18th entry for 23rd, April

Whipping Star is a novel I’ve bought with the same pack as the Márquez novella this February. This story from Frank Herbert takes place in a universe quite different from the one of Dune (I was a little surprised to learn that Herbert has made up several different sci-fi universes). This one has much more resemblance to our 21^st century even though it includes a dozen of sentient alien species and the possibility of instant communication and travel through unlimited space,introduced by some of those aliens.

For me, the most important feature of the novel was showing how astonishingly one-sided and narrow-minded could be the human point of view on the Universe, since we are perfectly unable to look at it as other than a three-dimensional system of objects and radiations. It might be nothing else but our very own model of physical reality, based on how our senses and brains instinctually map our environment. Agent McKie is ordered to negotiate with a Caleban, a kind of creature no-one has actually seen so far. As it later unveils, their form of existence, however material it is, cannot be comprehended with the sensations and concepts we’ve made up so far. Their conversations take place in a metal ball, a self-propelled ‘house’ the Calebans create for communication with other sentient species (not all the story takes place in the ball, however). Although Fanny Mae – as she, confusingly, calls herself, probably because name is a new concept for Calebans – is obviously a superior intellect, they’re both struggling very hard to understand each other and to make themselves understood in the humans’ language; all because of the very-very few common concepts between their ‘cultures’.

Finally, with the help of an accident, McKie understands some of how Calebans apprehend the Universe (thus he’ll be able to solve the story’s crisis), and the reader is given a clue as well, but I’m sure it will make even more sense if I re-read that chapter a few months later.

17th entry for 16th April

After finishing the complete Dune saga by Frank Herbert last December, I supposed I'll find myself uncomfortable being left without the 'never ending story'. I was fourteen when I bought its first volume, inspired by a computer game's unusual atmosphere. I was amazed after the first few pages. I loved the whole concept and all the ideas of that 'irregular' type of future. In Dune, most of the technology we'd imagine in our futures – including computer technology – was made obsolete by the very thing it was supposed to surpass: the well-bred and well-trained human body and mind.

Then, there was much more to come. All the thoughts, conversations and acts of those super-conscious characters are so inspiring that they enhance one's intellect on an unconscious level. I've never experienced that reading any other novels. It was somewhat surprising to learn later that it was an effect on which the author has banked upon writing Dune. It wasn't a book to tell me all the mysteries of the Universe, of course, but from time to time, I continued getting new pieces of the six-volume saga and reading them, getting that special state of mind and way of thinking again for a few weeks at a time. I was more than twenty when I had a final restart in reading the series, feeling able at last to comprehend every single sentence of it. What have I learnt of this story of five thousand years? I guess there's no way of telling it without telling 'just read it all'. It doesn't cover even the whole of the human world, yet it seems to penetrate through all the frivolous problems of the 21st century.

After all, it has left a feeling that it has taught me everything I'll need to live without the story that took eleven years to read and seemed never to end. Reading some of Herbert's short stories in English, however, I just can't refuse reading some of his other novels without translation.