There are elements of tragedy in it, but it’s really about power and politics and human struggle, so I can’t see how there wouldn’t be.
I don’t feel like we read the same books. Your experience reading whatever books you did sounds miserable.
I read a story about politics and power, a story about the struggles of humanity to expand across the universe and survive across millennia.
I guess you read something about getting empires when you don’t have computers.
The Jihad empowered people to do independently even more than what prior generations could do with computers. I don’t think the weird cults were the only possible outcome, they just made for a better story about power and politics.
Ito should have already been banned imo.
The Jihad was the basis for the development of mentats, navigators, prescience, most of what the Bene Gesserit could do, etc.
The spice became a cause of atrophy as well when people became reliant on it, but that’s consistent with the theme.
Fuck the Great Convention obviously, but the Jihad was (mostly) good actually.
I think it’s not about primitivism, but discarding tools that atrophy us rather than empower us.
I’m not sure what side humanoid robots fall on.
It’s probably my favorite sci-fi series as well, yet I got a completely different read from it.
In-universe the Jihad was generally seen as a necessity. No one was really against it politically, even if they skirted around or violated it in actuality.
Leto II said: “The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines. Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
With all his prescience he saw humankind dying out unless he followed the Golden Path. That is a kind of tragedy, to be very nearly all-powerful and all-knowing, to know right from wrong, and to have tyranny be the only way forward.
I don’t for a second believe that Frank made the jihad as a reference to Samuel Butler because he thought it was a bad idea. If the book had wanted to communicate that it was a bad idea, it would have been presented as one at some point.