Location from Dune by Frank Herbert
The Harkonnen homeworld — a ravaged industrial hellscape of factories, gladiatorial arenas, and perpetual smog where cruelty is the organizing principle of civilization.
Giedi Prime smells of machine oil, ozone, and something acrid that burns the back of the throat — a cocktail of industrial pollutants that the Harkonnen have never bothered to filter. The air tastes metallic. Everything is loud: the grinding of factories that never shut down, the roar of arena crowds carried on fouled wind, the clang of slave labor echoing through processing plants. The population lives in stratified misery. The slave class works the factories and mines. The middle class administers and enforces. The upper class competes for the Baron's favor through escalating displays of cunning and brutality. Entertainment centers on blood sport — gladiatorial combat, hunting slaves through industrial mazes, and worse. The Harkonnens have made cruelty into an art form and an economic system. There is a perverse efficiency to the place. Giedi Prime produces enormous industrial output. It simply does so by consuming its own people as fuel.
A sky the color of bruised metal, permanently hazed by industrial output from continent-spanning factory complexes. No natural landscape remains — every surface is built over, strip-mined, or paved. Black ferrocrete structures rise in brutal geometric blocks. Floodlights cut through the smog at all hours because natural sunlight rarely penetrates. The gladiatorial arenas are the only structures given any architectural ambition — massive coliseums lit in red and orange, designed to hold hundreds of thousands of spectators.
Also known as: Harkonnen homeworld, Giedi Prime