Dune Messiah

Our book today is Frank Herbert's 1969 Dune Messiah, the much-despised sequel to his towering 1965 science fiction classic Dune, and I recently returned to it because received opinions are always to be tested, and the received opinion on Herbert's Dune books can be overheard in the Science Fiction aisle of virtually every retail bookstore in the country, at least once a day: "The first one is great, but the sequels just keep getting worse and worse."

Sigh.

Three things make this received opinion virtually inevitable: first, the sheer magnitude of Herbert's Dune achievement is so great, so stunning, that any sequel - especially the first one - is naturally going to look a little anemic; second, there's no discounting the deleterious effect all those truly-ghastly Dune-lite ripoff books written by Herbert's son Brian (with ample assistance from Kevin Anderson) might have had on the Dune-reading public (if you follow the subject-labels to the very earliest days of Stevereads, you can refresh your memory on at least one of those books); and third and most important, the first sequel in question here is Dune Messiah - which, I'm curiously saddened to note after all this time, is indeed bad enough to taint the objectivity of a saint.

The story opens twelve years after the events that climaxed Dune. Young Paul Atreides, heir to the House Atreides, has harnessed the giant sandworms and barbaric Fremen warriors of the planet nicknamed Dune and used them to wrest control of the Empire from its corrupt emperor and his shadow-counselors, the all-female super-society called the Bene Gesserit. In order to foster a peaceful transfer of power, Paul agrees to marry the former emperor's daughter Irulan, even though he's actually in love with the Fremen woman Chani. Paul is aided in all of this by the fact that the life-extending spice found only on Dune - melange - has given him vast powers of prescience, allowing him to see into every corner of the future. As a result, he knows where to send his faithful legions in order to win victory after victory and subjugate star system after star system (Paul's younger sister Alia also possesses this spice-awareness - by the time of Dune Messiah, she's grown into a beautiful and fierce warrior-priestess, feared and revered by the simple folk on Dune). When the sequel opens, Paul is bored with his absolute power - and the problem is, Herbert has no experience capturing that on the page; in Dune, absolutely nobody is bored with the power they have, so we don't get scenes as Hollywood-arch as this one:

"You've allowed the weather to fall into a very primitive pattern," she [Irulan] said, rubbing her arms through her robe. "It was dry and there was a sandstorm today. Are you never going to let it rain here?"

"You didn't come here to talk about the weather," Paul said. He felt that he had been submerged in double meanings. Was Irulan trying to tell him something which her training would not permit her to say openly? It seemed that way. He felt that he had been cast adrift suddenly and now must thrash his way back to some steady place.

"I must have a child," she said.

He shook his head from side to side.

"I must have my way!" she snapped. "If need be, I'll find another father for my child. I'll cuckold you and dare you to expose me."

"Cuckold me all you wish," he said, "but no child."

"How can you stop me?"

With a smile of utmost kindness, he said: "I'd have you garrotted, if it came to that."

Unfortunately, that distinct note of bloat is present throughout this book (which is, ironically, the shortest Dune novel of them all). Characters - especially Paul - are forever doing much more thinking, pondering, and musing for their own (or our) good. Even when a ghola (as close as Herbert - in 1969 - could come to envisioning a clone) of a beloved old friend of Paul's is sent to his court by a dangerous faction who claim they mean the act as a gift, the book's dormant tensions refuse to waken. Exchanges like this don't help:

Paul found himself fascinated by a well-remembered mole on the ghola's chin.

"Trying to live in this future," the ghola said, "do you give substance to such a future? Do you make it real?"

"If I go the way of my vision-future, I'll be alive then," Paul muttered. "What makes you think I want to live there?"

The ghola shrugged. "You asked me for a substantial answer."

"Where is there substance in a universe composed of events?" Paul asked. "Is there a final answer? Doesn't each solution produce new questions?"

There are plot developments in Dune Messiah, although far too few. An attack robs Paul of his eyesight (he's not really inconvenienced - Herbert tells us it's because his powers of prescience give him a map of everything as it unfolds, although a moment's thought shows how screamingly illogical that is), and even from the beginning of the book, it's clear that Alia harbors an instability could become dangerous. She longs for the simple days before the complaisance of power:

The departing swarm [of pilgrims] had stirred up dust. The flinty odor came to Alia's nostrils, ignited a pang of longing for the open bled. Her sense of the past, she realized, had been sharpened by the coming of the ghola. There'd been much pleasure in those untrammeled days before her brother had mounted the throne - time for joking, time for small things, time to enjoy a cool morning or a sunset, time ... time ... time. Even danger had been good in those days - clean danger from known sources. No need then to strain the limits of prescience, to peer through the murky veils for frustrating glimpses of the future.

Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden - love, smoke, a pillar of fire, and a man striding across the open bled."

But the most important plot-event in Dune Messiah is the birth of Paul's twin children, Leto and Ghanima - and the reason it's so important is because it sets up this book's own sequel, Children of Dune, which is a massive, glorious return to form for Herbert, a fast-paced, incredibly intelligent, exhilarating science fiction novel. And Herbert's three Dune novels after that, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune are similarly fantastic (in my opinion, God Emperor is fully the equal in quality to Dune itself).

For decades, I've been thinking - and telling people who asked - that Dune Messiah was an odd aberration in Frank Herbert's writing career, and especially in his Dune series. The received opinion I'd long ago devised here was that all the other Dune books were entirely wonderful, well worthy of being the jewels in Herbert's reputation, and that only Dune Messiah lets the side down.

And just this once (!), it turns out received opinion was right on the money - at least as far as this one book goes. Those of you who're contemplating taking on these books are well advised to simply skip Dune Messiah - its skimpy important contents are effectively reprised in a page or two of Children of Dune, so go right on to that one and enjoy yourselves!

God Emperor of Dune

Our book today is God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert's 1981 third sequel to his massively successful and influential Dune, and even just that half of a sentence suddenly requires about a year's worth of explanation and clarification, which we here at Stevereads will attempt to boil down to just a couple of enjoyable paragraphs, as a public service (and to save ourselves some labor, since we plan on writing about all the other sequels in due time). And it's not just a factual rear-guard action we have to wage, informing and filling-in, no: because in addition to everything else, we've found that the sequels to Dune, in and of themselves, are apt to spark arguments from Manhattan to the Ivory Coast.

The gist of the matter is this: somewhere in the early '80s, an idea took hold in what, for want of a better term, we'll call the science fiction community, and that idea was this: Dune is, of course, great - but either a) Dune Messiah stinks, Children of Dune is good, but all the others - God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune, all stink, or b) all the sequels stink. This opinion was disseminated wide and far and can today be heard firmly parroted by science fiction fans who've never actually read any of the books in question.

This idea is almost entirely wrong. It's true, Dune Messiah is a very, very rare creative misfire by Frank Herbert. But all the other "Dune" books are fantastic, each in many ways better than the one before it. Herbert's art grew wiser as he grew older. There are epic battle-scenes in Chapterhouse:Dune that are drawn with only a handful of extremely deft master-strokes, and God Emperor of Dune is full to over-brimming with a gigantic and playful wisdom. It's in every way a thoroughly remarkable book, poorly served by the knee-jerk condemnation floating around the sci-fi world, a condemnation made all the easier by the largely atrocious books churned out lately by the author's son.

For those of you coming cold to the world of Dune, a few preliminary words: the setting is the far, far future, a galaxy-spanning empire ruled by an emperor and fueled by the spice melange, which prolongs life for those wealthy enough to afford it, and the mind-expanding qualities of which allow the navigators of the Spacing Guild to ply the space-lanes between star systems, thus making the empire possible at all. The spice occurs on only one planet: Arrakis, the desert planet - Dune.

In Dune, the control of the spice is wrested from the empire by the desert people of Dune, lead by an exiled scion of a noble Imperial house, Paul Atreides. He thereby becomes the most powerful man in the empire, and when a resurgence of his enemies manages to kill his infant son Leto, he's devastated and names his next son Leto as well. This second Leto grows to young manhood in an empire controlled by House Atreides but riven everywhere by striving power factions - the Spacing Guild, the shape-changing Tleilaxu, rival imperial houses, Fremen purists from the sand-villages of Dune, and perhaps most effectively of all, the Bene Gesserit, an ancient and secretive quasi-mystical sisterhood following their own long-sighted ends. Leto II's grandmother was a Bene Gesserit, and he grew up both schooled in their ways and resentful of them.

In response to a crisis in Children of Dune, Leto does something remarkable and unprecedented: he accepts the larvae of Dune's enormous, savage sandworms into his own body. They begin immediately to make physical changes that give him physical abilities which allow him to save the day in that book, but the after-effects are unknown.

Those after-effects are the main scaffolding of God Emperor of Dune, because the novel opens thousands of years after the close of Children of Dune. As far as we're aware here at Stevereads, this is the only time such a devise is used in all of science fiction, and it's only made possible by that amazing gamble young Leto II takes in the previous book. Because it turns out the sandworm organisms he grafted into his body have changed that body, strengthening it and altering it as they slowly, gradually transform Leto into the title character, the God-Emperor whose rule has lasted for thousands of years. In God Emperor of Dune Leto is no longer human in any way - not only is he physically transforming into a great sand-worm, but he's mentally coping with being a not an individual but a self-defining community, vastly older than everybody around him, constantly incubating a plan, a hideous, long-term plan to at last domesticate humanity.

Herbert captures all these utterly weird eventualities with a width of vision that's hugely, dramatically convincing. Long, long hours of deep contemplation perhaps gave these insights to Herbert (that, and losing his beloved wife, a loss he heartbreakingly makes memoir of in a later Dune volume), but the genesis of it hardly matters - the result is a book of precipitate speed and power. Here, for instance, is God-Emperor Leto wistfully contemplating his lost humanity:

I feel the vanished parts of myself. I can feel my legs, quite unremarkable and so real to my senses. I can feel the pumping of my human glands, some of which no longer exist. I can even feel genitalia which I know, intellectually, vanished centuries ago....

Herbert has many strengths as a writer, but his strongest by far is his ear for dialogue (two things should be pointed out here: first, this is, oddly enough, the hardest trick for writers to master, and second, Herbert's son utterly fails at it - hasn't written a convincing word of dialogue in thirty years). In Heretics and Chapterhouse his dialogue explodes off the page, becomes in and of itself an action, but even in God Emperor it's achieved a crystalline quality most science fiction writers can only dream of:

"Where did you get the spice-essence?" Leto asked.
"We bought it from smugglers," [Bene Gesserit sister] Anteac said.
"There've been no smugglers for almost twenty-five hundred years."
"Waste not, want not," Anteac said.

Events in God Emperor of Dune are pre-ordained - Leto has the spice-gift of predicting the future, only to an extent no other savant has ever approached, and he's plotted the course of his life down to the last 'accident' that twists its path. But somehow, Herbert manages to weave this element of pre-destination throughout all his "Dune" books without ever sapping the dramatic impulse that pulls them all forward. The entirety of the series (possibly excepting Dune Messiah) is hugely worth your time, regardless of nerd-sci-fi prejudices, and we here at Stevereads - being immortal and semi-human ourselves - favor this particular book above all the others in the series. The next time you see a paperback of it for 40 cents, take a chance and dig right in!

Books! Stoopid Sci-Fi!

You know, the main enemies of science fiction aren't the genre-snobs who think it starts and stops with Philip K. Dick (or that Margaret Atwood has ever written a word of it).

The real enemies of science fiction are the writers of it who've bought into the mainstream idea that genre readers are a little dim.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's dumb genre writing. As if genre fiction doesn't have enough handicaps to getting any respect in the literary world.

Mainstream fiction is another matter altogether. It's already accepted, so it doesn't need to prove itself. James Patterson's novels are pitched - intentionally or otherwise - at about a seventh grade level of literacy, and they sell millions of copies each, regular as clockwork. Every single one of Earth's 10.3 billion inhabitants has read The DaVinci Code, and it was so dumb the movie version was an IMPROVEMENT.

Mainstream fiction is so complacent in its stupidity that writers who are at best mediocre are lauded as its literary lions (I'm guessing most of you could append my usual list here). Margaret Drabble's latest indescribably dull novel goes on the best-seller list. Gilbert Sorrentino barely merits a one-paragraph obituary in the Dogwood Dispatch.

Science fiction has the potential to be the most relevant, the most challenging of all the genres. Exotic, killer diseases, staggering sights beamed to Earth from far-voyaging probes, the unlocking of the genome, the miniaturization and saturation of computers ... these developments aren't coming once every fifty or hundred years, like with Darwin and Mendel. Science fiction is happening in every morning's newscast (and not just in the technologically developed West - the meanest sub-Saharan village will be cast into turmoil right alongside London and Cairo by the destruction of the environment or the spread of mutated super-diseases).

So it's all the more frustrating that I recently read two stupid science fiction novels.

Not just stupid novels - although they were, good Gawd they were - but novels that ASSUMED stupidity on the part of their readers.

That assumption might help to sell more books, but it's certainly NOT something science fiction should learn from James Patterson.

This isn't to say that dumb science fiction can't be enjoyable (dumb pretty much anything can be enjoyable, although some things - like newscasts or commentary 'discussion' shows - nonetheless should never, ever be dumb).

No, the problem is that the two science fiction books I read recently have two distinct but equally compelling reasons NOT to be stupid, and yet stupid they are, stupid, stupid, stupid. Which is frustrating.

The first of the two books is titled ... well, I have no idea WHAT it's titled. The front cover (which, traditionally, gives the reader a clue or two as to the title of what they're reading) has two possible candidates, but I see no instinctive way to pick between them: either Crucible: McCoy or Provenance of Shadows. (I'm hoping it's the former, since the latter sucks like hard vacuum)

I can HEAR you rolling your eyes from here! Let me quote you: "A STAR TREK novel? Well OF COURSE that's going to be dumb! What did you expect?" Close enough?

That's this book's compelling reason NOT to be stupid. Because even genre fiction has its ghettos, and although 'Star Trek' ranks higher than 'Star Wars' (which ranks higher than 'Dragonquest,' which ranks higher than 'Warhammer'), it definitely constitutes a ghetto.

I stand for the ghetto. The entire 'Star Trek' phenomenon has attracted a tribble-trove of howling nutjobs over its forty year existence, it's true. But it's also attracted a whole lot of really smart, really passionate people, and: it's produced some really good books.

David George's "Crucible McCoy Provenance of Shadows" sure as Hell ain't one of them.

Good novels, really. It's a shame so many of you will never believe that, but it's understandable. For every Federation or Ship of the Line or Strangers from the Sky, there'll be books like this one, confirming every prejudice you have.

That doesn't mean I don't hate each such book with undimmed energy, as they come down the pike.

George takes as the fulcrum of his storyline ('plot' would be WAY too complimentary) the great 'classic' Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," in which, as many of you will not need reminding, a drug-addled McCoy goes back in time to 1930s Earth and Kirk & Spock go after him.

McCoy alters the timeline by saving the life of Edith Keeler, and Kirk & Spock restore it by preventing him from doing that.

Only NOT! Turns out the timeline in which McCoy saves Edith Keeler and changes Earth history happened after all, spooling out in mind-numbingly tedious daily detail in which McCoy is never rescued by his friends and never returns to the 23rd Century.

The separate timeline - in which Kirk & Spock rescue McCoy - turns out not to have erased the other one at all. They go on right next to each other, and the saved McCoy feels connected somehow to the unsaved one throughout his life.

That's really it. The saved McCoy doesn't somehow save the unsaved McCoy. And the unsaved McCoy doesn't somehow save the future. Nope. They both just live out their lives.

As was, I imagine, his goal, George takes us through most of the McCoy 'highlights' on the original series, the movies, and the character's brief cameo in the premiere of 'The Next Generation.'

Balancing this, we also get the life & times of the unsaved McCoy, who finds himself in the 20th Century with no ID and no background.

I guess I should point out, in case any of you missed it, that this premise a) makes no friggin sense whatsoever and b) could have made an absolutely RIVETING parallel-lives novel anyway, in the hand of a good writer.

The A part is obvious to anybody who's actually SEEN 'City on the Edge of Forever.' For those of you who might need your memory's refreshed (or who'll CLAIM you do - stand up and take a bow, Harlan!), allow me to walk you down memory lane:

Kirk & Spock follow their ailing comrade into the past. They meet Edith Keeler (there's that sublime scene in the basement, where she needs only a second to intuit that where Spock belongs is "at your side, like he always has been and always will be"), and Kirk falls in love with her.

(Decades of fan fiction have asserted that Edith Keeler is the great love of Kirk's life - something George seems to agree with, and maybe something that will salvage his upcoming Kirk novel)

Kirk is escorting Edith to the movies when she makes incidental mention of McCoy, that he's living back in the Mission they've just left. Kirk, electrified by the news, turns immediately to go back and find his friend. He sternly tells Edith to stay right where she is (Shatner's very good, showing a Kirk a little desperate to hold on to everything, old and new).

Just as Kirk is reaching the Mission's front doors, McCoy comes out - the friends have found each other! The rescue is a success!

Edith, seeing this joyful reunion, naturally walks toward it, intrigued. She doesn't notice the truck bearing down on her until it's too late. McCoy tries to save her, but Kirk, mindful of restoring the timeline, stops him. Edith is struck and killed.

In other words, McCoy CAN'T FAIL to save her unless he's ALREADY BEEN saved himself. The one follows the other. So there can't be any alternate timeline in which he grows old in the past. Either he grows old in the future, or he grows old in the past WITH Kirk and Spock (assuming here that the restoration of the timeline is what prompts the Guardian of Forever to return them to their present ... the story is a little vague on that point, with all due respect to its author!).

Still, I would have been willing to swallow a plot inconsistency of that size if the storytelling had been up to the task. Even Homer makes plot gaffes (a free book to the first of you loyal readers to give me an example! And again, don't send it to me privately! Share it with your legion of fellow Stevereads acolytes!)

But the storytelling is dumb. George is a leaden, endlessly repetitive writer who fundamentally distrusts his readers to pay attention for more than a page or two. PARAGRAPHS of exposition are repeated with only minimal variation EVERY SINGLE TIME their object is mentioned. It becomes mind-deadeningly dull.

And he's so self-conscious of writing intentionally 'canonical' Star Trek novels that you can virtually HEAR him flipping pages in the 'Star Trek Encyclopedia' every time he even so much as mentions a character.

The most ludicrous example of this? At one point, while he's performing the minor miracle of making a Federation/Klingon starship battle DULL, he contorts the action into balloon-animal shapes because of one tiny little line of dialogue. One of the Klingon ships the Enterprise is facing is commanded by Captain Koloth, and damn if George doesn't feel BEHOLDEN to Jadzia Dax's comment (a free book to the first person to tell me where!) that Koloth never faced Kirk in battle! Guess being AT the same battle on opposite sides but never actually exchanging phaser-fire honors that restriction!

This is EXACTLY the kind of crap that causes even science fiction fans to roll their eyes at 'Star Trek' novels. Continuity over drama. Fanboys over readers.

And it doesn't help any that his characterizations are unfailingly wooden. One excrutiating example should suffice. Spock suggests to McCoy that Kirk is hiding from his grief over Edith Keeler. And McCoy replies:

"I wasn't aware of what transpired between Jim and Edith Keeler. But do you really think his refusal to really deal with his loss is impacting the captain's ability to command?"

To paraphrase a wonderful bit of snark, that's prose written on a computer BY a computer. It would sound stupidly formal and verbose even put in a Vulcan's mouth - does any 'Star Trek' reader (aside, I guess, from George) for a moment picture McCoy sounding like that?

I'm sure all this venting is mostly wasted effort. Most of you wouldn't read a 'Star Trek' novel with a phaser pointed at your head (although I know at least three of you, like myself, have lots of fond memories of earlier ones that were actually good).

My frustration comes from the fact that stupid novels like this - where distrust of the audience's intelligence is the bedrock starting point - not only betray the intelligences that created 'Star Trek' in the first place but also make it that much harder for ANYBODY to take these novels seriously.

The exact same state of affairs pertains to the 'new' "Dune" novel, Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. The same state of affairs: stupid writing, pitched to coddle stupid readers.

Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the five greatest science fiction novels of all time. It's a crowning example of how smart, sharp, and moving the genre's fiction can be. It's a magnificent reading experience, and I'm of the opinion (not shared by all of you, I know) that all of Herbert's subsequent "Dune" novels are almost equally great (God Emperor is my personal favorite).

One of the fundamental REASONS they're great is because Herbert always assumes his readers are as intelligent as he is (since his intellect was up in Elmo's slightly-creepy range, this isn't always the case, and some of most delicious sensations in Dune come from the reader scrambling to KEEP UP).

Herbert's son, who for some reason seems to think his filial devotion is best demonstrated by exhuming his father's literary corpse every year and sodomizing it for all the world to see, holds just the opposite view. He assumes his readers are video-addled pre-adolescent boys, and he writes accordingly.

How many travesties has it been? Five? Six? But bad as they've been, they haven't been as bad as they COULD be. One thing prevented it: none of them were explicitly SEQUELS.

Brian's writing a thick, laborious version of the Butlerian Jihad? Well, that's appalling of course, but hey - Frank never wrote about it. Brian's free to envision it any way he likes, I guess. And I'm free not to pay that much attention. Even with the "House Atriedes" trilogy of prequels, it was just barely possible to convince yourself that it didn't 'really' concern Dune at all.

Hunters of Dune takes that all away. Its plot - and its HUGE marketing campaign - entirely DEPEND on it being the sequel to Frank Herbert's final Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune. It picks up exactly where that book ends.

The marketing campaign - and Brian's self-serving preface - assert repeatedly that the ending of Chapterhouse is a cliff-hanger that's gone unresolved for twenty years. Brian hauls out that oldest of fraud-chestnuts - the lost manuscript locked in a bottom desk drawer (how many such drawers has Hemingway had so far? Four?), and tries to cloak his 'sequel' in legitimacy by claiming it's just the fulfillment of a book Frank meant to write.

I read and loved Chapterhouse back in 1985, and I've re-read it several times since (Herbert's books REALLY repay re-reading, in a way even those of his smart contemporaries often don't). At no point did I feel I was reading a cliff-hangingly incomplete novel. Nor do I believe Herbert thought he was writing one (writing a book that was not an aesthetic whole would have been anathema to him, as his son should bloody well know).

The scene at the close of Chapterhouse is tense and precarious, yes, but by no means incomplete. The savage Honored Matres - in the person of their Bene Gesserit-trained new leader Murbella - have reached a fragile, suspicious accord with the Sisterhood. True, some dissenters have stolen a spaceship and disappeared out into the Scattering beyond the Empire, but Murbella is still holding her tentative alliance together, and there's a note of hope for the future.

The book ends on this note, followed, as all readers of the book know, by a heart-breaking tribute from Herbert to his late wife. This personal coda actually informs the novel, which is populated with one of the richest and most varied cast of female characters in all of fiction, let alone science fiction.

It's spare and unapolgetically intelligent: in life, there are no pat and simple conclusions - we adapt as best we can and move forward with what tools we have, always true to our larger purpose (it's obvious from his tribute that Herbert's wife both embodied this philosophy and served as its inspiration)(in other words, what the fuck is wrong with a son who thinks it's a good idea to screw with that kind of end-note?)

Herbert's novel, like George's, is lumpy and endlessly repetitive - as one reader pointed out, just how many frickin times do we need to be told what 'the spice melange' is?

At every turn, characters are re-introduced and their comments carefully explained. The action - such as it is - is done so poorly it sometimes takes you a couple of pages to realize that anything has happened at all. On every page, Frank Herbert's literary legacy is despoiled, by the only person on Earth with the legal ability to do so.

It's extremely depressing to think this is just going to keep happening (as that same reader lamented, "Can't we just PAY him to stop writing?"), but the book's opening clarion call, "the saga of Dune is far from over!" makes it pretty clear the son is going to go right on doing this to his father's creation.

My solution, and my recommendation to all of you? Go back and read the real "Dune" books again. You'll find gems buried in them you missed before, no matter how many times you've read them.

And of course if you HAVEN'T read them, you should ignore Hunters of Dune and do so at once. They'll amply show you what SMART science fiction can be like.