SPOILER WARNING

The following reaction will contain spoilers for both Dune and Dune Messiah. As a policy, I’m trying to keep the spoilers in What I’m Reading reactions to a bare minimum and limited to the first fifty pages of the book. If the spoilers exceed those guidelines, I’ll make a point to include a note up front.

DUNE MESSIAH

From a certain point of view, Dune Messiah is a disappointment: It simply doesn’t live up to the incredibly high standard set by Dune itself.

Some of the problems with Dune Messiah are failures in the basic craft of storytelling; flaws which would be notable in any work. For example, there are far too many scenes – particularly in the first half of the novel – which are told in flashback or exposition instead of being shown. One is often left with the feeling that Herbert just didn’t quite feel up to the challenge of telling the story to be found in those scenes.

This central flaw, in fact, contributes to many of the problems in Dune Messiah. For example, the stellar character conflicts of Dune are notably blunted in Dune Messiah… often because key components of those dramas are ignored or elided over. For example, there is a cold war tension between Chani and Irulan which begins to flare into open conflict at the beginning of the novel. But then the resolution of that interplay is simply shoved off-screen and then cursorily resolved in an almost incidental and completely off-hand fashion. (And this despite the fact that its resolution is absolutely pivotal in setting up the novel’s conclusion.)

What ultimately keeps Dune Messiah from achieving the true status of classic is that it fails to find that precious gestalt of Dune: Where Dune operated on many different levels at once, Dune Messiah is stripped down to a far simpler dynamic. Elements of the political thriller, character drama, and high tragedy remain… but Herbert can’t quite seem to keep all the balls in the air.

For one example, let us consider the tragic grandeur of Yueh’s betrayal in Dune. Herbert almost manages to capture the dynamic of high tragedy once again in his portrayal of Paul’s prescient vision turned to bane. Paul, trapped by the inexorable fate seen within his prescient vision and bound by the irresistible momentum of the race consciousness lying behind the Jihad carried out in his name, has all the makings of such a tragedy. But Herbert lets it slip through his fingers: The prescience itself, although brilliantly handled in many respects (such as the scene where Paul must let a doom befall himself in order to find a greater good), also ends up denying some of the central necessities of true tragedy.

I also think that Dune Messiah is a difficult story specifically because it ties Paul in those chains. I think a lot of people (myself included) read the end of Dune as a triumph… and Dune Messiah makes it explicit that Paul failed and failed badly. That’s a tough pill to swallow. I know it’s what made me put the book down the first time I tried reading through the Dune saga: It wasn’t the sequel I had written in my own head. I wanted the Messiah Triumphant and I got something akin to the False God’s Fall.

With all that being said, I would be seriously remiss in ignoring the strengths of Dune Messiah, particularly in the book’s second half: Duncan Idaho’s personal struggle is a very powerful and well-handled piece of characterization. Paul’s manipulation of his prescient vision — his constant struggle to find the slightest loophole through which to escape the chains of his own future — is often powerfully dramatic. And there’s also some great expansion done on the nifty, sensawunda stuff, along with the depth and unique feel of the Dune universe (Tleilaxu face dancers, for example).

But, with that being said, I would still love to read a version of Dune Messiah in which Herbert managed to:

(1) Avoid the storytelling errors in the first half.

(2) Expand Alia’s personal drama (something which would have also added a great deal of depth to Children of Dune).

(3) Let the Chani and Irulan conflict play out with the type of detailed political intrigue that he displayed himself fully capable of in Dune.

(4) Communicate the by-play of the mutual and interacting betrayals between the conspirators (and let more of those by-plays and betrayals play themselves out).

(5) Handle the framing devices of the story better.

In short, Dune Messiah reads like a rushed novel. There’s a lot of potential in the basic structure of the story, but little or none of it is realized in actual practice. Perhaps if Herbert had taken the time to develop the novel more fully, we might have gotten a work that would stand up better in the inevitable comparison to its predecessor.

GRADE: B-

Frank Herbert
Published: 1969
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441172695
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To read a spoiler-free review of Dune, click here.

For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the book, go ahead and read more…

(more…)

It’s interesting reading Dune immediately following a mass-reading of Vernor Vinge’s catalog, because both authors are essentially fascinated by post-humanity: Both see something essentially incomprehensible in the transhuman, but they approach it in different ways. Vinge chooses to approach it at oblique angles – from the POV of children; or on the rapid approach to it; or from a great distance; or through the lens of the primitive.

Herbert, on the other hand, tends to tackle the transhuman directly, but he does so from a fundamentally religious point of view.

To be clear on the distinction here: Vinge also equates transhumanity with godhood (the references to “Applied Theology” and “deicide”, for example, in A Fire Upon the Deep). But Herbert actually structures his narrative around a religious viewpoint – he couches his understanding of the transhuman through symbolism and prophecy; through divine mystery and ceremony.

Of course, the post-humanities of Vinge and Herbert are not exactly identical, either. But it would be interesting to see Vinge tackle Herbert’s thought (as expressed in an interview): “I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their critical judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?”

And it would be equally interesting to have seen Herbert tackle Vinge’s thesis: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. … It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.”

But I digress.

For those of you completely unfamiliar with Dune, it may suffice to say that it is one of those works grouped with the Foundation Trilogy or The Lord of the Rings: A transformative and pivotal classic which cast a long shadow upon the entire genre from the moment it was published.

To understand how Dune achieved this stature, consider for the moment a seemingly simple question: What is the most impressive thing about Dune?

The trick is not in any particular answer. It is in the breadth of answers your question will provoke. Many people will point to the planet of Arrakis itself — painstakingly rendered and with a completely realized ecology. Others will point to the manipulation of prophecy. Or the action-packed battle sequences. Or the alien cultures. Or the evocative future history. Or the exploration of religious themes.

The story of Dune is a political thriller; it’s a character drama; it’s high tragedy; it’s mythological; it’s religious. And then Herbert tells it in the style of historical fiction within one of the most deeply realized science fiction settings ever realized on paper. It’s a gestalt creation.

And what do I, personally, find most impressive about Dune? The fact that Herbert successfully realized a story with the emotional depth and archetypal resonance of a Greek tragedy. I’ve probably read, watched, and listened to the Dune story more than two dozen times. And yet, every single time, there’s something fresh and new which can be gleaned from the experience.

GRADE: A+

For additional comments on Dune, which include SPOILERS, click here.

Frank Herbert
Published: 1965
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441172717
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To read a spoiler-free review of Rainbows End, click here.

For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the book, go ahead and read more…

(more…)

It seemed to me that Rainbows End was the perfect storm:

For starters, Vernor Vinge was an author who could truly boast that every single novel he’d ever written was better than the one he’d written before: The Witling was better than Grimm’s World; The Peace War was better than The Witling; Marooned in Realtime was better than The Peace War; A Fire Upon the Deep was better than Marooned in Realtime; and A Deepness in the Sky was better than A Fire Upon the Deep. If Rainbows End followed that pattern, it was going to be a tremendous book.

Rainbows End also saw Vinge returning to a fictional universe which had been the setting for two excellent short stories: “Fast Time at Fairmont High” and “Synthetic Serendipity”. An analogy could be drawn, I felt, between this relationship and the relationship between “The Blabber” and A Fire Upon the Deep. Both of these latter stories are set in in Vinge’s Zone of Thoughts universe, and “The Blabber” was the first peek we had into that universe. In that story, Vinge gave us a glimpse — from the edge of the Slow Zone — of what an amazing place the near-Singularity of the Beyond would be like. Frankly, when I first read “The Blabber” I didn’t think Vinge or anyone else could really deliver on that promise. But Vinge did. And A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the most amazing science fiction novels ever written.

“Fast Times at Fairmont High” excited me even more than “The Blabber”. Vinge was working his future history talents at their finest: He forwarded half a dozen different technical fields all at once and then started looking at how that would change us as a society and as individuals. His vision was compelling, startling, dynamic, and utterly believable. If those technologies become prevalent, society is going to look a lot like “Fast Times at Fairmont High” — you can already see the beginning of those trend lines forming in the high schools of today as the technology of today reshapes the contours of daily life. And those trend lines are even clearer today than they were in 2001 when he published the story.

So when I approached Rainbows End I was excited: Even if Vinge did nothing more than expand his previous treatment into a larger, more intricately woven plot it was going to be one of the most exciting science fiction novels I’ve read in the last decade. And if he followed his previous trends, I was fully prepared to be dazzled by his vision of the future

Finally, on a personal level, Rainbows End was being published just as I was tearing through Vinge’s entire corpus work of work: As you’ve seen in my recent reactions, I worked my way through his short stories and then tackled his novels one by one. It seemed as if I was working my way up a triumphant crescendo that would culminate in Vinge’s most recent and most brilliant work.

Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed in this.

To be clear, the book – considered in and of itself – is just fine. It’s a solid near-future techno-thriller. It’s very well executed, with some really interesting twists, and I give it a B+ with a solid recommendation to accompany it.

But I still can’t shake the feeling that, with Rainbows End, Vinge played chicken and he lost. He got into a staring contest… and he blinked. Rainbows End reads like a giant step backward from the vision he conjured forth in “Fast Times at Fairmont High”.

To take one example, in “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, Vinge looked at the ways in which augmented reality would fundamentally change social interaction. In Rainbows End , by contrast, there was essentially nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a cellphone and text messaging. (The only exception I can think of is when a character virtually pops over to a beach in Indonesia … but once she’s there in virtual form, there’s nothing remarkable about the experience at all. It’s one step up from a webcam, but there’s nothing fundamentally transformative.)

There was, to put it more bluntly, more complexity of world-building in his short story than there was in his novel. And, ultimately, I consider that to be a colossal failure.

Vinge seems to have suffered a failure of imagination. And that’s not a flaw I ever thought I’d see in him.

GRADE: B+

For additional comments on Rainbows End, which include SPOILERS, click here.

Vernor Vinge
Published: 2006
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812536363
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