Dune Versus Foundation and the Future of Humanity
Write a compare-and-contrast analysis essay to compare the way two different texts present similar ideas.
Dune Versus Foundation and the Future of Humanity
By Andrew Wasswa Lwebuga
The books Dune by Frank Herbert and the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov both are pillars of the science fiction genre. However that isn’t the only aspect these books have in common; they both are about human development and power structures. This essay is a compare-and-contrast analysis of these two texts.
The Foundation trilogy began to be published in 1951. The story is set somewhere between twelve and fifty thousand years in the future at the tail end of a galactic empire. The only person who can see that the end of the galactic empire is quickly approaching is Hari Seldon. He is able to do this by using a mathematical formula he developed called psychohistory. This allows him to predict the actions and responses of large masses of people, and by large I mean that the minimum population requirement is that of a planet. With his psychohistory he was able to predict that the galactic empire would fall in about five hundred years. This would then be followed by ten to thirty thousand years of disunity and war. To avert this calamity, Seldon set up two foundations at the opposite ends of the galaxy. The first foundation was set up at the farthest reach of a spiral arm. Its job was to catalog and improve on the technology of the old empire. As for the second foundation, nobody knows; I mean we do find out in the later books where they are and what they do but I’m not going to spoil it.
Dune has some of the core ideas that Foundation has, such as space empires and foresight of the future, however Dune’s feel is entirely different. The first book was published in 1965. The setting is twenty thousand years in the future. On top of that, it is ten thousand years after the Butlerian Jihad, a religious crusade to destroy all thinking machines. In the absence of any computation devices, humans had to make up the gaps left by these tools. That's why orders and institutions such as the Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Spacing Guild exist. The Mentats are there to be human computers and more. The Bene Gesserit attach themselves to powerful institutions such as the imperial throne and the great houses and manipulate religion and politics from the shadows. Their hope is to make a person who can help them steer humanity into a better future. Last of all, the Spacing Guild has a complete monopoly on interstellar transportation. However, to guarantee safety of interstellar transport the guild needs a constant supply of melange. All of this now exists in a feudal galaxy balanced between the imperial throne, the great houses and the Spacing Guild.
Both Foundation and Dune are about understanding the future, with both stories having some mechanism of predicting the future. In each text there is a galactic empire. But Foundation’s core concept is wrapped up in a scientific and technological future, whereas Dune’s core concept is more of an inspection of human character and patterns. You can see this distinction clearly in the book, Foundation and Empire, when the characters find out that all their efforts to change the outcome of an event were futile and the outcome they wanted would have come about had they worked for it or not. In Dune, on the other hand, the outcome of events are never clearly going to happen and events never feel as if they fell into the characters lap like a mechanical machine dropping a ball. The Foundation series is about the “machine” humans make when there are enough of them; Dune is about the “organism” humans make when there are enough of them.
In conclusion, Foundation and Dune both explore the same phenomena. Foundation views it like a mechanic inspecting a car, and Dune is more like a doctor inspecting a patient. Each book series is excellent and I encourage you to read both. However remember that the Kwisatz Haderach has foreseen all and Hari Seldon has predicted the future!