There are really two stories here: 1) the fun escapades of the hero learning the trade of determining whether a newly rediscovered Terran colony is hiding any militaristic tendencies in its hope of gaining free entry into the growing new galactic order; 2) an essay on religious mysticism on the part of the author....in the form of the hero of the first part of the book being transformed into a god in the second part. The first part of the book is a moderately well done 3* adventure. The second part is also a moderately well done 3* description of a man being squeezed into deitism(?). The extra 1/2* is bonus points for the intellectual challenge of describing a time when all of the world's religions come together and accept that they each believe in GOD, etc. and only differ in the particular way that God instructed them each to worship Him/Her/It. ( )

Yet more evidence that Dune was the pinnacle of Herbert's science fiction career, and the majority of the rest of his books are pale reflections of the themes in that series or, to a lesser extent, the ConSentiency series. In stuff that predates Dune, like all of these short stories or Destination: Void, you can see him fumbling around with ideas and appreciate how much he raised his game for Dune. For stuff that antedates Dune, like Hellstrom's Hive, it's weird how much less insightful his treatments seem, with worse characters, lamer plots, and all-around loss of energy. Not that Dune isn't an incredible series, but I can't help mentally comparing these journeyman efforts to those of someone like Asimov, who didn't slow down until decades after Foundation and whose side projects in his prime were still excellent and fresh. Anyway....

Lewis Orne starts off as an agent of Rediscovery & Reeducation, a goverment organization dedicated to finding human worlds that have lost contact with the mass of humanity after an intragalactic war. If the planets seem martial, he's supposed to alert his supervisors at the Investigation-Adjustment bureau so they can come pacify the planet, ensuring that no further large destructive wars threaten the survival of the species. He's really good at his job and rescues the crew of a ship captured by a planet under investigation, so he gets promoted to a full I-A agent, whereupon he gets injured in the line of duty and sent home to recuperate. While home, he foils the conspiracy of breed of super-clever women to control galactic politics, discovers he's got psionic potential, and then undergoes a lengthy series of apotheosis procedures to literally become a god and teach humanity the true meaning of life and growth and reality, etc.

Stuff that gets recapitulated in Dune:
- The female breeding program/conspiracy, as the Bene Gesserit
- Goofy religious mysticism, including the idea of designing religions for lesser peoples
- The idea that enforcing false peace will only lead to greater wars
- Spacey drug talk about false binaries, things requiring their opposites, infinite change, the impossibility of trying to impose thought matrices on the universe, etc.
- The agents and their organizations are clearly dry runs of the BuSab in the ConSentiency series

Enjoyable enough though, and a quick read. ( )

Frank Herbert is the author of the Dune books but this book is a totally separate universe. Lewis Orne is monitoring a planet that was once devastated by war. His job is to detect any sign that war might restart. Because of his extrasensory powers he comes to the attention of the "gods" and is invited to join them. ( )

A visit to the idea of bending people to your will, if you can control the inputs. As usual there will be consequences. ( )

Frank Herbert's favourite word was "prescience". The stories that make up the novel were published a few years before Dune although the novel wasn't published until 1972.

This explains the structure. The first half of the book consists of a bunch of episodes of detection, kind of like Asimov's "I, Robot" stories which involve the two cowboy robot detectives. The second half is like Dune-lite, as the character develops the power of prescience. The whole book resembles Dune in the deepities which are sprinkled at the start of each chapter. If I were fifteen, I would have bought into the tough talk of the planet-adjusting cowboys, but not any more.

I seem to remember that in "Count Zero", someone gets blown up and then regrown in a vat. A bit more dramatic than the fate of the protagonist in this book. ( )