Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Of the non-Dune Frank Herbert books I've read, I liked this one the most. It's been a while, but it has another PoV on the entire idea of a person becoming a god.

I thought the ending and the solution offered was pretty brilliant, and quite in line with some of Paul's thoughts in Dune Messiah.

Anyone else read this one?

I've read it and I think I've got it on the PC but it's been a while.

Ain't that the one with the wierd priests that want to turn people to gods?

I thought it was pretty bad for FH actually. Rushed.

Golly gee, it's been more that 20 years since I read that and apart from the plot elements mention already I can't remember a thing. Orald has a point but to me it felt more like it had a full head of steam rushing towards it's inevitable conclusion. But like I said it was a long time ago when all this was Fields, you could see for miles and most a’ you pups weren’t even a possible outcome of chemical chance.

Just picked this up. Seems short and sweet, I expect to finish this on my lunch breaks this week.

Apjak wrote:Just picked this up. Seems short and sweet, I expect to finish this on my lunch breaks this week.

I read it for the 2nd time a few months ago and still really enjoyed it. It goes by a little quickly for my taste, but the Lewis Orne's reasoning/conclusions are fun to read.

Finished. It was really, really fast, but I enjoyed it none the less. The idea of the Nathian women controlling their men's lives rings again of the aunts that inspired the BG. Also I enjoyed seeing "Herbertian" themes used and reused such as glowglobes and the writings of Noah Arkwright. It wasn't his best or worst, but it was nice having something FH that I could give the proper amount of attention to here and there on breaks at work without slogging through it like you would the meatier parts of some of his meatier works.

The first thing that strikes me about the main theme of The Godmakers is how incredibly prescient it was, concerning what kind of geopolitical climate we now face today. Along the same kind of prophetic lines that Dune followed, The Godmakers takes on the idea of pre-emptive war or subversion of foreign states in the pursuit of engineering peace (or at least, avoiding mass-scale war). Herbert's storytelling elucidates the hazards of engineering peace, and the great danger of contradicting ideas with actions when it comes to giving peace at the barrel of a gun.

The only problem that I encountered was the lack of coherency. The events of the first half seemed completely stand-alone from the second half-- and even if they were centered around similar themes, there were a lot of things left dangling by the end of the book. But actually, that might have been his entire point: leave things open-ended.