science fiction – David S. Moore: Insights & Innovations

I had read Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune many years ago, when I was in college. I even took a college class from Frank Herbert. But I had never read the second book in his series, Dune Messiah. Recently I had seen Part 2 of the new film version of Dune and had seen the director Villeneuve interviewed on TV. He said that they were considering making a Part 3 that would be based on Dune Messiah, so I decided I had better read it.

I’ll begin by saying that this is a book that sorely needs a glossary. There are a lot of words that Herbert invented for his books, and it would have been really helpful to me if it were possible to look some of them up.

By the time I was finished with the book I felt that there were a number of loose ends that I wished he had tied off. To avoid spoilers, I won’t mention them all here– but the very first character introduced in the book, Bronso of Ix, was one such dangling piece.

From a pure “writing as craft” point of view the book violates virtually everything that present day tastes dictate. For example, Herbert has many scenes in which multiple people are involved, and for which the personal perspectives of several characters are narrated in sequence. That’s called “head hopping” in contemporary parlance– and it’s considered a grave sin that proper writers should never employ. Personally, I thought it worked alright in most cases– but then I think that many contemporary standards about what constitutes proper writing today are highly contrived. I especially rebel at the rules regarding the use of numerals in written text– but that’s probably best left for another essay.

The first two thirds of the book is mostly head games. We encounter several of the adversaries of the Atreides family and we learn in great detail their motivations and impulses. To avoid spoilers, I won’t get into specifics. By about two thirds of the way in I thought I wasn’t going to like the outcome and that all of the angst and vitriol of the many personal narratives amounted to so much overblown hyperbole. But as it turned out I did like the ending. Or at least I found it a fitting ending for the story line as it was developed. It’s a very wordy book, and I personally felt that a great deal of its wordiness went off in unresolved directions. That was probably the greatest contributor to my sense of loose ends.

One curious detail: At one point in the narrative Paul Muad’Dib mentions the atrocities of several humans from Earth history. He specifically mentions Hitler and Genghis Khan, and he attributed 4 million deaths to Genghis Khan. Today’s research pegs that number at something closer to 40 million. I don’t doubt that Herbert was using what were probably regarded as the best known numbers at the time, and of course we’ll never know the true count. I just thought it odd that the number he used was one tenth the present day number. It shows, I think, just how little Genghis Khan’s impact on the medieval world was understood.

I have spoken elsewhere about faster-than-light travel. If you haven’t read that blog entry, here’s the summary: I don’t believe in it. And consequently I don’t believe in galactic empires. In Herbert’s universe traveling across a galaxy, or across the universe, is accomplished by “folding space.” That sounds very technologically cool, but there is no physical basis for such a thing. The premise of the Dune series is that there is a single emperor who presides over the entire universe. That’s possible because of human mastery of the folding of space. And since I don’t buy into the concept of folding space, I can’t really buy into the fundamental setting of the story.

Dune Messiah is about Paul’s role as emperor of the known universe– and as the figurehead of a religious cult. Regardless of whether you accept the notion of a universal empire, it’s a good premise. It’s the tension between Paul the emperor and Paul the religious figurehead that is the real driver of the narrative. Paul won the position of emperor by defeating his predecessor, but his role as a figurehead was thrust upon him by his adoring followers. Again, it’s a good tension, and one that made Paul’s character complex and engaging. But I also think this aspect of the story often got smothered by the wordiness of Herbert’s introspective narrations. It’s yet another dangling element.

In addition to the emperor/figurehead duality Paul struggles throughout the book with his prescience. Because he drank the Water of Life (in the first book) he can see into the future. But the visions he has of the future are often incomplete, or blurry. Sometimes it sounds like Paul sees absolutely every detail; and other times he misses major aspects of the course of the future. So is he truly prescient, or is he not? And if he’s truly prescient, and if he knows exactly what’s going to happen, what can he do about it? Can he avoid the pain that he envisions, or must he sublimate his feelings of revulsion and simply go with the flow? It’s a constant tension throughout the story, and in my opinion it was never adequately resolved.

I don’t believe in prescience. I don’t see how it will ever be possible for anyone– regardless of how many drugs they may consume– to see the future. In mathematics there is a concept known as “chaos.” It’s defined as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” That phrase has been rendered in everyday speech as “the Butterfly Effect.” The idea is that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Rio de Janeiro, six months later the weather in London will be different from what it would otherwise have been. Tiny changes in a complex system today can have a ripple effect that can drastically alter the course of future events. Nonetheless, the question of whether prescience is a good thing or a bad thing seems like it might be worth discussing. It’s a recurring theme throughout the book.

To me the most frustrating aspect of the book is that I still don’t think I know who the real players were in the narrative. I can’t add any detail around that statement without spoiling the entire story. But as I read it there were things that some of the leading characters did that they could not have done without a highly detailed prescience of their own. And it was never made clear as to just how they obtained that level of prescience.

The first book– Dune— was very engaging. There was much more action– and violence. And it arrived at a satisfying conclusion when Paul defeated the emperor of the known universe and assumed control if the empire’s most important resource– spice. This book is much more cerebral. There’s far less action, far less violence. But there’s also more introspection and deliberation. And more to think about.

Time travel is a staple in science fiction stories. Marty McFly traveled into the future and back into the past by means of a flux capacitor designed by the eminent Dr. Emmett Brown. Until he surrendered it to Thanos, Dr. Strange used the power of the time stone to control time. And Dr. Who cavorts merrily through time and space in his TARDIS with the simple flip of a lever. It all seems so easy. Humans have invented all manner of dazzling wonders, from pottery to ships to steel to microchips to orbiting telescopes. Surely it is just a matter of time before some genius working in a garage builds a variant of Dr. Brown’s flux capacitor and is thereby able to zap himself into the future, whether with the flip of a lever or by racing through a mall parking lot at 88 miles per hour.

But is time travel actually possible? Well, certainly it is. With no energy expenditure at all everything and everyone in the universe moves inexorably forward into the future. And it is certainly possible to move into the future at a faster rate than other observers. Special relativity says that two observers moving relative to one another experience the flow of time at different rates, and that difference depends on their relative velocity. This prediction of relativity has been confirmed in experiment many times. For relative velocities that are a small fraction of the speed of light, the difference is quite small. But even so, the Global Positioning Satellite System is so time dependent and so accurate that it had to be designed to account for this and other relativistic phenomena.

Just how extreme can the difference between the clocks of two observers get? Well, the most extreme case concerns one observer at rest and another moving at the speed of light (in their mutual reference frame). In this case the moving observer’s clock actually stops while the clock of the at rest observer continues at its usual pace. If the moving observer travels at the speed of light for a million years, then returns to the physical position of the at rest observer, the at rest observer would be long since dead though the traveling observer would not have aged a single second.

Okay, so travel into the future is certainly possible. What about travel into the past? For an answer to this question we must turn to an astounding result due to Kurt Godel. In 1949 he constructed a solution to the field equations of Einstein’s General Theory of General Relativity that allows an observer to travel to any point in space and time– present, future, or past! This particular solution of Einstein’s theory is a fascinating and instructive study in its own right, but it is decidedly not a solution that corresponds to our own universe. The universe of the Godel solution has an intrinsic rotation about an axis. Our universe has no such rotation. The following video demonstrates how the closed time-like paths of Godel’s solution would enable one to travel into one’s own past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=078jOiaevAQ

Let us assume for the moment that such minor difficulties can be overcome in the grand cathedral of future human knowledge. Time travel still presents many practical difficulties that must be considered. Imagine that you are sitting in the driver’s seat of Dr. Brown’s DeLorean, and that you set the time control device for six months in the future. Now you stomp on the accelerator, get the car up to 88 miles per hour, and fzap! You reappear six months in the future, in precisely the same physical location where you disappeared.

But the Earth moves. The Earth is currently revolving around the Sun. In six months the Earth will be on the other side of the Sun. So the DeLorean cannot simply move in a straight line through time and space to reach the point where the future Earth will be in six months. It must move along an arc that exactly follows the path that the Earth will take.

And more than that, the Sun itself is moving. The entire solar system is revolving around the center of our galaxy at the rate of one complete revolution about every 225 million years. So six months in the future, the solar system would have moved a considerable distance around the galactic center from its present location. Dr. Brown had better make corrections for that, or the DeLorean will reappear in interstellar space.

There are other motions to consider as well. The Earth rotates on its axis, and the axis itself has a precession– that is, a wobble. Earth’s axis makes one complete revolution about every 26,000 years. So the position from which the DeLorean departed will have moved, irrespective of the other motions we have discussed.

There are other influences as well. Johannes Kepler showed that the paths of the planets are ellipses, not circles. But that is only to a first approximation. The moon and the other planets exert gravitational forces on the Earth. Those forces distort Earth’s orbit from that of a perfect ellipse. So to ensure that the DeLorean returns to the exact point from which it departed, every detail of Earth’s orbit will have to be considered– including all of the influences due to other gravitational objects in the solar system.

And there are more mundane considerations as well. What if someone builds a cement wall just a few feet beyond the point from which the DeLorean disappeared. When it reappears, the DeLorean will travel just a few feet before smashing into a cement wall. Not good. 😦

An earthquake might thrust up a chunk of the Earth’s crust right into the DeLorean’s path on return. A river might change course, causing the DeLorean to plunge into a torrent of water. Someone could park a car right in the DeLorean’s future path. Ouch.

Time travel as a literary device is pretty ridiculous. If its purpose is to get the reader to think about the possible future course of events, it may have some value. But I have never encountered any science fiction story that makes a full accounting of all of the many considerations we have discussed. There is in fact little or no “science” involved in the way time travel is generally portrayed. And therefore time travel will have to remain fully in the province of fantasy, rather than science fiction. Wave a wand, utter magical incantations, discover an ancient artifact that will open a doorway to a time portal. But please don’t pretend that time travel has any basis in science. It’s just not possible.

Category: science fiction

Book Review: Dune Messiah

The Madness of Time Travel