This will be more comprehensible if you have
read Frank Herbert's "Dune" books, which pass for science fiction but
are at least forty-nine percent fantasy. You'll be still better off if you've
gone so far as to read the fill-in books Frank Herbert's son has written since
his father's death.
But, unlike a Bene Gesserit warrior-nun in
teaching mode, I have tried to make my satire understandable EVEN for the
uninitiated.
‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
HOPECRUSHERS OF DUNE
“Come in,” said Reverend Mother Bodelia
Sneakaround, “for all of life is entrances which are exits which still are
entrances to the exits we enter.”
“Er, um, right, what you said.” The Fremen-born
girl Dazzlechick, in her first year as a Bene Gesserit novice, came in, looking
relieved that, in spite of the typical gobbledygook speech from her mentor, it
still was possible to do a simple, natural action like walking forward through
a doorway. “Reverend Mother, my prana-bindu meditation exercises have been
disrupted by a question which I cannot expel from my mind.”
“Questions go questing,” Bodelia solemnly
intoned, “in quest of the unanswerable answers which question the
unquestionable process of answering the answers that we question.”
“Of course, Reverend Mother. Now, may I, um,
you know, actually tell you what my question is?”
“The ancestors of our questioners have been
telling the untold answers ever since humanity left Old Earth and began forming
the Empire of the Known Universe, my child. Here on Planet Arrakis, the
descendants of those who decided calling the place Dune was less of a mouthful
are daily writing all sort of questions in the sand, where the wind of destiny
blows them away unnoticed.”
Dazzlechick nodded nervously. “I’ll take that
as a Yes, Reverend Mother. What unsettles me is this question. Since the Bene
Gesserit Sisterhood is supposed to be all-wise and totally awesome, guiding all
humanity toward the glorious evolutionary something-or-other, why does
everybody’s life on every planet always turn out so rotten? Also, why aren’t
males making more of a contribution to trying to fix things?”
To the girl’s surprise, instead of scowling and
delivering another meaningless lecture, Bodelia smiled.
“Praise be to nothing in
particular!” She arose from her lotus position to hug her apprentice. “I had
been hoping that you would get around to raising that very question on your own
initiative! Prepare to learn an actual answer!”
The Fremen girl was further surprised, but
encouraged, to hear her teacher speak so coherently for once. “Enlighten me,
Reverend Mother!”
“Come this way, then,” Bodelia invited. “We
must follow the Golden Path to the Oxygenated Path, followed by the Depleted Uranium Path
and the Carbon Fiber Path. Along the way, we’ll say goodbye to the Yellow Brick
Road, but BEWARE!-- we must avoid wasting time hopping and bopping to the
Crocodile Rock. Thereafter, all shall become clear.”
Dazzlechick never was sure how they made their
mystical journey. It was weirder than any of the times she had ridden on board Rockymountainhigh-Liners of the Spacing Guild, and accompanied by what
looked like psychedelic visual effects in a movie. At one point, she thought
she heard the Dawn Sequence from “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” But presently they
found themselves in one of the Art Deco-style chambers common to adaptations of
the Dune novels; and there waited one of the Spacing Guild’s own Navigators,
the ones who folded space in order to keep storylines moving without endless
delays for characters to get from one solar system to another.
“Peace and incalculable profundity to you,
Zipzoom,” said the Reverend Mother to the Navigator. To this, he replied,
“Journeys always contain more arrivals than departures; just a minute, I think
it’s the other way around. No, that’s only when we overbook flights. Never mind
that. Who’s your novice?”
“This is Dazzlechick of the Fremen. She is a
very demure girl; she’s had no more than twelve knife-fights this week. But
more to the point, no pun intended, she is the first of all my apprentices ever
to think of asking me WHY everything is so miserable for everybody in our
universe.”
The Navigator smiled-- which, given his grossly
mutated appearance, only made him uglier.
“Welcome, Dazzlechick! You will find
this ffff….flabbergasting! Gotcha, you thought I would say ‘fascinating.’ Nope,
I’m not a Spock fan.”
Dazzlechick frowned in thought. “Wait! I just
realized, we’re all in a normal atmosphere! Don’t you Navigators need to stay
in a mélange-gas atmosphere to live?”
“Not at all,” Zipzoom laughed. “We just make
the suckers think that so they’ll be more impressed with how alien we seem. But
we should proceed, shouldn’t we, Bodelia?”
“Right. Lead on.”
So the Reverend Mother and the Navigator led
the Bene Gesserit novice into a colorful control room, where twenty or more
non-mutated men were monitoring some sort of computer terminals which seemed to
incorporate interstellar communication systems. “This,” Bodelia announced to
Dazzlechick, “is Hopecrusher Central.”
“It’s our most covert operation,” Zipzoom
added. “From here, Joy-Suppression Teams are dispatched to every world where
there’s danger of something going right for someone. Just listen for a while to
these mission controllers as they work, and you’ll soon get the idea.”
Dazzlechick, still finding it hard to believe
that someone would actually name a place “Hopecrusher Central,” turned toward
Bodelia. “Reverend Mother, I said I was distressed about things going wrong for
people all the time, but Navigator Zipzoom speaks as if it’s a BAD thing for
someone’s life to go RIGHT! What does this mean?”
“The meaning of life, dear novice, is a lively
meaningfulness of life that means living.”
Exasperated that Bodelia would choose this
moment to revert to gibberish, Dazzlechick saw no better option than to do as
the Navigator had urged her. So she listened to the multiple duty-related
reports being called out in the control room….
“Attention! Planet Jetlag has people treating
sexual attraction as a motivation to exercise kindness and honesty, instead of
treachery and exploitation! They must be stopped!”
“Prepare a team for intervention! There’s an
industrial facility on Planet Hownowbrowncow that ISN’T ruining their entire
environment!”
“Action stations! The government on Planet
Attaboy is changing hands without violence!”
“Warning! We have detected a mother and father
on Planet Wigwaggon who aren’t abandoning their children to horrible ordeals
for obscure causes!”
“Catastrophe! Some siblings on Planet Milktoast
are not in vicious rivalries!”
“Alert! There are as many as fifteen happy marriages
on Planet Faraway!”
“Danger! A bloody civil war has just been
successfully prevented on Planet Skiptoomyloo! If this outbreak of
reconciliation is allowed to spread, it might cause a major galactic downturn
in bitterness and hatred!”
“Panic! On Planet Inkadink there is an advance
in medical care which doesn’t do more harm than good!”
“Maximum crisis warning! Inhabitants of Planet
Gruntpoo are beginning to believe in a Supreme Being, WITHOUT this belief
causing them to murder everyone in sight!”
Zipzoom suddenly stepped away from the two Bene
Gesserits, to stand beside the controller who had spoken last. “This one gets
the supreme priority!” he told the controller. “If people start realizing that
faith in God can be a GOOD thing, our whole program will fail!”
Dazzlechick took hold of her teacher’s hand.
“Reverend Mother, what does this mean? And please, tell me an actual meaning
for once!”
“So I shall, dear girl. All of us here are
operating in the universe of an existentialist worldview, like that of Sartre and Camus, in which despair is
the bedrock foundation of all philosophy. Those controllers are in charge of
stamping out any hope, anywhere, that EITHER scientific achievement OR
supernatural faith can ever lead to anything good in the long run. Notice that
the controllers here are all male? You asked why men weren’t doing more; well,
these men ARE doing their part: working toward an endgame in which people find
peace in relinquishing all hope. While we are the Bene Gesserit, they are the Bene
Herbert.
“Those who do not themselves believe in any
afterlife, or in any spiritual consolation, often conclude that misery does
love company. As you may be suspecting, that’s us. Therefore, all material
progress of civilization in stories must be made to produce more and worse
injustices, and every movement of religious faith must turn into destructive
madness and oppression. Heroes and heroines must be seen to fail, and
supporting characters must always end up disillusioned with them-- until the
reading public, and ultimately the whole universe, agrees on a nice, tranquil
resignation, and scoffs at idealists. Meanwhile, we of the Bene Gesserit supply
the profound-sounding nonsense to keep humanity confused. And based on this
program, Bene Herbert men write stories which promote existential despair.”
“Do people actually enjoy reading such unhappy
stories?”
“I know it sounds odd, child. But the Bene
Herbert novelists have refined their narrative skills to such a degree that the
sheer detail and inventiveness hold the attention of readers, even though evil
keeps on prevailing in the stories. Then, by a subtle emotional influence, we
Bene Gesserit convince those readers that the sophistication of the plotlines
DEPENDS ON this pessimistic worldview. We trick them into assuming that
speculative fiction can’t be inventive and clever unless it promotes the loss
of all hope. And our reward for these efforts is-- the satisfaction of knowing
that other people are as depressed and miserable as we are. Of course, we
normally don’t admit to ourselves that we’re unhappy; most of the time, we tell
ourselves that we’re just being realistic.”
Dazzlechick drew a long breath. “Maybe you're pleased to do
that, Reverend Mother; but not I!”
Without waiting for Zipzoom to rejoin them, and
without waiting for Bodelia to utter more empty speeches, the Fremen girl
dashed out of Hopecrusher Central. Finding the inter-dimensional path by which
the Reverend Mother had led here here, Dazzlechick fled back along it. Not back
to Dune, for she realized that her home planet was doomed forever to be part of
the Bene Herbert’s grand scheme of telling everyone that the universe had no
Creator and no divine plan to make truth and love triumph.
Instead, she would seek a universe where hope
wasn’t held in contempt.
To her great relief, Dazzlechick found herself
arriving in the universe of the writings of Joseph Richard Ravitts, who did
believe both in God and in the possibility of love and virtue succeeding. There
she would become a sympathetic, likeable character in the Grey Eagle saga.
And she would REMAIN a likeable character,
instead of going down the toilet the way Frank Herbert had caused both Paul and
Alia Atreides to go down the toilet after the first volume.
