_New York Times_, 1 August 1976, pg 176

"Of Things To Come", by Gerald Jonas

To appreciate Frank Herbert's achievements in the Dune trilogy, which concludes with CHILDREN OF DUNE (Berkley / Putnam, $8.95) you have to be a devotee of obsession. On the surface, the Dune books offer an unlikely combination of old-fashioned space opera, up-to-date ecological concern and breathtakingly ecumenical religiosity. The space opera elements include a decaying galactic empire, heroes and villains of nearly superhuman power, and truly formidable monsters. The ecology centers around the planet Dune, which is one vast desert, yet which supports a population of remarkably disciplined human beings known as Fremen.

To survive on a planet that has absolutely no surface water, the Fremen have learned never to waste a drop of precious bodily fluids; their cave-like homes are sealed off from the moisture-stealing air, and when they venture onto the endless sands of their world, they wear "stillsuits", which trap and recycle every molecule of water in their urine, sweat and breath. Herbert's vision of a people forced by circumstances into total ecological awareness is worked out in convincing detail; and since the first book in the trilogy, "Dune", was published in 1965, he can hardly be accused of mere faddishness. (In fact, "Dune" was recommended as an ecological primer in the pages of "The Last Whole Earth Catalog".)

But neither space opera nor ecology is sufficient to account for the enormous appeal of the Dune books. The first two books in the trilogy, "Dune" and "Dune Messiah", have sold nearly a million copies in hard and soft covers, and more than 47,000 copies of "Children of Dune" have been printed in hard cover. What sets these books apart from their competitors is the obsessive quality of Herbert's imagination. The word "obsession" comes from the Latin verb "to besiege". An individual who is obsessed cannot tear his attention away from an idea or a feeling, even though he may be aware that the idea or feeling is completely at odds with reality. This can be painful for the victim, but like many forms of mental anguish, it is fascinating to experience at a safe distance. To read the Dune trilogy is to plunge into someone else's obsession. As in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", nothing in these books is real, yet everything has a life-or-death importance.

Whatever else the characters in Herbert's books have to worry about, none suffers from that common malady of our day: a sense of meaninglessness. Virtually every page in the trilogy contains a sentence that hints at the momentousness of the events being described. This is where the religiosity comes in. Herbert keeps interrupting the action with quotes from made-up sources that reinforce the atmosphere of millennial conflict and resolution. Taken out of context, these passages sound silly, like the words of wisdom spoken by Oriental sages on a TV sound stage.

Example: "It is said of Muad'Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. 'That was its fate', he explained." But the whole point of an obsession is that it cannot be criticized from the outside; what distinguishes a successful obsessional tale from a failure is that the reader is held, like Coleridge's Wedding Guest, so that "he cannot choose but hear", no matter what his other faculties tell him. On this criterion, I would personally rate the Dune trilogy an unqualified success.

Equally obsessive, although far less accessible, is a recent novel called THE SIEGE OF WONDER, by Mark S. Geston (Doubleday, $5.95). The theme of the book is nothing less than a winner-take-all war between "science" and "magic". I would describe it as an allegory except that I don't usually like allegories and I like this book very much. Geston's strategy seems to be closer to what physicists call a thought experiment. Suppose that all human endeavor were reduced to two extremes and people were forced to choose sides. On one side is "science", defined as everything that is coldly analytical, that seeks to understand the nature of reality by dissecting it. On the other side is "magic",
 defined as everything that is intuitive, imaginative, unpredictable, that subjugates all other values to the exercise of the individual will.

For Geston, there is nothing ethereal about this conflict; he presents the magicians as "men of power", who have stumbled on the ability to manipulate forces that exist in "spectrums paralleling the electromagnetic". This power enables them to turn dross into gold, and ordinary men into slaves. Arrayed against the magicians are the technicians, whose instruments gradually peel the veil of mystery from the "parallel spectrums". As the source of the magicians' power becomes "understood", their creations literally fall apart.

When the book opens, the two sides have been at war for nearly seven hundred years. A physical border separates the land of "magic" from the land of "science". battles are fought, towns and villages are destroyed, men are killed by fantastic new weapons or deadened by war-weariness. Weariest of all is the book's hero, a man named Aden - a spy from the land of "science" whose loyalties have been subverted during his long sojourn in enemy territory. He meets a beautiful sorceress and an ancient unicorn; both touch him with their beauty. Aden knows better than anyone that the tide of war has finally turned; the victory of "science" is assured; yet quixotically, he chooses the side of the defeated.

What is the point of Geston's thought experiment? Is he making a prediction, issuing a warning, or dramatizing his own frustration at the competing claims of intellect and imagination? Although he leaves no doubt where his sympathies lie, he does not pretend to have all the answers. Rather, he presents his obsession as if it were raw data - and invites the reader to come to his own conclusions.