According to an obituary a few days ago in the Washington Post, science fiction author Frederick Pohl died on 2 September, aged 93.
In junior high and high school, I read science fiction voraciously, and Frederick Pohl was one of my favorite authors (another was Frank Herbert, whom I have previously written about). The Post obituary describes his works as "sociological science fiction," and that seems right. Although his books were what I would call "hard" SF, meaning they were real science-based rather than space opera, they were more concerned with the effects of space travel and future technology on human society and individuals than on the gee-whiz aspects of the technology itself.
His most famous books, which I read multiple times, were the Heechee saga. In these books, humans discover a hollowed-out asteroid where thousands of spaceships belonging to a long-dead alien race have been stored. After some tinkering, humans figure out how to make the ships fly, but are unable to interpret the controls to allow them to control the destinations. A few of the ships fly to resource-rich planets, but most end up at useless or dangerous spots. The adventurers who take these ships stand to earn vast fortunes, but only at the risk of death.
The first book in the saga, Gateway, concerns Robbie, a man who earned a great deal of money on a voyage on a Heechee ship, but at the cost of the life of his girlfriend, who was the love of his life. He escaped the ship only barely as it approached a black hole, while the other crew members didn't make it. What makes it even more difficult is that he knows the other crew members aren't dead yet--thanks to the odd (but true!) nature of extreme-gravity physics, time is ever-slowing for them as they approach the black hole, so while a decade has passed for him, only a few seconds have gone by for them. He worries that his girlfriend believes he betrayed them to escape, and the guilt from this haunts him. The book alternates chapters between his visits to a computer psychiatrist named Siegfrid and the action as it took place in the past. Over time, his psychiatric sessions help him come to terms with the tragedy.
As mind-blowing as his books were, the real reason I am writing about Frederick Pohl is that he once helped me with a school project! In the ninth grade (this would have been 1990), we had to write a long report on America. I forget the exact parameters of the report, but it was open-ended enough that for my topic I chose "America in the Year 2020." As part of my research, I wrote to a number of people about what they thought America would be like in 30 years.
One of the people to whom I sent a letter was Frederick Pohl, who wrote back with a well-thought out response. His view was that the main challenge facing Americans in the future was the environment, and the stress the American way of life placed on the natural ecology. What a thrill it was to hear from a man I much admired! I still have the letter to this day. I might also add, I received an "A" on the paper.
Good-bye to a fine author, and one who was admirably generous with his time for a fan who asked for his help. Though it's been twenty years since I've read a book by Frederick Pohl, his works have been a huge influence on me. I can only hope some bit of his classiness has rubbed off on me as well.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Monday, September 2, 2013
What I'm Reading: Complete Peanuts, 1979-80
So this is the second volume of the Complete Peanuts I've read in the past few months. The Complete Peanuts is a project to publish every strip of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, from its inception in 1951 to its final panel in 2000. It's a gargantuan undertaking, and a new volume covering two years is issued every six months. The project is now up to the late 1980s, but I'm a little behind and have only reached 1979-80. (See here for my review of the 1977-78 volume.)
This volume introduces only one new character, Henrietta, a girl bird who joins Snoopy's Beagle Scout troop for their hikes. She figures prominently in the book's longest sequence, a six-week (!) arc of strips when she and another of the birds get tired of camping with Snoopy one night and go into town, where they get into a fight with some bluejays. Charlie Brown gets a call to come bail Henrietta out of jail. Walking her back to rejoin the Beagle Scout troop, he gets lost in the woods and Peppermint Patty and Marcie have to go searching for them. Of course they all manage to find each other, with Snoopy, who in story time has been gone from home just two or three days, only vaguely remembering "that round-headed kid" when he encounters Charlie Brown.
Another lengthy sequence is an unusually somber arc where Charlie Brown feels woozy and checks himself into the emergency room. The problem may be that he's been hit on the head with too many fly balls. During his stay in the hospital, the other characters react to his illness. Sally moves her stuff into his room, Peppermint Patty and Marcie wait on a bench outside the hospital, and Lucy uncharacteristically grieves that he might not come back. As Schroeder points out to her, "It's interesting that you should cry over him when you're the one who always treated him so mean." So distraught is she, that she promises when he gets out, she'll hold the football and really, truly let him kick it. The punchline is that when he does get out and she holds the football, he misses entirely and kicks her in the hand, requiring her to get a cast.
Not as solid as the 1977-78 volume, but still pretty good. Schulz isn't quite sure what to do with his new character, Eudora (introduced in 1978), and some of the running gags, especially with Peppermint Patty's poor grades, are getting pretty threadbare. Still, the two sequences described here, and a couple other long-ish ones, are quite entertaining. As with the past few volumes, I have to ask myself after this one whether I'll get the next volume. The answer this time is yes--I bought this and the 1981-82 volume as a set to save money. After that, we'll see. The strip has started its slow decline--it's still good at this point, but each new year of strips brings less delight than the last.
This volume introduces only one new character, Henrietta, a girl bird who joins Snoopy's Beagle Scout troop for their hikes. She figures prominently in the book's longest sequence, a six-week (!) arc of strips when she and another of the birds get tired of camping with Snoopy one night and go into town, where they get into a fight with some bluejays. Charlie Brown gets a call to come bail Henrietta out of jail. Walking her back to rejoin the Beagle Scout troop, he gets lost in the woods and Peppermint Patty and Marcie have to go searching for them. Of course they all manage to find each other, with Snoopy, who in story time has been gone from home just two or three days, only vaguely remembering "that round-headed kid" when he encounters Charlie Brown.
Another lengthy sequence is an unusually somber arc where Charlie Brown feels woozy and checks himself into the emergency room. The problem may be that he's been hit on the head with too many fly balls. During his stay in the hospital, the other characters react to his illness. Sally moves her stuff into his room, Peppermint Patty and Marcie wait on a bench outside the hospital, and Lucy uncharacteristically grieves that he might not come back. As Schroeder points out to her, "It's interesting that you should cry over him when you're the one who always treated him so mean." So distraught is she, that she promises when he gets out, she'll hold the football and really, truly let him kick it. The punchline is that when he does get out and she holds the football, he misses entirely and kicks her in the hand, requiring her to get a cast.
Not as solid as the 1977-78 volume, but still pretty good. Schulz isn't quite sure what to do with his new character, Eudora (introduced in 1978), and some of the running gags, especially with Peppermint Patty's poor grades, are getting pretty threadbare. Still, the two sequences described here, and a couple other long-ish ones, are quite entertaining. As with the past few volumes, I have to ask myself after this one whether I'll get the next volume. The answer this time is yes--I bought this and the 1981-82 volume as a set to save money. After that, we'll see. The strip has started its slow decline--it's still good at this point, but each new year of strips brings less delight than the last.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
What I'm Reading: City of Scoundrels
City of Scoundrels by Gary Krist is historical non-fiction covering the story of a particularly horrific week-and-a-half in the history of Chicago, specifically, July 21st to July 31st 1919. The experimental flight of an airship kicked the eleven days off when it caught fire above the Loop and crashed through the atrium of a bank building, killing airship riders and bank employees alike. The next day, a six-year old girl was kidnapped, the prime suspect a pedophile living next door, kicking off a media feeding frenzy. An incident on the border between a white beach and black beach a couple days later sparked one of the worst race riots in American history, exacerbated by a transit strike that forced thousands of city workers onto the dangerous streets and nearly shut the city down.
It's a dramatic period to cover, and Krist does a good job of giving each of the events its due, but without crowding anything out. He provides context and background, bringing readers up to speed on how and why each development occurred, and to what extent they were inter-related. He also does an excellent job of bringing interesting little details to light, helped by his use not only of newspapers and official reports from the period, but also diaries from contemporary Chicago residents, particularly that of Emily Frankenstein, a nineteen-year-old with an interest in current events.
That Krist was able to assemble such a complete picture of the period is largely due to the existence of eight daily newspapers in Chicago at the time. The different newspapers served Chicago's left, right, and centrist readers, its labor sympathizers and big business, its blacks, Germans, and Poles, assuring that any major event, and lots of smaller ones, would receive coverage from several viewpoints. Should an American city now experience such an eventful week, I wonder if historians decades from now will be able to research it as thoroughly. That even major cities now rarely support more than two, and often only one, daily makes me doubt it. The typical response to that would be that of course blogs and micro-newssites on the Web cover cities with a wealth of detail not possible in earlier times--but will these blogs and sites still be accessible in fifty, eighty, or a hundred years?
Rather less successful was Krist's attempt to show that this sequence of events had far-reaching consequences in Chicago. In fact, the whole point of the book is that this eleven-day period somehow forged modern Chicago, but I just don't see it. The airship disaster was a freak accident, the kidnapping of the six-year old was regrettable but not especially important (except to her family, of course!), and the transit strike was only one in a long line of labor unrest incidents in Chicago, not the first and far from the last. The only one of the incidents that really had a long-lasting impact, from what I can tell, was the race riot. Up until then, in Krist's telling, Chicago had been relatively welcoming to blacks migrating from the South, but the riot seemed to have ignited a period of racial animosity that smoldered for decades.
In fact, I'd say the very facts Krist present show that Chicago went on pretty much as it always had, despite its hellish summer in 1919. The same Republican-machine mayor, Big Bill Thompson, was re-elected that fall. No important businesses began or failed, no social movements or major reforms had their seeds in the events. Big Bill did manage to pass his Chicago Plan a few months later, a framework for vastly expanding and modernizing Chicago's roads, bridges, parks, and civic institutions. While the events in the book perhaps gave fresh impetus to the Chicago plan, it had been in the making for almost ten years and very likely would have passed in any case.
No, the real event of 1919 that impacted Chicago was the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution on 16 January, with entered force a year later. This amendment, prohibiting alcohol, was the prime cause of the rise of organized crime in Chicago, which really defined the city in the 1920s. Except for the race riot, the events related in City of Scoundrels, as fun and satisfying as it is to read, are little more than historical footnotes, notable only for their close temporal proximity.
If this sounds interesting to you, by all means read this book--you won't be disappointed. I highly recommend it for the armchair historian. But if you're hoping to find out what really made the city tick in the 1920s, you should instead read Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, the definitive history of Prohibition, and one in which Chicago plays no small role.
It's a dramatic period to cover, and Krist does a good job of giving each of the events its due, but without crowding anything out. He provides context and background, bringing readers up to speed on how and why each development occurred, and to what extent they were inter-related. He also does an excellent job of bringing interesting little details to light, helped by his use not only of newspapers and official reports from the period, but also diaries from contemporary Chicago residents, particularly that of Emily Frankenstein, a nineteen-year-old with an interest in current events.
That Krist was able to assemble such a complete picture of the period is largely due to the existence of eight daily newspapers in Chicago at the time. The different newspapers served Chicago's left, right, and centrist readers, its labor sympathizers and big business, its blacks, Germans, and Poles, assuring that any major event, and lots of smaller ones, would receive coverage from several viewpoints. Should an American city now experience such an eventful week, I wonder if historians decades from now will be able to research it as thoroughly. That even major cities now rarely support more than two, and often only one, daily makes me doubt it. The typical response to that would be that of course blogs and micro-newssites on the Web cover cities with a wealth of detail not possible in earlier times--but will these blogs and sites still be accessible in fifty, eighty, or a hundred years?
Rather less successful was Krist's attempt to show that this sequence of events had far-reaching consequences in Chicago. In fact, the whole point of the book is that this eleven-day period somehow forged modern Chicago, but I just don't see it. The airship disaster was a freak accident, the kidnapping of the six-year old was regrettable but not especially important (except to her family, of course!), and the transit strike was only one in a long line of labor unrest incidents in Chicago, not the first and far from the last. The only one of the incidents that really had a long-lasting impact, from what I can tell, was the race riot. Up until then, in Krist's telling, Chicago had been relatively welcoming to blacks migrating from the South, but the riot seemed to have ignited a period of racial animosity that smoldered for decades.
In fact, I'd say the very facts Krist present show that Chicago went on pretty much as it always had, despite its hellish summer in 1919. The same Republican-machine mayor, Big Bill Thompson, was re-elected that fall. No important businesses began or failed, no social movements or major reforms had their seeds in the events. Big Bill did manage to pass his Chicago Plan a few months later, a framework for vastly expanding and modernizing Chicago's roads, bridges, parks, and civic institutions. While the events in the book perhaps gave fresh impetus to the Chicago plan, it had been in the making for almost ten years and very likely would have passed in any case.
No, the real event of 1919 that impacted Chicago was the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution on 16 January, with entered force a year later. This amendment, prohibiting alcohol, was the prime cause of the rise of organized crime in Chicago, which really defined the city in the 1920s. Except for the race riot, the events related in City of Scoundrels, as fun and satisfying as it is to read, are little more than historical footnotes, notable only for their close temporal proximity.
If this sounds interesting to you, by all means read this book--you won't be disappointed. I highly recommend it for the armchair historian. But if you're hoping to find out what really made the city tick in the 1920s, you should instead read Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, the definitive history of Prohibition, and one in which Chicago plays no small role.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
What I'm Reading: X'ed Out
X'ed Out is a graphic novel by Charles Burns. It was loaned to me by a friend who lauded it as one of the better things he's read lately. It follows Doug, a 20-something art school student who's been having a tough time lately. His relationship with his girlfriend is going bad, his mom is sick, and his dad is descending into pain pill addiction. Worst of all, he's taking pills (for depression, maybe? It's not made clear.) that give him bizarre nightmares.
I have to say, the nightmares were my favorite parts. In them, the art turns more cartoony and Doug looks like an adult Tin-Tin. It's nicely surrealistic and horrifying, while mixing-up the events of his daytime world with dream logic. They take place in a sort of South Asian village, where bizarre creatures curse Doug out when he slows them down on the sidewalk, people eat strange worm-like creatures with human facial features, and biotoxic waste spills openly into the waterways. Yet, like dreams, there is a sort of internal logic to this world and indeed, Doug seems to be on a sort of mission there, something involving a queen imprisoned in a big beehive in the center of town, even if he doesn't understand fully the mission or why he must carry it out.
Of course, Doug's waking life is hardly any better. These parts didn't work as well for me, largely because Doug isn't very sympathetic. His life is aimless, living at home with his parents, attending art school because he doesn't know what else to do, passive-aggressively trying to break up with his girlfriend when he meets someone new. Actually, passive-aggressive is a good term for how he lives. It's no wonder he's depressed and finds it easier to live meaningfully in his dreams. He rejects anything that might make his waking life worthwhile, but doesn't seem to have the energy or gumption to create his own way.
Not that his character doesn't ring true--I've met plenty of people like him. Like those people, I kind of want to give Doug a shake. Wake up! Set yourself a goal! It frustrates me to be around people like that, and it frustrates me to read about them.
Of course, maybe the point of the book is that Doug finds his way. I don't know because the book ends just as Doug is about to enter the Hive, where the queen in his nightmares has been taken. The next volume is due in, let's see...2012. So I guess it's probably out already. I might check out, the art was pretty great, and I'd like to see what the Hive looks like. But if I don't get to it, I won't miss Doug. See you around dude, hope things work out for you. You want my number, maybe we can hang out sometime? Nah, I'll see you when I see you.
I have to say, the nightmares were my favorite parts. In them, the art turns more cartoony and Doug looks like an adult Tin-Tin. It's nicely surrealistic and horrifying, while mixing-up the events of his daytime world with dream logic. They take place in a sort of South Asian village, where bizarre creatures curse Doug out when he slows them down on the sidewalk, people eat strange worm-like creatures with human facial features, and biotoxic waste spills openly into the waterways. Yet, like dreams, there is a sort of internal logic to this world and indeed, Doug seems to be on a sort of mission there, something involving a queen imprisoned in a big beehive in the center of town, even if he doesn't understand fully the mission or why he must carry it out.
Of course, Doug's waking life is hardly any better. These parts didn't work as well for me, largely because Doug isn't very sympathetic. His life is aimless, living at home with his parents, attending art school because he doesn't know what else to do, passive-aggressively trying to break up with his girlfriend when he meets someone new. Actually, passive-aggressive is a good term for how he lives. It's no wonder he's depressed and finds it easier to live meaningfully in his dreams. He rejects anything that might make his waking life worthwhile, but doesn't seem to have the energy or gumption to create his own way.
Not that his character doesn't ring true--I've met plenty of people like him. Like those people, I kind of want to give Doug a shake. Wake up! Set yourself a goal! It frustrates me to be around people like that, and it frustrates me to read about them.
Of course, maybe the point of the book is that Doug finds his way. I don't know because the book ends just as Doug is about to enter the Hive, where the queen in his nightmares has been taken. The next volume is due in, let's see...2012. So I guess it's probably out already. I might check out, the art was pretty great, and I'd like to see what the Hive looks like. But if I don't get to it, I won't miss Doug. See you around dude, hope things work out for you. You want my number, maybe we can hang out sometime? Nah, I'll see you when I see you.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Again With the Importance of Writing Groups
So I was on vacation last week, and the week before that was just crazy, and maybe the week before that I'd been kind of lazy. But for whatever reason, I hadn't written in my WiP for three weeks. I was really dreading getting back to it, too. After you haven't worked on your project for a while, it's hard to get back into the groove.
But on Monday I went to my Writers of Chantilly meeting, and I came away charged. Ready to return to my work. Maybe it was the positive comments I received on my latest chapter. Maybe it was being around other writers excited about their work. Maybe it was simply thinking about the writing process. Whatever the reason, last night I sat down at the computer and made a number of changes to my novel I've been meaning to for a while, and got in some actual writing as well. All in all, a solid night, and I'm still ready to write again tonight.
So here's another reason we could add to the list of why you, a writer, should definitely be in a writer's group: getting back on track when you've lost your way.
But on Monday I went to my Writers of Chantilly meeting, and I came away charged. Ready to return to my work. Maybe it was the positive comments I received on my latest chapter. Maybe it was being around other writers excited about their work. Maybe it was simply thinking about the writing process. Whatever the reason, last night I sat down at the computer and made a number of changes to my novel I've been meaning to for a while, and got in some actual writing as well. All in all, a solid night, and I'm still ready to write again tonight.
So here's another reason we could add to the list of why you, a writer, should definitely be in a writer's group: getting back on track when you've lost your way.
Friday, August 9, 2013
What I'm Reading: Daytripper
Daytripper is a graphic novel by Brazilian brothers
Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. The two have illustrated American comics in the past (notably the Umbrella Academy series from a few years back that was popular with the artier portions of the comics readership), but I think they might be better known in other parts of the world. I remember Daytripper receiving quite favorable critical reviews when it appeared in serialized single-issue form in 2010, though I passed it by at the time. I think now doing so was a mistake and am glad that my brother sent me the collected version last Christmas.
The story follows Brás, a journalist in his early 30s whose career is stuck at a small newspaper in Sao Paulo, where he writes the obituaries. To make matters worse, his father is a famous and respected novelist in Brazil whose accomplishments will always overshadow Brás's, no matter what he does. He's depressed over having to attend a reception for his father, although things are looking up when his best friend Jorge, a staff photographer, also ends up assigned to the reception. At the end of the first chapter, Brás is unexpectedly shot in a robbery at a bar near the reception hall, and the final words are his own obituary.
This sets the pattern for each of the ten chapters (corresponding to the ten original issues), each of which visits Brás at a certain period in his life and ends with his death, giving the overview of his life up to that point in obituary form. Obviously, the point here is not a straightforward narrative of his life; indeed, the chapters are not even in chronological order, jumping around to various important points in his childhood, adulthood, and old age.
Rather, I think the purpose is to show how the meaning of Brás's life changes with the context, his roles as lover, friend, son, father, husband, employee, and so on coloring the way his life is interpreted with each succeeding obituary. It's not surprising that Brás has a certain everyman quality about him, allowing the reader to easily identify with his different life stages.
The story follows Brás, a journalist in his early 30s whose career is stuck at a small newspaper in Sao Paulo, where he writes the obituaries. To make matters worse, his father is a famous and respected novelist in Brazil whose accomplishments will always overshadow Brás's, no matter what he does. He's depressed over having to attend a reception for his father, although things are looking up when his best friend Jorge, a staff photographer, also ends up assigned to the reception. At the end of the first chapter, Brás is unexpectedly shot in a robbery at a bar near the reception hall, and the final words are his own obituary.
This sets the pattern for each of the ten chapters (corresponding to the ten original issues), each of which visits Brás at a certain period in his life and ends with his death, giving the overview of his life up to that point in obituary form. Obviously, the point here is not a straightforward narrative of his life; indeed, the chapters are not even in chronological order, jumping around to various important points in his childhood, adulthood, and old age.
Rather, I think the purpose is to show how the meaning of Brás's life changes with the context, his roles as lover, friend, son, father, husband, employee, and so on coloring the way his life is interpreted with each succeeding obituary. It's not surprising that Brás has a certain everyman quality about him, allowing the reader to easily identify with his different life stages.
It's perhaps a little odd I should have gotten this far in the review without discussing the art. After all, it is a graphic novel, and one with spectacularly good art. Perhaps it's because the art so perfectly fits the story, realistic but loose, catching all the little details and illustrating characters' emotions so well, it hardly seems necessary to comment on it specifically. Odd, but I think perhaps making art that is unobtrusive is harder than something that really calls attention to itself.
Some nudity and sex makes the book inappropriate for younger readers, but it's not salacious in nature and shouldn't put any older readers off. I would recommend Daytripper to any adult or mature teen-ager who is interested in a quiet but beautifully told and drawn story delving into what life means as we assume different roles as we age. Tuesday, July 23, 2013
What I'm Reading: Children of Dune
When I was a teen-ager, I was a little obsessed with Frank Herbert's Dune series. It's a science fiction series with deep world-building and lots of political intrigue, and has become a cult favorite since the publication of the first book in the mid-1960s. Over the past year, I've been re-reading them to see how they hold up.
The series is set on Dune, a harsh desert planet with scant rain or life. The only humans native to Dune are the Fremen, a primitive people possessed of a rigorous code of honor. Despite all that, Dune is the most important planet in the galaxy, for it is the source of spice, a substance produced by sandworms, a creature that lives nowhere else. Spice extends life, so that those wealthy people who can afford to use it daily live up to 200 years. Taken in large amounts, it also allows a user to see into the future, although this is a dangerous practice as overdosing is fatal. The only ones who would take such a risk are the navigators of the Space Guild, who use the prescience provided by huge spice doses to keep from steering their ships through stars when traveling faster than the speed of light.
At the beginning of the first book, the noble Atreides family has been awarded the planet Dune by the emperor, and because of the importance of Dune, they move their capital from the lush world of Caladan to Dune's harsh environs. The award turns out to be a trick, however, a conspiracy between the emperor and the cruel Harkonnen family to rid themselves of a pesky rival House. The head of the Atreides, Duke Leto, is killed, and his wife, Jessica, and sixteen-year-old son, Paul, flee into the desert, accompanied only by the loyal master swordsman Duncan Idaho and family bodyguard Gurney Halleck.
They find shelter with a group of Fremen, and Paul insists on risking a spice overdose so he can see how to lead his family back to power. He realizes that the Fremen, toughened by desert life, make perfect warriors. For their part, the Fremen worship Paul as a Messiah, for their legends foretell a man who will live through the spice trance and lead them to glory. With Duncan's and Gurney's help, Paul trains the Fremen in modern weaponry and they start attacking spice mining vessels. The empire sends legions of elite Sardaukar troops, led by the emperor himself, to put down these rebels who are disrupting the vital spice trade. Taking advantage of a massive sandstorm that renders electronic communications impossible, and leading huge sandworms that can swallow entire ships at once, the Fremen defeat the emperor's troops and force him to surrender to Paul Atreides.
The second book, Dune Messiah, takes places about ten years later, when Dune has become the seat of the empire, led wisely but firmly by Paul and his Fremen warriors. No matter how benevolent his rule, however, some of his subjects will inevitably be disgruntled. He discovers an assassination plot against him but willingly falls victim to it after a spice trance reveals to him a terrible fate for the empire, and all humanity, if he remains alive. Sadly, his Fremen concubine Chani, who is his true love--rather than his wife, the late emperor's daughter, whom he married for political reasons--dies during childbirth just before Paul's own demise.
The third book, Children of Dune, follows Paul's nine-year-old twin children, Leto II and Ghanima. Due to his spice overdose, Paul's genetic material was altered and the children have the power to recall past lives, even into far history when humans still lived on earth. Since Paul's death, the empire has been ruled in their name by their aunt Alia, who has fallen under the sway of the evil Baron Harkonnen. Alia has no intention of ending her regency and giving the children power, and under her the empire has become a stagnant, oppressive place filled with spies and dungeons for those who oppose her. When they discover Alia's plot to marry Ghanima off to a nephew of the old emperor and to kill Leto, the twins hatch a plan to overthrow their aunt and assume their rightful place on the throne.
So what's my conclusion on re-reading the series so far? My estimation of their quality has fallen a few notches from 20+ years ago, although it's still mostly positive. I really admire the political intrigue in a galaxy that is simultaneously futuristic and medieval, and how carefully Herbert has designed his world to retain a human element, rather than overwhelming the reader with all the technology from thousands of years in the future. For instance, humans outlawed computers centuries before, and personal shields have rendered laser and energy weapons pointless. Instead, humans have reverted to using human computers called Mentats and fighting with swords. This allows Herbert to avoid a lot of clichés of space opera.
Also, the extensive, completely immersive world is super-cool, with the human computer Mentats, mutated Space Guild navigators, galaxy-spanning religious orders whose nuns possess powers of hypnotic suggestion, the various noble houses and how they interact, insect-sized robots that carry poison needles, the desert society and religion of the Fremen, the well-thought out ecology of Dune itself, and much, much more.
On the other hand, the writing style, which I suppose I didn't care about as much as a teen, leaves a lot to be desired for the adult me. The dialogue, especially, tends towards the stilted, and the constant need of every conversation to have hidden meaning and layers of intrigue is hugely annoying.
My rank ordering of the books remains the same 20 years later, however. Children of Dune is the best, perhaps because Herbert has moderated some of the excesses of his writing style, but mostly because it contains a truly tense story (after a fairly slow start in the first fifty pages or so). The original Dune is ranked second, for its drama, mystical overtones, and epic sweep. The second book, Dune Messiah, is the weak one of the bunch, with a fairly boring story and terrible dialogue. We'll see how the fourth, God Emperor of Dune, holds up when I read it in a few months. I recall that one as seeming almost to be from a different series, as it is set 1,000 years after the events of the first trilogy.
The series is set on Dune, a harsh desert planet with scant rain or life. The only humans native to Dune are the Fremen, a primitive people possessed of a rigorous code of honor. Despite all that, Dune is the most important planet in the galaxy, for it is the source of spice, a substance produced by sandworms, a creature that lives nowhere else. Spice extends life, so that those wealthy people who can afford to use it daily live up to 200 years. Taken in large amounts, it also allows a user to see into the future, although this is a dangerous practice as overdosing is fatal. The only ones who would take such a risk are the navigators of the Space Guild, who use the prescience provided by huge spice doses to keep from steering their ships through stars when traveling faster than the speed of light.
At the beginning of the first book, the noble Atreides family has been awarded the planet Dune by the emperor, and because of the importance of Dune, they move their capital from the lush world of Caladan to Dune's harsh environs. The award turns out to be a trick, however, a conspiracy between the emperor and the cruel Harkonnen family to rid themselves of a pesky rival House. The head of the Atreides, Duke Leto, is killed, and his wife, Jessica, and sixteen-year-old son, Paul, flee into the desert, accompanied only by the loyal master swordsman Duncan Idaho and family bodyguard Gurney Halleck.
They find shelter with a group of Fremen, and Paul insists on risking a spice overdose so he can see how to lead his family back to power. He realizes that the Fremen, toughened by desert life, make perfect warriors. For their part, the Fremen worship Paul as a Messiah, for their legends foretell a man who will live through the spice trance and lead them to glory. With Duncan's and Gurney's help, Paul trains the Fremen in modern weaponry and they start attacking spice mining vessels. The empire sends legions of elite Sardaukar troops, led by the emperor himself, to put down these rebels who are disrupting the vital spice trade. Taking advantage of a massive sandstorm that renders electronic communications impossible, and leading huge sandworms that can swallow entire ships at once, the Fremen defeat the emperor's troops and force him to surrender to Paul Atreides.
The second book, Dune Messiah, takes places about ten years later, when Dune has become the seat of the empire, led wisely but firmly by Paul and his Fremen warriors. No matter how benevolent his rule, however, some of his subjects will inevitably be disgruntled. He discovers an assassination plot against him but willingly falls victim to it after a spice trance reveals to him a terrible fate for the empire, and all humanity, if he remains alive. Sadly, his Fremen concubine Chani, who is his true love--rather than his wife, the late emperor's daughter, whom he married for political reasons--dies during childbirth just before Paul's own demise.
The third book, Children of Dune, follows Paul's nine-year-old twin children, Leto II and Ghanima. Due to his spice overdose, Paul's genetic material was altered and the children have the power to recall past lives, even into far history when humans still lived on earth. Since Paul's death, the empire has been ruled in their name by their aunt Alia, who has fallen under the sway of the evil Baron Harkonnen. Alia has no intention of ending her regency and giving the children power, and under her the empire has become a stagnant, oppressive place filled with spies and dungeons for those who oppose her. When they discover Alia's plot to marry Ghanima off to a nephew of the old emperor and to kill Leto, the twins hatch a plan to overthrow their aunt and assume their rightful place on the throne.
So what's my conclusion on re-reading the series so far? My estimation of their quality has fallen a few notches from 20+ years ago, although it's still mostly positive. I really admire the political intrigue in a galaxy that is simultaneously futuristic and medieval, and how carefully Herbert has designed his world to retain a human element, rather than overwhelming the reader with all the technology from thousands of years in the future. For instance, humans outlawed computers centuries before, and personal shields have rendered laser and energy weapons pointless. Instead, humans have reverted to using human computers called Mentats and fighting with swords. This allows Herbert to avoid a lot of clichés of space opera.
Also, the extensive, completely immersive world is super-cool, with the human computer Mentats, mutated Space Guild navigators, galaxy-spanning religious orders whose nuns possess powers of hypnotic suggestion, the various noble houses and how they interact, insect-sized robots that carry poison needles, the desert society and religion of the Fremen, the well-thought out ecology of Dune itself, and much, much more.
On the other hand, the writing style, which I suppose I didn't care about as much as a teen, leaves a lot to be desired for the adult me. The dialogue, especially, tends towards the stilted, and the constant need of every conversation to have hidden meaning and layers of intrigue is hugely annoying.
My rank ordering of the books remains the same 20 years later, however. Children of Dune is the best, perhaps because Herbert has moderated some of the excesses of his writing style, but mostly because it contains a truly tense story (after a fairly slow start in the first fifty pages or so). The original Dune is ranked second, for its drama, mystical overtones, and epic sweep. The second book, Dune Messiah, is the weak one of the bunch, with a fairly boring story and terrible dialogue. We'll see how the fourth, God Emperor of Dune, holds up when I read it in a few months. I recall that one as seeming almost to be from a different series, as it is set 1,000 years after the events of the first trilogy.
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