Space travel, obviously, has been the engine of this civilization’s development and spread. A.I., on the other hand, has been invented, embraced and then explicitly rejected through the long-ago convulsion called the “Butlerian Jihad,” which establishes as a commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
Transhumanism, meanwhile, has been rejected in some ways and embraced in others. In place of computers, Herbert’s galactic imperium has cultivated what we would consider superhuman mental powers, often via the use of mind-altering drugs — Google Gemini, absolutely not; psychedelics, maybe so. At the same time, the imperium’s powerful Bene Gesserit sisterhood has pursued a vast eugenic project, but one that’s hedged about with various taboos. When a Bene Gesserit reverend mother in “Dune Messiah” is offered the chance to continue her eugenic work via artificial insemination rather than arranged pairings of men and women, she recoils from the idea, since “no word or deed could imply that men might be bred on the level of animals.” Selective mating, yes; cloning and I.V.F., maybe not.
Finally, religion has flourished in this spacefaring future via a kind of syncretistic creativity: The novel’s main scripture, the Orange Catholic Bible, is the kind of ecumenical holy book that probably seemed a bit more plausible in the 1960s, when “Dune” first appeared, than it does today, and the religions of the future are mostly remixes of Old Earth faiths, complete with names like “Zensunni,” “Navachristianity” and “Buddislam.”
So you can see “Dune” as presenting a civilization that has achieved galactic takeoff while working through, in weird but recognizable ways, our own cultural-technological debates. But then Herbert further portrays his far-future world as having fallen into decadence itself, with a stable but cruel order based on corporate feudalism, religious manipulation and other interlocking exploitations.
And here some of the debates around the movie adaptation, about whether the main character, Paul Atreides, is a liberator or an oppressor, a hero or a villain, miss the harsher argument at work in the original story: Namely, that sometimes the only path out of a corrupt status quo involves convulsion and fanaticism and death. So the book’s Paul is both a hero and a villain, both a destroyer and a savior; he’s taking a terrible path that’s also the only plausible path for humanity to take. (And to readers of the later books: Yes, I know that eventually this path requires a long period of even deeper decadence under a human-sandworm hybrid god-emperor in order to prepare humanity for a new explosion of interstellar migration, and also to breed a line of human beings immune from prophecy and prescience … look, I’m not a nerd, you’re a nerd.)