The last noble house on the planet was the mustache-twirlingly evil House Harkonnen, hated rivals of the Atreides who oppressed and slaughtered the native Fremen tribes as “backward savages.” Leto is expected to move into the Harkonnen’s probably booby-trapped castle and maintain their rate of Spice production while keeping peace with the Fremen. House Atreides has been sent to Arrakis to oversee the mining operations upon which the entire galactic society depends. (In small quantities it just gives you precognitive visions, some light psychic powers, and glowing, blue eyes.) Why does anybody fuck with this place? The dunes of Arrakis happen to be the only known source of Spice, the aforementioned drug that gives people the ability to yeet through space. Why everyone is headed to Arrakis aka the dune planetĪrrakis is the eponymous planet of Dune, a desert wasteland populated only by hostile natives and even more hostile giant sandworms.

In reality, House Atreides is being set up to fall. Paul has a lot of enemies, because Duke Leto’s morality just got his whole family unseated from their ancestral home and dispatched to the planet Arrakis. Or a boy whose best bet for survival is to take advantage of thousands of years of cultural manipulation in preparation for a messiah. Paul Atreides, their 15-year-old son, who might be the messiah. And Leto wanted a son so bad ( wow, Leto) that Jessica defied her orders and deliberately had one. She was supposed to conceive a daughter with him in order to form the penultimate generation of the thousand-year Bene Gesserit plan to eugenically produce a messiah, but instead they fell in love. His spouse in everything-but-actually-being-his-legal-wife is Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit adept and his assigned consort. Think of them as “all-female space Illuminati with witch powers.” The major characters of DuneĪmong those noble Houses of Dune are the Atreides, ruled by Duke Leto, your typical Good Noble in Trouble for Having Morals. They don’t talk about how they’re pulling all the strings, but it’s obvious. The invisible fourth pillar of this structure is the Bene Gesserit order.

Power in the galaxy is a three-way balancing act between the Spacing Guild, who hold a monopoly on faster than light travel the Padishah Emperor, who controls a fanatical army of Space Spartans (think 300, not Halo) and a system of alliances between hereditary noble Houses. Instead, we discovered a drug so unspeakably dank that enough of it lets you fold space with your mind. Spaceships can travel faster than the speed of light - but not because we built fancy engines. Everyone has force fields that are impervious to fast-moving projectiles, so they have to fight with swords instead of guns. Humanity lives in a galactic empire that barely remembers Earth. Picturesĭune takes place so many millennia into the future that it is essentially a fantasy universe.

Dune original book