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

aim painful barbs.

But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek
play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these
mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do
they learn this?

Enter the fugue. In music, the fugue is usually based on a single theme that
is played many different ways. Sometimes there are free voices that do
fanciful dances around the interplay. There can be secondary themes and
contrasts in harmony, rhythm, and melody. From the moment when a single
voice introduces the primary theme, however, the whole is woven into a
single fabric.

What were my instruments in this ecological fugue? Images, conflicts,
things that turn upon themselves and become something quite different,
myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our common
heritage, products of our technological evolution, our human desires, and
our human fears.

You can imagine my surprise to learn that John Schoenherr, one of the
world's most foremost wildlife artists and illustrators, had been living in my
head with the same images. People find it difficult to believe that John and I
had no consultations prior to his painting of the Dune illustrations. I assure
you that the paintings were a wonderful surprise to me.

The Sardaukar appear like the weathered stones of Dune. The Baron's
paunch could absorb a world. The ornithopters are insects preying on the
land. The sandworms are Earth shipworms grown monstrous. Stilgar glares
out at us with the menace of a warlock.

What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fuguelike
relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape.

As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that
turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time.
What about Paul's gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the
Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination.
Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically
enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always
encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like
the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."

Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a
larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and
in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide
time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.
But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe
fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict
accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.