Reading in the Rearview Mirror

In the last couple of years, I've been drawn to picking up memoirs by people who were in the forefront of the social battles of my youth. I've been finding the reading most interesting, because it brings back so much, remembering a time that really was different then in very many ways.

The late 60s in North America (and many other places around the world) were years of such energy, such optimism - the civil rights movement, the young left, second wave feminists, the very beginnings of queer liberation - it was so easy to believe that the world could change.

And it has, but the terrifying thing is that the more things have changed in a way that makes it possible for individual women, people of colour, queer people, other marginalised people, in Western society at least, to have greater freedoms, options and opportunities within society, the more society has become something that is in some ways our worst nightmare.

We won some battles, but did we lose the war?

The books that have started me really thinking about and trying to remember what it has meant to be a social radical and activist for almost 40 years:

Ten Thousand Roses - Judy Rebick
The World Split Open - Ruth Rosen
Tales of the Lavender Menace - Karla Jay
Street-fighting Years - Tariq Ali

I'm of a mind to hunt up some more memoirs, reminiscences and histories by people who were there and in the middle of it all - suggestions and recommendations welcome.

The Prehistory of Dune

I admit it.

I loved Frank Herbert's Dune. And the sequels, although I don't think he ever wrote another Dune book like the first one. I still wonder what it is, out there beyond the Known Universe, that has the Honoured Matres so effin' spooked.

So of course I was a perfect audience for the prequels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson. In fact, I've read them all.

The Butlerian Jihad
The Machine Crusade
The Battle of Corrin

House Corrino
House Harkonnen
House Atreides

Not as novels, though. Because they really aren't. At least, not particularly well-written ones. So why did I read every word, full of blatant telling rather than showing, and relatively flat characterisation, as they were?

Because I just had to know where the worldbuilding started, what Frank Herbert had sketched out as the backstory to this fascinating universe, even if it was told more in the manner of a 10th Grade history text than a novel about living people who produced the settings and legends and societies and rivalries of Dune.

And as 10th Grade history texts, they are worth reading. If you burn to know what happened before Shaddam IV sent Duke Leto and his court off to Arrakis, then read.

And now, of course, comes the word that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have finished writing the last volumes of Frank Herbert's planned series - now tentatively titles Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune. They are in the editing process, and the books are due out in 2007 and 2008. They worked from Frank Herbert's notes.

I will, of course, read them once they are published. I have to know, you understand. It's just... will I be able to enjoy the reading of them as much as I will enjoy knowing the end of the story?