Apostrophe S

OK, admitadly, I’m reading a slower pace than I was earlier in the year. But I’m still in the black, so to speak. Meaning that I’ve already read 11 books and this is only the fifth month of the year. I’ll get back on track. I promise. Anyway…

I have read a few of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novels and enjoyed them very much. What draws me to Herbert’s writing is his sense of scale and ability to create huge and believable worlds that share similarities with our own, but are far enough removed to give them a fantastic quality. The scale of “The Eyes of Heisenberg” is rather small compaired to the “Dune” universe, but that’s probably because “Eyes” is only 157 pages, as opposed to the eleventy billion pages that compose the writings concerning “Dune,” including the stuff that Herbert’s son is working on. I found myself wondering if “Eyes” was supposed to fit in the “Dune” timeline, just much earlier.

The premise of the book is constructed around the notion that in the future — about 80,000 years into the future, as a matter of fact — humans are no longer born the “ancient” way, that is via the mother’s womb. They are instead grown from embryos in vats that provide all the necessary nutrients. In addition, skilled surgeons inspect the DNA of the embryos and make corrections, called cuts, to cure disease and affect appearance and temperament. These surgeons are apparently so skilled that the various classes of people are cut in distinct ways, so that surgeons can identify what “cut” an individual is just by looking and talking to them. Genetic manipulation has also led to the creation of the Optimen, a class of humans that are more than human. They are called the live-forevers because, well, they are immortal. Or so they think…

By the time the plot of the book takes place, some Optimen have been alive for 40,000 years or more, and they preside like a pantheon of Greek gods over the rest of humanity, called the Folk. They are perfect in every way — except that the “Optiman cut” leaves the individual sterile. The Optimen exercise absolute control over the world, taking turns ruling for a few hundred years as a member of a small group called the Tuyere. The weather is determined by the whim of an Optiman somewhere. Folk breeding is closely watched, and a contraceptive gas is used to keep the gene pool in check. And discontent stirs in the underground.

That’s a lot of background, I know, but you kind of need to know it.

So here our story begins to unfold, in an embryo facility in the megalopolis of Seatac, which, from what I can tell, encompasses an area about the size of Washington state. So along come Harvey and Lizbeth Durant, simple Folk who have been allowed the privelage of producing offspring. They produce a viable embryo, and when it comes time for the surgeon to perform the cut, they ask to watch. According to law, the parents have to right to watch, but no one ever does. This is worisome to the surgeons who work for the Optimen, because they use the genetic manipulation as a means of keeping the Folk gene pool in line. So they sometimes make unnecessary cuts, which might create suspicion in the mind of the parents, if they watched closely. But the Durant embryo is different. The surgeon, Potter, recognizes this right away. The embryo has the potential to be an Optiman, but it has the potential to be more. It could be non-sterile Optiman. The ruling Tuyere would never allow such an individual to exist, so Potter, in an act of rebellion against his bosses, decides to make the necessary cuts and try to help the embryo survive. Thus we have our conflict. I won’t tell you how it ends.

I found the book to be a little slow, even for one so short. It picked up in the middle and then at the end floated off into la la land looking for resolution. I get the feeling that Herbert didn’t really know where he was going with the story when he started it. For the first part of the book, we pretty much see the events through the eyes of the rebellious characters. Toward the last 50 pages, the focus shifts to the plight of the Optimen when they are presented with the possibility of their own mortality. The original conflict of “will the Durants’ child be allowed to live and what consequences will this have” is never really resolved. Instead we get to see what thousands of years of peace, hubris and a sheltered lifestyle create in the Optiment: boredom. Herbert posits that this sort of immortality is not really living, and that without the possibility of death, life has no meaning. As one character states early in the book, “Efficiency’s the opposite of craftsmanship.”

As this book was written only about a decade after Watson and Crick discovered that DNA was a double-helix, the descriptions of the actual science can seem silly from 40 years later. The surgeons use actual mechanical devices to alter the genetic code, and they are able to inspect the embryo’s DNA, identify problems, and make the corrections in less than an hour. Pretty impressive. But then again, who knows what will be possible 80,000 years from now.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. Not bad for a used bookstore miscellaneous bin find. Herbert’s imagination and ability to construct new worlds are awe inspiring. But I’d probably only recommend this book to my hardcore sci-fi brethren. If you want to read Herbert, start at the beginning with “Dune,” which I believe is one of the greatest works of science fiction, if not literature, of the 20th Century.

Next book, “The Tesseract” by Alex Garland.

[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]