Frank Herbert, who created the series, had some vague explanations for Jihad, but never fully explained them. Then, after Frank’s death in 1986, his son Brian took over the series and wrote an entire prequel series explaining the war in very different terms than his father. It’s every Dune fan’s right to choose the pros and cons of each approach, but HBO’s prequel series, Dune: Prophecydoesn’t have that kind of luxury. So instead it chooses one version of the past and roots the entire universe in it.
But for the universe of Dune: Prophecyit is important to first understand the differences between Frank and Brian’s version of Jihad itself.
Although Frank does not include too much explanation of Butlerian Jihad in his novels, he does at one point describe God-Emperor Leto II Atreides describing it more as an ideological movement than a war itself. According to Leto II, it was a moment when humanity began to sense the proliferation of technology and that “thinking machines” – essentially computers that could reason better than human – had stolen their humanity and made them the subjects of the instruments they created. In this moment of clarity, a wave of revolution swept through humanity, leading to the destruction and outlawing of nearly every thinking machine in the universe, even setting a technological step backward for the species to regain their agency.
This kind of metaphorical war on technology is a fascinating idea, and appropriately unique and thorny for Frank Herbert’s universe. Science fiction is full of universes based on wars fought long ago (like the Clone Wars in the original Star Wars trilogy), but it’s rare for those wars to take the form of a social movement rather than armed conflict , especially considering the way it changed the world. way the entire universe functions.
Brian Herbert, on the other hand, has captured these years in the Dune universe much more traditionally in his numerous prequel novels. The very short version of its story is that it is simply a big, bad robot intelligence that threatens humanity. And to be fair, much of his work in the Dune universe is based on notes and conversations with Frank while he was alive, so it’s not really clear where to draw the line between his ideas and those of his father. But what we can say is that in Brian’s prequel novels, the Butlerian Jihad is a simpler, Terminator-like war between humans and complex machines determined to destroy and/or enslave humanity.
This is the version of Butlerian Jihad Dune: Prophecy cooperates, as we see in the opening moments of the premiere. It’s less interesting and unique than Frank’s abstract war, but it’s 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 a huge surprise, since it’s technically an adaptation of one of Brian’s prequel trilogies, called Great Schools of Dune.) The Butlerian Jihad, set in the world of Dune: Prophecyis 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 combat war, rather than an ideological war, means that viewers can still feel the enormous toll that this war took on humanity. We can still see the evidence and remains of those violent times when entire houses rose and fell by virtue of their great (or terrible) deeds.
Of course, just because Prophecy has made clear his version of Butlerian Jihad, doesn’t mean the show will be full of easy answers. After just the first episode, we still have plenty of questions about who exactly Desmond Hart is and what his powers entail, where the Bene Gesserit are in their sordid history of power plays, and whose eyes are the ones the sisters see in their dreams. . But whatever answers the show ultimately reveals to those questions, at least we know what kind of robot war caused this chaos.