Hi Lauranimal and All,
I am also fond of both Robert Jordan and Frank Herbert having read both series in their entirety, as well as some of the earlier work.
There are corollaries in both series to the world we are living in as seen from the respective authour's perspective. Both appear to me as having a very keen eye for the world we live in and perhaps chose that medium of writing to get principles and ideas across which may not be communicated so easily if writing in a non-fiction or instructional format.
When you consider Herbert and his themes, you find the "messianic complex" that humanity engages in periodically; the genetic manipulations of the Bene Tleilaxu; power struggles for resources as means of control and manipulation of the masses (water and the spice) as well as "religious engineering" by the Bene Gesserit and "restoration of memory" or regaining consciousness of 'other lives.'
The theme with Jordan that I find interesting is his reference to the Dragon, Wolf and Fox (Rand, Perrin and Mat) as these three can be seen to represent esoteric references of consciousness. I do not know if he intentionally meant to do this and reading some of his interviews it would appear he did not, after all he continually claims he is just a storyteller and that people taking his work too seriously disturb him, but even if at a subconscious level there ARE great truths he conveys.
On the Dune theme again . . . in 1980 Herbert wrote the following essay which those who have not read Dune might enjoy. It provides a sense of what he stated his aims were in writing the series. (FYI for those who have not read Dune, in the end Frank Herbert wrote 6 for the series rather than a trilogy)
It can be found here:
http://www.frankherbert.net/news/genesis.html
Cheers,
Avi
Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert
Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.
How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.
Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.
My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.
This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane.
That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?
All of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in the entertainment business first. It's all right to include a pot of message, but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. Yes, there are analogs in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places, whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.
But that was only the beginning.
While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there. The USDA was seeking ways to control coastal (and other) sand dunes. I had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade.
Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can be just as addictive as any other kind of high.
Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence project fed my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It's an open-ended list.
Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions, psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research, soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's cauldron: the psychology of planetary societies.
Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.
Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation. Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to aim painful barbs.
But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do they learn this?
Enter the fugue. In music, the fugue is usually based on a single theme that is played many different ways. Sometimes there are free voices that do fanciful dances around the interplay. There can be secondary themes and contrasts in harmony, rhythm, and melody. From the moment when a single voice introduces the primary theme, however, the whole is woven into a single fabric.
What were my instruments in this ecological fugue? Images, conflicts, things that turn upon themselves and become something quite different, myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our common heritage, products of our technological evolution, our human desires, and our human fears.
You can imagine my surprise to learn that John Schoenherr, one of the world's most foremost wildlife artists and illustrators, had been living in my head with the same images. People find it difficult to believe that John and I had no consultations prior to his painting of the Dune illustrations. I assure you that the paintings were a wonderful surprise to me.
The Sardaukar appear like the weathered stones of Dune. The Baron's paunch could absorb a world. The ornithopters are insects preying on the land. The sandworms are Earth shipworms grown monstrous. Stilgar glares out at us with the menace of a warlock.
What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fuguelike relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape.
As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul's gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."
Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.
But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.
The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions-all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune.
Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.
Of course there are other themes and fugal interplays in Dune and throughout the trilogy. Dune Messiah performs a classic inversion of the theme. Children of Dune expands the number of themes interplaying. I refuse, however, to provide further answers to this complex mixture. That fits the pattern of the fugue. You find your own solutions. Don't look to me as your leader.
Caution is indeed indicated, but not the terror that prevents all movement. Hang loose. And when someone asks whether you're starting a new cult, do what I do: Run like hell.
Lauranimal said:
Something has been niggling at the back of my mind.
I tried to do a search on the QFG sights, but the search function seems to be dis-abled, and the the search function on SOTT does not seem to encompass the index of QFG articles. Hmmmm...
Well ... I recall reading at some point in either the Wave series, Adventure's with C's or articles on psychopathy. (I think it was Adventures, and I tried culling through the material, but still couldn't find it.)
All this adu about what? Laura made an obscure and passing reference to having corresponded for a short time with a sci-Fi / Fantasy author, never having given his name. Is it now possible to reveal that information?
I ask out of a deep curiosity because I have been reading (since 1990) a series called the 'Wheel of Time' by, Robert Jordan who died in September of 2007 having completed his notes for the final book in a series of, up untill now, 11 books. (FYI; The author who has taken up the reigns in writing the final book has actually found it necessary to divide it into 3 more books in order to do the story and their original author, 'justice'.)
From: Abbyland (I find this to be a pale review that does not seem to cover the depth and richness of the series, but it gives a general starting point) _http://www.abbygoldsmith.com/wot/
So what's the PLOT SYNOPSIS?
The Wheel of Time takes place in an Age of Exploration type of world; [as if] "the late 17th century [...but clearly not ours...] without gunpowder," according to Robert Jordan in his interview with Locus Magazine. Magical ability called the One Power is practiced by a small percentage of humans with the lucky genes (or unlucky genes, depending on the culture). Due to a mistake made by well-meaning scholars in the distant past, only women can wield the One Power without going insane. Men who are born with this ability get exiled, tortured, or executed. The saga centers around one young man, a sheepherder's son from an isolated region, who can wield the One Power. His fate is to defend the world from evil forces (most of them human, and each nearly as powerful as he is) while battling his own growing insanity and the thousands of people who fear him, want to use him, or seek to destroy him.
It's really a story about struggle, when all is said and done. He hears voices in his head. He has memories of a childhood experienced by someone who lived and died three millennia ago. He's afraid to hurt anyone whom he considers a friend, and he's developing a stress complex over it. What could make a better hero than that?
What the series is REALLY about is the struggle between STO & STS !
Some of what I find interesting is that as I have read through these books, I would come across words that somehow seemed familiar. Seemingly, they were words that he had created for his story, but many years ago, I started looking them up. As it turns out, the man is a historian and he wasn't just borrowing words from history, but using them by their original symbolic meanings and weaving their threads into the fabric of the story with perfect integrity.
He was a graduate of the Citadel (Military College of South Carolina), fought in Vietnam, and so had a strong grasp of strategy and understanding for politics,war and the causes and consequences of them. He also possessed a degree in physics and one of his hobbies was chess.
Those things being said, all of this background is clearly reflected in the depth of his writing. And it occurred to me that since he was deeply grounded in history, physics and the idea of an alternate dimention and 'unknown' qualities of THIS one, that he could very well be the Author that Laura had fleetingly referred to.
Any comments?
~Lar
