There was no Omnius, Erasmus or anything like that in Frank's books. Those stories don't enter into consideration.
Let me go one step further. Firefly is the prequel to Warhammer 40K. The lost colonies are rediscovered by the Emperor in the distant future.
40K being that parody of grimdark scifi that was mistaken for a sincere effort? I've had the intention of working with GW just so I could write a 40K story where a guy named Josh gets eaten by a Tyranid (sp?) in honor of an old coworker who loved that game. I like the idea, Matilda's an emergent force sensitive.
A while back I made a semi-serious suggestion that Star Wars is in the future of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. I don't remember the logic chain I used, except I suggested that the term "Force Lance" gains more significance.
Dune is a sequel to Firefly? I might read it one day if that is really so. But I think Cranford was a better prequel.
No if anything it's a kinda thematic sequel to Asimov's Galactic Empire series/Foundation, which started as Campbell and Asimov doing Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire. Herbert is kinda doing something similar except based on the early rise of Islam. And Star Wars is just Lucas doing it, but with liberal democracy.
I take no position on the Dune connection here, but methinks you may have forgotten the nukes popping like flashbulbs all over the visible hemisphere of Earth as the ships fled in that flashback. Six nukes went off in less than 10 seconds. I think that whole "we used up the planet" line was just to make the people of the 'Verse feel better. Although I am not sure "we polluted the planet to death" is really more reassuring than "we blew up the world"...
Here's one that somebody came up with here a while back: The 'Verse as seen in Firefly/Serenity is a part of the Star Trek universe. How so? Well, after WWIII, many people escaped in slower than light ships to find a place away from a wrecked Earth. They came across a system in a remote part of the galaxy with 'dozens of planets and hundreds of moons', as mentioned in the opening credits of Serenity, and they colonized and terraformed all or most of them. What happens as mentioned in the series and movie happens, with the peoples of the Alliance being blissfully unaware of what's going on in the rest of the galaxy. Eventually, in the 23rd or 24th century, a Starfleet ship discovers the system, and the peoples of the Alliance learn that they are not alone in the universe, and that other life forms that aren't human also exist. They also learn that Earth survived, thrived, developed advanced space travel, contacted other worlds, established a Federation that spans part of the galaxy, and has left them behind technologically and socially. How the Parliament of the Alliance will cope with this is unknown.
Interesting, but with STL ships, how could they get to a remote part of the galaxy by the 24th century?
My impression of that scene wasn't that those were nukes, but the various ships launching from Earth. A ship emerges directly from most of those flashes.
Yup. The pollution clouds where meant to be so thick the exhaust plume of the ships illuminated it as they passed though.
I think whenever you disturb someone's favorite thing with some other thing, and the internet is involved, hate is generated. I just passed along that Interstellar is a prequel for Wall-E and I was called a hater. I just thought it was a good observation. It can be a prequel to Dune if you like. I blame Prometheus.
Depends on how thorough the nuking of Earth would have been, as long as the entire surface didn't go up in nuclear fire (which would have required a ridiculous number of nukes to do) the surface should mostly be intact and possibly not completely radioactive, especially if the bombardment was focused on a particular target.
The nuking of Earth in the third Jihad novel was quite thorough - as thorough as when Arrakis is nuked in Heretics of Dune. In both cases, absolutely nothing was intended to survive. That's not my only objection, though. Honestly - in the Butlerian Jihad books you've got all of Earth controlled by Omnius, Erasmus, Titans, lesser cymeks, and the human minions such as Vorian Atreides and Iblis Ginjo. Exactly where is this conference of the Commission of Ecumenical Translators supposed to happen without any of the aforementioned knowing about it (the information in the appendix in Dune makes it clear that this conference occurs on one of the Hawaiian islands)? Especially when the intent is to harmonize the human religions as much as possible, rewrite the Bible, and include proscriptions against computers and artificial intelligence? KJA/BH missed the whole boat with their books. The Butlerian Jihad wasn't Man vs Machine. It was Man Who Thinks Computers/AI is Good and Beneficial vs Man Who Thinks Computers/AI is Evil and Harmful. It was the latter group that won in the end, and convinced the rest of the people in the Imperium to adopt their viewpoint. After humans no longer had computers/artificial intelligence to rely on, they were forced to (re)develop skills that had been lost - skills such as what even we in our RL would consider fantastic feats of memorization, and the Mentat abilities of calculation and logic.