Imagine reading a novel about a global pandemic with the background of Irish violence right about when Covid struck and people didn't know how Brexit was going to turn out and what it would do to Irish tensions. That was the best moment to read it. A bit anachronistic, with some pacing issues, The White Plague is still one of Frank Herbert's best.

  After reading the book synopsis, one expects to get a book about a violent global pandemic, but in fact that's just the first quarter of the book. The rest is psychological explorations of people motivations and characters, the ubiquitous Herbert attempts to find a solution to the toxic human organizational structures, analysis of history, violence, religion and philosophy. I mean, it's Herbert!

  A violent "Provo" bombing kills the wife and daughters of a molecular biologist that was in Ireland on vacation. He goes mad and creates a plague to destroy the people who wronged him by killing their women. I can't but smile at the implications, that if a smart educated scientist gets pissed off they could easily cause more damage than the toys and sticks of military people. The theme reminds me of his short story Public Hearing, which explores what happens when immense destructive power can be achieved with little effort by individuals, and how that makes governments - the keepers of peace - obsolete.

  But then there is the larger part of the book that is just the guy walking in the Irish countryside with a priest, a mute child and an IRA member that was actually the one who ordered the bomb that killed his wife. And to tell you the truth, the scientist is not very sympathetic, the IRA soldier is annoying and the priest and the child are unbearable. The ideas that the author is analyzing are interesting, but the pacing is slow, methodical, and perhaps the reason why more people haven't heard of this book.

  And there is the usual strangeness of Herbert's approach to female characters. There is just one, really, in this book, and she comes across as stupid, vain but also calculatingly self serving, while still having men fawning over her. That in a story which covers the death of most women on Earth. The guy didn't like women much.

  Anyway, if you take anything from this review, is that together with Hellstrom's Hive and of course the Dune series, this is one of the books that impacted me most. 

  McKie again saves the world, while at the same time getting some intense nookie. He is Frank Herbert's James Bond, the guy who can outthink everybody, adapt to any situation and still look cool and positive while doing it. To be fair, I enjoyed The Dosadi Experiment quite a lot, perhaps because and not despite the air of interplanetary secret agent idea. I liked it more than Whipping Star, the first book in this universe, which had the handicap of having to establish it first. Also, because most of that was a human trying to understand a Caleban, which was not terribly exciting. This book explores a planet used as a (unlawful) social experiment and what the result of that experiment was.

  There is something I both like and despise in Herbert's writing. He weaves different captivating stories and worlds from the same pieces. So you get the stagnating civilization, malignant government and various explorations of solutions to solve the problem, you get the very rational yet emotionally immature male heroes and the amazing and terrifying women that they stumble upon, the idea of terrible pressure shaping civilizations and individuals alike into extraordinary form, the people reaching higher levels of awareness and saying or understanding the precise best things that could have been said or understood. There is even a Gom Jabbar in this.

  In fact, some of his books remind me of chess games. And one might enjoy chess games immensely, but after a certain level you just don't get if they are brilliant or complete shit. It's the same with The Dosadi Experiment, where everybody begins seeing the world in the Dosadi way, speak in the Dosadi way, think in the Dosadi way, but you never understand what that is, other than a form of psychopathic focus on power games.

  I believe that, given more time, Herbert could have shaped the ConSentiency Universe into something really unique, not as dry (pardon the pun) as Dune, not as depressing as Pandora, something that would combine the mind games and social analysis that he loved with good fun and great creative ideas. Alas, other than a couple of short stories, that's all we get for this intriguing world building.

  Bottom line: a little more lighthearted than most Herbert books, featuring more action, but still having the distinctive attributes one would expect from the author. I liked it, but it wasn't as memorable as the books I really like from him.

  One of my favorite Frank Herbert books and one that is not part of a series, Hellstrom's Hive is horrifying and inspiring in equal measure. I don't know why so few people mention reading it, probably because the ending is a bit weak, or maybe because of the touchy subject, but I loved it.

  The idea is quite simple, although as usual with Herbert, the underlying motifs are subtle and powerful. An unnamed and probably illegal secret organization, possibly an arm of the corporate world rather than government, discovers by accident something suspicious about a farm, owned by a guy named Hellstrom. There, they discover an unnamed and probably illegal secret organization, a group of people who hide from the world their own brand of civilization, inspired by insects.

  You can immediately see that the two organizations are juxtaposed for effect. Which one, if any, is the good one and which one is not? Are the relatively moral agents of the first group better than the mindless drones of the second? What about if they execute their orders without thought of consequences? Are the ecosystem aware, science and reason oriented, efficiency focused godless denizens of the hive abominations or are they the way of the future, the solution to humanity's rapaciousness? Could people accept such a radically different way to live, even if it doesn't affect them?

  As many of Herbert's creations, the book touches some recurring themes: the inevitable evil of government, the importance of focusing with mind and soul towards the betterment of individuals and the human species in general, the chemical, sexual and instinctual drives at the root of behavior, the power of ritualistic fanaticism, the danger in wanting too much or getting complacent and so on. In a way, this is a revisiting of the ideas from The Santaroga Barrier, only better.

  I was dreading reading this book, I have to admit, because I was remembering the big impact it had on me when I read it in my childhood and I was afraid that it would be anachronistic, that it would feel stupid and unrealistic. I am happy to report that it did not. I mean, yeah, it does portray a story happening in the 70's, but it is realistic for those times and it could be adapted to the present with minimal changes. I don't know why no one attempted to put it on a screen. It's a captivating story.

  The Godmakers is one of Frank Herbert's weaker books. It was cobbled together from four previous short stories and it shows, as the various parts of the book go into wildly different directions. The first part was interesting, the idea of an organization dedicated to uncovering (and totally destroying) any tendency of a civilization to go to war; it feels like a police procedural of sorts. But then the book loses focus, goes into an incoherent and incomplete "god making" plot, then veers into Herbert's latent fear of women and some weird conspiracies that make little sense.

  The book is short, so one can get through it really fast, but I won't recommend it. It does have bits of Herbert brilliant insights, but they are more like a few diamonds in a lot of rough.

  Frank Herbert's single non science fiction book tells the story of a heartbroken native American who embarks on a journey to create a spiritually significant event against the White people who wronged him and his kind. But since nothing is simple with Herbert, the plot is about the relationship between our antihero and his victim. If nothing else, it's a great exploration of Stockholm Syndrome, but also things the author was fascinated with: the power of stories to change reality, the impact of cultural absorption and the power of tribal ritual to fight against it.

  While reading the book I got a feeling that made me remember Tom Sawyer trying to escape Injun Joe. It has the same kind of remoteness, the innocent White boy and the native American antagonist dynamic, but while that book was simple and focused on the mentality of regular American people (even the "injun"), Soul Catcher explores how kidnapper and victim create a rapport, how the beliefs of one person can infect others if presented with sufficient confidence, the way two cultures cannot understand each other sans a common language.

  You see, Charles Hobuhet is not a wild rebel, dressed in animal skin and shooting arrows from horses, he is an educated American of native origins whose job is to train young boys in the ways of nature in a natural reserve. A traumatic event (reminiscent of the one starting things in White Plague) makes him "snap". But what does that mean? Is his quest the fevered revenge dream of a mad man or is it him waking up to the reality of his people's captivity at the hands of the White man? Mirroring this ambiguity in the relationship he has with 13 years old David is the genius of this book. Is it a stupid act to connect with your captor and not work relentlessly to escape? Then are all occupied people like the native Americans stupid? Isn't the first responsibility of a prisoner to escape? Then, to what degree and for how long? Can there ever be peace?

  Recently the book rights have been bought in view of making a film out of it, but I doubt it will work. People need to understand the underlying currents in the book and faithfully portray them on screen, regardless of how controversial. The whole point of the story is to make one think and feel themselves in all of the situations. I am afraid Hollywood is unable to go down that path anymore. However, this could just as well be adapted as a theatre play, having just a few characters and focusing heavily on each person's thoughts and motivations, rather than on specific settings.

  A very interesting book, with many layers that probably require rereads. Highly recommended.

  Whipping Star is a book of a lighter mood than what Frank Herbert usually writes, even comedic at times, although it is as creative as he can write. A universe of sentients of very different cultures and shapes and mentality, working and living together, is at risk. Only the lead agent of the Bureau of Sabotage, an organization created to slow down the efficiency of government, can save everything.

  It is funny that in a book about a huge universe in peril the thing that stayed with me the most is the very idea of the Bureau. Apparently, a lack of foresight caused a particular species of sentient to take over the bureaucracy in the entire universe, bringing it to total efficiency. Hard to imagine efficient governments, but once you do you realize you may not really want them! The solution was to create a special branch that has the role to fix that original error. I found that hilarious, especially guessing the view the author had about governments.

  However, the book is not about that. It's about a very rational exploration of the interaction between very weird species, trying to communicate a solution before it is too late. It reads like a detective story, really, where the main character is trying to solve the case, but filled with some very interesting and mind broadening ideas. So Herbert! It is short and fast paced.

  Only after I've read the book I realized it is part of a series. I don't really care, since I am on the journey of reading the complete list of novels by the author, but even so, this is a stand alone story. I recommend it because it is both intriguing and fun. As far as I am concerned this is not Frank Herbert's best book, but still deserves top marks. 

  Another short standalone book from Frank Herbert, The Santaroga Barrier feels a lot like a longwinded Wicker Man. An outsider comes to investigate a strange little town where people keep to themselves, refuse to sell land to outsiders and show weird social statistics, like no mental illness, no drugs, no TVs and show a weird directness in everything they do or say. The book shares a lot of its DNA with the later Hellstrom's Hive, which I remember I liked a lot as a child and can't wait to get to read it, in the sense that it also examines a society which splintered from main culture in disgust and now is fighting with the entire world to maintain its identity. It also features a substance that frees consciousness and prolongs life, a concept that sounds familiar somehow...

  Around the middle of the book I expected it to end, but instead it lasted for much longer, even after "the catch" was revealed, because Herbert was probably interested in examining such a weird society rather than be content with a pedestrian focus on a cardboard main character. The author likens the way we live our lives in the Western society with a constant battle against marketers, advertisers, government people and so on who wage war on our psyche in order to pacify and control us. He decries the people who never live a life, instead they watch TV, they turn it off then they go to sleep and turn themselves off.

  I liked the book quite a lot. There are issues with it, though. I mentioned the slow pacing, but there is also a romantic connection to a woman which feels completely fake the entire book. Say whatever you wish about Herbert, but a good writer of female characters he was not. I can see this story as a Twilight Zone episode, it feels the same: a bit spooky, but not too much, with some really deep ideas in parts, but mostly people talking and moving through small towns.

  The Heaven Makers is a short novel, but which encapsulates the essence of another facet of Frank Herbert, his cruelty. He is able to do what few authors can: to write compelling empathetic characters, then completely ignore their importance or feelings in order to tell stories bigger than any of them. It was thus with Dune, and yes Pandora, although I hated that series. Most authors are either in love with their characters and can't get the story right because it would inconvenience their infatuation, others are sadistic torturers of their characters in order to get a cheap thrill. Some manage to get trough by telling a personal story, one they can't change much and which they know exactly how it felt. I believe that Herbert is neither of these. His characters are not incidental to the story, but neither are they the pillars of the plot. He uses them like others would write about chairs or the weather.

  This book is about an alien abduction and, indeed, it plays like that for most of its length. Only to then clobber the reader with a deep deep philosophical musing about the meaning of life, the value of death and both the insignificance and paramount importance of the individual in relationship with society and eternity. The style is quite archaic, the setup something that feels from the 50s rather than the end of the 60s, the small American town, the slice of life that one might imagine many American authors to write about. And yet, Herbert's unique way of thinking rises like a giant even in this book which seemingly is a serialized work for a magazine.

  I mentioned the style, which is sometimes hard to swallow, but there are several other things that make this book less than it could have been. The characters are really, really weird. Forget the aliens. The people Herbert describes feel autistic, the world they live in small, limited and petty. They are not bad characters or formulaic, they're just nuts. 

  Bottom line: I think the book is a must read for a Frank Herbert fan, but it is neither his best or his worst work. A patchwork of deep philosophy and poor worldbuilding, great ideas and caricaturesque characters, it is short enough to be read quickly and enjoyed for the brilliant bits in it.

  Woohoo! Done with Pandora! It was a ridiculous series that almost didn't feel like having any continuity. The origin book was about a small crew on a starship, then the trilogy that followed felt like a completely different beast, with each of the books in it different from each other, as well. Was there a common thread? I guess the evolution of humanity, but unlike something like Dune, the Pandora Sequence was random, cruel, overly pompous, with pointless religious overtones that went nowhere and with inconsistent characters. Worst of all, the ending of all of the books came out of nowhere, nullifying the meaning of most of the beginning.

  The Ascension Factor is like that, as well. We start with a world ruthlessly ruled by a man just 25 years after the events of the previous book where things were left off with a society that was building spaceships to get to the hibernation pods in orbit. And now it's a quasifeudal fiefdom in which people are controlled with fear, surveillance and famine. When the authors need technology, it's suddenly there, when they need people to be poor and starving, they scramble to have a line to throw in illegally in the sea to catch a fish. I guess in a way that's plausible, considering I am complaining about this on a laptop after having read the book on a smartphone and knowing that there are people in the world somewhere living in abject poverty, but Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom want me to believe this happens at the same time with the same people. And the ending, oh God, should be the textbook definition of Deus ex machina!

  Bottom line: I thoroughly disliked the three main books of the "sequence" and I couldn't wait to finish them. Now I did! I have no explanation on how I ended up remembering this series as good reading it 30 years ago.

  In Dune, Frank Herbert had a certain pattern of trilogy storytelling: a book that built the world and introduced some characters in a more traditional way, so something to hook you in, then a connective book that would upend the order set up in the first book, then a third which would tell the actual story that needed telling. This inevitably led to people enjoying just some of the books and created this up-and-down kind of level of quality. You can see something similar in the Pandora series, but the books are just so confusingly different from each other that one can barely consider them part of the same universe.

  The first actual book (which is numbered 0.5 for some reason, perhaps because it's not happening on Pandora) was about building an AI on a starship. The next book was about an omnipotent starship acting like a god to the poor people of Pandora, forcing genetic mutations, cultural and personal behaviors and demanding worship. And now this one, The Lazarus Effect, where Ship is gone and all you get is a kind of whodunnit with a limited cast of characters on the now aquatic world of Pandora. I can already tell you that the last book starts from a completely different point and going in another direction than what the ending of this one left off.

  And then there is the quality of the books. I kept very favorable memories of these books from my childhood when I first read them, but now I realize it was probably either a phase in which I understood and enjoyed a lot more than this one, or (more likely) I was nostalgic for the hours and hours of playing the Civilisation-like video game Alpha Centauri which was inspired by Pandora. Short story long: Other than Destination: Void, which I thought was kind of heavy but I enjoyed a lot, all the other books feel … empty of pleasure. There is nothing to make you, as a reader, feel good while reading them. No characters are fleshed out enough to empathize and they are often unlikeable anyway. The world, biologically, ecologically or socio-politically, is rather basic and uninteresting. Perhaps at the time of its writing it was an amazingly fresh universe, but now it just feels like Waterworld and Pandora (from Avatar this time) mashed together by Chinese filmmakers. All of those elements are fun taken separately, but together they're just a mess.

  As for this book, I think one can get into the correct mindset to understand and maybe appreciate The Jesus Incident, even if I couldn't now, but The Lazarus Effect has almost no redeeming qualities. It is just boring and uninteresting, slogging towards a predictable ending. It took me ages to finish it because I just found other things to do rather than read it. I am now grinding through the last book and I can't wait to get rid of it.

  I already said while reviewing Destination: Void that I did not like the direction the story was going in the end, so it should be no surprise that I didn't like The Jesus Incident. A book filled with religious allegory and heavy philosophy about the definition of being human and the essence of religious worship and violence, it was so heavy that I had to make a lot of effort to finish it. I am going to go ahead and assume I didn't really understand it, but the important thing is that I didn't enjoy it. It was like all of the pretentious stuff from Dune got concentrated in Pandora and expanded upon by the contribution of Bill Ransom.

  It's funny that as I was preparing to read the series again, my memories of it from my early teens were corrupted by my own desires, mixed up with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, muddled by all I have read since. I know feel betrayed, because I really liked the Pandora series when I was a child and now I wonder if I have gotten dumb with age or if I just didn't get what I was reading back then to the point that I hallucinated a whole new narrative and feel.

  So in the previous book a crew of clones on a generation ship construct an artificial consciousness. Because it is fully aware, it is also God-like, controlling space, time and reality. From the book it's not clear how exactly it did it, but, thus equipped, Ship accomplishes its mission to bring its human clone cargo to a habitable planet in the Alpha Centauri system by switching/constructing different realities until a habitable planet exists there. This leads to many histories, many Earths, many types of humans. Or it could have just created the planet out of nothing, then ran some extra realities for fun, although this doesn't explain why the planet was so hostile to a typical human population and makes the existing lifeforms its direct invention and responsibility. Anyway, once there, Ship acts like an omnipotent god, interfering when it feels like it, demanding WorShip and declining to interfere when it suits it, by invoking vague snobby principles that it makes up on the spot or it derives from histories that it otherwise keeps hidden from the human population. Somehow Jesus is involved in all of this, although for the life of me I couldn't see what the connection was.

  Bottom line: I almost hated this book. And it has so many of Herbert's obsessive ideas in it: religion, politics, ecology, evolution of humanity. As much as I respect Frank Herbert as a writer (so much that I am in the middle of rereading all of his books) I have to subjectively review this book alone, and for that I will probably rate it under average.

  I will be frank (pun not intended) and say that this book shocked me with how good it is. It is not very accessible, as it is fairly philosophical and technical - and the technical side may be a lot of mumbo jumbo, but I think this book shows what Frank Herbert was capable of at the height of his prowess.

  In short, Destination: Void is about a crew of four people on a disabled ship who need to construct an artificial intelligence in order to save the ship and their lives. There is only one snag: no one has managed to successfully build an AI that didn't end up disastrous. Here you have to accept a concept without which the book will not work: that an ultimately conscious entity has full access to the universe, giving them godly powers. This is not only a book about building a computer system, but a philosophical dissection of what consciousness is, what is intelligence, how the human mind works and should we, when building mechanical intelligence, even follow that design as a model.

  This book features many of the brand Herbert ideas: the deeply meaningful thoughts, conversations and actions between an isolated group of people, the inner thought voiced in the writing, the declared and hidden agendas of people, the oppressive society that uses immoral methods to get to its goals, the great potential of human beings that can only be unleashed by extreme circumstances, the religious and sexual components of human drive, the archetypal roles of the characters, etc. And the insane pacing puts those ideas even more into terrifying focus.

  Again, I was amazed by this book, all but the ending. I would have loved an entire series following the spirit of most of it, unfortunately the next three books go in a completely different direction: the nature of godhood. Perhaps that is why this is not considered the first book in the "sequence", but book 0.5, because if the next ones focus on a god, this one focuses on building one. Or perhaps because Pandora is not even part of the story here.

  In conclusion, I recommend reading this book as a standalone story. Kudos if you want to read and enjoy the entire Pandora series, but in my mind Destination: Void is quite different from the others.

  Frank Herbert's writing feels paradoxical to me, as he examines the minutiae of individual characters or particular scenes, yet his main focus always remains on the situation as a whole. His heroes are worlds entire, with people just instruments of inevitable evolution or death. The Eyes of Heisenberg might be Herbert's alternative to Zamyatin's We or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The same oppressive dystopia of clinical control of society, the rebels, the groups of people vying for control and/or survival, the epic sweeping finale. Yet, where a central protagonist was the focus of those books, this one refuses to hold any one person to a rank high enough to outshine all of the others.

  Imagine a world ruled by Optimen, immortal people living in their own bubble of beliefs and absolute power, served by the Folk, cloned and genetically engineered people destined for a centuries life of predetermined work, yet still mortal, rarely rewarded for their servitude with the permission to procreate. The world has become this after a terrible war between Optimen and cyborgs, in which the Optimen prevailed. A couple of young parents come to the clinic for the "cutting", where the embryo is examined, genetically manipulated against flaws, then put in a growing vat. But this embryo is special! A race between several groups of people is on to hide, preserve, destroy or use it as bait.

  You know that I don't usually describe the book plot in that much detail for fear of spoiling the story, but in this case I feel it is warranted, as The Eyes of Heisenberg is so full of technobabble it takes great effort to start reading it. Once the names and who is who are clear, the book is easy to read, but the beginning of the book... ugh! Especially since genetics wasn't really developed at the time, and all of the futuristic mumbo jumbo is obviously bull.  

  I really liked the idea of the story. Herbert always had great imaginative ideas that were not limited by his ability to express them. He will spend as much time or explanation for any detail or person as he needs, then sweep them over like they never mattered just a bit later. The idea was always first! It took me some time to realize this, but Herbert always rushes the endings. He builds this incredible set of worlds and then, at the very end, he gets impatient and does it over with. It's not as bad as Peter F. Hamilton, but it's there. I guess it takes a lot of determination and planning to keep a consistent pace throughout a book.

  I am sure you will be curious to know if this book, published in 1966, just a year after Dune (together with two other novels), is anything like the book that made Herbert famous. It does. People are cloned in axolotl tanks, organizations form around their approach to the solution of life: technical minded cyborgs, sterile immortals manipulating genes, couriers developing humanistic methods of communication and analysis. Some of the inner thoughts put on page, the tool that made me fall in love with Dune in the first place, is there. There is also that permeating generic idea of the strong coupling between environment and life. Somehow I want Herbert to come back and write books in the Starcraft or Alien universes, I am sure he would have loved those worlds.

  Bottom line: not a perfect book and feeling a bit dated - note that I did compare it with work written three or four decades before - but still entertaining and evocative of Herbert's general ideas and style. Pandora is coming next, all four books.

  1966 was a prolific year for Frank Herbert. A year before he had published Dune and now he won a Hugo for it, he published the first book of the Pandora series, The Eyes of Heisenberg and the book I am reviewing now: The Green Brain. It features a lot of the recurrent ideas of ecology versus politics, how the environment defines and shapes life, including people, warnings about the human abuse of nature and the deeper interactions between people - complete with inner thoughts, Dune-style.

  However, the book feels rough. The plot is immediately revealed by both title and early scenes, the female character is pretty much a joke and, while the premise is great, the execution is rather bland, for example with characters that appear in some chapters then are completely forgotten, and most of it is a pointless trip through a jungle. I liked it, but I can't but feel that it was something that was partially written in the past and got published only because Dune was a hit.

  I can only recommend it for Herbert fans, because analyzed by its own it's pretty average and has a lot of unfulfilled potential.

  The Dragon in the Sea could have been a story about real life submariners as, other than a few details really, the novel is barely science fantasy. The story is about a near future in which the West and the East are in an eternal Cold War where no one trusts anyone because of deeply embedded sleeper agents and where conflict is fought in the ocean between sophisticated nuclear submarines over underwater oil reserves. Places like the British Isles have been nuked into oblivion and the big prize is bringing home petrol syphoned from the other side.

  The entire action of the book happens in such a submarine, tasked to go through enemy lines and extract oil from a hidden reserve. There are no chapters, just one long and action filled story. Yet the focus is not so much on the world or the technology, although both are described pretty well, but on the characters, on why and how they function, on what such a prolonged and tense conflict can do to people's psyche. The main character is indeed a psychologist, while also an electronics specialist, in a crew of four - including the captain.

  The careful analysis of character motivation and inner thoughts is reminiscent of Dune, but also the idea of global conflict over a finite resource affecting the entire ecology and sociology of the planet and extreme peril changing people to their core. Ten years before Frank Herbert was publishing Dune, its seeds were clearly already planted.

  To me it was a fascinating read. It was one nonstop trip filled with danger, but the author was clearly interested in how the characters were functioning under extreme stress and how it translated at a very visceral and atavistic level. It was a combination of action and psychoanalysis, still a bit unpolished, but deep and insightful. I liked how Herbert hinted at what the world had come to by just placing a few crumbs of information in an otherwise uninterrupted sub adventure. Imagine Das Boot, but with a socioeconomic and psychological message in it. I liked it!