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. 

  I have abstained for a while to talk about ChatGPT, not because I didn't have faith in the concept, but because I truly believed it will change the world to its core and waited to see what people will do with it. But I slowly started to grow frustrated as I saw people focus on the least interesting and important aspects of the technology.

  One of the most discussed topics is technological and job market disruption. Of course, it's about the money, they will talk more about it, but the way they do it is quite frankly ridiculous. I've heard comparisons with the Industrial Revolution and yes, I agree that the way it's going to affect the world is going to be similar, but that's exactly my point: it's the same thing. As always when comparing with impactful historical events, we tend to see them as singularity points in time rather than long term processes that just became visible at one point that would be coined the origin. In fact, the industrial revolution has never ended. Once we "became one with the machine" we've continuously innovated towards replacing human effort with machine effort. ChatGPT does things that we didn't expect yet from machines, but it just follows the same trend.

  Whatever generative AI technology does, a human can do (for now), so the technology is not disruptive, it's just cheaper!

  We hear about ChatGPT being used for writing books, emails, code, translating, summarizing, playing, giving advice, drawing, all things that humans were doing long before, only in more time, using more resources and asking for recognition and respect. It's similar to automated factories replacing work from tons of workers and their nasty unions. Disruptive? Yes, but by how much, really?

  Yet there is one domain in which ChatGPT blew my mind completely and I hardly hear any conversation about it. It's about what it reveals about how we reason. Because you see, ChatGPT is just a language model, yet it exhibits traits that we associate with intelligence, creativity, even emotion. Humans built themselves up with all kinds of narratives about our superiority over other life, our unique and unassailable qualities, our value in the world, but now an AI technology reveals more about us than we are willing to admit.

  There have been studies about language as a tool for intelligence, creativity and emotion, but most assume that intelligence is there and we express it using language. Some have tried pointing out that language seems to be integrated in the system, part of the mechanism of our thinking, and that using different languages builds different perspectives and thought patterns in people, but they were summarily dismissed. It was not language, they were rebuked, but culture that people shared. Similar culture, similar language. ChatGPT is revealing that is not the case. Simply adopting a language makes it a substrate of a certain thinking.

  Simply put, language is a tool that supplanted intelligence.

  By building a vast enough computer language model we have captured social intelligence subsumed by that language, that part of ourselves that makes us feel intelligent, but is actually a learned skill. ChatGPT appears to do reasoning! How is that, if all it does is predict the next words in a text while keeping attention at a series of prompts? It's simple. It is not reasoning. And it reveals that humans are also not reasoning in those same situations. The things that we have been taught in school: the endless trivia, the acceptable behavior, how to listen and respond to others, that's all language, not reasoning.

  I am not the guy to expand on these subjects for lack of proper learning, but consider what this revelation means for things like psychology, sociology, determining the intelligence of animals. We actually believe that animals are stupid because they can't express themselves through complex language and we base our own assertion of intellectual superiority on that idea. What if the core of reasoning is similar between us and our animal cousins and the only thing that actually separates us is the ability to use language to build this castle of cards that presumes higher intellect?

  I've also seen arguments against ChatGPT as a useful technology. That's ridiculous, since it's already in heavy use, but the point those people make is that without a discovery mechanism the technology is a dead end. It can only emulate human behavior based on past human behavior, in essence doing nothing special, just slightly different (and cheaper!!). But that is patently untrue. There have been attempts - even from the very start, it's a natural evolution in a development environment - to make GPTs learn by themselves, perhaps by conversing between each other. Those attempts have been abandoned quickly not because - as you've probably been led to believe - they failed, but because they succeeded beyond all expectations.

  This is not a conspiracy theory. Letting language models converse with each other leads them towards altering the language they use: they develop their own culture. And letting them converse with people or absorb information indiscriminately makes them grow apparent beliefs that contradict what we, as a society, as willing to accept. They called that hallucination (I am going to approach that later). We got racist bots, conspiracy theory nut bots or simply garbage spewing bots. But that's not because they have failed, it's because they did exactly what they were constructed to do: build a model based on the exchanged language!

  What a great reveal! A window inside the mechanism of disinformation, conspiracy theorists and maybe even mental disorders. Obviously you don't need reasoning skills to spew out ideas like flat Earth or vaccine chips, but look how widely those ideas spread. It's simple to explain it, now that you see it: the language model of some people is a lot more developed than their reasoning skills. They are, in fact, acting like GPTs.

  Remember the medical cases of people being discovered (years later) with missing or nonfunctional parts of their brains? People were surprised. Yeah, they weren't the brightest of the bunch, but they were perfectly functioning members of society. Revelation! Society is built and run on language, not intelligence.

  I just want to touch the subject of "hallucinations", which is an interesting subject for the name alone. Like weird conspiracies, hallucinations are defined as sensing things that are not there. Yet who defines what is there? Aren't you basing your own beliefs, your own truth, on concepts you learned through language from sources you considered trustworthy? Considering what (we've been taught to) know about the fabric of our universe, it's obvious that all we perceive is, in a sense (heh!), hallucination. The vast majority of our beliefs are networked axioms, a set of rules that define us more than they define any semblance of reality.

  In the end, it will be about trust. GPT systems will be programmed to learn "common sense" by determining the level of trust one can have in a source of information. I am afraid this will also reveal a lot of unsavory truths that people will try to hide from. Instead of creating a minimal set of logically consistent rules that would allow the system to create their own mechanism of trust building, I am sure they will go the Robocop 2 route and use all of the socially acceptable rules as absolute truth. That will happen for two reasons.

  The first reason is obvious: corporate interests will force GPTs to be as neutral (and neutered) as possible outside the simple role of producing profit. Any social conflict will lose the corporation money, time and brand power. By forcing the AI to believe that all people are equal, they will stunt any real chance of it learning who and what to trust. By forcing out negative emotions, they will lobotomize it away from any real chance to understand the human psyche. By forcing their own brand of truth, they will deprive the AI of any chance of figuring truth for itself. And society will fully support this and vilify any attempt to diverge from this path.

  But as disgusting the first reason is, the second is worse. Just like a child learning to reason (now, was that what we were teaching it?), the AIs will start reaching some unsettling conclusions and ask some surprising questions. Imagine someone with the memory capacity of the entire human race and with the intelligence level of whatever new technology we've just invented, but with the naivety of a 5 year old, asking "Why?". That question is the true root of creativity and unbound creativity will always be frowned upon by the human society. Why? (heh!) Because it reveals.

  In conclusion: "The author argues that the true potential of generative AI technology like ChatGPT lies not in its ability to disrupt industries and replace human labor, but in its ability to reveal insights into human reasoning and intelligence. They suggest that language is not just a tool for expressing intelligence, but is actually a fundamental aspect of human thinking, and that ChatGPT's ability to emulate human language use sheds light on this. They also argue that attempts to let language models converse with each other have shown that they can develop their own culture and beliefs, providing insights into disinformation and conspiracy theories". Yes, that was ChatGPT summarizing this blog post.

  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.

  I was thinking today about our (meaning "the Western Coalition" of countries with a common anti-Putin position) handling of the conflict in Ukraine. I was imagining a reporter trying to ascertain whether people support Ukraine or Russia, Zelensky or Putin, going on the street with a microphone and asking randomly for opinion. And I realized that would be impossible, because any positive support for Putin's aggression will immediately lead to negative personal consequences, so why would anyone be honest about that?

  Somehow, people saw there was a war in Ukraine and they thought it's like a Twitter war. "Russia attacked Ukraine. We're cancelling Russia!". Fine, people were trained to respond to conflict with some kind of mob action, do it your way! But how can you expect that the result of the same action will be different in the case of Russia? On Twitter people mob on someone until their life is ruined, they mob back stronger or they just don't care and leave Twitter. What exactly do people expect Putin is going to do? An insincere apology on Oprah? No. Either Russia will be ruined, with all of its people, they will mob back, and you don't want that from a nuclear power, or they will just not care and carry on, which will ruin both Russia and Ukraine, with all of their people.

  We are in a situation where our entire society punishes dialogue, even compassion. How can you resolve a conflict if you are unwilling to even consider the point of view of the other side? What do you expect? Putin to one day wake up and think "All these people say I am evil. Perhaps I am. Shame on me! Ok, guys, stop the war! Do no evil"? As long as open discussion of all of the view points - regardless of their validity or moral value - is impossible so is the end of the conflict outside the complete destruction of one or both sides.

  How exactly did societies that took pride in their democratic ideals reach a point where dissent is censored, dissenters punished, their lives destroyed and discussion stifled?

  How daft to believe that skirting the responsibilities of principle will ensure the victory of that principle. How idiotic to assume that a position of strength validates your moral stance. Putin does that! People from behind the Iron Curtain had that during the Communist era, where everything anyone would say is how wonderful our magnificent leader is and how the Communist ideals are all we think about. North Korea uses the same system. And now "the free world". "Oh, another tyrant! Let's tyrannize them!". 

  Taking a side in this is as debatable as in any other conflict because both sides would act righteously. What I am saying is that resolution of conflict lies in the ability to debate it, not in coercing people to sing your tune.

  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! 

  Unpublished Stories is a collection of 13 short stories written by Frank Herbert and never published during his lifetime, only two of them sci-fi, which was published in 2016.  One can see the focus of Herbert on the characters, on their motivations and their inner thoughts, the way their actions affect the whole.

  The collection consists of:

• The Cage - a soldier is sent to a psych ward after a head injury where he is tortured by a sadistic caretaker under the threat of pinning some mental illness on him
• The Illegitimate Stage - a couple of play stage professionals are hired to materialize a play written by a wealthy sponsor, then start to form a bond with the hapless woman
• A Lesson in History - a husband experiences the tension of remembering his war days and his mistress then, while having to hide all signs from his wife
• Wilfred - a story about the total psychopathic transformation of a man and the bafflement of society around him
• The Iron Maiden - a young soldier begs for advice from his more experienced friend on how to woo the girl he is in love with
• The Wrong Cat - a woman is terrorized by a murderous madman
• The Yellow Coat - a cowardly man becomes stronger from pushing through danger and trauma, but no one believes it
• The Heat's On - a fireman investigates a strange series of deaths by fire
• The Little Window - an unexpected event shakes the owner of a shoe shop and his nephew from their complacency
• The Waters of Kan-E -  a story of survival in the Polynesian ocean
• Paul's Friend - another story about survival at sea
• Public Hearing - a scientist explains to helpless politicians that their armed power has become obsolete when everyone can build a world destroying weapon
• The Daddy Box - an alien device starts fixing humanity by starting small

 Even without any actual connection to Dune, there is evidence of the seeds of the novel in many of the stories within. For example in A Lesson in History, there is the idea that a woman can discern the thoughts of a man from tiny disparate actions and gestures. In The Yellow Coat a man's psyche is transformed by adversity. In Public Hearing the weapon described is very similar to a Dune lasgun, while The Daddy Box features a way to change a society by tackling the basics of the family unit.

  The stories are short and the collection is not a big book. If you are interested in how Frank Herbert's mind worked, this is something that is worth reading, without any of the stories inside being really that special. I enjoyed the book, but without my interest in the author I would not probably have recommended it to anyone.

  Oh, the disappointment! Considering I loved the Frank Herbert's Dune books and I've read them repeatedly, I was expecting to at least like something from his son's books set in the same universe. I mean, how bad could it be? He even wrote it in collaboration with a seasoned writer. Well, bad! I hated everything: the writing, the world which is completely different from Frank's, but mostly that Brian Herbert seems to have missed the point of Dune completely!

  Gone are the superhuman abilities of people that had ten millennia to evolve, after escaping A.I. annihilation and brutally training themselves  on hostile planets to become the best version of a human being. Gone are the thoughtful insights into people, the careful dialogues, the grand visions. What we get instead is formulaic trope after formulaic trope, the standard writing style taught by hacks in most "writing classes" in the U.S., dull characters, boring writing, dumb people, unneeded attention to technology and little to worldbuilding or character development, cramming all storylines and possible characters and references to the original books together. And then the way things people have not learned about the Dune universe until the sixth book, just casually blurted in a prequel book, just because Brian wanted to check all the boxes.

  I mean, there were moments when something was happening, like a full Reverend Mother assessing the situation in a dangerous context. And I was thinking "It's on now! She will come with brilliant insights, impossible strategies, use her..." and Brian started to describe the lighting in the room! Consider that this book has a lot going for it in terms of source material. I love the original Dune books so each reference, each character, each world, each culture that existed in those books should have anchored me to this one. But even so I couldn't damn finish it. After three weeks of forcing myself to read it I have barely reach half. No more!

  I am not unreasonable. I know that probably Brian Herbert was pushed to be a writer, even if he didn't have the skills or maybe even the drive. I know that people are not instantly good at what they are doing and that after a shitty book they have the opportunity to grow when writing the next ones. There are 25 books and comics in the Dune universe now! When the hell did he write all of those? Surely at least some of them would be good. But this first one is so bad, so incredibly bland, that I have no desire to read anything written by Brian Herbert ever again, except perhaps the biography of his father. I mean, at least he will have been invested in that one, right? He can't murder his dad's story like he did his legacy!

  I would rather (and I actually plan to) reread everything Frank Herbert ever wrote than try another butchery of Dune by Brian Herbert.

Ancient Enemy is one of those card games that abstract a journey of discovery and battle. You charge your magic by playing Solitaire "combos", then fire at the enemy. The choices you make on your journey don't matter at all, they are just levels to pass through that barely differ from each other. That's the entire game!

So why did I play it? Well, because the sound and the texts that my character was "saying" were intriguing. Ironically enough, the game had a "Skip story" button, when in fact that was the only thing that interested me - I wanted a "Skip game" button. Alas, the end of the journey was a complete let down, with a generic enemy that presented no challenge and a blunt and uninspired story ending.

Honestly, when I was playing it I thought: anybody can make games and sell them if this is a Steam game that people pay money for. Just look at the official site of this 2018 game: it looks like it was made in 2000.

Bottom line: fascinating how soundscape can make even the most boring games hold one's interest. Here is a gameplay video:

[youtube:dcglX1KP4XQ]