cjh%CCA-UNIX@csin.UUCP (02/09/84)
Since nobody else seems to have taken this up, I'll see if I can explain why this book doesn't belong on the trash heap. Despite his rabid conservatism, Frank Herbert is distinctly interested in drugs and their effects on comprehension (perhaps his conservatism is what keeps DUNE from being FLOW MY TEARS, THE HARKONNEN SAID). The notion of a drug that will somehow make the scales fall from one's opponents eyes is a seductive one; Brunner's THE STONE THAT NEVER CAME DOWN is one of the better combinations of story and argument on this; Herbert works in a different frame (comprehension of time) in DUNE, but there's a distinct similarity between the driving factors of tSB and tStNCD (note Brunner's analogizing of VC to the (argued) pep-pill effect of the non-conversion of urea in [primates], while the Santarogans describe jaspers as "consciousness fuel"). tSB, although it is written in third-person singular (everything from the viewpoint of Gilbert Dassein), does not exist primarily for a simple linear plot (first he did this, then that, and now he's doing the other) but for the reactions of Dassein (and of the other characters to him) as he tries to understand jaspers without taking significant doses of it. In tStNCD the decision on whether to spread the drug is begun in reason and made in fright, but there's never a serious suggestion that the VC is not a good thing, while Herbert from the beginning gives a more balanced view (it's almost a libertarian one, in that the most sinister thing is the way the Santarogans seem to unite and lose their individualities in confronting the outside world, while their refusal to be swept into the commercial orbits of various moneyed interests (although it's the reason Dassein is there) is seen as praiseworthy---which is odd because Herbert, when he spoke at Boskone XVI, seemed more like a doctrinaire conservative)). Certainly there are plenty of things happening---Dassein seems accident-prone---but the happenings aren't there to advance the plot but to heighten the tension as Dassein tries to balance the rational and passional desirability of Santaroga (personified by Dr. Sorge and his daughter Jenny respectively?) against its sinister qualities. It could be argued that the inexplcable happenings make tSB a stfictional setting of a ghost story but the apparent supernaturalism is simply lack of understanding (e.g., Dassein is invited by Dr. Sorge to expand S's research on the quantifiable neurological effects of jaspers). I won't argue that tSB is a "great novel" (however you want to define such) but it is not as pedestrian as space opera (and its contemporaries) and does not have the conspicuous flaws or difficulties of many of the works that here have been praised and damned, both vigorously. Two final notes: tSB was serialized around 1967 and may have been written significantly earlier; there's an late-50's/early-60's feel to it, more obvious than in many space-oriented stories (tolerance of interracial marriage is marveled at, Gilbert and Jenny barely get to the handholding stage outside of a particularly stagey moment), which may put off current readers. And I don't know whether Herbert deliberately gave his lead a name similar to Gilbert Gosseyn, the hero of THE WORLD OF NULL-A, but it's certainly possible considering how much they both deal with a quantum change in mental abilities (thought tSB is a far better book).