Man of More Than Two Worlds

Last September I finished up Frank Herbert’s anthology of short fiction, Eye. My second read since I got this book. The first time I read between the lines to see a strategy lurking there.

Back up for a moment. I read The Road to Dune last spring, a collection of correspondence and excised chapters from Dune. Then I started on the novel after Independence Day and finished it for the seventh time. Don’t need to read Dune often, need to read it every once in a while to remember and reinvigorate. Every time I come up with things I like more, and things I like less. This time around, my opinion was expanded by new knowledge about the novel’s development.

The Road to Dune contains “Spice Planet”. None other than the unpublished predecessor of Frank’s Magnum Opus. He wrote “Spice Planet” around 1960; it is a complete story arc bounding the theme of corrupt aristocracy. A more primitive version of two famous Frank thesis:

1. power attracts the corruptible,
2. the dangers of leaders are amplified by the number who follow idiotically. 

Dune develops the dangers of messiahs and strategic resources, knocking the aristocracy down to a tertiary place as the social backdrop. The predecessor draft is clearly less imaginative and expansive; the draft is also smarter in some ways, such as offering a more plausible explanation for how satellite surveillance can be thwarted over the deep desert. Dune proposes an enormous bribe to keep satellites way, an imaginative but stupid method because Frank forgot that spy planes and spy balloons could still loiter over the land. He also forgot his own massive sand storms and high altitude dust could do a pretty good job of concealing targets on the ground. Spice Planet uses computer hacking to spoof spy satellites, an insidious method that could theoretically succeed since no one would think it necessary to send out a confirming air flight. Comparing episodes like these helped to show me why Dune is such a great book despite its lapses… while “Spice Planet” did not need to be published. I’ll explore those details some other time.

  

Catching back up to September, I read The Dragon in the Sea for the first time. Eye contains an excerpt from the first three chapters. I borrowed my brother’s copy to get the rest of the story. Dragon was Herbert’s first novel, originally serialized ten years before Dune. These two separate books share a conviction—religion is a social fundamental. 

What to do with that convention differs strongly in the intervening decade. 

Seen through the eyes of hero Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica, Dune is wholly cynical of religion. While expecting that it will continue to permeate human society, the Duniverse regards religion as opiate for the masses. It goes so far as to call out the warrior-chieftain Stilgar for becoming swept up in messiah worship, “a lessening of the man”. 

Dragon takes almost the opposite approach: religion is a lasting glue for both the individual and the team. Now this debut novel is publicly praised as a work of human evolution; introducing Frank’s reoccurring theme of adaption to psychological pressure. However the actual plot resolution is that future submarine crews must find religion in order to prevent psychiatric casualties. The book even takes potshots at atheists in a framing device; in the early stages of the book, the protagonist muses that efforts to dismiss Jesus Christ as nothing more than a “religious paranoiac” were decisively disproven, while the final chapter features a stereotypical secular scientist, pounding his desk and stereotypically pronouncing “faith” as if it were a dirty word.

Before anybody starts lamenting the infection of faith and politics in fiction, linger a moment longer. Dragon includes a less noticeable framing device that suggests Frank was doing something a little dirty himself.

When I read Dragon, I thought Frank must have been more religious in the 1950s. Or at least being contrarian by pointing out that religion still has a place in a high-tech society. Only he couldn’t be contrary this way because the United States made a show of being extra religious during the mid-Fifties—partly as a response to world war, partly as a response to cold war. Who could Herbert contradict, except an already disenfranchised minority? Then he must have got swept up in the “God is Dead” craze of the Sixties and decided religion was a pure tool of social control with no free virtue.

Until I reread Eye and spotting something else afoot. Something reflected in Dragon. That novel begins and ends with a set of framing devices, including the knock on atheists, including a cheesy interplay with the protagonist’s wife. The novel foresees Dune in ending on a note about wives. Beverly Herbert meant a tremendous amount to Frank according to his own prefaces in later books... although I don’t believe that heartfelt emotion was expressed in the hackneyed conclusion to Dragon.

Now put that framing notion of wives up against the stories in Eye—those written before 1970 are focused on characters with so-called nuclear families. Or who feature the traditional housewife and working husband.

In Eye, I realized that Frank had turned his own orbs on audience appeal. A lot of his short fiction had been aimed at fifties family value readers. It was how he gave his stories both a social credibility and a cushion for the more challenging ideas. Dragon probably was written with a sympathy for the Christ, but it was written for a Cold War audience.

This is a sharp contrast to my own fiction. I have a set of seven novels planned for this first part of my bibliography, and none of them have the traditional White Protestant nuclear family. The closest is probably Hammer of Witches, but in that novel virtually every character is separated from their spouses and children. Indeed, I open Revelation Range with the discovery of the destruction of a family. At best, my books deal with broken families, estranged families, and childless professional couples.