Free The Synopsis Treasury by Christopher Sirmons Haviland Page A

situations that were far different from those halcyon depictions of friendly, trouble-free machines that performed work we didn’t want to do. Flipping utopia over into dystopia, the author wrote about scenarios that might exist if machines were either given (or developed) artificial intelligence, and in the process became something quite dark. He asked the familiar science-fiction question, “What if?” What if AI-machines sought to dominate their creators, and in the process tried to take away human freedoms? What would be left of our humanity then?
    Throughout the Dune series and other stories, Dad liked to explore myths and assumptions, and to compare them with reality. One of his major themes was to ask the question, “What does it mean to be human?” In his February 25,1965 letter to Damon Knight, he wrote, “The enlightened person sees what underlies all things, including himself, but he is always something other than what he sees.” This is, of course, a very Zen view of the universe, where wordless realities trump all human perceptions. Though he did not practice any religion, he said that he found Buddhism the most appealing of all religious and philosophical concepts.
    During his newspaper career, Frank Herbert worked as an investigative reporter. Similarly, in his creative writing he liked to (as he put it) “turn over rocks and see what scurried out.” In the process, he analyzed the unexamined assumptions and myths under which we were living as a species. Ultimately, this was all about human consciousness. He saw people around him just plodding along with their lives, without really thinking much about their actions, Frank Herbert came to see that humans were actually perceiving the world around them through filters, and were expending the energies of their lives in seeking myths that they often didn’t even know existed. Thus, humans were driven by forces outside themselves, forces that involved the human species as a collective organism.
    As Dad wrote to Damon Knight on January 20,1964, the project to create artificial consciousness (in Destination: Void ) succeeds “only when those involved see that they have to aim at something far different from an Asimov robot.… They see that man is conscious and aware, in part, because of his animal inheritance—all the instinctual trappings out of some 400 million years of primate development. This project must find a substitute for that animal history and condense the development time into a scale manageable in a human lifetime.”
    That’s an ambitious goal for Frank Herbert’s characters, and for his story. But big objectives did not deter Frank Herbert. For the planet Dune, he extrapolated what it might be like if all of Earth were to become like the Sahara Desert, and sand covered what had once been lush greenery. Then he asked what people would need to do in order to survive in such a hostile environment, and what sort of society and religion they might develop. Ultimately, people living on his desert planet would need to adjust to their environment—yet another aspect of the human condition. As he wrote in the novel Dune , “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” This human ability to adapt better than other species has led to its dominance on Earth, but Frank Herbert took that historical fact a step further, and asked what conditions might emerge that could further tax (and possibly break) this ability. As an author, he liked to keep raising the stakes, increasing the perils and challenges that his characters had to face.
    In Dune , he also warned of the dangers of machines, envisioning a westernized, galaxy-spanning civilization of humans that—paradoxically—had no legal computers at all. This was because of past abuses thousands of years before, when humans were enslaved by “thinking machines”—a legendary time for Dune fans when mankind ultimately rose up in a heroic “Butlerian Jihad” to overthrow the mechanical