Correct me if I'm wrong here, but does Herbert ever give a reason for why the characters in Dune do not use gunpowder/projectile weapons (a.k.a. guns), similar to modern armies? I never understood why the characters in Dune bothered with this melee warfare, except maybe for ceremonial reasons.
It's worth reading the whole article. If you've ever read any of Iain Bank's books you'll definitely appreciate it.
Lasers hitting shields basically results in a fusion explosion which would bring down the wrath of the Houses/Imperium.
Shields are not used much on Dune due to shorting out from storms and attracting worms. This results in some use of projectile weapons when the Harkonnens seal the Atreides troops in caves with mortars or the Fremen shoot the noses of off the Emperors spaceships with artillery.
For bonus points, energy weapons weren't really used because if one hit a shield, it would cause an explosion (centered on the energy weapon maybe?) that would take out half a city.
This never really made much sense to me. IRRC when an energy weapon hits a shield either the emitter or the shield generator blows up. Since shields are protecting something while the emitter can be anywhere to me the logical outcome seems to be energy weapons everywhere and no shields at all.
A small edit that would make this work: energy beam weapons could not penetrate a shield, and just reveals the location of the shooting weapon.
That said, and something I don't think anybody else has mentioned in the thread, in the first Dune novel when the Sardaukar land on Arrakis and have a bunch of fights after the betrayal they _do_ use projectile weapons, which has the affect of trapping the Atreides who'd retreated into caves.
It is brought up later that these weapons aren't worth returning, because their use was a one-off. These cannons were considered a "quirky surprise" rather than a useful weapon.
If you mean the Brian Herbert prequels, a lot of fans don't really consider those to be canonical. I don't remember much exploration of this in the later Frank Herbert books; if anything most of the restrictions are eventually abandoned.
> Computers are banned (for good reasons)
It's at least _hinted_ that this was more about a moral panic than anything else.
Dune's technology setup is contrived to produce a particular type of society; it's one of the most extreme examples of this approach. There's nothing wrong with this (and it's very common in sci-fi) but it is what it is.
Only if you accept Brian Herbert's additions to the canon. Assuming that, like all right-thinking people, you treat those as apocryphal, it's left _very_ vague as it exactly what it was all about, and it's at least implied that it was not particularly rational.
You can find people today who'll tell you that humans are enslaved by computers because, I dunno, we use TikTok too much or something.
This doesn’t do justice to the world building of Dune. Technology is very limited. Computers are banned (for good reasons), and using those energy weapons is also forbidden in most situations. Thus, combat is once again dominated by the kind of melee encounters that were also historically the domain of a trained warrior caste. All of this is explored in detail in the later books, which maybe the author hasn’t read? If anything, Dune deeply affirms that society mirrors technology rather than creating a simple “naive feudal sci-fi” world as claimed here.
I haven’t read much past that yet since the article is very wordy, and it’s hard to be motivated to push forward once you stop being convinced that the author has a point.