[geeks] more on dune

[Phil Stracchino]

On 06/14/10 12:57, rjtoegel at verizon.net wrote:
>    IIRC, there was a biologiest/ecologist in the employ of the empire who
>    was studying the planet (I guess to see if conditions could be
>    duplicated) but was killed in a spiceblow.  I just thought it was too
>    simple to last any length of time.

That would be Kynes, whom the Fremen called Liet-Kynes.  To say that he
was killed in a spice blow would be to rather misrepresent the case ...
my recollection is the Harkonnens dumped him in the desert, on top of a
pre-spice mass, without a stillsuit.

Recall that the Dune books really only mention a few players in the
ecology of Dune: the worms, the sandtrout, the sand plankton, the spice,
and the mouse (muad'dib) is mentioned largely as an aside.  But that
doesn't imply at all that those are all the players there are.  The very
fact that Paul chooses the mouse as what he thinks will be a "harmless"
name shows that there are other players in the ecology of Arrakis beyond
the sandworm cycle; they simply don't enter into the main story.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
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         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.