Dune: Prophecy | Official Teaser | Max
“10,000 years before the birth of Paul Atreides, before the universe knew them as the Bene Gesserit...”
“The new Max Original Series Dune: Prophecy is streaming this fall on Max.”
Edited to fix an error in the submission title.
I feel like "10,000 years" works better as a bit of hand-wavey poetry rather than a serious suggestion for a setting. I know that societies can be more or less static, but damn, 10,000 years ago, people were just beginning to play with the idea of doing cooler stuff with their stone tools.
That said, the cast and production design looks good. I hope this doesn't suck.
I like the Butlerian Jihad and resulting ban on even the simplest of “thinking machines” as a way to help explain away any anachronisms, too. Clever solution.
I also appreciated that the recent movies haven’t tried to explain that, but hinted at it with, for example, analog gauges in the ornithopter.
The Dune timeline in the books covers something like 20,000 from the beginning of interstellar space travel up to and through the Atreides dynasty and all it kicks off.
I believe Frank Herbert took the stance that once technology gets to that level, it remains static as there is little else to discover/develop.
I believe that Herbert intended it at some level, I just don't think it was well-considered as world building.
It is fine though, as a way to handwave anything that doesn't make sense and to underline just how weird this setting and these people's cultures are going to be. This is not to denigrate it. It's just more a storyteller's trope intended to tell the audience to settle in and leave your expectations behind. I guess this show will step in just after the end of the Butlerian Jihad maybe, but the ebbs and flows of human cultural change over 10,000 years means that it's just one more thing he was intentionally not focusing on, and making a very specific prequel about an era that should be almost lost to the mists of time is inviting questions the "Duneiverse's" nerd-infrastructure is poorly equipped to handle.
I'm sort of just musing, though. I'll absolutely watch it, and if they tell a compelling story I will smile and shrug and not let it affect my enjoyment.
That actually fits in the Dune universe.
Dune itself happens around 20,000 years in the future.
Here’s a timeline that covers the various events in human history
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_(Expanded_Dune)
Considering the title I’m guessing this will cover the inception of the Kwisatz Haderach program by the Bene Gesserite. A long term human genome program thousands of years in the making and undermined by the premature birth of Paul when his mother was supposed to have a girl instead.
I absolutely believe it's been set down. It's just a weird number to have picked in the first place, a full 20k years or whatever into the future. It feels more like Frank Herbert originally just wanted to say "all that happened a long god-damned time ago... don't fixate on it." Yet here we are, fixating on it. If it's a good show, I won't mind at all, but I find it amusing.
It certainly feels and looks like a tv series. As a Dune fan, I'm cautiously optimistic. Hopefully it lives up to expectations, even though there aren't really any expectations yet at the moment.
