[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by Master Belisarius:

quote:

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Originally posted by Aloofi:
So spice can be eaten and is a fuel at the same time?
Isn't that kind of wierd?
I guess I know now why I didn't like it in the first place.

Is not a fuel.
It's a drug that use the Navigator Guild's pilots to control the space ships in the transtellar travels.
This drug give them a "prescience" that they need to control the ships.

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Yeah, sorry for confusing the issue - I was trying to keep the explanation short and left out too much. The basic point is that the Guild has an effective monopoly on space travel, because of the Navigators; the House that controls spice production on Dune/Arrakis has a huge amount of power because the spice is essential for the Navigators to do their job; and as for the strategy of ruling the universe by controlling the spice, any House that attempted to do so would find itself at the receiving end of a large Imperial warforce, transported by some angry Guild Navigators. Of course, that's assuming that the House got farther than the planning stages before the Guild figured it out and started denying travel services to the plotting House. Kinda hard to take control of a planet when the only reliable transportation is based on a Guild that has a vested interest in protecting free access to the planet...

And, as others have mentioned, the strategic importance of Dune/Arrakis is the central point of the book and one of the major drivers for the postulated sociopolitical structure. (The other major driver is the ban on "thinking machines", a ban dating back to the "Butlerian Jihad", a war between "thinking machines" and humans).

BTW - no-one's mentioned the fact that the Dune series doesn't use sentient alien races: the Guild Navigators are mutated humans, the Bene Gesserit and Mentats are highly trained humans with drug-enhanced abilites, and the Tleilaxu are a weird sect of human society that's learned how to manipulate genetic codes.