Discworld's Nac Mac Feegles and the Arakin Fremsen

I might be walking out on a fragile limb here, but I can see some pretty convincing parallels between Prachett's Nac Mac Feegle society and Frank Herbert's Fremen. (For those who don't know, the Fremin are a society in the Dune series that, like the Feegles, might be taken as primitive upon first glance.)

There's the obvious structure of the societies, in which both are broken down into clans (or seiches) with their own hierarchy and relationships. While the communities help one another, primary allegiance is to one's own clan/seich. Both Feegle and Fremen are primarily warrior cultures and are deeply spiritual. And, most notably, both place one woman in a particular seat of power: the kelda and the Reverend Mother.

There's a scene at the beginning of Chapter 6 in A Hat Full of Sky that fleshes out the comparison between these two ruling women more vividly than I could. It describes how Jeanne knew that Tiffany had been inhabited by the hiver, by ingesting some water from a caldron plus some "special water" from her mother's caldron. This resulted in an experience in which the kelda has access to the memories of all the keldas who came before and a slight bit of prescience from the memories of future keldas.

This ritual is nearly perfectly analogous to the ceremony that produces a Reverend Mother in the Fremen culture, in which poisoned water (of the spice, for those who know the books) is ingested and must be consciously altered to a benign drug by the potential Reverend Mother. This process awakens genetic memory, allowing her access to the experiences of her ancestors. This same spice gives a limited prescient awareness of the future, just as in the case of Jeanne.

It's interesting that these two societies can share so many parallels, but especially in regard to the similarities between the kelda and the Reverend Mother. Here we have one humorous fantasy world and one of the most serious science fiction worlds ever written sharing the exact same power structure and memory emergence. Sure, Herbert, unlike Prachett, makes more of a scientific appeal by stressing that the memories are not magical but merely wrought in our genetic code, but the fact remains that the two showcase what is essentially the same societal blueprint. It seems to support the idea that the difference between fantasy and science fiction isn't the content, but in the way said content is explained.