Books: A New Turn of the Worm

GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE by Frank Herbert; Putnam; 411 pages; $12.95

The age of technological science fiction appears to have ended. Who needs to read about imaginary rocket ships and interplanetary voyages when he can read about the real thing? The age of psychological and mythological science fiction, however, is definitely under way. Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels are notable for using a futuristic setting to peer into man’s past and speculate on his future. If Lessing is the Athena of the genre, Frank Herbert is its Homer.

Herbert, a former West Coast newspaperman, set the science-fiction world on its antenna in 1965 with the publication of Dune, an involved and resonant adventure saga of how human civilization was reborn in a desert. Set on the waterless planet of Arrakis, or Dune, the book introduced a hero whose ancestry went back to the legendary Greek House of Atreus. Paul Atreides had something for everyone. He was part Odysseus, part Jesus and part Muhammad. His followers were a desert people forced by circumstances into a mystical and practical awareness of their ecosystem.

With its space messiah hero, its understanding of ecology and its references to mind-expanding drugs, Dune found a large and appreciative audience during the mid-’60s. It was a book the young readers made, largely through word of mouth—”far out,” “mind blowing,” etc. Dune won both a Hugo and a Nebula, science fiction’s most coveted annual awards. Sales eventually hit nearly 2 million copies. But Dune was only the beginning of a long-running drama, the first part of which is now being filmed in North Africa. In 1969 Herbert published Dune Messiah, which has since sold more than 2.2 million copies in hard-cover and paperback. Seven years later came Children of Dune, which has also topped the 2 mil lion mark. Now Herbert has turned the trilogy into a tetralogy with God Emperor of Dune, a fourth visit to distant Arrakis that is every bit as fascinating as the other three—and every bit as timely.

God Emperor is set a full 3,500 years after the events of the previous books.

Atreides has been dead for millenniums.

His son Leto is still in control, his life extended by a geriatric drug whose supply he has cornered. Throughout the centuries, Leto has been slowly and deliberately metamorphosing into the gigantic sandworm that the planet’s original inhabitants worshiped as their god. Furthermore, Leto’s private drug stock has given him the racial memories of all his ancestors and the ability to see the future. His utterances are gnomic and awesome: “Oh, the landscapes I have seen! And the people! The far wanderings of the Fremen and all the rest of it… You must remember that I have at my internal demand every expertise known to our history … I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived. I watch them inside me and outside. Past and present can mingle with odd impositions in me … I lave extremely acute hearing and vision, plus a sense of smell extraordinarily dis criminating … You cannot hide very much from my senses.”

With such power, it is not surprising that Leto plays the eternally dangerous game: manipulating his own race and those of his enemies to assure both the emergence of a successor and the survival of the species.

Told through a combination of straight narrative and excerpts from imaginary histories and journals, God Emperor is a cautionary yarn about the messianic ego and an uncritical faith in technology. The book also harbors a cynical view of politics. Some musings from the worm who would be god: “Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat.” Some of Leto’s decrees are variations on the Old Testament. Dune’s religion, for example, outlaws computers as graven im ages of the mind. Throughout, his observations toll a somber truth: “Government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.”

Though written in a popular style, God Emperor does not sidestep moral complexity and ethical dilemma. Herbert understands that humanity needs myths and heroes to embody them. But he also knows the danger posed by those who claim to be the sole carriers and interpreters of those myths. Dune folk who subscribe unquestioningly to Leto’s self-proclaimed godhood are shown as virtual automata, doomed to perish with him or to be lost without him. In Herbert’s dry and gritty world, the future belongs only to those who think for themselves.

—By Peter Stoler

Excerpt

“‘You talk riddles!’

‘I talk accumulated observations which tell me that the peaceful posture is the posture of the defeated. It is the posture of the victim. Victims invite aggression.’ ‘Your damned enforced tranquillity! What good does it do?’ If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people.'”