Theory: All of Frank Herbert's Novels Take Place in the Same Universe

[Scott]

Hey folks,

Forgive me for dropping in for the first time with a random theory, but I'm curious what people think of this idea: All of Frank Herbert's novels -- not just the Dune series, but Jesus Incident, Eyes of Heisenberg, Whipping Star etc., all exist in the same universe.

I don't know of any place where the idea is explicitly refuted in his writing, nor any place where it's explicitly acknowledged. I'm just wondering: Is the idea consistent with Herbert's writing? Or is this just a bonkers theory? And what would it imply if it were true?

[Richard]

Today I learned that Frank Herbert wrote books besides the Dune series. I'll have to look into this further.

[Rick]

I can't see the Whipping Star universe books existing in the Dune universe. You could head canon it so that they're separated by thousands of years but that's hard since we know the future of the Dune universe for that kind of time frame and it looks nothing like the Dosadi/Whipping Star setting. Of course, you could just say "It's a million years apart!" but that's almost cheating.

So, i doubt it and would argue against it but I'm not aware of anything from Herbert or his writings that say one way or the other. Things like Jesus Incident could, I suppose, be shoehorned into the early history of the Whipping Star universe. Maybe.

[Scott]

Yeah but I actually was thinking along those lines. Even assuming all the Dune books are canon, including the ones written by his son, I think the idea that there's a vast amount of time separating different eras allows you to slip everything in to one extent or another.

[Rick]

But that's basically cheating. You can force anything into the same universe that way. "Oh, but this took place in another galaxy and 50 million years before/after that book!" And if that's true... does it mean anything when events are separated by such great gulfs of time and space? No. For it to mean anything you have to find connecting threads, I think.

If not, hell, I could argue Star Trek and Star Wars take place in the same universe. After all, the crawl for the latter starts out... "Long long ago, in a galaxy far away.." so it practically confesses that it's on this universe. So is Star Trek (fictionally) so....

I mean, each of us can make this our own personal canon and it doesn't really do anyone any harm, so in that sense... whatever works for one. The only limit on that would be if an author definitively said one way or another that the universes were or were not the same.

[Trike]

Rick wrote: "I can't see the Whipping Star universe books existing in the Dune universe. You could head canon it so that they're separated by thousands of years but that's hard since we know the future of the D..."

Yep. One could claim The White Plague is an antecedent to Dune, but that’s like saying Raptor Red (a story about a dinosaur 70 million years ago) is a precursor to The Red Badge of Courage (a story about the USCivil War). It’s possible but pointless.

I suspect because Herbert had a few series with similar themes that people want to connect them. In Dune one of the background elements is that AI is bad and forbidden, and in the Destination Void series he writes about an AI that takes over a generation ship. Maybe they’re linked beyond that tenuous theme, but it would be a hard sell for me to buy into it.