Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Frank Herbert: The Works

Bob R. Bogle



I'm Bob Bogle, and I'd like to tell you about my newly-released critical biography of the complete works of Frank Herbert.

As author of the world-famous Dune series, as well as numerous other science fiction novels, Frank Herbert (1920-1986) has long been regarded as one of the most acclaimed masters of the genre.

Frank Herbert: The Works is a comprehensive critical biography documenting the literary achievements – and sometimes stupendous disappointments – which comprise the legacy of this colossal figure who has for so long dominated the science fiction stage. Herbert's most famous and compelling works, including Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Whipping Star, Destination: Void and The Santaroga Barrier, are recast in an original compositional and intellectual perspective that establishes the hidden interrelationships and ideological connectivity woven throughout his entire oeuvre. A new understanding of the deeper significance which riddles his most well-known works emerges from the context of his less renowned fiction and non-fiction alike, as well as from consideration of the times and places in which he worked. Answers to innumerable questions which Herbert's legions of fans have been pondering for decades are offered here, along with extensive supporting arguments and documentation. What emerges is a new synthesis and appreciation for the expansive mind of a truly original American writer and artist.

Among the problems tackled in this volume are these: How was Herbert influenced by the 1960s counterculture in San Francisco? How did he assemble the disparate pieces that synergized into Dune? What are some of the technical shortcomings of Dune? How did Herbert begin to model an extended spectrum of consciousness within his other novels, including Destination: Void and The Santaroga Barrier? Was Herbert at heart more of a scientist or a mystic? How prescient was he concerning the modern threat of terrorism? How did Herbert envision the interface between spacetime, energy, matter, and the mind? Did he see government as a dangerous, power- and control-seeking force determined to keep people down, or as an inevitable emergent property of social interaction that expresses a collective subconscious will? How might Frank Herbert have written the last volume of his Dune series had he lived? What would Frank Herbert think of the modern conservative movement?

A free sample of the book is available at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Herbert-T...

The Facebook page for the book may be found here: http://www.facebook.com/FrankHerbertT...

If you're interested in Frank Herbert, I hope you'll consider taking a few minutes to check it out and see if you think it might appeal to you. Naturally, posted reviews are always very welcome. Thanks sincerely for your support!

Sincerely,

Bob
http://brbogle.blogspot.com/

Thanks for posting this. I will need to take a look at your book at some point. I would like to compare it to another biography I have written by his son Brian: Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. Though, I'm still trying to find the time to read it.

I like the questions you have taken on in your book. Looking at Dreamer's index and toc, they seem to be quite different. However, I won't know until I've read both.

Anyway, I'll put your book down on my TBR list. Good luck promoting it in the meantime.

Dreamer of Dune is certainly worth reading, although it's a bit uneven and the index is, er, pretty irritating. There are a couple other critical books as well: Touponce's is okay; a bit hard to track down. O'Reilly's was the first in this sub-genre and is quite worthwhile.

Check the bibliography in Frank Herbert: The Works for more.

I'm always up for talk about Herbert. I always learn new things from the insights shared by other readers.


Bob

I would also enjoy an ongoing discussion on Herbert. Perhaps I'll do a little research and pose a question here for us to take forward. That is, if you don't mind. Alternatively, we can open a general topic on Herbert if you'd rather do that.

sure. however you like.

about to post a review of Dune on Amazon. daunting. how exactly do you write anything new or interesting in review-format about something so colossal? a challenge.

You know, I was thinking about that myself. My own idea was to take the major themes already posted by others. Then one by one, comment why you think such comments are true/false. If of course you have a comment that has not been seen before, then you have a better chance of adding some value to the sea of stuff out there.

There are many things that can be discussed here based on your book. However, for the sake of intellectual discourse, let me raise an initial question (similar to our talk outside this topic) and see where it goes. Q1: Can Frank Herbert be considered a "New Wave" writer?

To delve into this, let me quote the basic definition of New Wave from wiki:

New Wave is a term applied to science fiction produced in the 1960s and 1970s and characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition and sometimes mocked the traditions of pulp science fiction, which some of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and poorly written.

1960s? Check.
Literary? Check
Soft SF? Check

I do believe based on the above definition one could argue that Herbert was indeed New Wave with the publication of Dune. However, the interesting point of contention might be how "experimental" Dune was. Reading your detailed analysis I think you can argue such was the case. Surely, it's tame compared to J.G Ballard's New Wave pieces. It also lacked much of the psychedelic flare of the 60s, exemplified in such works as --let's say-- Bug Jack Barron by Spinrad. Still, I would argue that Herbert's experimentation (though subtle) was dedicated to a) depth of philosophical foundation. And b) he used literary devices such as changing point of view, in an attempt to exemplify hyperconscious steams of thought. Were there others? I'd be curious to list them all out here, give them rigorous consideration, and compare them to other writers/works if possible.

You asked whether Frank Herbert can be considered a New Wave writer.

My kneejerk response to questions like this is to simply dismiss such categorization out of hand. I'm the kind of person who likes what I think is good writing, be it by Frank Herbert or Herman Melville or Ernest Hemingway or Roger Zelazny or Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce. Genra is a marketing ploy engineered and successively improved and aimed like a guided missile by sellers of physical books at unsuspecting consumers of the written word, at you who are reading this now. The intention of genra-fication is to partition the market, to create an extended caste system that facilitates with maximum efficiency the extraction of capital from the consumer, that imposes invisible barriers the better to selectively exclude one group of readers from accidentally stumbling across and discovering another kind of writing, a system of separate-and-unequal into which the very notion of science fiction is necessarily forever ghettoized in the collective unconscious. The pity is that, in the spirit of Orwell's 1984, the reading public has been conditioned to accept this artificial partitioning and judging as both normal and acceptable, when the only valid judgment of any art should, I think, be concerned with its emotional and intellectual hold on the psyche of one who encounters it. So I'm less concerned by far with whether or not Frank Herbert was a New Wave writer, or even a science fiction writer, or a writer concerned with the fiction of technology, as Herbert himself sometimes stated, than I'm concerned with the question: Was Frank Herbert a good writer?

So much for my kneejerk response. But let me take on the question in the spirit it was raised.

According to the parameters you've listed, primary among them being the timeframe in which he wrote, there's an argument to be made, as you suggest, that Herbert was indeed a New Wave writer. And yet I think of Herbert as much more of a classic science fiction writer who capped the end of an earlier period. When I think of New Wave, I think of Roger Zelazny. Herbert I associate unshakably with writers not like Zelazny but like Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein: those masterful guys who, with the coming of the Space Age, were striving to clean up and elevate the pulp space opera tradition into a fresher, sassier, more stylish proposition. And yet their literary toolkits were chockfull of traditional, classical storytelling implements. They were fighting the war to make science fiction socially-acceptable with 1950s-style armaments. The true New Wavers, original visionaries fired up with 1960s-style imagination, threw away Dad's toolkit and came at speculative fiction with most of its historical baggage forsaken lovingly but with determination at the side of the road, relegated to a past that could never be revisited. There's a generation gap separating those more classical masters from their New Wave successors. Herbert and Heinlein especially tried to push through that gap, but after all while they might live in their times and try to speak to a new generation with various degrees of success, they could never be of the new generation.

When I was writing Frank Herbert: The Works I was continuously aware of the fact that my focus shifted depending on which of Herbert's novels or stories or essays I was considering. As you point out, I give little attention to stylistic considerations in my treatment of Dune, unlike I do in, say, Children of Dune or God Emperor of Dune, or in many of his later works. In part this gets back at my stated concern with whether a work is good fiction or not. I contend that the overall quality of Herbert's work shifted radically with the publication of Children of Dune in 1976. Before this Herbert was far more occupied with conveying his plotlines than he was with conveying genuine character studies that were psychologically deep. I know this sounds paradoxical if not heretical when speaking of a writer who was so preoccupied with deep psychology during his entire career, and yet I think it's undeniable that the characters of Children of Dune and later possess more gravitas than do those of Dune and before. Herbert was becoming more literary-conscious, and so I must disagree that he was particularly literary in a formal sense in Dune: more on this directly. Herbert never became as experimental as the true New Wavers, but I think it was not before the mid-1970s that he began to push himself to be less of a science fiction writer and more of a writer; likewise it is within this timeframe in my own book that I begin paying closer attention to his stylistic concerns.

But let's focus on Dune specifically, as you did when opening this discussion.

When I began examining Dune for my book, my major fascination as a writer was this: how is it possible that one human mind carted along in a merely mortal body, after all, could park itself down in a hard-backed chair before a simple mechanical machine, and with a long series of finger jabs produce an imaginary world imbued with such extraordinary penetrating depth from scratch, and using building materials no more substantial than patterns of ink vigorously impressed into a towering stack of paper sheets? I mean, how exactly does a squishy flesh and blood human being – let's face it: a simian – proceed from that first blank sheet of paper scrolled around a typewriter platen all the way to Dune? I was thinking this way because if I could divine how Herbert had raised this cathedral in a neighborhood of lesser edifices that then housed the science fiction world, then in theory others might attempt to replicate his kind of accomplishment. It has nothing to do with aping his style or his personal concerns and obsessions with hyperconsciousness and so forth, but everything to do with penetrating to the sleight of hand involved. One admires the stage magician and seeks to emulate and reproduce, and hopefully expand upon, his performance. And so I was thinking mechanically, I was thinking about the secret, concealed studs in the walls, about the heavy lifting and about process, and not about Dune's literary merits or stylistic affections.

If you want to know what conclusions I reached, well, there's my book to consult, but let me try to cram it into a nutshell. Herbert himself often spoke of a layering technique he used in constructing Dune. I think the metaphor is spot-on. I mean, literal layers were involved. I'll try to tell you how.

When I was a child I remember that my grandparents owned a coffee table on which a large, thick sheet of laminated glass was set to flatten and preserve a myriad of family photographs underneath. As children we used to sit on the floor near the coffee table in the living room to watch TV, and many times I would look into that deep sea-green glass edge-on and see it as a thick stack of parallel laminar sheets. This is how I always imagine Dune now.

I believe that Herbert created many different and initially unrelated physical layers of story, and then he very carefully glued them all together very tightly and allowed them to interact and cross pollinate organically, so that the various heretofore unrelated storylines began to influence and alter each other during the process of interpenetration. No doubt the mutating storylines surprised and impressed Herbert himself then as he was typing the thing one word after another no less than they continue to astonish readers today. What were some of these initially independent horizontal layers? The power struggles overseen by the Imperial family, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, the history and ambitions of House Harkonnen, the history and ambitions of House Atreides, the ecology of Dune and the life history of the sandworm, and on and on. In this manner the whole of Dune became much more than the sum of its parts: what became Dune grew organically and unpredictably in the way that real life grows, while the author watches on in wonderment and records what he is seeing.

Note that in the hands of any other writer you can name, in science fiction or in any other genra, any one of these layers would have provided the kernel for a complete and entire novel unto itself. Dune is not so much a novel as an internovel. It is this conceptual breakthrough about how to write compelling, believable future fiction which, I believe, other science fiction writers have thus far failed to appreciate. The fundamental incomprehension of how Herbert did it accounts for Dune's continuing unchallenged crowning position at the apex of all science fiction. By far the overwhelming majority of writers focus on a single plotline that follows the pattern of rising action, climax and falling action. In Dune Herbert created conditions from which a story became an emergent property. He kept it all more or less pointed toward the very traditional story arc of Joseph Campbell's journey of the hero – and very, very far away from New Age goals of overthrowing these traditional designs.

The reason Dune worked so successfully when it was new and continues to dazzle to the present day is that we don't see the lamina. Herbert's imposed a vertical viewpoint upon us: we look down upon the stack from above and see clearly the family photographs underneath, all their interrelationships implied by thematic sharing of genetic traits. And because of the internal reflections and refractions, our minds assemble Herbert's desired illusory vision – and it's vital to authors to recognize that it is an illusion – of great depth. The glass is transparent, and we can only gawk, wondering: How'd he do that?

And now I see I haven't really addressed the finer points of your question, which have more to do with stylistic issues than with the hidden girders and bolts and tresses that I've been describing. It's true, for example, that in some chapters Herbert does bounce around between the minds of multiple characters in precisely the way all modern writers are trained never to do. It's also true that he gets away with this and we scarcely even notice it. But to a degree I must wonder whether this constitutes subtlety on Herbert's part, or is it an indication that he hadn't yet fully contemplated the rhetorical relationships of the reader, the biased characters acting out his monarchial drama, the voice of the disembodied implied author, and the puppet master author himself, and the crossfire of parallax that's required among all these judgmental, psychological layers in order for a reader to arrive at the "truth" of a story or novel? Certainly in his later fiction a more mature Herbert had outgrown this kind of "subtlety."

I guess while I consider these elements to be of legitimate interest, I think their comingled effect imparts a relatively minor, if not finally cosmetic, contribution to the impact of this novel. And by the way, my opinion on this matter differs from that of Herbert himself; but then, all authors want to highlight the subtlety of our handiwork . . .

Don't we?