[ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers
Damien Broderick
thespike at satx.rr.com
Mon Jul 21 05:42:48 UTC 2008
At 10:15 PM 7/20/2008 -0700, John Grigg wrote:
>I just finished reading "God Emperor of Dune" by
>Frank Herbert. It shows the psionically prescient Leto II merging his
>body with a sandworm [larva]. This allows him to live for thousands of
>years and also grants him great resistance to physical attack. I had
>mixed feelings about Leto, he was sort of an enlightened monster/super
>dictator who felt his prescient god-like visions showed him why it was
>so necessary to manipulate and cull the galactic population for the
>sake of the "Golden Path" and the future of humanity.
Frank Herbert didn't want you to have mixed feelings; he wanted you
to feel revulsion at the prospect. The DUNE trilogy is a critique of
heroes. As a very great sf critic observed (in x, y, z, t: Dimensions
of Science Fiction):
<Presumably it startled many of Herbert's fans to learn that Dune and
its sequels were not merely (and not meant to be) an exciting heroic
romance. Below the power-fantasy surface, the sequence is a bitter
exploration of the corrupting effects of just that mystique. Its
Islamic roots give it peculiar prophetic cogency today. Dune, its
prophets, messiahs and god-emperors, grew out of Herbert's
fascination with `the messianic convulsions which periodically
inflict themselves on human societies.' Unlike many sf novels, his
series was meant to demonstrate that `superheroes were disastrous for
humans' (O'Reilly, Timothy, Frank Herbert, Frederick Ungar, 1981, 153).
The early books dealt with Paul Atreides, futuristic
avatar of Agamemnon's bloody house of Atreus. Child of a breeding
program aimed at creating a prescient, totally conscious aristocracy,
he is all that and more. Yet, Herbert insists, Paul's very authority
cripples him and spoils his world. With each succeeding book, this
thread of heightened perception and its discontents is wound tighter.
Paul's son Leto II, transfigured into an ageless monstrosity,
connives at his own death to set humanity free of his awful,
stultifying omniscience. The last books propose complex results of
that decision some thousands of years down the line, a world governed
by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and their enigmatic foes.
Female Jesuits in Herbert's ironic mythology (the
punnish wordplay in their name is no accident, Herbert told me), the
Bene Gesserit confront enemies from within and without their own
system; courage is displayed, strange truths uttered, at last the
world of Dune itself is shattered... and the saga opens out toward
the next book, in which a new world is seeded with immortal sandtrout
and Dune World is reborn. Like the dunes rolling irresistibly over
all in their path, Herbert's extraordinary future history surged, it
seemed, toward the 1990s and his next Hawaiian island; even his death
has not ended the irresistible momentum toward yet another fat volume
full of superhuman folk telling each other deeply cryptic truths and
lies, vying for control of all space and history, dying horribly only
to spring back to cloned or reincarnated life.
One might doubt the durability of a book like Chapter
House Dune, concerned preposterously with conflict between the
monastic Bene Gesserit and their crazed opponents the Honored Matres,
a sort of Nazi coven of bureaucrats who use sexual bonding as their
secret weapon. It was a little difficult to see why any reader should
care. But the damned things sell and sell, and so do the inferior
prequels. Build it, perhaps, and they will come?>
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