The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (2 page)

My first venture into science fiction was “Looking for Something?” As with the childhood fragment, it contains rough edges.

“Looking” deals with a subject which I explored in greater detail later: that borderline of awareness out of which our compulsions grope for recognition. It says you may not know the full spectrum of motivation behind your everyday activities. And when you go looking for that motivation, you may encounter more than you wanted.

“Nightmare Blues” (“Operation Syndrome”) was my first acceptance by the late John Campbell of
Astounding/Analog.
I was still mining the same vein of “Looking.” However, “Nightmare” moves more freely and contains more of that special color which science fiction requires—the teleprobe, the skytrain, the sound switch beside the window, the undersea nightclub. It has that immediacy of detail which I believe a story must contain before it gives you the full sense of the place were the characters are performing. It contains some things familiar today, but the backdrop is tomorrow.

“Nightmare” says, as well, that tomorrow's world may not be the most pleasant place you've ever imagined. It brings up the subtle meaning of the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

Much science fiction views the world and human future more from a Hebrew curse than the Chinese. It reads: “May you grow like an onion with your head in the ground!” For this latter variant, the writer plays prophet, crying: “Lift up your heads and look around you at what we are doing!” Looking back on it, I can see that this dominates the story “Cease Fire,” a modern Sorcerer's Apprentice yarn.

Please note the monumental prophetic error in “Cease Fire,” however. Written in 1958, it was set in that far-off time of 1972. Vietnam was a decade ahead and somewhat warmer of climate than the setting I chose. To the best of my knowledge, Vietnam did not produce an equivalent to Larry Hulser, my protagonist, nor did it produce his invention. “Cease Fire” does say something about the war syndrome and the simplistic world of those who begin their preachments with: “We could end wars if we would just…”

Hulser's invention will have to wait, but I expect something like this to come. You will recall that dynamite was supposed to end the possibility of war because it was too dreadful. And before that, it was the crossbow. Instruments of violence apparently don't end wars.

My timing error recalls the story told about Edgar Allan Poe, that he was walking with a friend in New York City in 1847 and suddenly cried out: “I've just had a vision of the future! Within a hundred years (by 1947) New York will have ten-storey buildings!”

Poe, the father of the modern science fiction story, failed to take into account the invention of the elevator and the steel-frame building.

As with much prophecy, so it is with science fiction. Thus far, we've been unable to achieve a surprise-free future. We fail to take some surprising development into account.

We do score occasionally, however, and these provide some of our greatest moments. Think of Arthur Clarke telling the world how a communications satellite would function and long before such wonders came into being. He predicted the development with such detail that the concept cannot be patented. Prior publication will prevent a patent. I did the same thing in “Dragon in the Sea” with the prediction of collapsible cargo devices and television periscopes. The truly classic example is that of Cleve Cartmill in the middle of World War II describing how to build an atom bomb. To this day, there probably are officials of the United States government who believe Cartmill's story developed from a leak in the Manhattan Project. The unimaginative always seem to underestimate how far the imagination can leap.

“Egg and Ashes” with its phoenix theme represents one of my earlier attempts to weave a linguistics theme into a yarn. How
does
a creature react if it hears in the spectrum which we see? This tale revolves on that common-to-science fiction element—possession as an alien presence. Why not? Most science fiction assumes an infinite universe where the wonders will never end. If you sample such a future through fiction, does that not prepare you to deal with surprising real events?

This is a question Martin Fisk of “Mary Celeste Move” might ask himself. Fisk could be any of us in a velocitized world which moves so fast we're unaware of running out of time and cannot react with sufficient rapidity to the shock power of a future into which we plunge. How much difference is there between the present breakneck pace of our freeway-insanity and Fisk's world of 300-mile-per-hour expressways where you slow down to 75 and a speed of 55 is to creep? Is it caricature or a glimpse of our current reality?

“Committee of the Whole” may have a familiar ring to some who read it. Is it today's world or just the day after tomorrow?

Here's where you separate the people who
grow like an onion
from those who merely accept that they live in the universe of the Chinese curse. I regret to say that “Committee” is my view of imminent reality. The future does tend to beguile us with myths of
progress
while the other hand prepares ever more potent shocks. “Look out for my atom bomb!” the future says. And all the while, an anonymous human is working in his basement on that surprise which will make over the atomic age into “the good old days.”

Cracking the atom represented only a milestone on a longer path. If science fiction does no more, it tells us this: we are developing larger and larger chunks of energy which can be manipulated by fewer and fewer of us. If this curve continues to rise exponentially, single individuals will soon be able to focus planet-shattering energies.

The role of the anonymous individual in this development is relatively clear. Science fiction at least since H. G. Wells has been drawing his portrait with a consistent success/horror. Propinquity, serendipity and curiosity lie in wait for the unwary onion head. My ventures into science fiction see our world in far more peril from a pharmacist and biotechnician working privately in a basement laboratory than it is from the atom, fission or fusion. Given the sums of energy becoming available to fewer and fewer of us, the brutalized human, the disaffected fanatic, represents our most profound peril.

There appears no present way to prevent his surprise whether that comes in the form of a biological weapon or an application of the bias-current principle to the cracking of our entire planet. The horrors of science fiction's most bug-eyed-monster extremes don't compare with what's happening in our “real world.”

The basic energy involved in this process is, of course,
knowledge.
How can you suppress that which is already or about to become
common knowledge
? Thought control quickly runs out of dependable controllers. Once Lize Meitner had published her findings, atomic fission was public property. Cleve Cartmill merely dipped into this public trough to produce his story. The materials and information tools behind such runaway growth are so widely spread in our world that the words
security
and
secrecy
contain a hideous kind of gallows humor or even worse. Official secrecy acts and the concepts of security based on them represent distractions which actually contribute to humankind's insecurity. I say it baldly here instead of letting it unfold in
fiction,
but I'm not the first to take this alarming view that
the fault is not in our stars, Mercutio
 …

Thus, “Committee” represents that form of science fiction which attempts to depict a deeper reality: Future History. It says in a story, which the reader can accept because it's “only a story,” that the essence of this fiction will come to pass. You as reader put the connections to reality together only after the reading.

This leads by what is to me an orderly thought process into the concept of the operating manual, the handbook for whatever you do as
work
. This is the book which gives you the myth of the orderly world, hiding all of the hangups and misalignments behind illusionary rules. Often such manuals are written by committees. (You may recall that a camel is a horse created by a committee.) My favorite of such handbooks is the Blue Jackets Manual which is issued to incoming recruits of the US Navy. The BJM has many classic lines, including this one:

“It is absolutely imperative that the ship be kept watertight.”

Nobody can doubt this, especially if his life depends on it. Between the book and the execution of the obvious, however, is a world of creative originality. Here's where we really operate by the book. It's this in-between world which inspired me to write a short story about the educated ignorance to be found in a handbook of the future, calling the story, of course, “By the Book.” The story says that those precise and orderly barriers we raise against omnipresent outer chaos can be useful tools or they can be traps. It all depends on how you interpret your manual. This is usually what I tell people who come to me asking for “rules about writing.”

Such a handbook is possible, of course, and many have been written. Mine might begin this way:

Rule One
: Work to develop an almost organic link between your primary tool and yourself.

Rule Two
: Your primary tool is
language,
written, spoken, however it communicates.

Rule Three
: Write regularly; don't wait for a call from your favorite muse.

Rule Four
: Be sensitive to and responsive to your audience, but not slavish.

And so on …

I mean that about an
organic linkage
most profoundly, understanding that you are connected to language by devices; in my case, a typewriter. This linkage is unique to the individual and, in a sense, it dissolves as you use it. You have to develop your linkage anew each time.

So much for rule books.

Which brings us to “The Primitives.”

The author's name originally was to have been Noah Arkwright. That's the pseudonym chosen by Jack Vance, Poul Anderson and myself when we plotted the story while building a houseboat which we used on the waters of the Sacramento–San Joaquin delta at the head of San Francisco Bay. We intended to write the story together as a lark, but the pressure of work forced Vance and Anderson out of the picture and they insisted I finish it. I developed our plot into the novelette.

To me this story has a lovely logic. After all, what would a primitive make out of a diamond? See if you disagree.

“The Primitives” also represented my attempt to open up another possibility for the role of women in our past. In my view humankind was matriarchal for far more centuries than it was patriarchal. Male dominance probably came onto the scene rather late after an earlier animal history of pack relationships probably similar to those of the higher apes, and
then
a long period of female dominance after we became self-conscious.

The picture of the female cowering in the cave with her brood while the male fought off the sabertooth tiger has always struck me as a bit much. I find it easier to see the image of the domineering
Cave Mother,
keeper of the birth mystery and the sacred vessel of ongoing life. If there's one thing primitives do not like, that's to bring down the wrath of powerful spirits.

Perhaps we haven't changed much in that respect, which is another recurring theme of science fiction:
It may
look
new, but it's really the same old thing.

“The Heaven Makers” plays with zen consciousness / taoist eternity translated for Western awareness. Words are finite creatures, however, and the universe (even the universe of your own book) changes as you touch it. There exists in this book a recognition of our concensus choice to use a linear rather than a non-linear model for our universe. But what do we do when we find that this linearity closes its own circle? Do the endless serial events merely repeat? These are some of the underlying conceptualizations of “The Heaven Makers.” We think our ancestral gods no longer awaken mysteries in our minds. We have the myth of the endless personal story, denying the visions of the older mysteries in the hope of finding new
scientific
answers. Thus we deify science and its offspring, technology. Science fiction has become a special toy to those alerted to this spectrum. It unfolds the monsters of awareness which lurk in our mutually-created vision of eternity. We know there are things in this eternity which we don't want to see, but like children peering past the protective legs of an adult, we seek a
safe
glimpse of the monster.

“The Heaven Makers” assumes that the immortal have no morality which can be equated with a finite morality. Look around you. The morality of the species overrides the puny morality of the individual. Our creation of
law
may have been the attempt to match species' morality with that of the individual. And, of course, the species may not be immortal.

In a natural progression from “The Heaven Makers,” and all the stories before it, you get “The Being Machine” (“Mind Bomb”). This is in part another story of outside manipulation of the individual, playing with the concept of what we mean by “free will.” It is the influence of reason in rebellion against any manipulation, even by itself. It is the paradox of manipulation in an equalizing (entropic) universe. This is
law and order
at the end of its tether, the species projected into a far-far future where manipulation of the individual has been carried to a self-defeating extreme. It says
law and order
lead inevitably to chaos.

Another paradox?

“Seed Stock” takes up that recurrent science fiction theme of humans colonizing/populating another planet (the eternity myth for the species). This story, however, says specifically that these colonizing humans must become transformed into children of
that
planet, even to the point of rejecting
Mother Earth.
By inference, it speaks to the eternity myth right here on this planet, saying that humans, to make their myth a reality, must become children of this planet once more and children of
any
planet.