[ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers

[Damien Broderick]

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?>