Word: herbert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Lord Thomson of Fleet, 82, international press czar; a month after suffering a stroke; in London. A debt-plagued salesman in rural Ontario during the Depression, Roy Herbert Thomson floated a loan to set up a small radio station, then acquired a struggling newspaper, the Timmins (Ont.) Press. From this slender base he built one of the world's largest press and broadcasting empires: more than 140 newspapers and dozens of magazines, TV and radio stations, mostly in Canada, the U.S. and Britain. In London, which became his base of operations in the 1950s, he picked...
...visions shown by the spice, forsakes his humanity completely. For some science fiction writers this device has worked admirably: the hero who loses everything to save the race, notably in Cordwainer Smith's "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdahl," but it falls singularly flat here. It seems that Herbert is repudiating the movement he helped start, that nothing can ultimately remove humanity from humans, no matter how distant in space and time...
...there had 25 years before when science fiction broke away from Buck Rogers--Flash Gordon space opera. On the crest of the wave--which demanded that science fiction be less technically oriented and more an examination of what human life and relationships would be like in the future--was Herbert's Dune. Dune is a swashbuckler of a novel built around the desperate plight of the imperial family, the Atrides, on Arrakis, and their attempt to win the emperor's throne. With this novel, Herbert created a masterful pastiche of Fremen, the inhabitants of Arrakis and the best fighters...
...Herbert followed his blockbuster with trite, undistinguished science fiction hack work before turning to the second Dune book in 1969. Dune Messiah was a less entertaining book than Dune, but something more important than mere entertainment value was missing--it seemed an element of humaneness had gone out of Herbert's writing...
...which leads to speculation about Herbert. The dust jacket states cryptically that he is an exnewspaperman, and shows a large bearded man smiling rather disdainfully at the camera. One hopes that Herbert will quit the pop anthropology of Children of Dune with its pretentious Carlos-Castaneda-like musings for the more insightful style that marked the first book, and chalk up Children of Dune as a book that paid for the groceries...