God Emperor of Dune

 Last year I decided that I was going to read as much of a few classic sci-fi series as I could. In that time, I have been working my way through Frank Herbert's Dune series, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series, and the not-yet-classic series The Expanse by James S.A. Corey. So far, I have found Asimov's and Corey's series to be the most enjoyable. I quit Rama after Rama II, and I am officially throwing in the towel on Dune. I just finished God Emperor of Dune and I have taken as much as I care to from this series of novels.

I know that there is much more to go and there is at least one more book written by Herbert himself in the series before his son took over, but I have had enough of them. I won't say that I didn't enjoy the books, but they definitely become a slog. Actually, they are sort of always a slog. The narratives are not straight-forward and Herbert leaves the reader to figure out a lot of the details of backstory. I didn't intend to sit down to write about the whole series, so I will skip to this book.

God Emperor picks up several thousand years after the events of Children of Dune. For those who may not remember or who never intend to read these books, Leto II, Paul Atreides' son has turned a sandtrout skin into a still suit at the end of Children. The worm skin bonds with his own and in the intervening years Leto has pretty much turned into a giant worm with a human face. He retains his powers of prescience that were detailed in Children. Basically, all the cool stuff that made Paul Atriedes a bad ass in Dune are multiplied in Leto and combined with immortality and being a worm.

So it is now the next day and I am working on finishing this review. I just read the phrase, “Paul Atreides' son has turned a sandtrout skin into a still suit,” and realize now how bonkers that sounds. Here is what I find disheartening about this book – please forgive me, I am about to editorialize and probably will not make my way back to the actual plot – for all of the crazy stuff going on, this book is incredibly boring. Like Children, there is a lot of talking and plotting but very little action. At least in Dune there were knife fights and traps. Here, not so much. Leto talks a lot to a guy who keeps coming back as a clone from the first book. There are Fish Speakers and Face Dancers, and all kinds of other ill-defined groups.

Basically, I had to push my way through to the end of this. I think that for the right kind of reader, there is a way to immerse in this world and to invest in these characters. I didn't find them that compelling. It seems to me more that this book was an opportunity to write a divergent narrative in the same universe as Dune.

This, then, is the end of my attempts to read the Dune series and I am likewise bailing on this post.

Book notes, pt. 1

Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are four of them.

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

John D. MacDonald is one of a handful of pulp detective fiction authors who I have spent a lot of time reading.  Writing in the hard-boiled style, his work is similar to that of Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and others.  They all wrote these short novels about tough-guy detectives who work just outside of the law, sometimes cooperating with police.  The characters are all pretty similar, they are all imposing men who are perpetual bachelors.  They are war veterans who we would probably recognize now as suffering from PTSD.  They all present extremely macho/masculine facades but are well-intentioned and can sometimes expose a domestic or feminine streak.  Their attachments with women are either idealized and distanced or short and intense.  

This novel contains a scene that I have come to find pretty common in these novels.  Travis McGee, MacDonald’s central detective character, is helping the younger sister of a friend of his.  The plot doesn’t matter much because it follows a pretty similar arc to many of these novels.  At one point, McGee helps the sister, Nina, prepare a meal and then clean her apartment.  Nina remarks on McGee’s domestic abilities and how it undercuts his tough guy image.  Then, when she throws himself at him he resists her advances, for a time at least.  

This scene recurs in these pulp novels.  The male figure in these novels is hyper-masculinized to the point that he is able to adopt stereotypically feminine attributes as a point of proof of masculinity.  McGee is so big and tough that he can cook and clean and it doesn’t detract from his properly masculine image.  Also, that act of resisting female advances, which McGee does throughout the book from different women, serves to prove his value at the expense of the women in the book.  He gets to maintain his virtue and good intentions while also eventually sleeping with the woman he desires.  

The Stranger beside Me by Ann Rule

This is the true crime book that sets the standard for a lot of modern true crime stories.  Ann Rule knew Ted Bundy before he became famous for his killings and her book follows much of the investigation through his conviction.  The copy I read has several updates with the last one detailing his execution.

Parts of this book were interesting but I thought it was a bit longer than it needed to be.  Because Rule follows the case chronologically, many details are repeated as investigations and trials in various states commence.  

This book also treads a line that I can find a little worrisome in contemporary true crime stories.  It comes very close to lionizing the killer-subject.  Rule has to walk a fine line because of her friendship with Bundy and can seem at times to tip toward being too complimentary.  She is careful to explain that this is part of Bundy’s game and what makes him dangerous: he was able to hide his dark side and be both disarming and charming.  Then again, I may just be projecting my own ambivalence about the subject.  After all, I did just finish reading a 600-page book about a serial killer.  If Rule is fascinated by this subject, so are a lot of other people (myself included), and a bit of ambivalence to temper the interest/enthusiasm may be the right course.

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol is the third installment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot saga.  These stories follow a SecUnit that has gained its own autonomy and travels around the galaxy on its own missions, but who ends up helping out humans in need along the way.  Back at the beginning of the plague, tor.com gave away the first 4 novellas in this series to their readers and I scooped them up.  I had already read the first two and just now got to this third one.  

I enjoyed reading it but am a little fuzzy on the details of the book because I read it on my phone during lunch breaks and while standing in line.

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

The third book in the Dune series left me a little cold.  This novel takes up the lives of Paul Atreides’ family that he has left behind when he went into the desert to, ostensibly, die at the end of Dune Messiah.  The principal family members include: Paul and Chani’s twin children Leto II and Ghanima, who are pre-born, or abominations, depending on the side of mythology you happen to follow; Alia, Paul’s younger sister who is also a pre-born abomination; Duncan Idaho, an Atreides loyal who died in the first book, comes back as a ghola, mentat in the second book, and who is now married to Alia; Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother who has been off-world for a while but returns to Arrakis; Princess Irulan, House Corrino daughter who married Paul at the end of the first book; and Farad’n, the heir apparent of House Corrino who may have designs on the Atreides Imperium.

There is a lot of talk in this book, and a lot of intrigue.  Many of the players are vying for control over the Atreides twins, which would provide control over the Imperium.  There is also some infighting among the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen, and other factions in the Dune world.  A lot of the talk gets further confused by the phenomenon of the “pre-born.”  Alia and the Atreides twins all possess within them the consciousnesses of all of their ancestors.  They have broader views of history and “remember” things that happened before they were born.  Occasionally two characters will dialogue but as different personalities.

One of the more interesting uses of the “pre-born” is to throw personal identity into question.  If Leto II is the conglomeration of all of his ancestors, is there room for his own personality?  Leto II ends up following a path similar to his father, Paul, so he comes to learn his place.  The use of the pre-born trope is also interesting as it plays with destiny and the ability to see the future.

This ability to look into the future using the spice and the effect that it has on people is one of the more interesting aspects of this series.  The Atreides twins are careful to avoid using spice in the beginning of the novel because they fear what it will do to their personalities.  Leto II also begins to fear that knowing the future will doom him along a certain path.  This means that the character is constantly pulled in two directions: toward the past and the influence of the ancestors living inside of his consciousness and toward a future that he wants to carve out on his own, separated from the spice melange.  

In the end, I have to say that I am getting a little bored with this universe.  I think that there are some interesting things going on, but there are also too many things going on.  Like in the preceding books, the reader must keep track of a lot of things that are not really well explained.  Herbert jumps around in his writing and seems to work out details as he goes.  This makes for some confusing reading at times.  

I think I have a copy of God Emperor of Dune somewhere in my office.  If I do, I will read it but otherwise I might be done with the series — though I will probably return to the first book, Dune, and read that again at some point in the future.

Dune Messiah

A while back I felt ambitious about reading a bunch of classic sci-fi series.  I bought Rendezvous with Rama and Rama II, I bought all of the Foundation series, and I bought 3 sequels to Dune.  I have slowly been making my way through these because I find that I have to separate them out from my normal reading sequence. While I have really enjoyed the first books in each of these series, I have not been enamored enough of any of the sequels to delve further into their worlds. 
When I picked up Dune Messiah, I figured that I would see the continuation of Maud'Dib's rule and hoped that I would get a bit more backstory to the mythology that Frank Herbert exposes his reader to in Dune.  One thing that I liked about Dune, and something that I also found frustrating, is that he offers up a rich world with a built-in mythology that he only barely explains.  He lets the reader pick up bits and pieces of the various cultures and religions the figure heavily throughout the novel.  On one hand, I like an author who trusts his audience enough to be able to put together enough to get through a novel without laying everything out for them.  I am also a patient enough reader that I am happy to piece things together and to let things go until/unless the author comes back to them.  I don't need every single novel to be overly plotted and planned and have everything tied up neatly.  A shaggy dog here or there never killed anyone.
But Dune Messiah isn't interested in delving anymore into these aspects of Dune that I found fascinating.  Herbert also doesn't seem all that interested in continuing the action of Dune.  To some extent, this is okay because Paul Atreides has won his Jihad and reigns.  This novel is about intrigue and the difficulties of maintaining power won.  But there is a lot of talk, and a lot of it is very repetitious. 
I don't want to get too much into plot here because it is both a simple plot and convoluted.  It is simple in the sense that the parties are introduced quickly or are already known from the previous novel and the conflict is rather straightforward.  But it is convoluted in the approach.  Herbert must find a way for his characters to deceive and trick a character with the power of prescience, or the ability to see multiple potential future timelines.  The way that Herbert pulls this off is rather clever and exposes Paul's fatal flaw.  It is the more clever because of the way that it places Paul in a company of mythic figures whose hubris leads to an eventual downfall.  This all fits well into the archetypal hero's journey.
The read is quick and it is satisfying in its return to known quantities but I didn't get as much out of it as the original novel.

Frank Herbert

I am amazed that I had not read this book sooner.  I suppose it is because I was always aware of the story, had seen the movie and the TV mini-series, and it seemed so familiar that I had never felt the need to actually sit down and read it.  

The story is about what I had thought it would be, which is to say that I had thought my memory of it was spotty and that there were things that I didn’t really know about the narrative, but I discovered that this is actually pretty close to the reality of the book.  For all of Herbert’s creativity and for the massive scope of the novel, there are a lot of holes in it.  I have inklings of the connections between the Houses and why they mimic feudal systems and I have a sense of the political intrigue backing it up, but Herbert does not like to explicitly state much of what is going on.

The narrative itself jumps in time and place without a lot of exposition, which makes the book seem jumpy.  More than once I had to backtrack to a previous section or page, only to realize that the narrative had completely shifted focus, or had jumped forward by 10 of more years in time. 

Beyond the narrative, I found the novel to be more interesting in the ideas that Herbert develops.  One that stands out is the competition Herbert sets up between new and old weapons technology.  At first, the reliance on knives for hand-to-hand combat seems an odd choice in a highly technologically developed world.  But over the course of the novel, the reader finds out that knives must be used to counteract the use of personal energy shields that deflect more advanced weaponry.  Because the energy shields block certain levels of force, the effective knife fighter is not the fastest, but the one who can modulate speed and angles to actually penetrate the shield.  The slower, more subtle energy of a blade can move under the threshold of blocked energy.

The interaction between characters that Herbert creates also helps to develop the narrative where exposition does not.  I had always assumed that Paul Atreides would be a heroic figure in the novel, based upon the David Lynch movie I had seen.  However, Paul is a more conflicted character.  He is something of an embattled figure on Arrakis.  The novel develops his quasi-magical/religious background more than the movie does and it throws a lot more of a pall across the character.  While Paul is always brooding, he is more dangerous in the novel.  Less is revealed about his true motivations and the narrative seems to distrust Paul’s adopted mantle of Muad’dib a lot more than the movie does.  Paul’s place in the middle of the struggle involving House Atreides, House Harkonnen and the Fremen of planet Arrakis is more that of an instigator than the champion of the people I had assumed it to be.

A final point that I had not expected was Herbert’s use of Jewish and Islamic religion in the work.  The novel relies heavily on Abrahamic mysticism, which should not be surprising given Paul’s role as the Prophet. But the nature of prophecy differs from the presented in a more religious context.  

There is a lot more going on in this novel than I care to address at the moment.  I wanted to get some of this down because it has been about three months since I finished the book and I wanted to capture some of my thoughts before they became too hazy.  Don’t be too harsh about those mistakes that I have made.  I wrote this without the book in front of me and with no other preparation than having thought about it for a while.  

I have some of the follow-up Dune books in my to-read pile, so expect to see more on Frank Herbert some time in the future.