Out of Arrakis all sorts of logistical imaginations flow. Movements both large and small, slow knives and shields, guild navigators and interstellar journeys, staggered steps of social production and centuries of environmental transformation. At a planetary scale it rests on the ecological structure defined by the mysterious sandworms of Dune. But these require technologies of control—ornithopters, harvesters, stillsuits, and thumpers—the varied and various artifacts of human regulation that attempt to fashion the planet to a human purpose for it.
Perhaps it is the Golden Path that offers the most powerful display of logistical power in the series. It is the vision of choice for humanity, a choice so difficult that Pual Atreides, Muad’Dib himself, cannot make it. The disturbing realization that control is the end of existence, suggests a damning condemnation of our own logistical practice—the narrowing smoothness of finely wrought pathways and perfect ordering. It can also be read as the ultimate expression of unbridled, emergent, distribution. Free from the cruel fortunes of geography, human potential and possibility the only commodity left at the journey’s end.