Speculation (spoiler warning!)

[Anathema]

Be warned, this might spoil part of Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse.

[hide]The honoured matres were fleeing from a powerfull enemy. Do you suppose the honoured matres were fleeing from self-aware machines in exile?[/hide]

[AlteaDeo]

hidding my text too...

[hide]Yeah, maybe they founded exiled machines... Or just some kind of sleeping robots, wich they awakened.... ehhh! I like speculating on after 6th Dune :P [/hide]

[ordos45]

Ok, here is what they said they were fleeing from (Also hidden):

[hide] I believe it said they were fleeing from the One's Of Many Faces. These seemed, at the end of the book, to be Face Dancers who had evolved to not obey Masters, and were independent, and could think for themselves. [/hide]

[TMA_1]

Ordos is right. thats all I will say.

[Duke_Atreides]

And the Futars

[Anathema]

again, hidden

[hide]I forgot about that one of the matres said that they were chased by the ones with many faces. I did remember the end of Chapterhouse, wich then didn't make any sense at all to me.[/hide]

[AlteaDeo]

Futars? help me remember... chapterhouse is a long way back :)

[Duke_Atreides]

The Futars were some kind of hybrids between humans and some kind of animal-thing-tleilaxu thing i suppose.

[AlteaDeo]

ohhh! yeah!!! :)

[hide]this is really a hidding text-o-rama-topic eh? :P[/hide]

[NeoDevilbane]

I don't know how to hide text, so I'm not going to bother with it here - you had to click on the topic to see this message, and the topic clearly says "spoiler warning!"

Anyway, here is a timeline of facts, folks :

* In Chapterhouse: Dune, the 6th and last novel FH released before he died, it is mentioned that the new villains, the Honored Matres, are being hunted by the "Ones with Many Faces" - a potentially even greater villain that to this day remains unknown.

* As KA & BH began doing their collaborating on the Prelude to Dune trilogy BH discovered the "complete outline to Dune 7," written by FH before his death. This outline, in KA/BH's own words, confirms what we already thought - Chapterhouse: Dune was a cliffhanger, not a conclusion... Dune 7 was to be that conclusion.

* KA/BH say that before they can work on Dune 7 off of FH's outline, apparently because of the nature of Dune 7's outline they must "lay groundwork" first in the "Legends of Dune" trilogy beginning with "The Butlerian Jihad" some 10,000 years before Dune to chronicle humanity's bitter war against the thinking machines/"cymeks."

Okay, folks, those are the word-of-god facts we *know* right now. Based on the above, it would reason to say that VERY potentially whatever new menace it is ("The Ones With Many Faces" or what-have-you) somehow, some way stems from the "Legends of Dune" books - methinks perhaps the cymeks themselves. After all... barring cryogenic freeze or some other wierdness, what kind of menace could possibly survive 14,000 years to be alive in the days after Chapterhouse: Dune? Cyborgs? Very bloody likely...

KA likes to ramble about how great of a villain he's created in "The Butlerian Jihad" with Erasmus, Agamemnon, etc.... I'd BET seriously (and mark my words) that KA/BH are going to create a villain/group of villains in the "Legends of Dune" trilogy, show us what a badass they are, and then somehow bring that villain(s) into Dune 7.

- Neo

[AlteaDeo]

like they said, that is a outline of dune 7, they still can do whatever they want with it! The fact is that, at first, FH didn't want to publish a Legend of Dune like books to make people understand Dune 7! So why needing it right now? Profits maybe? Sure... Also that they probably wrote an history that fit better in their mind, who also fit to the outline of dune 7.

Remeber that na outline would (should) be not that precise, maybe FH didn't even thinked about who would be the one with many faces. Ok, face dancers are the best option, but I think that even Herbert (father) may had dreamed of something bigger...

[NeoDevilbane]

I do give KA/BH some credit, particularly Brian Herbert... I do seriously, honestly believe when they do Dune 7 (in the year 2036) they will be true to & religiously stick to the outline - and they've said it's a "complete outline" - that Frank Herbert composed.

If my dad died and I was going to complete his never-completed story he wrote a thorough outline to, I'm going to stick to the outline word-for-word. There's just no two ways about it.

Whether we'll ever get to READ ourselves Frank's outline for Dune 7 so that one day we'll be able to judge how true KA/BH were to it after Dune 7 is published (again, somewhere between 2036-2070)... I kind of doubt it, but I do believe the outline will be adhered to with an absolute minimum of KA/BH-added shit.

As for the "Ones With Many Faces," I *do* believe Frank knew who and what they were. This is a man who backward & foreward engineers a vast storyline of multiple chapters spanning hundreds of millennia... he was writing parts of Dune Messiah & Children of Dune even when he was working on the original, and I'd suspect he did the same with the later books. Plus, since we know Chapterhouse: Dune was meant to be a cliffhanger, not a conclusion, I'm quite positive Frank was aware in his head of the big picture of how things were to be wrapped up, and certainly who the "Ones With Many Faces" were, be it renegade Face Dancers, cymeks returning from exile, or what-not.

- Neo

[Anathema]

Remember, in House Corrino a navigator (D'Murr) takes the fake spice and accidentely folds the highliner to a distant region of space. There, he says, is an enemy that hates humans for what they are. If anybody whould have a reason to hate the humans, it would be the machines. But perhaps this is not even related to the ones with many faces, I dunno.

[NeoDevilbane]

"The Ones With Many Faces" could mean many things, none of which necessarily *literally* meaning they have many faces. After all, from what we've read cymeks can pop their "brain jars" or whatever into whatever cybernetic machine they want at will - maybe even cyborged human bodies.

There could be two main theories for how Frank wanted things wrapped up in Dune 7 in my perspective :

1) This new, unknown menace comes and whups everybody's asses - everybody dies, and Dune becomes Dune again.

2) When the new, unknown menace shows up, the Bene Gesserit, the Landraad, the Tleilxu, and even the Honored Matres - basically *everyone* - unites to stop them, sort of bringing the galaxy into harmony again in the end.

- Neo

[AlteaDeo]

isn't the matres and the Bene Geserit finished forming one entity at the end of Chapterhouse?

[Anathema]

Again, hidden.

[hide]At the end they had the same leader, Murbella.[/hide]

[AlteaDeo]

[hide]wich would mean yes ;)

Hey!! I've just read some of the first pages of Mesiah... It's the french version, it may be just a wrong translation, but "[...] who [talking about the Butlerian Jihad] wiped out the "thinking machine" from a large part of the universe[...]".

That's what it is written, freely translated by myself... That would argue that thinking machine had not been completly destroyed everywhere![/hide]

[Anathema]

[hide]They probably meant the whole universe with exeption of worlds as Richese and Ix.[/hide]

[AlteaDeo]

maybe... just maybe :)

[Colonel_Worf]

I do believe now that the Ones of Many Faces are the leftover Cymeks from the Butlerian Jihad.

[exatreide]

Maybe the combined houses of Tuplie?

or did letto II get them?

dont reamber....

[Colonel_Worf]

Heh... who knows? :D

[AlteaDeo]

God himself probably... Not Leto II, but a real god....

;) no? awwww.... ::)

[Dude_Doc]

Maybe the whole conclusion to Dune ends with machines conquering after all? We know that the machines planned to destroy humans because they didn't need them anymore. Maybe they constructed a weapon to conquer the humans with, but never had any time using it, because they were defeated at the Battle of Corrin. Maybe, they suspected that if they used this new weapon, the humans would surely go after and find it. Remember: They ARE thinking machines, they can store memory in databases, when they learn something, it won't be forgotten, unlike humans, we can forget. This means that maybe, they left for a reason. Maybe they wanted the humans to think they were dead, but instead, they had something bigger in mind, which we in thins case will read about in Final Dune. Maybe, they even is some pattern, some hidden message in the Dune Chronicles, that somwhow points out what the enemy is like. But the more bigger question is: Why? Anyways, we will know for sure in about 50 years, so hold on! :P

[AlteaDeo]

Ok, there is one things that bugs me.

That is obivious that KJA and BH are writting the butlerian Jihad to conclude Dune 7.

STILL

That's far too quick! I mean, look how Chapterhouse finished. Dune 7 come, we need to write an history, and what, the thinking machine will appear in the last 2 chapter of the book, and in the last and final chapter, they'll destroy humanity?

That's just too: "ok, we're the thinking machine, you've never saw us before, oups, now you're dead. The end."