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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure we read the same story. By the time of the inciting incident, the technocrat cyborgs (Titans) have been enslaved by the machine leader, which has no humans in charge of it.

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You did, in fact, read a different story. You're thinking of the story told in the books by Brian Herbert and KJA - which were a distinctly pulpier take on the Dune universe than Frank Herbert's.

Those last books were a lot easier reading! I actually enjoyed them, but I'm still suspect about the whole "finding a floppy disc" thing, seeing as they've been so secretive about it.

We did. Brian Herbert’s expansion of his father’s work is best left in the shelf.

So true. Frank H. is the only author who I connect with the Dune universe. His son and the authors he wrote with totally fudge it up.

In defense of his son, he wrote Dreamer of Dune biographing his father. It was a great book.

A lot of long time Dune fans don't consider those books canon when discussing them in the abstract. Frank Herbert had a vision of what the jihad was and what it meant, and its eventual book depiction was fairly base.

I think you read a lot of books that are post-2000. IMO the original 4 or 5 books imply strongly that it’s man v man, not man v machine

It's left fairly ambiguous by Frank Herbert's books. The Jihad is implied to have taken place over ten thousand years before the beginning of Dune - it's ancient history to everyone involved*, so it's only natural that the details are a little hazy.

*: except Leto II, and he doesn't say much about it

Interesting to note that despite the epochal changes Leto II wrought on human society in service of the “Golden Path”, he retained the Butlerian proscription against computers—despite his personal interest in & use of Ixian devices.

(This may have been to postpone or prevent the breaking of the Spice/Guild monopoly on interstellar travel by the Ixians.)

Leto II had visions of AI-driven Ixian hunter-killers annihilating all human life in the universe. That probably had something to do with it.

After the Scattering and the fulfillment of his eugenics program with the Siona gene, he no longer cares, because it is no longer possible for even AI to eradicate humanity.

His target was removal of prescience - which would have allowed that, AI or no AI.

In fact he also explicitly prepared a renewal of computing and thinking machines in order to break free from spacing guild

The Siona gene didn't actually remove prescience, it hid people from prescience. That's why Leto II is still able to control events as far in the future as Chapterhouse Dune.

This is an important distinction. It's also the case that Leto needed the Ixians for the no-ship technology, which he also regarded as of extreme importance for the same reason. Which also, remember, the Idaho gholas had to be confined to no-ships so they, lacking the Siona gene, wouldn't be visible to prescience.

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