Free The Synopsis Treasury by Christopher Sirmons Haviland

threaten the political equilibrium that has preserved the galaxy until now. Violence, romance, and death, from outside and inside the group, come as a inevitable accompaniment of their journey, and one revelation follows after another, all of it focused around the great SF theme of transcendence, as the protagonist is gradually transformed from a disillusioned skeptic into a believer in humanity and its quest for transcendence.
    The novel ends as the protagonist reaches the goal and submits himself to the process he had originally scorned, but we do not learn whether he achieved transcendence or death. A sequel (Transubstantial?), or even a trilogy, is possible.
    In addition to the theme of transcendence, the novel will deal with the theme of stasis versus change. The questions to be answered during the progress of the novel are: who hired the protagonist? who is the prophet? who (or what) doesn’t want the pilgrimage to reach its goal? The answers to these questions, and others, will undergo many transmutations as sides and motives are unveiled.
    A parallel might be drawn to Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces : “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man.”
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Frank Herbert

    Frank Herbert, the visionary author of Dune , wrote more than twenty other novels, including Hellstrom’s Hive, The White Plague, The Green Brain , and The Dosadi Experiment . During his life, he received great acclaim for his sweeping vision and the deep philosophical underpinnings in his writings. His life is detailed in the Hugo-nominated biography Dreamer of Dune , by Brian Herbert.

    There are many fascinating windows into the mind of Frank Herbert. He possessed an astounding intellect that stretched to the very limits of human consciousness. Everything interested him. My father once told me that he could not look something up on one page of an encyclopedia without wanting to read the opposite page that lay open on the table. A reviewer for the New York Times once quipped that Frank Herbert’s head was so overloaded with ideas that it was likely to fall off.
    Some of Dad’s literary characters were like that, as he spoke through them. In God Emperor of Dune , he described Leto II, who through genetic processes acquired all human information. Outside the Dune series, Frank Herbert wrote of a vast Galactic Library, a storehouse containing the written wisdom of humankind. The author, like Leto II and the Galactic Library, was a repository of incredible, wondrous information. His words captivated millions of people all over the world.
    Frank Herbert was a human dynamo, a force of nature. Everyone who knew him benefited from the relationship. He shared as much as he could with me, with his friends, and with his legions of fans. He wrote many letters, and in the days before faxes, e-mails, and text messaging, he sent his correspondence by what we call “snail mail” today. The letters he exchanged with Damon Knight between 1963 and 1965 are particularly interesting, focusing as they do on a novel about the creation of artificial consciousness ( Destination: Void * ).
    Just before that exchange, back in the 1950s, Americans had been inundated with visions of a future that involved robots performing household chores for them and other tedious or boring tasks. Television commercials and science fiction stories depicted homes that were fully automated, with mechanical servants flitting about, and well-dressed housewives enjoying the benefits of futuristic kitchens. In that Utopian future, automation was supposed to make it possible for people to have more leisure and productive time—allowing them to more fully achieve their human potential.
    In Dune and Destination: Void , Frank Herbert portrayed