| Frank Herbert Novel Introductions Below Are Introductions To Frank Herbert's Novels Copyright Herbert Estate The White Plague Frank Herbert
1982 To Ned Brown
For his years of friendship PRECEDE There's a lust for power in the Irish as there is in every people, a lusting after the Ascendancy where you can tell others how to behave. It has a peculiar shape with the Irish, though. It comes of having lost our ancient ways -- the simpler laws, the rath and the family at the core of society. Romanized governments dismay us.
They always resolve themselves into widely separated Ascendants and Subjects, the latter being more numerous than the former, of course. Sometimes it's done with great subtlety as it was in America, the slow accumulations of power, law upon law and all of it manipulated by an elite whose monopoly it is to understand the private language of injustice.
Do not blame the Ascendants. Such separation requires docile Subjects as well. This may be the lot of any government, Marxist Russians included. There's a peculiar human susceptibility you see when you look at the Soviets, them building an almost exact copy of the czarist regimes: the same paranoia, the same secret police,
the same untouchable military, and the murder squads, the Siberian death camps, the lid of terror on creative imagination, deportation for the ones who cannot be killed off or bought off. It's like some terrible plastic memory sitting there in the dark of our minds, ready on the instant to reshape itself into primitive patterns the moment the heat touches it.
I fear for the shape of things which may come from the heat of O'Neill's plague. Truly, I fear, for the heat is great. -- Fintan Craig Doheny May the hearthstone of hell be his bed rest forever! -- Old Irish Curse
The Godmakers Frank Herbert
1972 You must understand that peace is an internal matter. It has to be a self-discipline for an individual or for an entire civilization. It must come from within. If you set up an outside power to enforce peace, this outside power will grow stronger and stronger. It has no alternative. The inevitable outcome will be an explosion, cataclysmic and chaotic. That is the way of our universe. When you create paired opposites, one will overwhelm the other unless they are in delicate balance. -- The writings of DIANA BULLONE To become a god, a living creature must transcend the physical. The three steps of this transcendent path are known. First, he must come upon the awareness of secret aggression. Second, he must come upon,the discernment of purpose within the animal shape. Third, he must experience death. When this is done, the nascent god must find his own rebirth in a unique ordeal by which he discovers the one who summoned him. -- "The Making of a God," The Amel Handbook Lewis Orne could not remember a time when he had been free of a peculiar, repetitive dream, when he had been able to go to sleep in the sure knowledge that the dream's wild sense of reality would not clutch at his psyche. The dream began with music, this really hokey unseen choir, syrup in sound, a celestial joke. Vaporous figures would come out of the music adding a visual dimension of the same quality. Finally, a voice would override the whole silly thing with disturbing pronouncements: "Gods are made, not born!" Or: "To say you are neutral is another way of saying you accept the necessities of war!" To look at him, you wouldn't think him the kind of person to be plagued by such a dream. He was a blocky human with the thick muscles of a heavy planet native -- Chargon of Gemma was his birthplace. He possessed a face reminiscent of a full-jowled bulldog and a steady gaze which often made people uncomfortable. Despite his peculiar dream, or perhaps because of it, Orne made regular obeisance to Amel, "the planet where all godness dwells." Because of the dream's pronouncements, which remained with him all through his waking life, he enlisted on the morning of his nineteenth birthday in the Rediscovery and Reeducation Service, thereby seeking to reknit the galactic empire shattered by the Rim Wars. | 
