can have the other memory of both male and female lineages.
Absolutely.
Because the Benedjessert can only tap into the female other memory of their lineage.
And the Benedjessert also do something called sharing.
So you can, one Benedjessert might be of one lineage and has all those other memory, but
if they share with somebody of another lineage, they have all their other memory too.
So it's almost like downloading other data files, which is very interesting with the
way the last two books turned out or the last three even kind of, you know, like the last
one Frank wrote was leaning in this direction and stuff.
So it's kind of interesting that the Benedjessert would download or, you know, share.
Yes.
So I would say that the first three books are basically a feudal war in space type story.
Yeah, very much so.
And it's very entertaining.
It's very entertaining and it's very political.
There's a lot of fucked up stuff that goes on.
And one of the things, even in the first book was plans within plans within plans.
So and that's an excellent summation for the whole series, the whole series, because just
because it looks this way on the surface doesn't mean that's how it's going to turn out.
Yeah.
The whole idea is that everybody is a superhuman because of this breeding program.
Everybody who is a ruling person who's making decisions is a superhuman.
Yeah.
On purpose.
And their machinations are extremely complex.
Because they think in eons.
So the Benedjessert think in eons and a lot of these male head of houses, even Duke Leto
Atreides and Baron Harkonnen and Emperor Shaddam were only thinking kind of in the present
day.
They weren't necessarily thinking 100, 200, 10,000 years in the future, right?
Right.
The men are very short sighted usually.
But the Benedjessert were and they have been and they always have been and they knew it
was going to be a long thing and they get called witches in every single book.
Everybody kind of hates them or despises them.
Not everybody, but a lot of the ruling men do.
Which is weird because they're all products of the Benedjessert.
Married to them.
Yeah.
And mostly married to them.
And have, yeah, they're all tied in with the Benedjessert, all of them.
Even the homosexual men.
Man, I want to, let's talk about that real quick.
So I had never read the books and I watched the newest Dune movie, which was, I thought,
phenomenal.
And they made the Baron, you know, like, but they didn't make the Baron as fucking perverted
and disgusting as he is in the books.
I mean, that guy is-
No, he was menacing but he wasn't a child molester, murderer, benedict, torturer, obscenist.
Oh my God.
And he had all these young men and he was trying to bang all these young men that looked
exactly like Paul Atreides in the first book.
And he's like, Oh, I'm going to have him back to my chambers because he looks just like
Paul.
And it's like, Oh my God.
Also I want to mention, and I don't know if you know this Mike, but the first Dune book,
Frank shopped it around and nobody wanted to publish it.
And it got published by an automotive manual manufacturer or publisher.
I knew that he had issues.
I didn't know that it was an automotive manufacturer though.
Yeah, if any of you are car people or gear heads or whatever they call them, if you look,
if you pick up a copy of the first Dune book and go to the inner flap, it says, it'll tell
you the first published, right?
Cause all books do.
And it's the, it's one of the big automotive manual publishers.
Oh, now I can't remember it.
Yeah, I can't remember it either.
I have a couple of them.
I know that.
Yeah.
My four wheeler, my S10.
Yeah.
And it's funny because it was like, I saw a meme or something and it was like, Frank's
like, Hey, I got this great book.
And all the publishers like, nah, nah.
And then he goes to this automotive handbook publisher and they're like, this is kind of
neat.
Why not?
And they publish it and it becomes like a number one hit.
So JK Rowling had issues too.
Yeah.
And still does from what I've heard.
But you know, except we're not talking about that.
We're talking about Dune.
But yeah, it sucks you in.
It's kind of like trying to talk about Lord of the Rings.
It's so complex, but the overarching idea is that there's these factions.
So the Tlaksu don't have, well, they don't ultimately have women.
They breed through taking women and turning them into machines and having them be baby
factories more or less.
And they don't have women as a factor in their society.
Let's talk about that for just a quick second, because that didn't, that revelation didn't
happen until post God Emperor of Dune.
Yeah, really.
I mean, he just mentioned the Tlaksu had axolotl tanks, axolotl tanks, axolotl tanks.
And the way that it was written, even the Bennett Jesuit, like nobody knew what these
tanks were.
And they just kind of like, I don't know, I guess me as a modern day person just assumed
they were, you know, like a cylindrical glass tank full of water, because most tanks in
sci fi movies are cylindrical tanks of water, right?
Or some kind of fluid.
And it wasn't until the honored matries that the kind of you finally learned that the Tlaksu
thought that women were absolutely zero value, and they would kind of chemically lobotomize
them and turn them into a living, but heavily reliant on, you know, medical applications.
I don't know, oxygenators and things and whatnot, they'd have hooked up to all these medical
contraptions, and turn them into basically just living wombs.
Yes.
And that was it.
Like the brain function would cease, and they would just keep them alive enough to
be a womb.
And that was a huge revelation within the series.
And you don't get there until later.
So you have to read several, several books before you even get to that point where like
this is fucked up.
Well, it falls within the part of the doing universe is the juxtaposition of opposing
viewpoints that are both wrong.
So you have the Harkonnens and the Atreides.
You have environmentalism versus industrialization.
You have the Bene Gesserits that don't believe in love, and men are only sperm donors.
And women rule society versus, you know, the Tlaksu who are the exact opposite.
And these that's where Leto, the second, tries to tie it all in and tamper all of these factions
down.
Well, that's why Lady Jessica was outcast from the Bene Gesserit in the first few books,
because she chose love over the Bene Gesserit way.
Yes.
And she chose to have Paul instead of terminating that pregnancy to have a female, because the
Bene Gesserits were supposed to only have females.
Yes.
Well, they could have males, but only if they knew.
Yeah.
And if they knew it was to be if it was going to be a potential that word, the K.H.
Quizzact Haderach.
Yes.
And Mike's listened to the audiobook and I only read it.
So I don't want to keep butchering butchering the term.
But it does it does come up in most every book.
So you know, but I'm sure you had a pigeon in your head of what it was.
Yeah.
And she she chose to have Paul, much to the dismay of the Bene Gesserit.
And he chose ultimately love over the Bene Gesserit way, even though he survived the
spice agony and was quote unquote a full Reverend Mother, I guess.
Right.
For lack of a better term.
And he chose Chani over Princess Erulin.
Erulan.
Okay.
This will be a common theme in this episode.
Mike will correct my pronunciations of all of the names.
It's not correcting.
So that people know Princess Erulin who was physically perfect because she was a product
of the Bene Gesserit breeding program.
Yes.
And I thought the interesting thing was that Paul was kind of a massive, massive dick to
her.
And in the end, she chose Paul's side.
Yes.
Well, in the extended Dune universe, there's a lot of more information that gets out there.
Of course.
Okay.
Yeah, for sure.
And they wasn't that much of a dick to her, but she was also a dick to him because she
put Chani on birth control.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying.
Which you wouldn't think would be possible in that universe.
You wouldn't think that would be possible.
But yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing is there's a lot of things that are possible in this
universe that kind of defy logic or even the universe itself that he set up.
So but it's all plans within plans within plans.
And even in the last couple of books, they have so we can talk about face dancers real
quick is that Tilexu developed face dancers and they can mimic other people just by just
by a touch, like you shake their hands and then they can mimic you, your look, the appearance
and voice and in some cases, memories, I guess.
And the kind of the culmination is there's these new breed of face dancers that are almost
undetectable even by truth sayers and the Bennett Jesuit have truth sayers who dope
up on the spice and can basically tell if you're lying or not.
And these new face dancers could even fool the truth sayers, which it wasn't hammered
home, which I really enjoyed about the whole series is nothing was really hammered home
as a modern modern movie or book or something would be today where you have to like lay
it out and lay it out again and remind the reader again that this is why.
But there was something in the last book that Eramis correct me Mike on the pronunciation.
You're so far off that I don't who's who's Eramis?
Omnius is counterpart.
Oh Erasmus.
Oh my god.
Okay.
Erasmus.
Erasmus right?
I know.
So Erasmus said something just fleetingly.
It was one sentence and he said that the new face dancers were so much sleeper cell agents
that a lot of them believed that they were human.
They didn't even know they were face dancers.
So that's how they could beat the truth sayers.
But it was like one sentence, one bit of dialogue in the last book.
And it explained how the rabbi could have gone so long and detected as a face dancer
because on the no ship that Duncan was on after they fled chapter house, they had a
saboteur saboteur and saboteurs had saboteurs because how it was also a face dancer who
that is correct.
He was few for how it.
Yes, and but they had their they used the last bit of their melange melange melange.
Oh, yeah.
I like when my wife wears melange melange array.
And anyway, but the only way to defeat a truth sayer would be to fully believe right your
story.
And that's kind of what they relied on.
But the Bennett Jesuit on the no ship consumed the last bit of their ultra potent spice to
do the big truth trials with the entire population of the ship, which had been out in the universe
for what, 25 years, something like that.
And I remember they landed on a planet and they were like, this is the first time some
of the population has ever been on a planet because, you know, they're on a no ship for
25 years, they're going to bang and the Bennett Jesuit are going to keep their breeding program
going.
So they're going to keep creating their breeding program and keep creating kids and things
because they were hoping to be the new seed of the Bennett Jesuit chapter house somewhere.
But it's things like that where it's like this the one sentence and they don't hammer
at home.
It's just like if you're paying attention, you're like, oh, okay.
So they designed these new face dancers to actually believe they were who they were pretending
to be.
And they didn't even know they were a face dancer necessarily.
Yeah, that's one of the things I really appreciated about doing as a adult reader was the so
little T and the lack of hand holding.
So I didn't notice this the first time I went through the series, but I did the second Norma
Senva was mentioned in God, Emperor of Dune.
And then she was like in one line and then she was mentioned again in chapter house or
heretics and then she shows up again in Sandworms of Dune.
And she's a super important character in the last book.
Yeah, the Oracle of Time.
You know, the person who invented space travel as we know it and Spice Priscence as we know
it and all this important stuff.
But there was no hand holding to show you how important this person was.
No, absolutely not.
And I'll tell you that we heard about the Butlerian Jihad and it didn't really go into
depth about what was all going on until I got to Hunters of Dune, which is the first
book that Brian and Kevin wrote.
But they had also previously written the kind of the Butlerian Jihad trilogy with Serena
Butler and everything like that.
And that's the big war against the thinking machines.
And I remember texting you, Mike, and saying, man, I wish I would have read that trilogy
before finishing up the series here.
But and I'll go back and I'll read these things because, you know, I did enjoy this whole
series, but that's kind of outside the main scope of the main timeline.
So you don't necessarily have to.
But I feel like the last two books would have been a little bit more impactful had I read
that that trilogy.
Right.
And I have read the trilogy and it is good.
So as an aside, I'm definitely halfway through.
Oh, me too.
Definitely halfway through my cigar.
And I like it.
It's fantastic.
I don't think there's been a flavor change, but it's been consistent.
Mine's getting darker.
It's getting stronger and darker.
And I like it.
You know what I just said?
I just said I don't think there's been a flavor change.
And I took a big puff and I'm like, this is darker now.
So I think I just hit that flavor change.
So anyway, yeah, they don't handhold you.
And we all know about the Butlerian Jihad because the strictures of not creating a machine
that thinks like a man is ever present.
But we don't really know anything about the characters who are involved with the Jihad.
Yes.
Which makes a big comeback.
It does a huge comeback in the last two books or last three really, because Frank was setting
it up in the last one that he wrote with the Tachyonnet and fleeing Chapter House and being
searched for.
But I was going to say that this was it?
Is it Norma?
Yes.
Because she invented the, I don't know, the Holtzman engines.
But they're named after Holtzman.
So I kind of want to read that story about how she invented it.
But this guy Holtzman, like, took credit.
That is the Butlerian Jihad trilogy.
Okay.
So that's definitely one that I need to read.
But that was very, very interesting.
And yeah, I think everything's super interesting.
You know, they kind of bring you in with Dune and Spice is really interesting and the things
that it can do.
Spice is gasoline or petroleum, petroleum, because everything is made from Spice, just
like everything is made from petroleum in our modern society.
Like I say, there's messages in there about society.
It's just not, you have to analyze it.
Well, it's not heavy handed.
No, no.
Dune had to be rewritten because the first version was a little heavy handed with the
Spice is petroleum concept.
Okay.
And the planetologist was the main character, not Paul.
Okay.
So I wanted to talk about Liet Kienz briefly.
And you and I had a little bit of a disagreement on the new Dune movie.
And you were upset that they made Liet Kienz a female.
And I said, well, that doesn't bother me.
And you said, oh, but it will.
And I've read all eight books and it still doesn't bother me that Liet Kienz was a female
in the movie.
It bothers me because in the Dune universe, all powerful women are Ben-Jezerit and Liet
Kienz isn't a Ben-Jezer woman.
You know what I mean?
Like that's part of the universe.
But she's Fremen.
That's true.
Or he's Fremen.
Well, he's Fremen, she's Fremen.
I will make an exception for that.
I've watched the Dune movie now again, twice, I think.
And I'm a lot more, I'm a bigger fan of it now than I was the first time I watched it.
And the first time I watched it, I really liked it.
So yeah.
And I really liked the Dune, the new Dune movie.
And I'm excited for the second part.
I know they're not going to, if they're taking two movies to do the first book, there's no
way they're going to do all eight of the books.
No, I think that our best case scenario is they'll go through Children of Dune and then
be done with it.
And they might do a little preview of God Emperor, you know, just like a flash of Leto
is full sandworm.
Yeah.
But, and that's fine.
I mean, and who knows?
They might do a Netflix mini-series or something that kind of like rounds out the rest of it,
but it won't be the original actors from the movie.
HBO might do a series.
Yeah.
Somebody, somebody might do one.
Well, HBO owns the rights.
Oh, okay.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
There's good odds that it'll be good.
Yeah.
I was just saying like, you know, in today's society, if you've got a good, good story
and a good IP, there's a good chance somebody's going to pick it up and do a mini-series.
So, but I didn't know HBO owned the rights.
I would, if HBO came up with a Dune mini-series, I would pay for HBO.
So but I'm a Dune fan.
So, but going back to Liet Keynes, Liet Keynes comes back in the last two books because the
Benedicessarate fully embraced the Gola program and they get volunteers from amongst their
ranks to be converted to these tanks.
And it's a kind of a major plot point because they pick up this group of Jews led by the
rabbi who is a face dancer.
Becomes a face dancer.
Yes, that we find out later and becomes one of the new face dancers as almost undetectable.
And his chosen woman became a Benedicessarate and then volunteered to be a tank.
And so he felt this huge amount of grief and whatever remorse and refused to leave her
side even when she was a tank and basically brain dead.
But they embrace their own program and they bring back all of these people from history
because lo and behold the Tlaxu have been gathering samples shortly after the deaths
of all of these people.
And you have to gather the cells right after the death to get all of their life memories
back because that's a huge part of the Gola program is you have to reinstate their memories
so they can fully become who they were to begin with.
And so they bring back Stilgar and Liet Keynes and even in their Gola lives, there's no reason
Liet Keynes couldn't have been a woman.
So I think I think that switch was perfectly fine with me.
It's not that it's not fine.
I just I think it hurts the gender politics between the Benedicessarate and the Tlaxu
because there's that juxtaposition and it will never be explored in the movies.
So for the movie context, it's fine.
Yeah, I guess.
Well, but they had cells of Lady Jessica.
So I don't know why they wouldn't.
Yeah, and I don't know why they wouldn't have taken cells from Liet Keynes regardless of
gender.
It's not regardless of gender.
It's just it takes away from the internal politics of the universe.
You know what I mean?
It's not like I die hard against it.
I just I mean, I guess I don't really see when it comes to that.
I don't really see how it takes away from the gender politics of the universe because
you have a Serena Butler and you have Lady Jessica.
And I mean, I guess I don't know Serena Butler's background if she was Benedicessarate or not,
because that was so far in the past.
She was pre-Benedicessarate order.
Pre-Benedicessarate.
But a big name and Lady Jessica was only a big name because she kind of stood against
the Benedicessarate and she was the mother of Paul.
And they had Chinese DNA.
So yeah, and she was a Fremen woman, but she was linked to Paul.
And Liet Keynes was father of Cheney.
And if Liet Keynes was mother of Cheney, I don't see why that would be a big issue.
Oh, it's not.
It's not.
It's not a issue of damaging the story.
It's more of I like the paradigm of the Tlaksu versus the Benedicessarate a lot.
I think it's hilarious.
Oh, I like it too.
They're both evil in their own way.
You know what I mean?
Even in the books, it's well, even the books when you're reading, it's very clear that
they're both not good.
There are no good guys, quote unquote, in the doing universe.
Everybody is a bad guy, including the Atreides, who are supposed to be the good guys.
Well, even people that are trying to be good are still villain vilified or villainified
or whatever the word is.
Yes, they have villainous behavior.
Nobody is a pure actor.
Paul Atreides is not a perfect person.
No.
And I think part of it is because they set up or he sets up this very, like you said,
very faction based, almost feudal landscape where, you know, the Atreides value honor
and loyalty to a fault in a lot of cases.
I mean, that's how you get a million Golas of Duncan, Idaho and Lado too, just unceremoniously
murders them and orders another one cooking, you know?
So he had like a standing order of he always had Duncan Golas ready to go whenever he felt
like killing the one because the one got too knowledgeable or, you know, had issue, moral
issue with the path Lado too was taking.
They mentioned one time later that Duncan, Idaho only lived a handful of full lives where
he died peacefully in bed out of the 10,000 lives of Duncan, Idaho.
Yes.
Well, that was super interesting because later on they say that they managed to the Tlaxu
managed to culminate all of Duncan's other lives into their current Gola, whatever current
Gola they were growing.
So it was, it was their own Tlaxu kind of breeding program almost in a sense where they
kept tweaking him and the Tlaxu would keep building in different things to their Golas
to fit their own designs.
And it also needs to be said that the Tlaxu were Golas themselves.
Yes.
Yes, of course.
And that was interesting because like Skytail and Waif have very short lifespans because
of the accelerated stuff, but that, but on Tlaxu, they always had all of the tanks ready
and they had other Golas growing.
So it didn't necessarily matter if their lifespan was 20 years versus 80 years or with the spice
life enhancing, you know, capabilities, a hundred years or 200 years or whatever it
was.
They were always ready to go.
Tag lived 300 years and he did not use spice.
Through the breeding program, they led naturally longer and longer and longer lives.
I think it was mentioned that the Fremen routinely lived to be 180 and they didn't have a breeding
program.
Well, and that I think, well, but they use spice.
That they use, they use spice.
Yeah.
So a double the natural lifespan.
Yes.
Spice gives you an extra 90 years or a hundred years or so depending, you know, lifespans
are interesting because even today, the lifespan is largely dependent on country that you live
in and, and your own genealogy, of course, but
And your lifestyle and your lifestyle, obviously.
Yes.
Yeah.
I, uh, I'm glad that you really enjoyed Dune.
I did.
I'm excited to read at least the Butlerian Jihad.
I know they did a whole bunch of house books.
They did House Harkonnen and House of Trades and they've done what?
Ben and Jezret, Ben and Jezret book and some other, some other books.
So
Yeah.
So the house books, uh, Atreides, Harkonnen and Carino take place before Dune, the original
book.
And then there's the, uh, Butlerian Jihad trilogy that takes place like thousands of
years beforehand.
And then they have the Caladan series, uh, which is just coming out now.
And I'm just starting that one.
I haven't read it.
And then they have Mentats, Navigators and Sisterhood.
And that takes place after the Jihad, almost immediately after the Jihad.
Okay.
The Butlerian Jihad or Paul's Jihad?
Butlerian Jihad.
Okay.
It's the Sisterhood, the Mentats and the Navigators is kind of like the creation of the society
post Butlerian Jihad.
Okay.
So the creation of the factions.
Yep.
The creation of the factions.
How it kind of, how the lands rod got created.
The lands rod for, we haven't mentioned it.
The lands rod is this, uh, house or it's like a Senate with all the major houses.
It's like a parliament.
Yeah.
And, uh, the idea is that the lands rod and the Imperial court have equal levels of military
power as a, they're like equals quote unquote.
Yeah.
And then you have CHOM.
Yep.
You have CHOM, which is the banking guild.
And they're the ones that control all the spice.
And you have the spacing guild.
Yep.
The navigators guild who are the only ones who can do interstellar travel.
For a time.
The Ixians.
Not even initially.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
And we didn't talk about the Ixians yet, but they do technology.
So they do everything short of creating a thinking machine.
And in God Emperor of Dune, Leto II is relying on them to basically build thinking machines
for him going against the convention against thinking machines.
Yes.
Ix and the Richazis both build technology, but there are also houses in the lands rod
that just happens to be their specialty.
Each of the houses owns a certain number of planets and they specialize in whatever they're
selling to all the other groups.
Yes.
And after, so after the God Emperor of Dune, he kind of set off what they call the scattering.
And so you have the old empire, which is kind of all the planets in the first three Dune
books.
And then after that, people scatter and go everywhere.
So the face dancers go out and they kind of create this group of handlers and I'm trying
to remember the name of those things, the futars.
Futars, yep.
But they're all human.
Like they all started as human, but it's been thousands of years, like, you know, tens of
thousands of years or whatever it's been.
And so these humans have developed to be more animalistic.
And it's the same with the, can't remember what they're, what they're called, but the
divers, the diving population on the planet that gets the sooth stones.
Yeah, I can't remember.
They're almost like, yes, they're almost like the futars because they're more animalistic,
but they still started as human at one point in time because there's no aliens in the whole
series.
It's all kind of evolution or breeding that has driven these big crevices.
More machines.
The machines come in and we haven't talked about the machines yet and we should because
that's kind of the culmination of the thing because it's almost the second machine, but
Larry and Jihad type of thing.
Yes.
So the scattering sent all these beings out and they came into contact with Omnius's empire.
And that's how the face dancers, the super duper face dancers were created by Omnius,
well, by Erasmus.
Yes.
And Omnius was the, what, the OG thinking machine.
And he created like different nodes of himself and survived the Belarion Jihad.
And Erasmus was more, I don't know, I would almost, I would almost, if we're doing like
modern day comparisons, Omnius is maybe more of a Trump and Erasmus is more of like a shadow
player kind of like pulling the puppet strings.
So he knows Omnius's weaknesses and strengths and fed him data to let him quote unquote
jump to his own conclusions to do things that would only better Erasmus's ultimate goals.
Yes.
Erasmus was an independent robot.
Yes.
He was more interested in, so all the new face dancers would come back and basically
download all of the data of all of the humans that they had interacted with, all of their
other memory quote unquote, right?
And Erasmus would download that because he was trying to figure out the core of humanity,
basically, like what, like humans were fascinating to him and he wanted to understand everything
there was to know.
And I really liked the last interactions between Duncan and Erasmus in the last book.
Yes, I like them too.
It makes a lot more sense after you read the Belairean Jihad.
I'm not going to lie.
But yeah, I felt very interesting.
Yes.
And if you look at when they were published, I think, yeah, the Belairean Jihad was published
before Sandworms and Hunters of Doom.
Yeah, because I think they didn't find those outlines until after they'd started publishing
other things.
Yeah, the outlines were found in a safety deposit box or something like that.
Yeah, it was wild.
Yeah.
But they had started publishing like these side things based on other note scraps that
Frank had made.
And so they took those and kind of ran with them.
And then they found the outline for like the conclusion of the main timeline.
So I kind of wove it all together.
And I never really felt like I had to read other stuff in Dune until I read Hunters of
Doom in the first two chapters, I'm like, fuck, I should have read the Belairean Jihad
books before starting this, because that's when they started leaning heavily into that.
And you know, it makes sense because they wrote those and they want to like get you
to read them on one hand.
But maybe that was truly Frank's vision was to tie the Belairean Jihad back into the conclusion
of the Dune main timeline.
So oh, there's no doubt there's enough droppings.
Oh, that's not a very nice way to put it, but droppings in the Frank Herbert written
series to where it all ties in with the wheels within wheels that is Dune.
Yeah.
And it's so I'm not saying it's super complex, but it is wheels within wheels.
That's how everything operates.
Yes.
There's a lot of I don't know, I would almost say this is sci fi second and kind of like
political thriller first in some sense of the thing, because it depends on how you want
to read it.
But if you're going to read the whole full on thing, it's almost more political than
it is sci fi.
I mean, it's definitely sci fi setting.
It's a sci fi setting for a political intrigue type story.
The sci fi is almost secondary.
And I mean, it kind of punches all the buttons and things I like, like I like sci fi and
I really enjoy the political intrigue where, you know, people's motives and goals aren't
clear upfront.
And it takes you some time to understand the complexities of everything, because even though
there's only there's a limited like a finite number of factions, they all have kind of
long term goals.
Outside of some of the male leaders, you know, like Duke Leto Atreides, what did he want?
He wanted to use desert power and keep banging his hot wife, Lady Jessica, you know, Baron
Harkonnen wanted to keep banging underage dudes that look like Paul and rape and torture
and murder and be all that stuff, you know, and it was interesting because like they brought
back not they but like the face dancers brought back Baron Harkonnen and he got to start turning
Caledon into an industrial wasteland so he was kind of how maybe the America, the United
States of the universe where he wanted to turn everything into like an industrial hellscape
and then rape and torture people.
Oh, yes.
Dune, just like Lord of the Rings definitely has an anti, not anti capitalistic, but anti
all out rape and pillage attitude, you know,
Yeah, so the destruction of the natural environment, so yeah, it was very pro ecology.
And I read somewhere that Frank was very interested in, I don't know if terraforming is the right
word but kind of like the ecological cycles and that's why Dune was, you know, so pivotal.
Frank Herbert was a Republican too, interestingly enough, he was like a campaign manager for
several Republicans before he was.
Oh, okay.
He was always a writer, but yeah, he was a Republican and he was a speechwriter.
So he was like old school Republican though before it was all about like the modern Republican
Party, you know what I mean?
He was like the hangover from the FDR years style Republican.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, where it was a little bit more, in my opinion, reasonable, but very interesting.
I read the Frank Herbert biography by Brian Herbert as well.
Okay.
So, and that's a good read too.
Okay, yeah.
Off to delve more into it.
I know the eight books for me, they weren't really a struggle because I thoroughly enjoyed
all of them, even the ones that I rated a four out of five instead of a five out of
five, but I mean, so it is eight books and outside of the follow up to Dune, which is
very, very short, Dune Messiah, I think, was the shortest of the whole bunch.
Yes.
So it's a lot of time spent in that universe.
And so there is some kind of, you know, universe or IP fatigue kind of going through all eight
of them.
Well, yeah, the first six books took 20 years.
And then the last two you read were 20 years after that.
So, yeah, there's definitely when you read them all as a group, it's kind of like reading
Harry Potter.
Even one book a year was the thing, it was a lot easier to read all the Harry Potters.
Now if we were to sit down, granted they're young adult novels, I could probably read
them in a month, but I'm sure I'd get tired of reading Harry Potter.
Yeah, and I only read Harry Potter after they're all done and after the movies were mostly
done and I didn't really get the fatigue with them because they're written for the age group
that the main characters were.
So the first one is kind of very much like, you know, I don't know, middle school-ish
level and then it kind of ramps up, but you're only ever getting to like high school level.
Whereas Dune, there's so much going on and so many different factions and so much political
things going on in the background that aren't and they're not handed to you.
So it is a little bit of work to try and like keep all this stuff in your mind as you're
reading through them.
So when you get four books in, you're like, I've been spending an awful lot of time in
this universe.
I kind of need to read something else before I get to the next book.
So it took me a while.
Let me pull it up.
I will tell you.
Dune actually changed the way that I interact with people at work.
Isn't that interesting?
I tried to do more wheels and plans within plans.
Oh yes.
Yeah, I definitely did change the way that I do things with like my long-term planning.
So here's what it says.
I read Dune between March of 2022 and April of 2022.
So it's taken me a full year to read all eight Dune books.
Not necessarily because of the length, but you know, we read Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse
Five, Lord of the Flies for the podcast in between those.
And I read a couple other books in between those.
Mostly just as kind of like a break, you know, like I felt almost too involved in Dune and
I needed kind of like a palate cleanser before I went to the next book.
Not because they're overly laborious, but I mean, it's a lot of stuff to take in.
Right.
And Dune, they're written for college level readers.
They're not simple.
Yeah, for sure.
I've listened to a lot of audiobooks between, I can tell you that.
And I've read several books as well.
I've been on a Chomsky kick lately and it's really depressing.
Okay.
I don't think I've read any Gnome Chomsky.
And I know we briefly mentioned that last episode.
It's fairly predictable, but it's depressing.
Yeah.
I mean, most things are if you think about them.
Alas, this is a Dune episode and not a depressing episode.
I mean, there's a lot of depressing things in Dune to be fair.
Yeah.
It's not always, mostly it's not very happy.
I'm not going to lie.
Yeah.
I was very happy that Leto II was one of the Golas in the last two books.
And like I said, I think he's my favorite character, even though he didn't really play
a huge part.
I guess he did play a huge part in the last two books, in the last book being specific,
because he basically told the sand worms to fuck some shit up on Synacrity, or Synacrity?
The Thinking Machine planet?
Synchrony.
I think it's supposed to be Synchrony.
Okay.
Synchrony.
Yeah.
And that was cool.
And then he got to rejoin with his Pearl of Wisdom that in God Emperor of Dune, he sent
out his consciousness into each then new sand worm.
So they were all kind of him.
So he kind of did his own mini Gola project.
But going back...
Yeah, Leto, he was interesting because he was kind of a one man band that had his own
breeding program.
And he had these massive plans that nobody else was aware of that came to fruition in
the end.
So it was really satisfying.
Yeah.
And a lot of the stuff that he, like you said, a lot of stuff that he did came back in the
end and made everything possible and made the conclusion of the entire series possible
because of what he did.
And it bought Duncan all the time he needed at the end to finally realize, but it took
Paul to tell Duncan that Duncan was the one to kind of kick Duncan off into his full on
role, which is interesting because that's the whole point of Gola's is you need kind
of like an inciting incident, whether it's like crazy sex with a benedicite or they fucking
drown Stilgar to get his memories back, you know, and a firm and who's who held all water
sacred and they put him in an excess of water, right?
To trigger his memories.
And Duncan had all this latent stuff that needed an additional kick.
Like he already had his Gola memories back, but he needed that additional kick to get
to his full potential.
Which you wouldn't have had if if Lado II hadn't bred the Atreides to be invisible from
prescience.
Yes.
And like I say, it's well, I think you mentioned it first.
It's more of a political intrigue story than it is sci-fi.
But it is sci-fi too.
Don't get me wrong.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
But that's a super cool about it.
I think it's not just sci-fi for sci-fi.
And I would say the original most of the Star Trek's, right?
Like the original Star Trek and Next Generation and stuff like that.
They're all kind of the Star Trek's are kind of like morality plays set in a sci-fi universe
to make them palatable.
And I don't know that Dune's any different, you know, but they tackle really heavy things
set in a sci-fi thing.
So it's not like, hey, this is here now, even though it is kind of here now.
Yeah.
That's what good sci-fi is, though, right?
It's not a story about magic things or technology.
It's a story about important things set in a sci-fi setting to make it palatable.
So it's kind of like Deep Space Nine, which is my favorite Star Trek.
That's a political intrigue story and a war story set in a sci-fi universe.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
So I know that I listen to the audio controls the wormhole.
Yeah, he who controls the wormhole controls it all.
He who controls the spice controls it all.
Right.
Yep.
Like I say, spices petroleum people.
Well, let's talk about the honored maters for a second, because I thought their origin
story was very fascinating.
And you don't get that in the first.
And I think that's the great thing about Dune is Dune introduces all these people.
And it's not till a couple of books later that you find out their origin story and who
they are and what they kind of stand for.
And so the honored matries were just kind of these like war hungry women that were crazy.
And they had and they had their own version of spice, which was adrenaline from their
dying victims.
And they would somehow harvest that and ingest that.
And they had orange flecked eyes instead of the blue and blue of the spice addicts, as
it were.
Yes.
And they started out as a political weapon to control all the men that they interacted
with.
Yes.
And that's disgusting.
And where can I find one?
No, I'm sorry.
Anyway.
And it was interesting because the one of the Duncan golas was trained as an anti honored
matri sex thing so he could break honored matries and things.
So that was an interesting play as well in there.
But the honored matries started as exodal tanks.
Yep.
They were Tlaatuksu women who were saved.
And they hated the Tlaatuksu.
And so they got out of their tank status and waged an unholy war on all Tlaatuksu, which
kind of then expanded and spilled out to anybody who stood in their way.
But it's a very sympathetic mission statement, I guess, not that that was their mission statement,
but hearing their origin story, it's hard not to feel empathy for them.
Yes.
Yeah.
Which is interesting because it's the same as the Bene Gesserit because in the first
few books, the Bene Gesserit are these evil witches who have these evil plans and do these
evil things.
And then later on, you're rooting for the Bene Gesserit against the honored matries,
against the Tlaatuksu, against the Thinking Machine Army.
And the first few books of honored matries are like, these women are crazy and psychotic
and evil and evil and evil.
And then you're like, oh, but that's their origin story.
So maybe they're not as evil as we thought.
And maybe that's the greatest part about Dune is you can get these people that you think
are evil because of what they're doing.
But he's asking you to sit there and think about what led to their decisions.
And that's the ultimate point of the ultimate book.
The last book is the Duncan is the ultimate Kiswetch Hatterach, right?
And he's the Sasquatch.
He's the SamSquatch.
And he needs to bridge the gap between the Thinking Machines and the humans, just like
they had to bridge the gap between the honored matries or Mirbella had to bridge the gap
between the honored matries and the Bene Gesserit to create the new order.
And just like Paul had to bridge the gap between this and Leto had to bridge the gap between
that.
And it's all about finding that common ground.
Yes.
Well, that's, I think one of the overarching messages is like the middle way.
It's one of those, the middle way is usually the correct way, not the extreme.
Yes.
Find what you can.
By the way.
Oh, go ahead.
Yes.
I was going to say find what you can agree on and then figure out everything else.
And that was kind of the coolest thing about Erasmus was he wasn't bloodthirsty like Omnius
was because he was actually seeking understanding, maybe not in the in the in the correct way.
But I did enjoy Krone when he came all in, he was all like puffed up and like, oh yeah,
well Erasmus, guess what?
Like we've had our own plans and Erasmus is like laughing at him.
And like there's a whole like couple pages on Erasmus picking the right laughter samples
from his databanks to like laugh in Krone's face.
And Krone's just getting like saltier and saltier.
And and then Erasmus is like, come on, like you're fucking stupid.
Of course I knew.
Also, I built in a kill switch.
So you're all fucking dead now.
You know, like it's hilarious.
Oh, it's fucking funny.
It was a like I say, it had a very satisfying end.
It was not a Stephen King novel.
Not at all.
Stephen King is good for three quarters of the book.
Mostly.
There's some books that are outside of that outside of that rule.
But
The book tower was good all the way up until the last like twenty five pages.
OK, my favorite my favorite Stephen King book is Pet Sematary.
I think that's that's literary gold.
The other ones, I think the stand is good.
I haven't read some of the other ones, but a lot of the other books are so good.
And then at the very end, he wants to toss in like 13 other things.
And I always think to myself, man, Stephen, you had me freaked out about this killer clown.
Why are you bringing in a giant spider at the end?
Like I'm all freaked out about the clown.
I don't need the giant spider.
Just give me the clown thing.
Let's just stick with that.
I like the shining.
The shining was good.
But I think that's the movie, too.
You know, oh, the yeah, the movie, the Stanley Kubrick movie is great.
He hated that one, though, and he made a made for TV one that I've seen that one a lot more
closely.
Yeah.
Anyway, go on with the we're doing Dune.
We're not trying to do Stephen King, but yes, satisfying endings.
I'm in my last half of an inch and I need a roach clip because it's definitely getting
hot, but it still tastes wonderful in my opinion.
Yeah, this one's great.
And I really enjoy this.
Phenomenal.
If you see one and you haven't had one, try it.
They're good.
Yes, indeed.
So anything else you want to talk about doing?
No, just wheels within wheels.
And if you read it, it will change the way you interact with the world, especially when
you're trying to do long term planning with people that you perceive as nefarious actors.
Or even people you perceive as friends.
Possibly.
Yeah, possibly.
If you want to be a real prick.
Possibly.
You don't have to be a prick about it, but you have to understand.
I mean, the whole point about Dune is everybody has their own agenda and you never know.
You never know the timeline of somebody else's agenda.
Because Krone, he was one of the new face dancers, had an agenda and he was so smug
throughout the last three books or whatever, right?
Or the two books or whatever it was.
And he was so smug and he was always thinking to himself like, well, the Omnius has no idea
and so-and-so has no idea because they would go and infiltrate all these other things and
replace Bene Gesserits and Ixians and Tlaxu with face dancers.
And so he really felt, and even like the Spacing Guild people with face dancers.
And so they kind of brought about a big loss in the Navigators and a big loss in the Bene
Gesserit and a big loss in all these other factions.
But in the end, it didn't matter because Erasmus's agenda was a lot more long term than Krone's
was and Krone thought his was long term.
Yeah, he was running for a couple hundred years.
Yeah.
Which is nothing in the time span of 15,000 years.
Oh no, for sure.
But that's what I mean.
Even if you have a friend or somebody that you think is a friend at work or wherever
and they're doing some weird things and you're like, well, that's kind of weird, but you
know what?
They're my friends, no big deal.
But you never know what their timeline is.
Their timeline could be a week or two weeks or a couple months or it could be a couple
years or it could be...
I mean, like in modern society, it's not going to be a hundred years because that'd be some
weird level of bullshit.
Yeah, it's all about your timeframe and what your goals are and spreading out your wheels,
you know, multiple planes of action, different avenues.
And that was kind of the thing was in the last couple of books, right?
Like Omnius, they thought they had the one Quizrach Haderach.
I'm still not saying that right, I don't think.
It was Zac Tadarach and he was only one of many, one of many.
Well, yeah.
And Apollo, right?
They had Paul Atreides, but they named him Apollo and gave him to Baron Harkonnen, Zgola
to subvert.
And they thought they had the one and then they wanted the other one, which they thought
was Paul Atreides from the No-ship, which turned out to be Duncan, not even Leto or
any of the other people that they had grown as Zgolas.
But they were so sure it was Paul, the Paul Gola, whether it was Apollo or Paul, and they
knew it was one of the two.
Or they thought they knew it was one of the two.
Yeah, that was...
And Omnius even said, like, I don't even...
Omnius was like, well, even if the one is dead, we sell the other one, it doesn't matter.
But ultimately it did, because the plans within plans or the timeline of the agenda.
And it ended up being Erasmus, who kind of fucked Omnius over, which is probably a good
thing because Omnius' goals were completely different than Erasmus' goals.
Right.
Very interesting.
People who haven't read it should go out there and do it.
Even though we did throw some spoilers in, it's still worth a read.
Well, there's spoilers in.
I think there's so much, though, that even if you listen to this and you haven't read
them, if anything we've said has seemed interesting, I don't think that by the time you get to
the eighth book...
I don't know how much of what we talked about on this episode you'll remember, and there's
so much more complexity to it than we could ever possibly talk about in an hour and a
half on an episode.
So it's still definitely worth it.
And I guess I'll ask...
I have a question for you, Mike.
What's that?
That is, after having read the main eight book trilogy...
Yeah, trilogy.
I'm going all Douglas Adams.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy in five parts is how he builds his series.
So having read the full eight book main timeline series, is my next stop the Balharian Jihad,
or what would you say my next reading from the Dune University?
I would say Balharian Jihad.
Like I say, the house series takes place pre-Dune, but with all the main Dune characters.
And then you have...
Okay.
Let's see here.
I'm looking at the list right here.
Oh, come on now.
The fall of Dune, the winds of Dune, that takes place between Dune and Dune Messiah,
basically.
Okay.
So that takes place with like during Paul's Jihad.
But I would say that the Balharian Jihad books are gold.
They're winners.
You'll like them.
Okay.
Yeah.
That was kind of like my inkling after reading the full eight books.
And even before I finished, well, when I started to book seven, and I remember, and I said
this earlier in the episode, that I texted you and I said, man, I wish before book seven
I would have read the Balharian Jihad stuff.
Yeah.
The Balharian Jihad is, you have to read that before you can read like the schools of Dune
series for sure.
Okay.
And then if you're still interested, you know, you could read the other ones too.
Yeah, I feel like essential reading though is probably the eight main series books and
then the Balharian Jihad trilogy and everything else is kind of like icing on the cake probably.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not obsessed with the Dune universe, but I really enjoy it.
So I'm just kind of going through as they come out.
Like the Heir of Kaladan came out last year.
So I haven't read that yet, but it's on the list.
So yes.
But I guess the good news is like it's his son and going largely based off of a lot of
notes and things that they found or that he found.
And you know, it's at least within the spirit of Frank and what Frank might have wanted.
So it's not a complete and you know what I didn't, there wasn't a huge tonal shift.
It was a little bit of a shift in writing style between the last book Frank wrote and
the first book Brian and Kevin wrote, but it wasn't drastically.
So it's still very much felt like Dune and like Frank was writing.
Yeah, they do a good job.
So I think that's one where, you know, it's, I mean, I know that they're doing it because
they make money off of it, but I feel like they're also doing it because they really
love the series that Frank started and they found a lot of notes and things that he left
behind kind of like Christopher Tolkien did with Lord of the Rings and everything.
So I don't feel like it's a complete money grab, although that is certainly part of it,
I'm sure.
But I think they're trying to do it as close to what Frank would have wanted as possible,
which is great because it seems like they're good stewards of the franchise.
Yeah, I agree.
And Brian Herbert, he's getting old too.
So yeah, soon Dune will be done entirely.
And it's not like reading Star Trek or Star Wars books, which I've read a few, which they're
different.
They have totally different authors.
So of course they're going to be totally different.
For sure.
Yeah.
So it's nice to have good stewards of the franchise that are continuing to put out stuff.
Yes.
I mean, I think that whatever Dune properties come out 20 years from now on the screen,
it's probably not going to be as good as what's going to happen now because Brian will certainly
be dead by then.
Yeah, he's 75 now.
Yeah.
So.
And it kind of depends on what they do with the rights and everything after Brian passes
on and Kevin and whatnot.
But I think that there's eight books in the main timeline and there's at least as many,
if not more, books in the, I don't know what we call it, the other supplemental materials
or supplemental stories.
Yeah, the Dune Extended Universe.
So there's plenty of material there.
So as long as if you're making movies or stuff from it, you've got plenty, like plenty.
I don't think there's anyone, any filmmaker alive that could do all eight Dune books in
their lifetime.
Right.
You know, because I know it was Dene Villeneuve who did the first one.
He's going to do part two of Dune and he's got to be old.
And even if he's not, if you take two movies to do one book, you're not going to do all
eight because you could do the second one.
You can do Children of Dune, but that's probably about it for a lifetime just with production
times and everything.
So I mean, there's going to be plenty of Dune stuff out there that people can do and we
wouldn't necessarily have to worry about the subversion of the, like the Star Wars franchise,
right?
Because George Lucas opened it up to everybody and let everybody write Star Wars books.
And so there's so many Star Wars books out there, some of which are great and some of
which are not great.
But I think with the Dune stuff, it kind of depends on what they do after Brian passes
on and what the family chooses to do with the franchise and the rights and everything.
But I don't foresee somebody else coming in and making like Dune fan fiction kind of stuff
that actually gets sold and published.
No, I don't think so.
And Kevin Anderson is 61 now, so he could do more, but he's written a lot of books outside
of Dune.
I don't know if he'd be interested in continuing that on or not.
Yeah.
And I feel like kind of anything post Sandworms of Dune wouldn't be hugely interesting because
that's kind of the whole point is the universe finds balance in Sandworms of Dune.
Yeah, none of the books take place after Sandworms.
So all of this stuff happens in that window, you know, but Larian Jihad to Sandworms of
Dune and there's not much outside of that window.
You could supposedly write other stories about minor characters, but I don't know.
I don't think the interest is there in the public eye, honestly.
No, not really.
We have the the miniseries, the Dune miniseries, and then we have the Children of Dune miniseries,
which I haven't watched yet.
But that takes Dune Messiah and Children of Dune and combines it into one miniseries because
you know, Dune Messiah is a very short book.
And so you already have that.
And those are two miniseries and then you have the Sting movie.
And then now we have the Dune Vien View part one and part two.
Part two is coming out soon.
But I don't see the average movie goer necessarily wanting to see the full eight books in the
main timeline committed to film.
I don't think the interest is there because like we said, Marvel, where, you know, the
first, yeah.
The first three books are all kind of like you have Paul.
Paul is kind of there and you can tie everything together.
But after that, it gets weird.
And you either like that weird or you don't.
And that God Emperor of Dune book is is kind of like if you like that one, you're going
to like all of them.
And if you don't like that one at all, you're not going to like the rest of them because
they only kind of get weirder from there in a sense.
Yeah, you'd be totally lost.
You have to read them in order.
You can't just jump in and know hunters of Dune.
No, not at all.
So you could jump in.
I don't think that God Emperor of Dune, I guess.
Yeah, but you'd be in for like one fucked up ride.
Right.
But so like I don't I'm not overly worried about that.
You know, like a lot of times when people adapt things to the film from a book, it's
kind of like, well, OK, let's see how they do.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I am officially done with my cigar, by the way.
Me as well.
Where we go.
What were your thoughts about the MX2?
This one's really good.
I like it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know what the price point is, but it's a great stick.
It's on the higher end of our normal range.
You can get a stick for nine bucks at a cigar shop.
OK, typically.
Well, the last one we smoked, I think, was about there's almost 20 bucks a stick, I think.
Yeah, for the the LFD.
And that was a phenomenal stick.
But this one's really good.
Oh, yeah.
I would still like to in place of the LFD any day.
Yeah, I liked that this one got kind of darker and more pungent or more strong as we went
along.
Very good.
I also highly recommend the Dune series.
I'm glad there were a couple of books and I gave them a four out of five, but I still
really enjoyed them, but there are a few books where I was kind of like, what in the fuck
is going on?
But if you if you power through those brief moments, I think it's well worth it.
Yes, it's a very interesting read.
Because a lot of these a lot of these plans within plans, wheels within wheels, take multiple
generations in the characters lives or in the characters time frame to come to fruition.
And the things that happened in God Emperor of Dune didn't fully come to fruition until
the very last book.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, you know, if you want to know the full thing, you just got to do the full thing.
Yeah, yeah, it's almost well, God Emperor, you're like lost in a lot of the reasoning
behind things and like, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
But it does.
In the end, it does come around.
Yes.
So and that's and that's the great thing.
And I think the thing that will hinder Dune from ever being a full on eight movie series
thing because there's it's so complex throughout it.
That's not a superhero smash.
No.
And even in the even in this podcast episode is very difficult to summarize every every
little nuance in there.
Oh, it's impossible.
You have to read it for yourself twice.
Yeah, times probably four times.
Probably.
It would be interesting for me to go and reread it again now that I know how it all ends.
But right.
Well, the first time I had noticed the name drops of like Norma Simva, I did.
Oh, yeah.
That at all.
The first read through and the second time I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
There's definitely some very interesting things that only come into play in the last couple
books.
So.
Yeah.
So we recommend Dune and we also recommend the MX to highly recommend the MX to.
Indeed, indeed.
Thanks for listening.
Be safe, have fun.