Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 in the universe, Mentats, human computers, and the royal witches...
...More like a popular novel," she said dreamily, her head resting against his cheek. "The hero is on an important mission for his country. He is warned by the girl. They are attracted to one another, but duty calls him home, and they never see each other again...
...quite. In a novel the hero would continue on into danger and conquer it, rather than run away...
...irony of this passage is Spiro Agnew's implied claim that he's writing a novel that is more than just popular fiction. Through his most intelligent, honest, noble characters he is trying to say that the situation he has created rises above the mundane, ordinary plot concoctions of pop novels. If the language doesn't clue you in, that fact that Zack and Amiri fall deeply and irrevocably in love in no time flat, and that this passage is an example of their wittiest repartee should tell you that Agnew's implied claim isn't quite true...
...passage not only describes Agnew's novel, but Ehrlichman's The Company as well: intrigue, lavish and exotic settings, vapid romances, powerful men doing important things, and a sense of vacancy surrounding it all. The passage doesn't describe some of the other aspects of these two pop gov thrillers: an overriding concern with power, fame, the good life, and the ambition that drives people to seek such things. Ehrlichman actually describes what these two novels are about in a short preface. He writes that while the characters are fictitious, "the forces--the stresses, pressures, fears and passions--that motivate...