📚 Fremen walking into the desert to die are wasting their water

On lazy worldbuilding and the practice of senicide in various cultures.

Jul 25, 2024

Dune1 is an enormously popular part of the science fiction canon. Its complex worldbuilding spans thousands of years and multiple cultures. As with the Pern books, the actual writing of the series spans generations, with Herbert’s son carrying on his legacy. The movies (which I must confess I’ve never seen and don’t intend to) are bringing the story to a new generation of fans.

Now seems like as good a time as any to complain about something that’s been bothering me for years.

At its core, the Dune series seems heavily inspired by the politics and culture of the Mediterranean region. House Atredies is modeled on the mythological Greek House Atreus — you’ve probably heard of Agamemnon, who died on his way home from the Trojan War. The Fremen have an awful lot in common with the Maghreb. Paul himself was, if I remember right, inspired by Lawrence of Arabia, who led an Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I. Sietch Tabr is probably a reference to Deborah and Barak2 raising an army at the foot of Mt. Tabor to defeat the heavy iron chariots and cavalry of the Canaanites — Deborah’s job was to convince the Israelites that their attack was supported by the divine.

Anyway, I first read Dune almost twenty years ago, and I've been hanging out in science fiction fandom since before I was old enough to drink. In all the literature I've read about Dune, all the hot takes and criticisms, I've never seen anyone comment on the illogical nature of Fremen suicide — specifically the practice of walking into the desert to die.

As a quick recap, Dune itself ends on a high note

At the end of Dune (i.e. the first book), the protagonist, Paul, has successfully taken control of a critical monopoly and is able to leverage that control into becoming Emperor. He does this thru a combination of taking advantage of good training by elite tutors, a genuinely clever sense of thinking outside the box when it comes to military strategy, good breeding — and what his mother’s people, the Bene Gesserit, have done to seed prophecies into the Fremen culture. There are shades of the Aztecs and Cortez, there, although it’s questionable whether the Aztecs really attributed his arrival to a prophecy of about a white-bearded god.

There is a sequel; in Dune Messiah things go somewhat less well for him. Paul's success in book one was dependent on him gaining access to ancestral memories, which because of his gender somehow unlocks prescient powers. Able to see the future, Paul is forced to unleash a bloody jihad in order to preserve humanity from extinction, presumably at the hands of AI, but perhaps not — my memory is fuzzy, and my copy of the book is upstairs where my daughter is sleeping. After Paul is blinded (physically, at first) by an assassination attempt, he also loses his beloved consort Chani in childbirth. The birth “breaks” his prescience and leaves him psychically blind; emotionally scarred for a variety of reasons, he walks into the desert to die, “in accordance with Fremen law.”

That’s the moment where the whole thing falls apart for me.

Walking into the desert is described as being something of a cultural norm among the Fremen—he does it because he has been blinded, and Fremen who are too old or infirm are “supposed” to stop being a burden to their people by leaving. A handful of human societies over here in the real world have something similar; senicide is rarely suicidal, but cultures developing a norm where people kill their elderly and infirm does happen. The Inuit would leave their elderly on the ice to die, but it was rare, except during famines. The last such case was in 1939. I've heard of it happening in a few other societies with extreme environments, like Indonesian forest communities.

In a society where water was one iota less precious — or the technology for recovering every ounce of water from a body less advanced — I would find it plausible, but on Dune, where stillsuits and deathstills exists, I find myself suspecting shoddy worldbuilding. It feels like Herbert heard “sometimes in extreme environments people walk out onto the ice to die” and thought “ah, perfect!” and stopped there.

So why did Herbert include this detail?

It feels like Herbert needed Paul needed to leave but be able to return, so a cultural quirk was added to Fremen society that felt reasonable for a harsh environment — after all, what use can old and infirm people be in a harsh environment, leaving aside things like providing childcare and wisdom and entertainment and leaving aside the fact that they walk into the desert, proving that this ritual applies to even more than those people who are too ill or infirm to travel. What would the Fremen do with someone who could not walk under their own power? Deliberately abandon them? That’s not so noble — and in the real-life societies where I've heard of it happening, it was usually orphans rather than beloved elders who were abandoned, but that's never addressed in the texts.

From what I know, desert religions typically have suicide taboos. It feels like the taboo would be even stronger on Dune, although some desert cultures do a thing where they drive exiles out into the desert to die. By walking into the desert, people who suicide on Dune are taking all the water their body holds — pounds of it — and abandoning it to the sands. It doesn’t make sense. Why not just stab yourself with a crysknife or drink poison or something?

For that matter — why blindness specifically?

Fremen travel at night and in sandy places all the time. Is it really so hard to imagine that blind people with good hearing and a sense of touch would be able to manage that? These are people who are taking their kids along with them, and gravid women. It’s hard to imagine that blind people really so much of a burden compared to anyone else who might conceivably be scarred in a disfiguring way. It’s even harder to wrap my head around given that — like deafness — is a bit of a spectrum anyway.

If the Paul had been someone who physically couldn’t move under his own power anymore, I could understand him refusing to use a Harkonnen-esque suspension chair to move on to the next location. An injured man staying back at the last camp alone once it’s clear he can’t move on would make sense. But walking into the desert due to blindness doesn’t. The idea that Paul just had to do it because he was “honoring the customs of his people” — and therefore securing the loyalty of the Fremen for his children — makes even less sense, no matter what the editors of Wikipedia think.

Now prophetically and physically blind, Paul chooses to embrace the Fremen tradition and walks alone into the desert, winning the fealty of the Fremen for his children, who will inherit his empire.

Paul has escaped deification by walking into the desert as a man, while guaranteeing Fremen support for the Atreides line.

As though the Fremen weren’t going to support Leto otherwise?

Maybe if the Fremen had rules against physically imperfect leaders, which I've read about in other contexts, it would make sense. But it's hard to imagine a scene in Dune where if a powerful leader guy lost a finger but was still totally able to keep up and be useful and fight and lead, it’s hard to imagine the Fremen going “you're physically imperfect, time to die now!”

I frankly find Dune Messiah to be one of the worst of Herbert's books — I even prefer the (generally awful) prequels. It’s shorter than the others, feels like a tacked on epilogue, and the culminating moment flies in the face of the core conceit of the societies in question.

The only other time I recall the books discussing the Fremen wasting this much water, it’s when Alia was found guilty of something so heinous — giving in to the ancestors and allowing herself to become possessed — that her water was considered tainted. The people of Sietch Jacurutu poured the water of her body out onto the sand. Meanwhile, we’re supposed to believe that Paul marching off into the desert to die because he was blinded was considered laudible?

As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the worst messages in the book.

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