Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, Explained

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, Explained

There’s a fun game fans play with science fiction franchises set in the near future. A film or book that came out in 1975 can pitch 2020 as a far-off space year. When 2020 came, audiences enjoyed pointing out how reality mirrored or missed those fictional predictions. Dune doesn’t provide that option. The story of Paul Atreides takes place 20,000 years from now. Their experience is so removed from ours that they’ve already been through several other far-flung future scenarios. Their war against the rogue AI is called the Butlerian Jihad.

Dune remains one of the most influential science fiction texts of all time. The original book will hit its 60th anniversary next year, but its relatively short lifespan has moved the genre. Frank Herbert created a comprehensive toolkit of science fiction concepts that other authors have folded into new narratives. The Butlerian Jihad is an excellent example.

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What is the Butlerian Jihad?

The Butlerian Jihad was the war and subsequent extermination campaign against artificial intelligence and thinking machines. Some 10,000 years before the events of Dune, humanity rose against the mechanical gods they created and destroyed them. The Jihad rebuilt the universe with new rules and ways of life, constructing the legacies that would become the most notable families in later generations. Thinking machines developed naturally over millennia, gradually reducing and removing labor from the lives of everyday humans. Their presence bred complacency, both physically and psychologically. Humans grew weak and lazy, allowing a new force to topple age-old structures. In many ways, humanity is the hero and villain of the story.

The Jihad develops into a nightmarish galactic combat, but it starts with a much less impressive event. Hostilities begin when twenty humans have their brains surgically removed and placed into preservation chambers, which can operate increasingly convoluted and dangerous mechanical bodies. They were the first cymeks, and they called themselves the Titans. The Titans conquered the complacent universe in a rush of violence. Though their goals were initially noble, they ignored their duties to pursue selfish pleasures. They gradually delegated the work of running their galactic empire to an artificial intelligence until it became a sapient god named Omnius. Omnius spread across the galaxy, killing or enslaving all that opposed him. Omnius launched a war of attrition against humanity, initially claiming many significant victories. The resistance struggled to fight back, but inspiration struck in time.

How did humans win the Butlerian Jihad?

The Jihad began on Earth, where Omnius Prime resided. In 203 BG, a human politician and Viceroy’s daughter named Serena Butler fell into the Titan Barbarossa’s hands. He delivered her to Erasmus, an independent robot obsessed with studying humans. While being studied, Serena realizes she’s pregnant and gives birth to Xavier Harkonnen’s baby, Manion. Erasmus is displeased, leading him to perform an unwanted hysterectomy and kill her son in front of her. She attacks and destroys a guard robot, sparking a brutal revolt among the other nearby slaves. With the help of another slave named Iblis Ginjo and the renegade son of a Titan named Vorian Atreides, Serena spread her rage and grief through the entire human race. This line comes from one of her many spectacular speeches:

The army fosters technology, and technology breeds anarchy because it distributes the terrible machines of destruction. Even before this Jihad, one man alone could create and apply enough violence to ravage an entire planet. It happened! Why do you think the computer became anathema?

The slave revolt killed every human on Earth, but it led to humanity’s first decisive victory. In the Battle of Earth, the human League of Nobles launched ships loaded with atomic bombs to destroy Omnius Prime. Humanity’s original homeworld becomes an uninhabitable, irradiated husk in a flash. This trend continues as the League and Omnius trade genocidal acts beyond imagination. Omnius unleashes a plague that wipes out billions, leading Vorian to pitch a nuclear option. The League utilizes newly realized faster-than-light travel technology to drop pulse-atomics on every occupied planet in the universe. It cost countless human lives but left Omnius stranded on a planet called Corrin, which the League quickly blockades. With the final Battle of Corrin, thinking machines were wiped out.

What replaced the thinking machines?

After humanity won the war, they developed a religious fervor against the machines. The supreme commandment in the Orange Catholic Bible reads: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” Building or owning a computer was an offense punishable by death. Conversely, scientists developed spectacular non-thinking machines. They also made strides in biology. The eventual replacement for thinking machines became human computers called Mentats. Mentats are trained to act as living calculators with infallible perception and memory. Every Noble House employs several Mentats with varied skill sets, negating the need for technology.

The Butlerian Jihad is an epic tale of sacrifice and rebellion. Humanity creates an Empire, rebels against itself, settles into a new dictatorship, builds a new oppressor, and bombs the universe to set itself free. It’s a cyclical nightmare that ends in a new enlightenment and a reawakened belief in humanity’s inherent divinity. It’s also a convenient plot device that allows Herbert to focus on the social forces that govern his universe instead of its technology. Though no one is ever likely to adapt Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Legends of Dune trilogy, there is a spectacular war story in the Butlerian Jihad. It’s a narrative worth experiencing as humanity dabbles with the “things which destroy us as humans.”

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