Dune: Prophecy’s Butlerian Jihad is a little different than you think

Frank Herbert, who created the series, had a few vague explanations for Jihad, but never fully explained it. Then, after Frank’s death in 1986, his son Brian took over the series and wrote an entire prequel series that explained the war in very different terms than his father. Picking the pros and cons of each approach is right for any Dune fan, but HBO’s prequel series, Dune: Prophecydon’t have that kind of luxury. So instead it chooses one version of the past and roots the entire universe in it.

But to better understand the universe of Dune: Prophecyit is important to first understand the differences between Frank and Brian’s versions of Jihad itself.

Although Frank did not include too much explanation of the Butlerian Jihad in his novels, he does highlight at one point that God Emperor Leto II Atreides describes it as more of an ideological movement than a war per se. According to Leto II, it was a moment when humanity began to feel the spread of technology and “thinking machines” – essentially computers capable of reasoning better than humans – had stolen their humanity and made them the subject of the tools they created. In this moment of clarity, a wave of revolution swept over humanity, leading to the destruction and outlawing of nearly every thinking machine in the universe, and the species even took a step back technologically to regain their freedom of choice.

This kind of metaphorical war against technology is a fascinating idea, and a fitting singularity and thorn in Frank Herbert’s universe. Science fiction is full of universes that depend on wars fought long ago (like the Clone Wars in the original Star Wars trilogy), but it’s rare that these wars take the form of a social movement rather than an armed conflict, especially in considering how it changed the way the entire universe works.

Brian Herbert, on the other hand, chronicled these years in the Dune universe across his numerous prequel novels much more traditionally. The very short version of his story is that it’s simply a big bad robotic intelligence that threatens humanity. And to be fair, a lot of his work in the Dune universe has been based on notes and conversations with Frank while he was alive, so it’s not entirely clear where to draw the lines on his ideas versus his father’s. But what we can say is that in Brian’s prequel novels, the Butlerian Jihad is a more straightforward, Terminator-like war between humans and complex machines bent on destroying and/or enslaving humanity.

This is the version of the Butler jihad that Dune: Prophecy works with, 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 story purposes. (And the show using Brian’s version of the story shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given that it’s technically an adaptation of one of Brian’s prequel trilogies, called Great Schools of Dune.) The Butlerian Jihad, in the world of Dune: Prophecyis fresh in the memory 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 one, allows viewers to still feel the enormous toll it took on humanity. We can still see the evidence and remnants of those violent times when whole houses rose and fell by their great (or terrible) deeds.

Of course just because Prophecy has made its version of the Butler jihad clear, that doesn’t mean the show will be full of easy answers. After just the first episode, we’re left with plenty of questions about who exactly Desmond Hart is and what his powers include, where the Bene Gesserit are in their sordid history of power games, and whose eyes the sisters see in their dreams. But whatever answers the show eventually reveals about these questions, at least we know what kind of robot war started all this chaos.