"Frank Herbert - Dune Genesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

This essay was originally published in the July 1980 issue of Omni
Magazine. It has never been reprinted, and most DUNE fans have not
had the opportunity to read Frank Herbert's description of creating
his masterpiece.




Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert

Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape
across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The
story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.

How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book
about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues,
fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent
bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory
that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero
(whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over
the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.

Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of
politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to
give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap
himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it.
Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.

My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted
themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming
bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that
neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.

This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your
critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people
may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being
who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human
mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And
sometimes you run into another problem.

It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want
power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people
are imbalanced-in a word, insane.

That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe.
The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly
word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ
them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that
picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?