What is the Golden Way in Dune?

This post contains spoilers For the books “Dunes” written by Frank Herbert.

A series of “dunes” that extends far beyond Currently planned cinema Waiting for the end, turning into another’s territory. There are serious changes in the acting, significant changes in the thematic focus and significant jumps in time. As long as you come to the fourth book, “God-emperor”, almost all the characters of the first book were dead for almost 3500 years. As long as you reach the fifth book, the “dunes heretics”, almost every hero of the fourth book also died about 1500 years.

Despite all these shifts and changes, Frank Hubert’s author still gave the series several constants to hold on. The first was Duncan Idaho (Jason Momao’s Cinema), the only character that exists in all six books, albeit in the form of a clone. The second and most important constant, however, was the idea of ​​the golden path. This is a concept that is a little elusive and rarely determined with the clarity that readers would like, but it is what the heroes are subtly from the first “dune” page to the last page “Chapter” and continues even in many of the books written by the son of Herbert Brian After the death of Frank.

In essence, the golden path is a vision of the future of humanity, which covers thousands of years, which can only be seen by the person who has high training and is able to see the future. Paul Areides (in the latest films played by Timothy Shalam) fully struggled with the golden path only after by absorbing the water of lifeA very dangerous substance derived from the bile of the dying baby worm.

This is the moment in a book/movie where Paul concludes that his path to the throne is inevitable, that his arrival to power and destruction that come with it are the necessary price for good not only by his family but also Overall. Paul can see that billions of people will die in the Holy War of Fremens, which spread throughout the universe as a direct result of its coming to power, and yet it decides to go through it anyway – partly because it thinks that the alternative will be worse .

So, what is the alternative? Well, stagnation. Humanity at the beginning of the “dune” was stuck in the range of millennium long; That is why the world of the HBO series “Power: Prophecy”, where it takes ten thousand years before the policy came to power, looks like the world in which the gender grew. In essence, all humanity is governed by the only government, the empire, and this lack of diversity (genetic, social, political, geographical) was a long -term threat to existence. There are also hints that the future son of Paul and Chani, summer II, are afraid of an external threat; Perhaps he was afraid of returning to enemy thinking (which were prohibited during the battleship jihad long before the series), or perhaps he feared the first human meeting with a reasonable alien species.

In any case, Paul and summer II believed that humanity was not ready to withstand any of these external threats, and even without them, they seemed convicted of internal collapse at the current trajectory. So, to protect humanity, they thought that they needed to radically shake the status quo of this universe.

For many reasons, perhaps the main one is that Paul was born for a generation before expected, and thus was not the final quisach Hadrakh, as he predicted, Paul did not fully adhere to his desire to fulfill the golden path. Second Book, “Democratic: Messiah”, which is dedicated to the fall of PaulA little vague about what Paul should be done to achieve this, but it is obvious that the golden path will entail even more human suffering and Paul will lose even more of his humanity. He decides to abandon his power and go into the wilderness to never take the throne again.

But although Paul refuses the golden path, his young prudent son of summer II (perhaps a real quice of Hoder) decides to follow him instead. He does this, knowing well that the path requires it to turn into a giant immortal creature-charve (yes, indeed) and control the universe with an iron hand. Hey, it’s a lonely life, but someone has to do it.

Summer II takes power at the end of “Children of Dune” (the third book) and gives us an idea of ​​what its management will be. It is especially noteworthy that it plans to continue deappust of Arrakis, gradually endangered by sand worms that produce a single stock of spices in the universe. At the same time, it will supply reduced spices mainly its close ally, while the rest of the universe will have to do without them. It was a very difficult change for many people throughout the universe, many of whom hoped for a spice to live an unnaturally long life, but summer II believed that it was necessary to deprive humanity dependence on Melange spice to make it stronger and more independent.

Another important factor is that the summer II, being essentially a giant intelligent worm, was mostly indestructible and immortal. Fiction writers often fought with the nature of absolute power, but rarely any leaders gave the character a scale of power as summer II. It is not only almost invincible, but almost all -proclaim.

Summer II allowed himself to kill at the end of the “God’s Emperor”, after more than 3,500 years of continuous control. However, all this was a part of the plan, because his death creates a deliberate vacuum of power, which leads to the fact that the human race no longer controls a single holistic empire. It helps that by this point the dependence of humanity on the spices is largely destroyed; Even if Ben Daplax (the main political faction, responsible for all those clones of Duncan Idahu), finally learned to make spices on their own, this is still not enough to prevent the decentralization of humanity. This is how a great scattering happens when humanity begins to travel around the stars to unknown areas of the universe, as the summer II planned.

Summer II management also led to a large period of technological innovation not only because the planets now needed to learn to function without spice, but also because factions that oppose the reign of summer II knew that they would need the best technologies to overthrow it . It also clearly benefited the public in the heretics and the capitule, as readers see with the invention of non-karablov (starships who cannot reveal anyone with clairvoyance), as well as with the introduction of more advanced Face Dancers. (Spies that can change their appearance). Humanity in general seems to have really taken a step forward from the beginning of the reign of summer II, both physically and mentally.

Unfortunately, Frank Herbert died without finishing the series, so it is unclear what he meant for the planned seventh and last book. Everything we have to work with is the books that his son wrote To put it mildly, disconnect. Most likely, we will never see the exact final purpose of summer II for humanity, assuming that it was what Herbert was planning to see for us. The golden path is very reminiscent of the answer to the question of the meaning of life, because it is difficult to determine it is difficult to imagine, and we are not sure that we would even like the answer if we got it. In a sense, it seems that the series “dune” seems to be a golden path for so long so that it will never reach it in the end.