Frank Herbert's Dune as Proto-Steampunk Science Fiction

Dune intruiged me as a young reader, I remember seeing the David Lynch film as a 14 yr old on television one day when I was sick.  Needless to say it was the 3 hr directors cut that was just released on DVD a few years back.  Subsequently it was a two part show, so I faked a case of mystery diarrhea and stayed home.  I was mesmerized, had never seen anything like it.  Later I found the book in my late teens.  It was like meth for my imagination, I was in awe of how someone could create such a complex social and political system as well as tell a pivotal story about that universe and still make me believe in the characters.  I had primed myself with the works of Heinlein, Card and Others.  I still treasure Dune and can call it my favorite novel still to this day.  I re-read it occasionally and this time I was struck by some elements that I can only describe as Steampunk like or Proto-Steampunk.

Dune was written in a time when Steampunk was not known by any name,published in serial in Analog Magazine in the 1960's it was written, as a story, to foretell the results of the idea of using a mind altering substance to increase human awareness and evolution, a popular idea at the time.  The spice Melange, was an analogy to the oil crisis and the ever increasing demand for limited oil supply. The story has recently been a warning of the fanaticism that has built in Radical Islam as a reaction American cultural and economic influence as well as the military industrial complex.  I see the Fremen in the story as the mirror of the more Fanatical Militant Muslim nations.  (Please understand I have no anger or malice to my mainstream Muslim friends and neighbors no offense is intended).  It being what it is, a warning about the power of faith as Paul Atredies became a messiah figure and later was trapped by his own mysticism, watch out bin ladin.

These things in themselves are clever and make the story very prophetic for our time.  The most outstanding steampunk idea in Dune is the Butlerian Jihad, a war against thinking machines.  A rebellion from enslavement that became a religious commandment "Thou shalt not make anything in the image of the Human mind."  This leaves very few rudimentary computers safe from this future ludite philosophy.  In steampunk our protagonists use no modern computers but use Babbage's Analytical Engine as a way to process data.  In Dune a interesting concept is brought in to replace the computer, the human mind.  Herbert has Guild Navigators, Mentats and Bene Gesserit Witches.  All have powers above Human Normal.  Navigators use the spice drug to mathematically predict the future.  Mentats are trained as human computers and the Bene Gesserit can look down their maternal line for information and use their bodies with perfect control even down to their biochemistry.  The evolution of the human mind once freed from the enslavement of the computer made this all possible.  This evolution of the human mind as a way to do new things in steampunk must be explored more.  I think there is a huge place for the quirky mad scientist in the Victorian inspired fantasy.  We have clockwork robots now why not more human computers from Oxford!

This is the first post in a succession of posts related to this topic.  Please feel free to comment.