Dune universe

The reason for this is clear.

A leader, even a king, can be questioned, but who is anyone to question a god? I made sure to mention Egyptian pharaohs here because the most successful god king in the Dune universe was actually possessed by an Egyptian pharaoh named Harum.

Paul Atreides' son, Leto II, was born ancient.

He and his sister Ghanima had access to the memories of their ancestors from birth.

Gods do not need a spirit world.

My spirits dwell within me, answerable to my slightest summons.

Leto had his own specific reasons for exactly why he did the things he did, but in the general sense, the purpose of God in the Dune universe is control.

And this seems to be in just about every case.

There's a parallel to be drawn here.

with the Bene Gesserit in the Dune universe.

And I don't know how intentional it was, and I don't know if you have dived into that a lot, but the Bene Gesserit over the course of millennia did seed cultural elements into various planetary peoples so that at some point down the road, they could exploit them and take advantage of it and play into them.

And that is one of the reasons that the story of Dune and how Paul Atreides comes to the Fremen of Arrakis and becomes their leader and everything His mom is there and the Bene Gesserit specifically set some things in motion in that planet's culture centuries or millennia earlier so that they could do that.

Okay.

What I find myself doing, though, is sitting there thinking, what kind of moron would have come up with this idea? Because the one thing that you absolutely want to do when you're in the Dune universe, although clearly it's set against the backdrop of these universal and galactic-spanning events and people and arts and organizations, you want to be on Dune.

Yeah.

And as it says on the book, Arrakis, dune, desert planet, but then doesn't have water listed as an asset.

So I thought it was fun to see Frank Herbert dip his toes into something that's a little less heady than his usual stuff and a little more humorous.

You know, I think Frank doesn't often in the Dune universe take time to be funny.

And here we get to see him play around with comedy a little bit, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

The world of building is kind of where it fell apart for me.

And folks, as the title of this episode indicates...

Today we're venturing beyond Frank Herbert's groundbreaking novels and the adaptations on film and TV into the wild unknown of unpublished documents and works in the Dune universe that you uncovered on your trip last year to the Fullerton Archives in California.

Yeah.

Yes.

What is canon? What isn't canon? The entries that we're talking about today were never published.

For whatever reason, they didn't make the final Dune encyclopedia.

And thus, we are considering these not canon within the Dune universe.

You know, we've always considered the Dune Encyclopedia second tier next to Frank's own words.