The Heretics of Dune
Batchelor, John Calvin
municate them, narrowly Christian sectarian to exclude them from the Mystical Body. She was given a job with the Jewish Council, a liaison body set up by the Nazis for their convenience, and...
...A friend, who survived, saw her at the train to Auschwitz "talking gaily, a kind word for everyone she met.., perhaps a touch of sadness...
...Profes-sor Costello, chairman of the department of Communication Arts at Notre Dame, is a sure-footed Theseus, deftly threading his way through labyrinths of celluloid...
...JAPANESE SOCIETY: TRADITION, SELF AND THE SOCIAL ORDER, by Robert J. Smith...
...a discussion of faith and politics sharply "rejecting liberation theology...
...A savior is required to rise from the obscurity of an outpost to plant the seeds of mankind's resurrection...
...joy here to crash up against sentences of impenetrable Germanic epistemology and not to stop reading, "Nowhere in the Wekht of Jandola, not to the farthest reaches of Tleilaxu Yaghist, wag there a living powindah who knew this secret...
...Cambridge University Press, $19.95, 188 pp...
...JOHN CALVIN BATCHELOR wrote The Birth ofthe People's Republic of Antarctica (Dial...
...To both...
...We teach," says an evil one, "that new knowledge is non-survival...
...The columns began in September 1905 and ended with Chesterton's death in June 1936...
...Chesteron's col- umns from the Illustrated London News, two-thirds of which have never begn reprinted before...
...He uses interviews with Fellini and published screenplays...
...Frank Herbert has a tin ear, an innocuous imagination, and no patience for sur-prise, character, forgiveness, love or what could be called the ha'penny details of humanity, like grumpiness...
...What does it mean that Leto II's plan lives on in pieces --those tablets --distributed in the brains of the big worms...
...This book nearly belies Fellini's statement that, "A film cannot be described in words...
...Westminster Press, $8.95 paper, 120 pp...
...Mr...
...Then the shrill whis- tle when the train with a thousand 'trans- port cases' was moving out...
...Mr...
...Every month, it seems, Americans are beaten about the head with two or three new books on Japan...
...Herbert knows how to crank out the old fate-of-the-universe-in-the-balance plot one more time...
...a reflec-tion on the theme of God's "death" 'or "absence" in contemporary culture...
...T he Midwest Chesterton Society has just received an offer from the University Press of America to publish all of G.K...
...Those in-terested in helping should write to: Frank A. Petta Midwest Chesterton Society Box 353 Carpenterville, IL 60110 Herbert's thrills than for the sunburnt beauties going by...
...on the other topics, his deep knowledge and rigorous examination of Protestant thought strike a shower of intellectual sparks...
...Contributions will be fully tax deductible...
...the proto apple might be infested with, will aggrandize America's ~opular culture next Christmas...
...She still threw a postcard out of the train, which a farmer found and mailed: "We left the camp singing," it said...
...A lavish motion picture of that original book, about a faraway and far- in-the-future desert world that is actually a paradise shot through with hal-lucinogenic powders and giant sand worms such as...
...Fellini's films are consciously au-tobiographical...
...Also, most impor- tantly, Mr...
...Names of major contributors (over $100) will be printed in this edition of the GKC columns...
...Herbert amuses when he reduces humanity's problems to a dia- logue worthy of a corporate strategy meeting for a new fast food chain empire: "To those out there," says a loathsome one, "a great issue is: 'Will I eat today?' 'Do I have shelter tonight that will not be invaded by attackers or vermin?' Lux- ury...
...John Calvin Batchelor F RANK HERBERT is a sixty-four-year-old veteran journalist from the northwest coast who has exercised the easy story-telling talent and dispassion- ate cynicism of the daily reporter to create, over the last twenty years, a world-famous and extremely lucrative series of science fiction tales based upon his happy genius of a novel, Dune (1965...
...The evil few are drug-addicted "whores" whose sense of wickedness includes characterizing themselves as "bankers" and who like to torture with a method that reminds one of ROSEMARY BOOTH has a Master's degree in city and regional planning from Harvard...
...Count Tolstoy did the Dune series's delightful core of salvation history much better in his fate- of-the-universe thriller, War And Peace, but then, Frank Herbert has stripped away all that annoyingly ambivalent ver- isimilitude in order to provide diverting, chatty, skimmable romanticism...
...Herbert has considerable hope for tired old mankind...
...To God...
...Nevertheless, the plot is concrete...
...Mr...
...It is part of the 7 September 1984:475 a nymph whipping a man with her long wet blond hair...
...All the plot twists turn upon bad blood, racial memories, and Darwinian absolutism, that is, prophets are born not made, magic is preserved instinct and not chicanery, survival is a matter of a superior gene pool and adoration of one's environment...
...The house atop such a foun- dation is left to the tongue-twisting of Mr...
...And what is left is Mr...
...a comparison of ChriStian and Buddhist quests for the true self...
...However, the cost of secretarial help and indexing for this project will be approximately $20,000 and the Society is urgently seeking funds...
...others know it and abuse it...
...This is the fun genre, and Mr...
...an argument for a new Protestant "Eucharist piety...
...This book by Donald P. Costello is a guide through Federico Fellini's com-plex major films La Strada, La Dolce IOta, 8.89 and Juliet of the Spirits...
...Herbert's glossary...
...It is not too late to join the parade...
...Again, Mr...
...I love people so terribly, because in every human being I love something of A novel of half-baked ideas You...
...By then, everything that happened seemed to strengthen Et- ty's "crystal clear mysticism...
...Five lectures at Yale: a critique of Protestant"guilt piety...
...Secrets...
...Ours," S. says to her "is real Hell...
...It is fifteen hundred years after the close of the last cycle (Dune Messiah, Children Of Dune, God Emperor Of Dune), and across the limitless reaches of space, mankind has again fallen into a pregnant dark age that resembles, sort- of, the Fertile Crescent in the first cen- tury A.D.: aging priest cults, arrogant warrior cults, and the arrival from out- side of a new and vibrant empire of gold-hoarders that could be Rome with the emendation that the women are in charge because of their sexual prowess...
...They so artistically pro- ject the interconnected realms of reality, dream, fantasy, and memory that Cos- tello states: "The complexity that results Correction In identifying reviewer William M. Sul- livan in the 10 August 1984 issue, we inadvertently altered his name...
...Now that you have gone, my path leads straight to God, and I shall be the mediator for any soul I can reach...
...On November 30, 1943, the drop of water that had been Etty Hillesum fell into the ocean of infinity, ready for it...
...municate them, narrowly Christian sectarian to exclude them from the Mystical Body...
...Notre Dame, $16.95, $9.95 paper, 214 PP...
...He has a faultless sense of Fellini's images, an intense grasp of his cinematographic languages, and a love and gift for exegesis...
...It is unironic good versus prosaic evil for the control of dimwitted mankind, then, and Mr...
...In brief FELLINI'S ROAD, by Donald P. Costello...
...most are ignorant of it and choose to remain so...
...And it is largely because of this light-hearted phenomenon that the latest episode of the big worms, The Heretics of Dune, de-serves attention...
...THE EDITORS stuns us with its likeness to the deeper reality which we all know...
...Unable to digest the idea that very different societies could achieve similar technical and economic powers --and yet remain very different societies --we keep wondering whether Japan hasn't stolen some Western secret and made even better use of it than we have, or we keep waiting for the other shoe to fall and Japan to awaken to all the Commonweal: 476...
...His passion is for biology, specifically genetic engineering...
...But it is surely to S. that she cries out: "You were the mediator between God and me, you taught me to speak His Name...
...Did she say it to the fellow pilgrim she lost...
...She was given a job with the Jewish Council, a liaison body set up by the Nazis for their convenience, and is forced to play an inevitably sinister role in as- sisting "the cold-blooded fanatics who clamor for our destruction" but of whom she was less afraid than of her "own demons I have to battle inside...
...We are, as the au- thor of this book observes, "clearly made uneasy and insecure by Japanese successes...
...But Julius Spier was to be spared the deepest pit of this hell, he became ill and died...
...Pannenberg sim- ply has little "feel" for liberation theol- ogy, and his critique suffers accordingly...
...He combines imagery with parody, gro-tesque sophistication with irony, humor, and pathos...
...This makes the Dune series distasteful to one whose affections are for the gentle accidents of heterogeneity, democracy, and intellectual freedom...
...Costello seems familiar with each frame of the film in question...
...this is not a book of spaceships or planetary geological events...
...One either believes that the history books are all, or one does not quite, and playfully takes to fiction...
...Dante's Inferno is comic opera by com- parison...
...Luxury is the possession of a drug or a member of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay...
...Herbert's ver- sion of the common people, whom he calls "muck...
...However, it is also a novel of ideas, and if they are half-baked like everyone on that beach, there is in this ponderous unraveling of the mystery of the big worms, a snappy acknowledgement of the central conceit of all novels of ideas, "The writing of history is a process of diversion: Most historical accounts divert attention from the secret influences around the recorded events...
...Herbert sketches this paranoid fan- tasy as well as one can, given that Dos- toyevsky's Grand Inquisitor has become a stylized television personality always changinig costumes for all those anach- ronistic historical mini-series...
...Poor "muck" is in the cheap seats of this melodrama, and is obliged to endure frequent lectures about how it is not to be trusted with intelli- gence...
...What drives the book is the drip-drip-drip of secrets: Why did 'God Emperor Leto II, who was mad in ac-ceptably human ways, like a very glib Assurbanipal, leave behind the hidden makings of a new order like Alka-Seltzer tablets...
...This is a book for the beach, where one has no greater curiosity outside of Mr...
...Herbert's good few are drug-addicted "witches" who breed like prize bogs, ageless stoical warriors who kill in defeatist calms, and teenage children who bounce between virginal equestrian longings to ride the big worms and born- to-lose yearnings to rule the big worms like battalions of bikers...
...Each is a quest for self- discovery, a journey...
...And is this plan benevolent or malevolent...
...I THE HERETICS OF DUNE Frank Herbert G. P. Putnam's, $16.95, 480 pp...
...Checks should be made out to the Chesterton Fund...
...Fellini himself has written: "Professor Costello, with his accurate and suggestive book, has made me want to go and see some of the films he writes about so well...
...Four stars...
...His films give the appear- ance of spontaneity but are constructed on layers of metaphor, staged with sure craftsmanship...
...CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY, by WolJhart Pannenberg...
...but none of these were ever why one turned to science fiction...
...One will find generous insight and self-enlightenment in these pages...
...But it is arguably a credible way to review mankind's history: There is a plan --some know it incrementally...
...Herbert does not construct any of this with metaphorical or allegorical exac-titude, and this interpretation is as good or useless as any...
...We apologize for our error...
...Herbert has little interest in physics or chemistry...
...In response, the hero thinks, "And you are the beast...
...FREDERICK FRANCK'$ books include The Zen of Seeing and Art as a Way...
...Fellini paints "a fresco of the society we live in...
Vol. 111 • September 1984 • No. 15
