Few events in the Dune franchise are more critical to explaining its universe than the Butlerian Jihad, so it may be a surprise to learn that the fictional war still holds a lot of mystery for many Dune fans.
Frank Herbert, who created the series, had a few vague explanations of the Jihad, but never fully explained it. Then, after Frank’s death in 1986, his son Brian took over the series and wrote a whole prequel series explaining the war in very different terms than his father. Picking over the pros and cons of each approach is the right of any Dune fan, but HBO’s prequel series, Dune: Prophecy, doesn’t have that kind of luxury. So instead it picks one version of the past and roots the whole universe in it.
But to better understand the universe of Dune: Prophecy, it’s important to first understand the differences between Frank and Brian’s versions of the Jihad itself.
While Frank didn’t include too much explanation of the Butlerian Jihad in his novels, he does at one point feature God Emperor Leto II Atreides describing it as more an ideological movement than a war itself. According to Leto II, it was a moment when humanity began to feel the proliferation of technology and “thinking machines” — essentially computers capable of better-than-human reasoning — had stolen their humanity and made them subjects of the tools they created. In this moment of clarity, a wave of revolution rippled across humanity, leading to the destruction and outlawing of nearly every thinking machine in the universe, and even taking the species a step backward technologically, in order to regain their freedom of choice.
This kind of metaphorical war on technology is a fascinating idea, and a fittingly unique and thorny one for Frank Herbert’s universe. Science fiction is full of universes that hinge on wars fought long ago (like the Clone Wars in the original Star Wars trilogy) but it’s rare that those wars take the form of a social movement rather than an armed conflict, especially given how it changed the way the whole universe functions.
Brian Herbert, on the other hand, chronicled these years in the Dune universe across his numerous prequel novels much more traditionally. The very short version of his story is that it’s simply a big bad robot intelligence that threatens humanity. And to be fair, many of his works in the Dune universe have been based on notes and conversations with Frank while he was alive, so it isn’t really clear where to draw the lines on his ideas versus his dad’s. But what we can say is that in Brian’s prequel novels, the Butlerian Jihad is a more straightforward, Terminator-style war between humans and complex machines that were hell-bent on destroying and/or enslaving humanity.
This is the version of the Butlerian Jihad that Dune: Prophecy is working with, as we see in the opening moments of the premiere. It’s less interesting and unique than Frank’s abstract war, but it is one that’s much easier to follow and communicate for storytelling purposes. (And the show using Brian’s version of the story shouldn’t be much of a surprise, considering that it’s technically an adaptation of one of Brian’s prequel trilogies, called Great Schools of Dune.) The Butlerian Jihad, in the world of Dune: Prophecy, is fresh in the minds of many of the great families, and still an open wound for some of them. The fact that it was a real fighting war, rather than an ideological one, allows viewers to still feel the huge toll it exacted on humanity. We can still see the evidence and remnants of those violent times in which entire houses rose and fell by virtue of their great (or terrible) deeds.
Of course, just because Prophecy has made its version of the Butlerian Jihad clear doesn’t mean the show is going to be full of easy answers. After just the first episode, we have plenty of questions left about who exactly Desmond Hart is and what his powers include, where the Bene Gesserit are in their sordid history of power games, and whose eyes it is that the sisters are seeing in their dreams. But whatever answers the show eventually reveals about those questions, at least we know what kind of robot war started all this chaos.
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