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Prequel to Dune Fan Fiction

Prelude to and Road to already covered!  🙋

I'd like to cover a background to a hypothetical adaptation of the Dune saga. This background provides a bit of the whys and wherefores of the "Duniverse" in the books.

And I'm riffing of "House of Suns" and "Star Wars" 😉.

The background is more or less the same conflict occurring in the 4th or 5th millennium as described in House of Suns. The reasons, perhaps, are different but one protagonist represents the remaining nations and corporations based on Earth, it's surrounding space habitats and the Moon. The other is the asteroid Ceres, now an independent nation.

Ceres wins and becomes the new hegemon after its armies of clones quell a rebellion by the "thinking machines" of Earth. The causes of the war are various but the result is that Earth is gradually abandoned and the surviving clones are used to colonise the galaxy.

During training it was discovered that the clones only readily took orders from female officers or their lieutenants. The motivation for the, mainly male, clones was basically sexual. It was decided to send the surviving clones in relativistic spaceships to unexplored planets. Some also crewed colony ships. The colonies established by these clone veterans were then to be "conquered" by female volunteers. To avoid disease these "Valkyrie Squadrons" were composed of virgins.

To cut a long story short these Valkyrie Squadrons eventually became the Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres orders. The experiences of the war lead to the fear of "thinking machines" by the descendants of its veterans, especially as these veterans' colonies vastly outnumbered those established during and prior to the clone-machine war.

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