ambivalence resolved

I visited Chapter's at Robson one time during the summer. I had mischronometrised and arrived quite early for a lunch appointment with Craig and Papa. It's very pleasant to visit all the old haunts: see what's new, what's old that's reprinted and new again, what never went away. I have a mental checklist: any new-old Silverberg? or Heinlein? or Herbert? or --

Alas, that there could be new-old Herbert; alas, there only is new-new Herbert. Instead of a re-issue of Destination: Void, which even Papa doesn't seem, to my frustration, to own, or of The White Plague or The Jesus Incident, we get, at best, The Road to Dune, which, well -- it styles itself thus, above the oversized "DUNE" in that characteristic font that now means another wretched volume has come upon us:

The companion to the New York Times bestsellers including never-before-published chapters from Dune and Dune Messiah, original stories, and a new novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

This book first came to my attention that summer day. It was sitting there in hardcover. There is barely a hundred and twenty pages of actual Frank Herbert material, but such is the hold of it over me that I was tempted to grab it right then. But my better senses prevailed, and I left it alone.

A few days ago I was again in the Chapter's at Robson. It was the day after Boxing Day. It was very obviously the day after Boxing Day. The shelves often contained gaps great and small and many books on them showed curled corners and scuffs on the cover and ruffled pages: surely they'd been bought and returned and reshelved this Christmas season. With two gift cards whispering in my pocket and no prospects to use them for many months anon I was eager to increase the burden of my space-crunch. So when I saw The Road to Dune in friendly paperback size I was certain I had to have it.

And at home as I started to read I was not disappointed. I read a summary of an article that Frank Herbert was thinking to write in the 50's, about how for the first time a system of plantings had been developed to stop the encroaching sand dunes from burying the little town of Florence, Oregon. The dunes are driven some twenty feet a year by wind, like water in tempo largo. More than ten thousand types of grass had come into the experiment to find one that would set down roots that would help fix the top sand in place. Reading this, reading Frank Herbert's excitement at the ecological solution to an historic problem and his agent's nonplussed replies, I thought of green plants in the desert, of ornithopters, of the opening of the film Koyaanisqatsi with Philip Glass's awed score over waves of water and clouds and cars, of (Mother of Muad'dib!) rain from the sky of Dune --

I decided that if I was ever in the area I should drop by to see the environs of the town of Florence, Oregon, this place that set in motion these thoughts in Frank Herbert's head. A quasi-hajj to Mecca-on-the-West-Coast. I discovered that my friend Daniel, a.k.a. Billy, formerly of UBC Math and now of Oregon Math, attends school just two miles from the town. That started me thinking.

From the reportedly many boxes of notes and text uncovered by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson in the pieces of Frank Herbert's estate they gave us some hundred pages of drafts and excised material from Dune. Some of it requires no explanation:

Paul stepped out of bed in his shorts, began dressing. "Is she [the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim] your mother?" he asked.

"That's a fool's question, Paul," Jessica said. She turned. "Reverend Mother is merely a title. I never knew my mother. Few Bene Gesserits of the schools ever do; you know that."

There are so many things wrong with this passage about the only piece of interest is to know that even the pen of Frank Herbert scribbled the kind of things that I'd write and strike out instantly. There's no indication of where this fragment came from, and I imagine it was indeed quickly discarded, and survived by happenstance among the many pages of unused material.

Much of the discarded material is like this in character, almost pure exposition either dropped or strongly reworked into more natural settings. A little is reasonably polished work from earlier drafts of the plot, like a visit of Jessica and Duncan and twelve-year-old (!) Paul to Dr. Kynes. Some, a very little, is really literarily indistinguishable from the finished product; for example, a deleted scene from Dune Messiah wherein Paul receives Otheym's message from the Tleilaxu-made dwarf Bijaz, which ends:

"The spice, M'Lord," Stilgar said.

"Of course we'll stop all shipments of the spice," Paul said. "Let's see how they like that." [...]

Bijaz began to giggle.

Paul turned toward the dwarf, noting how the creature had the attention of everyone in the room.

"How they'll wish on the morrow they had no teeth," Bijaz sputtered between giggles.

"What in the name of the worm does he mean by that?" Stilgar demanded.

"Without teeth they'll be unable to gnash," Bijaz said, his voice reasonable.

Even Stilgar chuckled. Paul stood silent, watchful.

"Who do you mean by they?" Paul asked.

"Why, Sire," Bijaz said, "the ones who planted that stone-burner on you. Could it be they wanted you to stopple the spice?"

The prose is clean, smart, and beautiful, and paced like poetry. No coincidence: we are told that many passages in Dune began as Haiku and the like before being enlarged only as necessary to make grammatical English, and if Frank Herbert later discontinued this practice it's clear he'd mastered the lesson.

The Road to Dune contains a re-constructed short novel entitled Spice Planet, apparently based, how loosely one couldn't say, on original notes (characters and events) for a story about narcotics and feuding noblemen set principally on a planet known as Duneworld. This, it seems, was the first draft of the Dune concept, later expanded into a whole new universe shot through with themes of ecology, politics, leadership, history, religion, -- and so many more besides. It would be interesting to see the story of Duneworld written from Frank Herbert's hand, but mostly because it would be from Frank Herbert's hand.

The volume also contains a hundred pages or so of short fiction by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. Most of it pertains to their books which they claim tell the story of the Butlerian Jihad. The last of them they describe in the introduction as in part a bridge between the end of Chapterhouse: Dune and their Hunters of Dune, the new first part of "Dune Seven" that they're writing. On the basis of this I sat down to read it. It's called "Sea Child," and it's a little over fifteen pages long. Someone please explain to me, then, why the first two are a summary of the current state of galactic politics. It's difficult to pick out something as representative of their prose, but this paragraph, towards the end of that summary, offends me particularly:

In moments of despair, Corysta [the Bene Gesserit protagonist of the short story] felt she had two sets of enemies, her own Sisters and the Honored Matres who sought supremacy over everything in the old Imperium. If the Bene Gesserits did not find a way to fight back -- here and on other planets -- their days would be numbered. With superior weaponry and vast armies, the Honored Matres would exterminate the Sisterhood. From her own position of disadvantage, Corysta could only hope that her Mother Superior was developing a plan on Chapterhouse that would enable the ancient organsiation to survive. The Sisterhood faced an immense challenge against an irrational enemy.

There's no sentence of this dreadful paragraph that doesn't make me cringe. The centerpiece of its naivete (as opposed to its rotten, cliche-ridden prose, which is a sample representative of the whole) is that little aside about Mother Superior. It reads like bad fan-fiction: the blunder is of assigning paramount significance to exactly what was in the text of the prior books, no less and no more. If we the reader spent two books following Mother Superior, surely Mother Superior is on everyone's mind. Truly she must have some awesome cult of personality to be solely responsible for the course of galactic politics. As to the details of the war, it's clear they don't understand that the weapons and battles are incidental. The motives of the foe, moreover, were revealed slowly and imperfectly to us, and I don't remember "supremacy over everything in the old Imperium" being anything more than a means; but this is the level of subtlety that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson will pitch to us.

For the lesson is that there will never be a moment in the books of these two like when Bellonda drops into the scene with an anguished cry: "Lampadas!" We know what she means: the training planet has been found and destroyed; all the Sisters and Reverend Mothers and the soldiers who defended them and their marshal, who we knew, died there. It is a crushing sentence for our protagonists and for us, and it's one the like of which we won't see anywhere in Dune Seven. They'd blow one word into a full scene and the content would be shot away, unrecoverable, just like they spammed us with two pages of irrelevant galactic simplifications in a fifteen-page short that barely gets off the beach before it delivers its metaphors with a heavy, Harkonnen-sweaty hand.

So what I'm saying is -- the spirit of restlessness that came years ago with the production of new books with "DUNE" in great letters upon them has fallen still. There is not now and will not be more old Herbert. The shlock released between those covers is puerile and clunky in equal measure. It is by me simply unreadable. There is no other thing to say about a book that can't pass half a page without dropping some dreadful nonsense, say:

In the floating image, the bristling ships opened fire, unleashing incineration waves with devices the Bene Gesserit had since named "Obliterators,"

to borrow a half of a single sentence from the first page of the excerpt of Hunters of Dune helpfully included at the back of Road.

So what I'm saying is -- I'm not buying any more of their damn'd books.

So what I'm saying is -- if anyone manages to get through "Dune Seven," let me know what's up with the Enemy. I'm all right with not knowing, but hey -- as with the transcendentality of π, if you could know, wouldn't you want to know?

That's all I'm saying.