Chapter House Dune (SF) - Frank Herbert ****

Although there have been follow-up titles by his son, Chapter House Dune was Herbert's closing work in the Dune sequence. Here the focus is fully on the Bene Gesserit, giving us a more sustained central character in Darwi Odrade than was available in Heretics of Dune - though once again the ending of the book, detached from her story, seems rushed and skeletal.

Although Herbert always highlights the drawbacks of the Bene Gesserit approach, they come through here as the heroes in contrast to the almost entirely negative alternatives of the Honoured Matres. As always in the Dune books, we get a mix of meandering dialogue/interior monologue and highly engaging action - here the waffly parts were more political than philosophical, which made them more interesting for me. Despite apparent contradictions in earlier books, Herbert seems to have been marginally in favour of democracy, though in a very particular form that was structured to avoid bureaucracy taking over.

There's a lot here to like, though it's a shame that Herbert didn't feel able to bring the series to a more definitive conclusion - there's a point where ending things is desirable, and by this book, it felt more than time for this to happen. Instead, there's an open ending with plenty of loose strands. It was also rather disappointing that Herbert kept to the eugenic line and didn't by this late stage make it clear that the human breeding programme that has been central to the books was doomed to failure because of the nature of genetics.

Nonetheless, this book is up to the quality of its predecessors.

Heretics of Dune is still solidly in print - but for entertainment's sake, the cover shown here is from my 1985 New English Library copy.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The Giant Leap - Caleb Scharf ****

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines. In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

Search This Blog