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

All of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in
the entertainment business first. It's all right to include a pot of message,
but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. Yes, there are analogs
in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places,
whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over
by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an
exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

But that was only the beginning.

While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to
write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there.
The USDA was seeking ways to control coastal (and other) sand dunes. I
had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my
superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next
banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and
others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade.

Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure
its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can
be just as addictive as any other kind of high.

Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence project fed
my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see
the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social
ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It's an open-ended list.

Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions,
psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research,
soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study
rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's cauldron: the psychology
of planetary societies.

Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the
beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the
guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt,
would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism
into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.

Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or
deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an
absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe
attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices
that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are
ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the
ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation.
Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible
targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to