I don't understand why the sand worms can only be raised on Dune...

I don't understand why the sand worms can only be raised on Dune. Why can't you just transport a baby one to another desert planet? And if you can't, why wouldn't the Emperor just base himself on Dune and not give it to other powerful noble houses he doesn't trust?

>I don't understand why the sand worms can only be raised on Dune. Why can't you just transport a baby one to another desert planet?
At first the link between worms and spice was poorly understood. Later, practical reasons and threat of warfare.
>And if you can't, why wouldn't the Emperor just base himself on Dune
Risk of insurrection. The Emperor (at the outset) ruled by a sort of consent, in that he could crush any one House but not all of them. Monopoly on spice (and therefore space travel) would be seen as going for total control. The only option left to the Houses would be war.
>and not give it to other powerful noble houses he doesn't trust?
The reason for entrusting particular Houses was essentially a Xanatos Gambit based on politics. The idea was that Houses with a finely balanced level of power would be given control as they could keep the peace but not resist the Emperor's forces. Look how that worked out eventually.

Nobody but the Fremen and the Spacing Guild really knew that the worms were the source of spice. The Spacing Guild didn't want spice production to spread, because having it limited to a single planet meant they could maintain a monopoly on its availability throughout the galaxy.

And the Emperor didn't want to live there because it was a shithole, and couldn't be terraformed without making it unsuitable for the worms. Giving it to a noble house meant that the recipient house was kept busy with the spice trade instead of being active in galactic politics. It let the Emperor neutralize a rival in a way that appeared to be a reward.

>I don't understand why the sand worms can only be raised on Dune
Because water is poisonous to them unless it's been encysted by the sandtrout, which only the Fremen (and Kynes) understood to be the larval stage of the sandworm

>Why can't you just transport a baby one to another desert planet?
They can. Read Chapterhouse

>why wouldn't the Emperor just base himself on Dune and not give it to other powerful noble houses he doesn't trust?
Let's see

>Because it's easier to let the other houses deal with the headache of living on the most inhospitable planet in the Known Universe and fighting with the Fremen (the most legendary badasses who ever lived, equal in combat to the Imperial Sardaukar) every day for the rest of their lives
>Because the Landsraad wouldn't have tolerated it
>Because the Spacing Guild wouldn't have tolerated it

To name just three reasons

Arrakis was a source of fabulous wealth, but also an enormous white elephant. In both the films Glossu Rabban is a complete moron, but in the novel he was the one guy who actually understood how incredibly fucking dangerous the Fremen were, and how the only way to control Arrakis would be to exterminate them (basically an impossible task).

Why couldn't the Bene Gesserit just kill Paul and breed Leto I with someone else to get those genes?

What if Duke Leto had the palace on Dune remodeled so all the doors were too thin for Baron Fats to fit through?

>implying he didn't

Good think Harkonen didn't need to actually go to Leto only have the traitor put a bow tie on him and drag him out in a stretcher

Well I'll ask here since I've been eyeing the books for a while. Is the whole series worth reading or am I okay with just doing the first book? I kinda don't want to start another big series since I'm in the middle of 2 already.

The first two books aren't that long and comprise a pretty complete arc.

I'd say start with the first two and decide for yourself if you want to read the rest. There are a lot of opinions and feelings based on the sequels and if you're new just determine for yourself and you'll be better off for it.

First book is the only must read. Second is okay. After that it gets weird. Don't read the stuff by Herbert's son, the son was way worse than his father.

but..but..the Oracle of Time!

The genes Jessica had were just as important as Leto's. Her Harkonnen blood tempered the Atreides line to make the ultimate ruler, someone who could lead by example, but also had cunning, who could be ruthless, but would not let his cruelty control him.

Dune is essential

Messiah is good, but nowhere near Dune good and brings SOME closure

Children is... not bad... and genuinely completes the trilogy with the golden path being assured


.... everything else after that is garbage, because the golden path... much like Seldon's plan in Foundation, the nature of The Force in Star-Wars, the location of Earth in BSG etc... is MUUUUUCH cooler when you don't have too much exposition about the details, and that's basically all that the books beyond the third do.

Then there's the book written by his son which are even worse.

All of that planning and Duncan was still better,

>sand worms can only be raised on Dune.
Well, can't blame you for not reading the series past the third book.

>implying there's only one
Oh user...

>Duncan was still better
Only in Dune fanfiction published by Herbert the Lesser.

Also the BG weren't planning anything per se. They were attempting to acquire knowledge and you can't plan around the unknown. The assumed the place they could not look would hold something useful for them but the knowledge which Paul has access to actually makes the BG obsolete and reveals that their machinations are yet more deterministic animalism. All of their careful work gets swept away in a single generation by forces of nature working within humanity that only an all-knowing being could hope to direct.

>tfw friend brings up shit from the junior books every time we talk about Dune
>"b-but he was working from his dad's notes, so it's canon"

Just cause the dude jotted down an idea doesn't mean you can just cram it all in and expect it to work. You're taking a politically rich and nuanced series and continuing it with the guy who wrote licensed Star Wars fanfic ffs

Children is crap, almost as bad as the last 2 Frank books.

Just read Dune. It's the high note. The other books only serve to detract from it, even the ones that are pretty decent (which they all are not).

>Children is crap
This. Everything in Dune felt... necessary. Like it was the logical result of the events that lead up to it. Children did not have that sort of integrity. Ridiculous shit just happened.

...

And a hereditary mental disorder

Because Dune is a poorly thought out setting which was constructed ad hoc as Herbert wrote the books. The stuff you mention all happen in a very short span of time once Herbert himself realized that it would be the natural things to do.

Dune has got lots of action and it is very self contained. kind of like Star Wars.

Dune Messiah is really kind of just a long epilogue with lots of talking. it's quite short and really good.

Children of Dune is kind of a new start for the series. if Dune was WW1 then Children of Dune is the beginning of WW2.

God Emperor of dune is probably the most climactic book in the series. hiroshima and nagasaki.

Heretics of Dune is my favorite and sort of the black sheep of the series. it develops things more laterally than linearly.

Chapterhouse: Dune is kind of underwhelming because pretty much the whole book is spent setting the stage for Dune 7 (the final book) which was never finished.

>And the Emperor didn't want to live there because it was a shithole, and couldn't be terraformed without making it unsuitable for the worms.

this, also doesnt Paul make it the Imperial capital when he becomes Emperor or did I badly misremember the sequel?

also the windows, otherwise he'd just float in

Yeah he does, which causes problems when the terraforming efforts to make the place less of a shithole drives the worms to extinction.

courtesy of Veeky Forums

If Sandworms eat spice to live and turn into spice when they die how is that sustainable?

Also add to this that the spice is in the water ane air and is addictive. If you spend too long on Dune it's hard to leave.

Which was also just as planned. Fucking prescience man.

So was the prescience Paul and Leto had legitimately just fucking magic? Or was it some kind of insanely complicated predictive modelling, like how Mentats could do crazy calculations in their head because computers are evil

Afaik it's really fucking janked up prediction.

A* post

Don't forget psychic powers exist in the setting- not magic perse

I always got the impression that any powers the BG had were just a result of the eugenics and ridiculous training regimen. I don't like using the example twice, but like mentats. Not exactly magic, just an extreme take on human ability.

I don't understand why the oil can only be raised from compressed dinosaurs. Why can't you just transport a baby one to another desert planet? And if you can't, why wouldn't the Trump just base himself on oil desert and not give it to other powerful noble houses he doesn't trust?

HE WHO CONTROLS THE WALL CONTROLS THE UNIVERSE

Children's a terrible read and Emperor is the pinacle of the series

It was predictive modelling based on the entirety of human and pre-human memory

>the most legendary badasses who ever lived, equal in combat to the Imperial Sardaukar
This wasn't really known about them prior to the events of Dune, and was partially due to Paul and Jessica spreading bene gesserit combat techniques among them on top of the skills imparted by their lifestyle.

Its possibly analogous to Egypt circa Ancient Rome, strategically vital but still very foreign

You could argue strategy, but thematically having the Emperor a long way away makes the galaxy feel big and slow

Also the plot wouldn't work

it's this
+ jacked up awareness of the universe. It's why nullships defeat the predictive powers of spice. Because nothing inside one effects anything outside itself you can't follow the dominoes as it were to predict the future via causality.

Sandworms don't eat spice. They eat smaller worms and sand plankton (which are the earliest stage of the sand worm life cycle.) It's not really well explained, but most likely the foundation of the ecosystem is the sandtrout middle stage, given that they're described as half plant half animal.

>Why can't you just transport a baby one to another desert planet?
If it's a baby worm, it will have nothing to eat. If it's a sandtrout it will not have the water it needs to complete its portion of the life cycle. You need to drop a bunch of sandtrout on a watery and destroy the entire ecosystem turning it into something just like Arrakis.

Literally space magic

Holy shit! That cesspool of human defects has managed to be right about something.

>Implying the other boards are not as awful, including ours.

Not comparable, now both you and fuck off.
Jk, we all know you're samefagging.

Pssst. The worms are not native to Arrakis.

Not really, Veeky Forums really is fucking garbage even compared to the rest of this site
And despite the whining, as someone who more or less regularly visits almost half of the boards I really think that Veeky Forums is one of the highest quality ones, especially out of those which move at reasonable pace.