I had missed that point. Thanks for explaining. I stand corrected.

In each instance the formal overcomes the informal, until it overcomes itself.

The greatest enemy of a successful State, is the success of the State.

That’s not the problem. One could just handwave it with a time-skip or invoke future tech to deal with the plausibility problem of terraforming happening that fast. The “tragedy” referred to is that the Fremen culture was the result of their environment.

So greening Arrakis means, in addition to destroying the supply of spice, the inevitable and predictable destruction of the Fremen culture. In Dune Messiah, the Fremen have become corrupt greedy venal urbanized theocrats ruling their new empire, and by the time of God Emperor of Dune, the success of the terraforming has reduced them to literally “museum Fremens” LARPing their Dune ancestors for tourists.

Simply showing some rain, as if it were an unalloyed good, misses half the story.

Lynch’s adaptation was trying to cover a lot of ground in a limited amount of time. Although Paul did not make it rain in the book as he did in Lynch’s movie, the Atreides family really did terraform Arrakis — it just took them a long time, and Lynch did not want to try to convey that length of time.

I would argue that Paul was indeed a chosen one, but the nature of a “chosen one” is more vague than Koyama wants to believe. Power is not the same as ethical sophistication or moral justification.

When I read Frank Herbert, I keep seeing madly romantic premises — a sentient star that likes S+M, a Captain from Castile in space, a spy trying to overthrow a hive of human insects — crammed into the 1950′s trope of smart nervous professionals doing something dangerous and complicated while terrified of their genius boss.