[Herbert] walks a narrow line between entertainment and didacticism. In his best work, such as Dune, the story itself is the message; the concepts are so completely a part of the imaginative world he has created that the issue of didacticism never arises. Ideas are there to be found by the thoughtful reader, but one never stumbles over them. Other works, however, are sometimes unnecessarily obscure. Herbert's shorter novels in particular lack the development of story and character to support the weight of the ideas they contain. (p. vii)

Herbert's work is informed by an evolving body of concepts to which the Dune trilogy holds the key. By tracing some of these central ideas, their sources, and their development from purpose to final form, it is possible to show how Herbert framed them with stories that insist that the reader use the concepts they contain. (p. 2)

One of [Herbert's] central ideas is that human consciousness exists on—and by virtue of—a dangerous edge of crisis, and that most essential human strength is the ability to dance on that edge. The more man confronts the dangers of the unknown, the more conscious he becomes. All of Herbert's books portray and test the human ability to consciously adapt. He sets his characters in the most stressful situations imaginable: a cramped submarine in Under Pressure, his first novel; the desert wastes of Dune; and in Destination: Void the artificial tension of a spaceship designed to fail so that the crew will be forced to develop new abilities. There is no test so powerfully able to bring out latent adaptability as one in which the stakes are survival. (pp. 2-3)

The opposition between isolation (or control) and adaptation to an environment is also shown in the ecological transformation described in [Dune].

The drama of the book, and especially of its two sequels, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, builds around the tension between Paul's very real prophetic powers and the results when he puts them to use in the attempt to regain his throne…. The Fremen seize on Paul as a prophet because he has confronted the uncertainty of the universe and brought forth reassurance for those who cannot or will not find it for themselves….

In Herbert's analysis, the messianic hunger is an example of a pervasive human need for security and stability in a universe that continually calls on people to improvise and adapt to new situations. (p. 4)

The entirety of Herbert's work is an attempt to remake [our picture of the universe and how it functions]. His use of the ideas of physics is not practical and predictive, but almost completely metaphorical. The relativity he is interested in is the relativity of our perceptions and our cultural values. In a universe that is "always one step beyond logic" (as Paul describes it in Dune) it becomes essential to look at the nature of our logic, and the role of our preconceptions in shaping what we see. (p. 7)

Herbert's work shows the possibilities for good and evil of factors present, but unnoticed, in our culture. He gives his readers ideals and dreams, but not as an excuse for avoiding the realities of the present. He wakes us up to the dark side of our dreams, and thereby gives us somewhat more of a chance to redeem that dark side. Most of all, he offers a chance to practice in fiction the lessons that are increasingly demanded by our lives: how to live with the pressure of changing times, how to flow with them rather than resist them, how to seek out really new possibilities in a world in which every path seems increasingly pretermined.

Herbert's analogies are strongest when they are least obvious and can do their work on an unconscious level. The cultural patterns modeled by the Dune trilogy, for example, are not simply reproduced but are … represented in a fable with an inner life all its own. Many of the features of the superhero mystique that Dune sought to unveil were not made explicit until the third book of the trilogy, fourteen years later. The "pot of message" Herbert offers is worked into the design of the entire tapestry; the analogue is not enfeebled by premature expression. The reader is told a story. He must draw his own conclusions.

Herbert has developed fictional techniques which demand that the reader sharpen his perceptions and powers of judgment. (pp. 8-9)

One such demand—providing an opportunity for his readers to engage their consciousness—is the building up of images from the unusual cues Herbert supplies. In the Dune trilogy certain kinds of scenes—confrontations, love, tragedy—are invariably accompanied by the same background images, colors, or smells. For instance, whenever dangerous confrontations occur, the color yellow is present. Herbert says, "By the time you're well into the book, if you tell them that there was a yellow overcast to the sky, they're sitting there waiting for something bad to happen." There is also consistent attention to who sees things. Point of view is always deliberate…. There may be a generalized view of a scene, which is followed more and more by a concentration on the area in which the action is going to happen. Finally the eye is brought in for close-ups, "a hand tapping on the table, or somebody's mouth chewing the food."

In using such techniques, Herbert feels he is talking subliminally to the reader. The tremendous illusion of reality the novel conveys is the result of years of thought, layered so that only the most important details catch the eye, and others speak directly to the unconscious. At the same time, however, much that is ordinarily perceived subliminally is made conscious: the expression of emotion in nonverbal gesture, colors, smells, sound are all noted and evaluated by the characters. Because details that took the author hours to assemble are absorbed by the reader in minutes, the fiction of hyperconsciousness takes on a kind of reality.

The greatest demand that Herbert makes upon his readers is not on perception, however, but on judgment. Most science-fiction novels (except those that are overtly dystopian) are variations on the heroic success story. In the Dune trilogy, Herbert portrays a hero as convincing, noble, and inspiring as any real or mythic hero of the past. But as the trilogy progresses, he shows the consequences of heroic leadership, for Paul, his followers, and the planet. Anyone devoted to the heroic ideal stands to be devastated by the conclusions of the trilogy. Herbert demands that his readers look at their expectations, their heroes, and exactly what they mean by success.

The structure of Herbert's novels reinforces this process. His plots tend to be extraordinarily complex. One level of action after another is introduced, any one of which seems enough to carry the story. Not until late in the novel is the tapestry being woven by these threads revealed. Even then Herbert does not employ a hierarchical orginization, in which fact upon fact lead to some ultimate understanding, which is, in effect, the final reduction. The achievement of the meaning, the theme, the answer, while it appears to be an achievement of the broadest truth, is actually accomplished by the elimination of all the possibilities inherent in the original situation. Herbert doesn't write the traditional kind of story in which a hero overcomes the obstacles between here and happily everafter. (pp. 9-11)

Under Pressure is a superb war story. It is also a novel of self-discovery, of wisdom wrested from painful experience. To solve his twin mysteries, Ramsey must shed the role of psychologist and become a submariner. Only when he has confronted his own fears and prejudices, and has seen himself in the men he is supposedly analyzing, can he find the answers he needs. (p. 25)

The [successful] homecoming of the sub with its cargo of oil is anticlimactic. The solution of the puzzle has been bewilderingly complex, each answer giving way to another, each with a weight of concepts that would have overwhelmed any but the most tightly written novel. It all works in Under Pressure because the conceptual unfolding is matched step by step in the action of the plot. The ideas never interrupt the action; they are tightly woven into it. This success at blending ideas and storytelling is a direct result of the nature of Herbert's psychological insight …: it is based on character, not on concepts. And so it is not as though there are two levels operating in the novel—the level of action and the level of thought—but as though thought in every case springs from what happens. This is careful realism. Ramsey's involvement in what is going on provides the material—and the matrix—for his thought. (p. 32)

Herbert is always aware that thought and emotion are embodied. The story is set up perfectly to give full play to this viewpoint. Ramsey is deeply involved in the action, but he must also observe and study the other men. So the reader sees multiple layers of viewpoint at once…. (p. 33)

The net result is that the reader is never allowed entirely to desert the realm of involved action for the realm of thought. He is always brought to the brink, and then stopped. The continual tension between thought and action yields a powerful illusion of life, and from life one does not expect the simple answers you sometimes find in stories. When in the end the answers pour out in a rush, their weight and complexity are easily overbalanced by relief at finding a solution at all. (pp. 33-4)

[In Dune] Herbert constructed a painstakingly detailed world, in an exercise of ecological imagination as gradual, as delicate, and as complex as such a planetary transformation itself might be. Not the least part of his task was to imagine inhabitants for this greatest of deserts. Herbert "assumed that if people had lived there long enough, there had been an organic, evolutionary process which produced people who know how to survive there." These are the Fremen, who, as befits such a harsh world, are composite of the most striking qualities of all of earth's desert dwellers. (p. 41)

Enter Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune. He is not merely a prophet, but a here-and-now messiah with more than a visionary dream with which to inspire a following…. In Paul, Herbert had a vehicle to explore the many factors that go into the creation of a messianic "superhero." He also lays out in detail the structure of aristocratic leadership, the use of psychological manipulation, the birth of an irresistible legend from individually insignificant events, and an unusual psychogenetic theory of history. (p. 44)

In powerful visionary episodes, Paul breaks through to the swirling matrix of possibilities that is the future. He sees the forces at work in the uprising of which he is a part, and understands how little who he is or what he does has mattered…. (p. 49)

In a sense, what Herbert does in Paul's visions is to take ecological concepts to a much deeper level. Paul comes to see opposition between the aims of civilization and those of nature, as represented by the human unconscious. An ecosystem is stable not because it is secure and protected, but because it contains enough diversity that certain organisms will survive despite drastic changes in the environment and other adverse conditions. Strength lies in adaptability, not fixity. Civilization, on the other hand, tries to create and maintain security, which all too frequently crystalizes into an effort to minimize diversity and stop change. (p. 50)

In his visions, Paul comes face to face with the universe as it really is, a vastness beyond any hope of human control. Men pretend to power over their fate by creating small islands of light and order, and ignoring the great dark outside…. Paul confronts the vision of infinity and learns to yield to it, to ride the currents of infinite time and not to restrain them. And then, symbolically, he leads his troops to victory on the backs of the giant sandworms, the untamable predators of the desert who may yet be ridden by those bold enough to take the risk.

These are difficult concepts, and Herbert went to a great deal of trouble to see that they became more than concepts in the reader's mind. Dune is filled with events and images that echo the same themes. (p. 51)

When an idea is seen again and again in so many different forms, it begins to take on a life independent of any of them. It is no longer an abstraction but a reality. above all, the layering of the many ideas within Dune succeeds because the ideas are seen as the shaping experiences of one man's life. They are not presented in a linear manner, as they have been here, but are woven into one great texture of plot, imagery, and character. When Paul utters his insights, the reader has witnessed the events that gave rise to the thought, and is prepared. The concepts have become an integral part of the world and everything that has happened there. (p. 52)

Dune is loaded with symbols, puns, and hidden allusions. Though they may not all be consciously grasped by the reader. they lend weight to the story, a sense of unplumbed depths. (p. 54)

Herbert's use of rhythm further demonstrates his ideas about the unconscious. He is convinced that the sound of a passage is subconsciously reconstructed by the reader even though he reads silently, and furthermore, that it has a powerful unconscious effect. As a result, Herbert wrote many of the book's crucial passages as poetry—sonnets, haiku, and other forms, depending on the mood—and then concealed them in prose. (p. 55)

The end result of all this art is a novel packed with ideas that cannot easily be shaken from the mind, but which is never overburdened by their weight. (p. 56)

In addition, Dune mirrors aspects of our own culture—uncertainty, ecology, and heightened consciousness are all becoming matters of public concern—and so its lessons are particularly applicable to the reader's own life. (p. 77)

In Dune, Herbert used heroic myth elements from the Western tradition in an effort to awaken in his readers a sensitivity to the needs that prompt a messianic religion. But even so, it is too easy to see messianism as something that happens only to desert peoples like the Fremen. Less immediately apparent is the fact that to Herbert the neurotic use of science in modern Western civilization betrays the same pattern as messianic religion. (p. 85)

Dune was the culmination of years of research, and sums up all of Herbert's prior work. A work of such dimension is inevitably more than a synthesis; it has the power to call forth from the author ideas he did not possess before he began, and which cannot then be separated from the mythic elements that give the story life. In the years after he wrote Dune, Herbert began to translate its mythic language to make explicit and self-conscious the ideas buried therein. This distillation appeared to weaken the novels that immediately followed; the concepts, stripped of affect, seem naked without the images that had served them so well. But the eventual result was to be a new level of artistic brilliance [which] would ultimately lead to The Santaroga Barrier and Dune Messiah. (P. 97)

All of Herbert's works seem to cycle around a central axis of thought, continually recasting futures from different combinations of basic ideas. This too is a genetic process….

This idea of genetic variability and uncertainty is underlined by Herbert's style, particularly his use of multiple points of view. (p. 120)

Multiple viewpoints have been characteristic of Herbert's style from the beginning, but there is a significant change in technique [in The Eyes of Heisenberg]. Despite excursions into other characters' minds, Ramsey's perception was definitely central to Under Pressure. In Dune, a host of major characters each had a different view of the action, but Paul stood above all the rest. The Green Brain and Destination: Void experimented with true multiplicity of viewpoints, but without the superb characterization and layering of the earlier novels. The technique lacked vitality and often impaired the continuity of the story. The Eyes of Heisenberg is Herbert's first real success in separating the reader from the truth of a single vision. It is a finely crafted novel, without an excess paragraph. Everything works.

[But somehow,] it does not entertain in the same way as do Under Pressure and Dune. To one familiar with Herbert's themes and the subtlety of his intentions, the elegant internal symmetries of the novel's architecture are striking and the story holds tautly together. But to many readers, the lack of a hero is disquieting. Things don't quite make sense.

This is less a flaw than an experiment springing from the same concern with heroes that shaped Dune. Herbert has said he is interested in "making demands on the reader." Such demands may include following a story where there are no final solutions and no triumphant heroes. The reader's need for a hero and a solution to unify the threads of a novel is a literary example of the same urge for security that motivates the crew of the Fenian Ram or the Fremen of Arrakis. For this reason, the Dune trilogy sets up, and then demolishes, one of the most striking heroes in science fiction. In The Eyes of Heisenberg, Herbert tries to do without heroes altogether. (p. 121)

In Dune Messiah, Herbert toys with the reader's expectations about the conflict of good and evil by introducing the conspirators as the equivalent of the completely evil Harkonnens of Dune, but as the novel progresses, it becomes obvious that Paul's "tragic collision" is not with the conspirators at all, but with his own handiwork. Striving to mold life into his own good but one-sided form, he created its opposite. The conspiracy is only one symptom of Paul's shadow projection; the decay of Fremen morals and the failing ecology of the planet spring from the same source.

It is precisely the lack of another actor in the tragic collision that makes Dune Messiah so unusual a tragedy…. [There] is only Paul. There is no enemy he can pursue, no one to symbolically defeat as he defeated Feyd-Rautha at the end of Dune. There is only himself, his own half-truth, which is not enough. (pp. 158-59)

[Children of Dune] continues the story of the Atreides to its more than tragic end. In Dune Messiah, Paul had failed, but he retained a vestige of majesty…. In the conclusion of the trilogy, Paul is brought back from his seeming death in the desert, an old, broken man who can only rage at the church built on his name. His son Leto must undo the damage Paul had unwittingly done, topple the church, and reverse the ecological transformation…. The ultimate failure of messianic leadership foreshadowed from the beginning has finally come to the front. (p. 159)

At times, one gets the feeling that Herbert set out to make the novel defy analysis, that even he does not know where all the parts fit. Children of Dune is perhaps too full of ideas forced together without the brilliant layering technique of Dune. It is saved by the strength of the images…. And it is saved by the depth of characterization. One was awed by the number of fully realized characters in Dune; Children of Dune surpasses its parent in this respect…. Dune was monolithic, in that every strand converged into one. Children of Dune is explosive, expanding rather than coming together at the end. There are scenes and ideas that apparently add nothing to the plot. But far from leading nowhere, such scenes lead out of the novel, out of the ken of both the author and the reader, into the private lives of the characters. One loses the sense of inner continuity by which a novel is contained in its own form. (pp. 172-73)

Because Herbert is so good a storyteller, this multiplicity of viewpoints creates an uncanny sense of reality. It also frustrates the reader's hunger for a single point of view that will sum up the rest. While Leto gives all the indications of having such a summary view, his conclusions are difficult to accept. Many of his ideas are so far out that it is a struggle to comprehend them. It is hard to know whether there is a clearly defined logic to the whole or whether Herbert has merely chiseled out from some great block of myth the rudimentary forms of insights still at war with each other.

To an extent, Herbert may have been carried away by his own pretensions. Throughout the trilogy, he had used portentous statements hinting of ultimate success or failure, of infinite peril or unmatched significance, to heighten the intensity of the story. Despite (or perhaps because of) his stated dislike of absolutes, he took every concept to its limit. In Dune, this served to build Paul up as an unmatched hero; in Dune Messiah, to bring him down through the excesses of his own power. But in Children of Dune, Herbert must strain to make both Leto's powers and his confrontations with the universe more spectacular and more believable than Paul's. He succeeds, but only partly…. [Though] Leto stands preeminent in his own novel, he is greater than Paul only because Herbert has torn down Paul by changing the explanations for his behavior. The nobility—foolish though it may have been—of Paul's last march into the desert is now recast as cowardice. History is rewritten so that Leto will eclipse Paul. (pp. 173-74)

To Herbert, the hero mystique is symptomatic of a deadly pathology in contemporary society, a compulsive yearning for easy answers. As long as men are looking for simple solutions to their problems, they will give over their ability to think for themselves to the first person who comes along and promises a solution. The Dune trilogy is an attempt to unveil that pattern and, in some small part, to change it. (p. 188)

In the end, the Dune trilogy does not solve but merely explicates the superhero syndrome. Both Paul and Leto seem to promise a messiah to end all messiahs, but they represent only one more cycle in the repetition of archetypal patterns. The solution, if there is one, is to be found not in the trilogy, but outside it, in the effect it has on the reader. When asked, "What is the final judgment?" Herbert replied, "Maybe the judgment is on you." (p. 189)

Timothy O'Reilly, in his Frank Herbert (copyright © 1981 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.), Ungar, 1981, 216 p.