SANDWORM (DUNE)

'Sandworms' are fictional desert-dwelling creatures from Frank Herbert's science fiction series ''Dune''. Among the Fremen of Arrakis (Dune) they are known as 'Shai-Hulud'. The Fremen believe that the actions of the sandworms are the direct actions of God, and so the worms have been given numerous titles such as the Great Maker, the Worm who is God, Old Man of the Desert, Old Father Eternity, and Grandfather of the Desert. ''Shai' hulud'' is Arabic for "a thing of eternity."

Sandworms are presumed to be animals, apparently similar to terrestrial annelids, though probably only through convergent evolution. They are cylindrical creatures with no significant appendages. Like terrestrial annelids, each segment has its own autonomous nervous control; thus a worm can only be killed by destroying every one of its segments. The book describes Shai-hulud as "incredibly tough." The only known ways an adult worm can be killed is by the electrocution of ''every'' segment, by another sandworm, or by exposure to a large enough amount of water, which is poisonous to the adult sandworm. Conventional explosives in the ''Dune'' universe are capable of shattering ring segments, but as each moves with a life of its own this will be unlikely to stop a sandworm. In the novel ''Dune'' it is noted that Liet-Kynes knows of no explosives — barring atomics — capable of taking out a worm in a single strike.
Sandworms grow up to hundreds of meters in length. The largest worms officially observed reach 400 meters in length and 40 meters in diameter, although Paul Atreides becomes a sandrider by summoning a worm around half a league in length, or 2,778 meters.^[1] As the worms seem to retain an aspect ratio of 10:1 of body length to diameter, a worm encountered in the deep desert by Muad'Dib that had an oral diameter of 80 meters could have been as long as 800 meters. These gigantic worms burrow deep in the ground and their constant motion around Arrakis is presumed to be the cause for the sand covering the globe.
The non-canon ''Dune Encyclopedia'' invents a scientific name for the sandworm: ''Geonemotodium arraknis'' (also ''Shaihuludata gigantica)''. However, genus ''Geonemotodium'' would most likely be invalid, as the segmentation is like that of the terrestrial annelids, rather than simple round-worm nematodes. The ''Encyclopedia'' also hypothesizes an elaborate ritual of adult sandworm copulation.

Contents

Sandworm life cycle

Sandworms and the spice

Spice mining

Spice cycle

Fremen and the worms

Riding the worm

Sandworm teeth

Paul-Muad'Dib, Leto II and the sandworms

The Emperor Worm

Derivative works

Film

Games

Music

Television

References

Sandworm life cycle

Sandworms begin their life as simple creatures known as 'sandtrout', or "Little Makers" to the Fremen. These creatures are similar to the trocophore larvae of terrestrial annelids and molluscs: simple haploid ciliated creatures. Sandtrout are drawn to water in the open desert and together multiple sandtrout will gather to encapsulate water, creating deserts safe for the adult worms. Once they have done so, they begin to make chemical alterations to the water to produce pre-spice mass, a potential water-safe nourishment for adult worms. Eventually, this process creates a build-up of gases that causes an eruption of the pre-spice mass, blasting carbon dioxide gas, water and the unique product of sandworms, the spice melange, out into the open desert. The water evaporates, leaving behind dried spice in the characteristic "spice blow" sought after by human harvesters. Spice blows can be identified by a large purplish colored patch of sand, smelling strongly of cinnamon.
Most of the sandtrout die off in this eruption, but the few survivors band together and bind themselves into cysts. Inside of these cysts they undergo a metamorphosis, emerging a few years later as a miniature sandworm.
The sandworm begins the adult stage of its life at only about a meter long, rarely surfacing before reaching two meters, but their final size, as indicated above, can be several hundred meters. They seem to have a near indefinite life-span, living for thousands of years. The adult sandworm seems to be immune to all sources of heat, but are vulnerable to electrocution and water.
A joke among imperial ecologists goes:
:Question: What do the sandworms of Dune eat?
:Answer: Humans.
While sandworms are capable of eating humans, the latter do contain a level of water beyond the preferred tolerances of the worms. The main diet of the worm seems to consist primarily of inorganic compounds of the Arrakeen soil, pre-spice mass and 'sandplankton' — tiny organisms that may even be immature sandtrout. They also seem to enjoy eating melange-harvesting equipment. The sandworm is equipped with a fearsome array of crystalline teeth (something not unheard of even in the worms of Earth), used primarily for rasping rocks and sand.

Sandworms and the spice

As metabolic byproducts, sandworms produce three notable substances: oxygen, which is expelled from their trailing body, replacing the need for photosynthesizing plants on Arrakis; sand from the constant consumption and excretion of rock; and the extremely valuable spice melange, which is released along with water as a waste product of sandtrout. It is from the production of melange that sandworms receive their title of "Maker," but it is unclear whether or not sandworms actually generate the melange or if the process is limited to sandtrout. There are implications, especially in the latter books, that sandworms may leave behind some melange, and all attempts to create melange-systems on other planets have been highly sandworm-oriented. Sandworms poisoned by water will also generate a melange-concentrate known as the Water of Life, or spice essence.
The exact process by which spice is generated is unknown. However, around the 15,000s A.G., the Bene Tleilax did develop an effective means of melange-synthesis using their axolotl tanks.
Following its discovery, the cinnamon-scented melange became a commodity of central importance to the universe due to its rarity and numerous remarkable properties. The most common of these properties is that it serves as a geriatric narcotic — a drug capable of extending human life well beyond its natural limits. This comes at the cost of great addiction and the denial of spice to an addict can only result in death. Spice addicts are easy to spot by their blue-in-blue eyes and are common among the aristocracy, Bene Gesserit, Spacing Guild and Fremen, although all these groups except the Fremen generally wear contact lenses to mask the blue color.
A second, and more remarkable property of melange is that it allows for users to experience prescience: to be able to see the future before it happens. This capability was taken advantage of by the Spacing Guild who saturated their navigators in melange gas, allowing them to see safe flight paths for heighliners and safely fold space using the Holtzman effect. Not everyone has the ability to obtain this prescience, as it requires a very high tolerance for melange. Paul-Muad'Dib and his son Leto Atreides II took their special role in history partly because they had especially high melange tolerances which allowed them to see the future. This ability appears to have become one carried down dominantly in all of the descendants of House Atreides since.

A third property of melange pertains to the Water of Life, or spice essence. Spice essence is a bile-like extract from a worm poisoned by water. This blue fluid is then ingested by Bene Gesserit acolytes as the last stage of their training, in a ritual known as the Spice agony. The fluid is highly poisonous and the object of the trial is to use the power of their minds over their metabolic systems to transmute the fluid into something non-toxic. This experience awakens the genetic Other Memory of Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers. Independently of the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen practice a similar ritual, drowning captive nine-meter "dwarf" worms to produce the fluid. They then have their "wild" Reverend Mothers transmute a large quantity of the fluid to produce a liquor used to incite celebratory orgies in the Fremen sietch dwellings. Paul-Muad'Dib and Leto II are notable as the only men in history to survive the spice agony, making them the male equals of Reverend Mothers, something the Bene Gesserit call the Kwisatz Haderach. Their experiences will be discussed below.

Spice mining

Due to these properties spice is, perhaps, the most valuable commodity in the entire universe, made especially so by the fact that it is produced on only one planet. Humans desperately seek it out across the planet to sell on the market. It is a very dangerous activity, as sandworms are territorial creatures and eagerly defend spice-blows. Harvesting is carried out by a gigantic machine called a ''Harvester''. The Harvester is carried to and from a spice blow by an enlarged version of the ornithopter known as a ''Carry-All''. The Harvester on the ground will have three scouting ornithopters patrolling around it watching for ''wormsign'' — the motions of sand indicating that a worm is headed towards the Harvester. The activity is made especially dangerous because sandworms are attracted to rhythmic vibrations on the ground — such as those generated by the Harvester as it extracts melange from the sand. The Fremen, who base their entire industry around the sale of spice and the manufacture of materials out of spice, have their own means for harvesting, as do smugglers. Both engage in these activities outside of the safe polar regions of Arrakis.

Spice cycle

Due to the value of melange, attempts have been made to transplant production onto other planets. However, placing either adult sandworms (often smuggled with funds going to the Fremen) or sandtrout into existing deserts always met with failure. The reason for this (and a solution) was realized by Leto II, as it had perhaps been before by ecologists Liet-Kynes and Pardot Kynes. In ''Children of Dune'', Leto II tells his twin sister Ghanima:

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.

The large salt flats of Arrakis indicate that it was not always a desert, but once had oceans. As spice production relies on the existence of a complete sandworm cycle, transplanting adult worms prevented the spice cycle from beginning anew with sandtrout, and transplanting sandtrout alone into existing desert denied them the necessary water to begin the cycle. Thus, placing sandtrout on a water-rich planet would allow them to start the complete spice cycle, at the cost of turning the planet into a desert, another Dune.
The Honored Matres destroyed Arrakis and the Tleilaxu (who held the secret to axlotl tank Spice production) in the hopes of eliminating the substance to damage the "Old Empire" but were thwarted when the Bene Gesserit escaped with a single sandworm. Using a process discovered by Leto II, they submerged the worm in Spice-rich water, causing it to separate into sandtrout, rather than simply die. With that they transformed their own Chapterhouse planet into another Dune and sent countless sandworms out into space.

Fremen and the worms

Sandworms, due to their size and territorial nature, can be extremely dangerous even to Fremen. Sandworms are attracted to and maddened by the presence of Holtzman force fields used as personal defense shields. Due to this, these force fields have very limited utility to soldiers on Arrakis. A peculiar Fremen weapon is the pseudoshield which attracts and maddens a worm, which then goes berserk smashing anything it finds near the pseudoshield. The device is sometimes used therefore in the same manner as a time bomb, land mine or grenade.
The Fremen managed to develop a unique relationship with the sandworms. For one, they learned to avoid most worm attacks by mimicking the motions of desert animals and moving with the natural sounds of the desert, rather than the rhythmic vibration patterns that attract worms. However, they also developed a device known as a ''thumper'' with the express purpose of generating a rhythmic vibration to attract a sandworm. This can be used either as a diversion, or to summon a worm for the Fremen to ride.

Riding the worm

The Fremen secretly mastered a way to ride sandworms for transportation across the open desert. First a worm is summoned with a thumper, the worm-rider then runs alongside it and catches one of the ring-segments with special ''maker hooks''. The hooks are used to pry up the front of the segment, exposing the soft inner-tissue to abrasive sand. To avoid irritation, the worm will rotate this to the top of its body, carrying the rider with it. The worm will then safely remain above the surface until the hooks are released. Other Fremen may then plant additional hooks for steering, or act as "beaters", hitting the worm's tail to make it increase speed. A worm can be ridden for several hundred miles and for about half of a day, at which point it will become exhausted and sit on the open desert until the hooks are released, when they will burrow back down to rest. The worm-riding ritual is used as a coming-of-age ritual among the Fremen. Worm-riding was then used by Paul-Muad'Dib for troop transport into the city of Arrakeen after using atomic weapons to blow a hole in the Shield Wall during the Battle of Arrakeen. The movie goes a bit beyond this to the point where Paul uses the worms with mounted Fremen as siege weapons.
After the reign of Leto II sandworms became unrideable, for reason elaborated on below. There was one remarkable exception, however, a young girl named Sheeana, an Atreides-descendent possessed a unique ability to control the worms and safely move around them.

Sandworm teeth

Sandworms possess remarkable teeth inside their maws. Fremen extract these teeth and use them as knives. This special type of knife is known as a crysknife. They are usually about as long as a standard kindjal. There are two types, fixed and unfixed. Unfixed knives are raw sandworm teeth used as weapons. They need to be stored in close proximity to a magnetic field produced by the human heart or it will disintegrate after a period of time. Fixed crysknives are put through chemical processes to keep them permanently intact. A traditional Fremen battlecry ("May your blade chip and shatter!") stems from the brittle quality of knives that are not kept in close proximity to a human.
Fremen tradition dictates that once a crysknife is drawn, it must not be sheathed until it has drawn blood. The Fremen "legend," as described in ''Children of Dune'' miniseries is that the crysknife dissolves when its owner has died.

Paul-Muad'Dib, Leto II and the sandworms

Paul-Muad'Dib and Leto II had a unique experience with melange in their high tolerances and experiences of the spice agony. In Muad'Dib even a slight exposure to melange triggered limited prescience in him, but he built up an ever increasing resistance to it. When he went through the spice agony he was given complete prescience, a complete map of the future, as well as a complete awakening as the Kwisatz Haderach.
Leto II, wishing to avoid complete prescience avoided high concentrations of melange, but was eventually kidnapped and forced to consume large amounts of it and the spice essence by Fremen Rebels. He went through the same experience as Muad'Dib, but became so super-saturated with spice that he was able to interact with sandworms and sandtrout in a different way. So saturated with spice, he was able to coax sandtrout onto his body, where they, convinced it was water, encapsulated him and buried their cilia thus fusing them into one being. The sandtrout skin enhanced his body's strength, speed and stamina, and made sandworms wary of him, as the presence of sandtrout indicated he was a mass of water. However, with the increased strength he was able to summon worms using only his foot as a thumper and ride them using his hands as maker-hooks.
The effects were not all good, though; fused into the sandtrout skin, Leto's physical development ended as a pre-pubescent child, but the concentrations of spice allowed his sandtrout-body to develop. Over 3,500 years it gradually transformed itself into a worm-body, absorbing Leto into itself. It granted him near immortality, and a special role as a half-human, half-worm monster which he used to elevate himself to the role of the pharaonic God-Emperor of the universe. However, now possessing the sensitivities of the worm he could not eat, nor drink, nor have any contact to water without extreme physical pain, as well as occasionally being reflexively taken over by the worm-body in stressful situations and generating spice essence directly in his body. He retained the notable features of highly dextrous hands, but useless, undeveloped flipper-feet as well as a brain expanded into large neural-ganglia throughout the worm-body.
Ultimately, Leto was assassinated by a ghola of Duncan Idaho and Siona Atreides, an Atreides descendant, by being thrown into the Idaho River. Due to his high spice saturation his worm body decomposed into sandtrout, which immediately began to undo the terraforming of Dune. Each one, according to Leto, carries in it a tiny pearl of his consciousness, trapped forever in an unending prescient dream. With the increased amount of neural-ganglia and human-like adaptiveness the worms would become too irritable to ride, but would also be able to finally be transplanted to a variety of worlds across the universe. Over the next 1500 years Arrakis, now Rakis, would be returned to a desert and the worms would thrive once more.
However, Reverend Mother Darwi Odrade became aware that humanity was being limited by the prescient dream of Leto, that he was still controlling humanity through his worm revenants, and thus she welcomed the destruction of Rakis by the Honored Matres, as this act freed humanity, and the one remaining worm and its descendants were not enough to restore Leto's control--perhaps the ultimate intent of his Golden Path all along. The remaining worm she took back to Chapterhouse, submerged in a spice bath to generate sandtrout which then turned Chapterhouse, and later other planets, into new Dunes, with new worms and infinite potential for gathering spice.

The Emperor Worm

Towards the end of '', it is revealed that both the Tleilaxu and the Spacing Guild have been secretly experimenting with the sandworms of Arrakis in a remote research facility in the desert as the three great Houses of the Landsraad, the Atreides, Ordos and Harkonnen are busy waging the War of Assassins amongst each other. It appears that the Tleilaxu have discovered the link between the Spice Melange and the sandworms as mentioned above. They plot to seize the Golden Lion Throne by breeding a man-worm, known as the Emperor Worm, and then fusing it with the Water of Life, mercilessly taken from the Lady Elara — who was held prisoner by the Reverend Mother (in truth a Tleilaxu Face Dancer) since the beginning of the game — giving it almost god-like powers.
All three Houses will be fighting against the Guild in a race against time to destroy the Emperor Worm before it awakens, with a different ending for each House depicting their units destroying the Worm.
One such ending revealing that, from the wreckage of the Emperor Worms scaffold, red eyes were glowing in the dark which perhaps suggests that the worm had indeed survived. Should the player fail to defeat the Emperor Worm then it becomes crowned as the new leader of the Empire of Man.

Derivative works

The concept of giant sandworms has been used in other fictional works created after ''Dune's release.

Film

★ In Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are to be thrown into a pit containing a Sarlacc, a carnivorous creature, while on the desert planet of Tatooine. In the original theatrical release of the film, the Sarlacc was depicted simply as a ravenous mouth in the sand, ringed with teeth and possessing tentacles. (See Charybdis.) In the digitally-remastered release, the CG Sarlacc more closely resembled a Sandworm.

★ In the 1988 Tim Burton film ''Beetlejuice'', sandworms exist on Saturn (called "Sandwormland" in the cartoon series) presented as a desert planet to which the dead are transported if they leave the location of their "hauntings."

★ In the 1990 film ''Tremors'', a small town in Nevada is beset by a number of giant worms which bear a resemblance to those in ''Dune''. They have large round mouths full of sharp teeth, move quickly under the sand, and respond to vibrations on the surface.

Games

★ In the Nintendo GameCube game ''F-Zero GX'', a sandworm can be seen jumping the track in the background during Lap 1 of the first Sand Ocean level.

★ The Nintendo 64 game '' features a boss which resembles a gigantic sandworm and whose arena looks very much like Arrakis.

★ The Nintendo 64 game '' features an area in the seventh level which contains an enemy called the Subterranean, a variety of giant worm that burrows through the ground and surfaces to attack the player.

★ The video game character Shadow the Hedgehog has an enemy known as the Sandworm. This Sandworms resembles a ''Dune'' sandworm, with the exception that STH's Sandworm has a single eye where its mouth would be, and also spits out smaller, missile-like worms.

★ In the video game '', there exist Sandworm-like creatures called Amorbis who are the guardians of the Dark Agon Temple.

★ Antlions, from the computer game ''Half-Life 2'' bear some similarities to Sandworms, being creatures which burrow underground, are attracted by vibration and are adverse to water. However, large thumper devices within the game drive away Antlions, at least in a radius around the thumper, rather than attracting them, as in ''Dune''.

★ The computer game '' features a mission set on the desert planet of Blenjeel where the player must evade numerous giant worms called Sand Burrowers which are virtually identical to those in ''Dune''.

★ The MMORPG ''Guild Wars'' features a giant worm-like enemy named Wurm that travels beneath the desert sand, only reaching the surface for attacking unprepared travellers. As the game progresses, player may encounter a few variants of this creature that are able to travel beneath earth, snow, or even volcanic rocks. In the third chapter of the series, Guild Wars Nightfall, players can obtain the ability to ride a special type of worms called Junundu throughout a deadly, sulphuric desert region.

★ ''World of Warcraft'' also has a giant sandworm called "Ouro" as a boss in the dungeon Ahn'Qiraj that a 40-man raid must conquer. He drops various items relating to ''Dune'' such as the Jom Gabbar, a reference to the Bene Gesserit gom jabbar. The ''World of Warcraft'' expansion, '', features another giant sandworm named Hai'Shalud.

★ In the constructible strategy game ''Pirates of the Mysterious Islands'', there is a Super Rare Sea Monster named Shaihulud.

★ In the 2007 third-person shooter video game '', there is a type of Akrid called the Undeep that resembles a massive worm, and attacks on an open snow plain which the player has to traverse.

★ Sandworms are common enemies in ''Phantasy Star IV'' and the ''Final Fantasy'' series.

★ In ''Gabriel Knight 3'', Gabriel jokingly asks John Wilkes if he is looking for giant sandworms as Wilkes takes seismograph readings. The icon used to prompt Gabriel to ask the question is a picture of a Dune sandworm with splayed trifaceted jaws.

★ In ''Starcraft: Brood War'', there is a doodad in the desert tileset that appears to be the skeleton of a sandworm.

★ In ''Starcraft 2'', a planned Zerg unit is called the Nydus Worm, which burrows out of the ground and resembles a Sandworm. It provides transportation for Zerg units.

Music

★ In the song "Weapon of Choice" by Fatboy Slim, the phrase "Walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm" alludes to the sandworms of ''Dune''.

★ A rare, early version of the Beastie Boys song "Intergalactic" begins with the phrase "Well the spice is the worm and the worm is the spice," an obvious reference to sandworms and their relationship to melange.

★ The metalcore band Shai Hulud drew their name from the Fremen word for the sandworms.

★ Giant Sandworms was the original name of Howe Gelb's band Giant Sand.

★ "Shai Hulud" is the title of a song on Filk artist Kathy Mar's album ''Plus ça Change''.

★ Experimental Los Angeles band Wormsign took their name from the series.

Television

★ In the ''SpongeBob SquarePants'' episode "Sandy, SpongeBob, and the Worm" , Sandy sees a sign which reads "worm" and exclaims "Wormsign!" Later in the same episode, Sandy and Spongebob perform a daring stunt which lands them on top of the Alaskan Bull Worm.

★ On ''The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy'', the episode "Mandy the Merciless" parodies ''God Emperor of Dune'' by having Mandy turn into an immortal giant Worm (a clear nod to Leto Atreides II), take over the world with her "cinnamon mines" (a reference to melange), and make clones of Billy in the distant future (Duncan Idaho's gholas).

References

1. Dune, , Frank, Herbert, Ace Books, 1987, ISBN 0-441-17266-0