I learnt that Erehwon - nowhere spelt backwards - exists only in Anne McCaffrey's novel,
Nimsha's Ship, where Nimsha, the protagonist, and her ship get sucked into a wormhole before being spat out in a galaxy far, far away. She names her refuge planet Erehwon, after 'an old Earth story' - evidently, Sam Butler's story - that influential utopian novel,
Erewhon, published in 1872, that quite rightly satirizes Victorian culture and its unwieldy self-view.
I learnt also that, inside the
Dune universe, in one back-story penned by Frank Herbert's son, Brian, and his co-author Kevin J. Anderson, there's a tale about a crusade, coincidentally called
(Dune) The Butlerian Jihad, prosecuted by the last free people of the universe. It's about a desperate war fought to banish all the 'thinking machines'.
The title was apparently inspired, not by our Sam and his dangerous Darwinian machines, but by a friend of Frank's also named Frank - Frank Butler - no relation - who in 1970 was instrumental in helping to stop the building of Seattle's controversial R.H. Thompson Expressway.
To be frank, in triplicate, complexity abounds. But, in cutting to the chase, whodunnit? Well, it's all a bit of a fiction init - a mock-up of a mystery. And the truth is all too elusive but hopefully not
completely unavoidable.
Someone's done gone bloody well dreamt it all up or done
something sneaky. That much is clear. But in each case, there's an implicated Butler so there's the lesson, right there. Ya gotta watch them blinkin' Butlers, fictional or otherwise. Take 'em out by all means… to some cheap restaurant for a hearty meal. Have a laugh. Have a drink or three. That often dilutes the confusion.
There
is a real nowhere, in New Zealand, listed as Erewhon - named in honor of that very same Sam Butler, who lived and worked in the vicinity between 1860 and 1864. He was, among other things, a sheep farmer in a place called Mesopotamia Station and was notably the first white settler in the area. Perhaps not ironically, this Erewhon of today is an enormous sheep station.
There's so much still to learn is what I learned, in summing up. I haven't yet read
any of those books;
Erewhon, the
Dune books,
Nimsha's Ship… But, I'll get around to that,
eventually 
