On Jan 31, 8:31=A0am, "Tony" <t...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Who brought the sandworms to Dune originally? =A0Speculations?
The Muadru...whom Frank Herbert never mentioned once in six books even
though their artefacts were found on multiple worlds scattered
throughout the Imperium!
;D
Seriously, I think it had to have been the pre-Jihad Ancients. Because
there are no (known) aliens in the Duniverse. In the Torkos timeline
on the Dune Novels website, the very first entry is
??? (=3Dyear)
Sandtrout are brought to Arrakis from an unknown place. Sandtrout
begin desertification of the originally water-rich Arrakis and later
start the sandtrout-sandworm-melange cycle. [Children of Dune]
Followed immediately by:
appr. 1200 B.C.
Birth of Agamemnon, son of Atreus. The future Atreides family
descending from Andrew Skouros claims to trace their lineage this far
back.
Obviously, Torkos is taking his lead from the new hackery (and, I
suspect, received info from Kevin and Brian for use in preparing the
timeline. I guess it's also possible that parts of it were edited
after they received it from him), but that Bronze Age date is simply
unsup****table. Unless they're planning on going down some Battlestar
Galactica-type line of silliness. (Not that I don't like the
reimagined BG, mind you. But it has no place in Dune.) That leaves
only aliens.
Leto's apparent OM recollection of having witnessed the event comes
about 1000 lines earlier in (my) CoD (file) than the Tanidia Nerus
ref. There's no specific mention of "terraforming" (was the term even
used yet, back then? FH used "terraform" as an adjective, meaning
"like that of/from Earth": "terraform life"):
"The sandtrout," he repeated, "was introduced here from some other
place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the
capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout
encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet...and
they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move
to their sandworm phase."
FWIW. :)
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