Sandworm And Spice
Percival Blanco
GQ: Colin, let me tell you about the point in Dune: Part Two when I realized I had no idea what was going on with the sandworms. In the first one, the sandworms are terrifying creatures to be avoided at all costs. This time around, the Fremen are riding them all over the planet as their primary form of transportation.
I don't think it's going to be too sharp. If you think about when the sandworm eats the harvester in the first movie, it's not like it's crunching down on you. The mouth is so big. I'd imagine that you're actually probably going to be crushed just because there's so much going in there and being compressed. But you'd have to consult one of the imperial ecologists.
So, spice is a psychoactive. The Water of Life is an intensely concentrated version of spice. What you're drinking is a really, really intense hallucinogen. Traditionally, the Bene Gesserit drink this to be in touch with their ancestral memories, so they can basically access all of the intelligence and memories of all of their entire matrilineal line. The Kwisatz Haderach, which as we learn is Paul, is able to access both his matrilineal and patrilineal ancestral memories. That's what the Water of Life does.
Does it taste like Blue Gatorade?
Yeah. Imagine if you seasoned your food with gasoline. It's also just like a casual thing that people use every day. It does have flavor, it's kind of cinnamon-y. Everyone in the universe is coming in contact with spice in some way, shape, or form. Which is why when Paul threatens to destroy spice at the end of the book, it matters so much because everyone in the galactic economy is dependent on it.
I would say little to nothing, other than, I suppose, good tenants. Shai-Hulud is the apex predator. He is unconcerned with these trivial things happening around him. He's housing spice harvesters for breakfast. Sandworms are not horses. The Fremen are not out here domesticating sandworms. It's much more like they're catching a ride on this massive natural force that's running through the planet. Yeah, sometimes maybe they can catch a sandtrout and milk some Water of Life out of it, but they're fully doing their own thing. The Fremen have little to offer the sandworms. The sandworms are fully on their own. The sandworms are just doing them.
The important thing to get across is that spice is the foundation of the galactic political and economic system. Sandworms make spice. Paul controls the desert. Paul controls the sandworms. He who can destroy the thing, controls the thing. That's all you have to know. Don't ask too many questions and have a good time.
First, mix the yeast and warm water. Let the yeast blossom like a sand storm in the desert. After ten minutes, add the brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, sietch spice, salt, and eggs. Whisk it all together until your bowl starts to smell like stale spice wine.
Sandworms are colossal, worm-like creatures that live on the desert planet Arrakis. Their larvae produce a drug called melange (known colloquially as "the spice"), the most essential and valuable commodity in the universe because it makes safe and accurate interstellar travel possible. Melange deposits are found in the sand seas of Arrakis, where the sandworms live and hunt, and harvesting the spice from the sand is a dangerous activity because sandworms are aggressive and territorial. Harvesting vehicles must be airlifted in and out of the sand sea in order to evade sandworm attacks. The struggle over the production and supply of melange is a central theme of the Dune saga. The sandworms are reverently called Shai-Hulud by the planet's indigenous Fremen, who worship them as agents of God whose actions are a form of divine intervention.
The sandworms in Dune were inspired by the dragons of European mythology that guard some sort of treasure. In particular, Herbert referenced the dragon in Beowulf that guards a hoard of gold in a cave, and the dragon of Colchis that guards the Golden Fleece from Jason.[1][2] Like these dragons, the sandworms of Arrakis will attack anyone who attempts to take the treasure that is spice from the desert sands, as if they were guarding it. However, in the story, the sandworms are merely territorial and have no use for the spice, which is in fact waste matter produced by their larvae.[3] In Children of Dune (1976), a character even refers to sandworms as "the dragon on the floor of the desert."[4]
In the plot of Frank Herbert's novel Dune, Herbert used the sandworms (along with the spice they produce) as a plot device to provide Paul Atreides with the trials through which he ascends to a superhuman state of being. Herbert believed that a memorable myth must have something profoundly moving that could either empower the hero or overwhelm him completely. The force in question must be dangerous and terrifying, yet somehow essential. In Dune, the sandworms serve this function. To earn the spice, humans must cope with sandworm attacks on their harvesting expeditions. To earn an even greater prize (his apotheosis into the all-seeing Kwisatz Haderach), Paul undergoes even more dangerous and transformative trials in which he risks madness and death, one of which involves the ritual sacrifice of a juvenile sandworm, and another in which he must learn to ride a sandworm.[5]
John Schoenherr provided the earliest artwork for the Dune series, including the illustrations in the initial pulp magazine serial and the cover of the first hardcover edition. Frank Herbert was very pleased with Schoenherr's art,[8] and remarked that he was "the only man who has ever visited Dune".[9] Schoenherr gave the sandworm three triangular lobes that form the lips of its mouth. This design was referenced for the sandworm puppets that appeared in the 1984 movie adaptation of Dune.[10]
Sandworms are giant creatures found only on the desert planet Arrakis. They are reverently called Shai-Hulud by the planet's indigenous Fremen, who worship them as agents of God whose actions are a form of divine intervention.[6][11] The Fremen also refer to the sandworms as Makers.
Herbert describes sandworms as colossal terrestrial annelids with features of the lamprey. They have an array of crystalline teeth which are used primarily for rasping rocks and sand. During his first close encounter with a sandworm in Dune, Paul notes, "Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter ... crystal teeth with the curved shape of crysknives glinting around the rim ... the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes ... acids ..."[3]
Sandworms grow to hundreds of meters in length, with specimens observed over 400 metres (1,300 ft) long[12][13] and 40 metres (130 ft) in diameter, although Paul becomes a sandrider by summoning a worm that "appeared to be" around half a league (1.5 miles (2.4 km)) or more in length.[14] These gigantic worms burrow deep in the ground and travel swiftly; "most of the sand on Arrakis is credited to sandworm action".[12]
Sandworms are described as "incredibly tough" by Liet-Kynes, who further notes that "high-voltage electrical shock applied separately to each ring segment" is the only known way to kill and preserve them; atomics are the only explosive powerful enough to kill an entire worm, with conventional explosives being unfeasible as "each ring segment has a life of its own".[15] Water is poisonous to the worms,[12] but it is in too short supply on Arrakis to be of use against any but the smallest of them.
Herbert notes in Dune that microscopic creatures called sand plankton feed upon traces of melange scattered by sandworms on the Arrakeen sands.[16] The sand plankton are food for the giant sandworms, but also grow and burrow to become what the Fremen call Little Makers, "the half-plant-half-animal deep-sand vector of the Arrakis sandworm".[17]
Their leathery remains previously having "been ascribed to a fictional 'sandtrout' in Fremen folk stories", Imperial Planetologist Pardot Kynes had discovered the Little Makers during his ecological investigations of the planet, deducing their existence before he actually found one.[16] Kynes determines that these "sandtrout" block off water "into fertile pockets within the porous lower strata below the 280 (absolute) line",[16] and Alia Atreides notes in Children of Dune that the "sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet's bedrock, formed living cisterns".[18] The Fremen themselves protect their water supplies with "predator fish" that attack invading sandtrout.[18] Sandtrout can be lured by small traces of water, and Fremen children catch and play with them; smoothing one over the hand forms a "living glove" until the creature is repelled by something in the "blood's water" and falls off.[18] Leto II says in Children of Dune:
The sandtrout ... was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet ... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase.[18]
The sandtrout are described as "flat and leathery" in Children of Dune, with Leto II noting that they are "roughly diamond-shaped" with "no head, no extremities, no eyes" and "coarse interlacings of extruded cilia".[18] They can find water unerringly, and squeezing the sandtrout yields a "sweet green syrup".[18] When water is flooded into the sandtrout's excretions, a pre-spice mass is formed; at this "stage of fungusoid wild growth", gases are produced which result in "a characteristic 'blow', exchanging the material from deep underground for the matter on the surface above it".[11][19] After exposure to sun and air, this mass becomes melange.[19][11]
Kynes' "water stealers" die "by the millions in each spice blow" and may be killed by even a "five-degree change in temperature".[16] He notes that "the few survivors entered a semidormant cyst-hibernation to emerge in six years as small (about three meters long) sandworms".[16] A small number of these then emerge into maturity as giant sandworms, to whom water is poisonous.[11][12][16] A "stunted worm" is a "primitive form ... that reaches a length of only about nine meters". Their drowning by the Fremen makes them expel the awareness-spectrum narcotic known as the Water of Life.[16]
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