Anyone who knows me in real life
right now knows that my life lately has been like Shark Week, but instead of
lots of shows about sharks it’s alternating episodes of crazy telenovelas and
episodes of Maury Povich, and instead of commercial breaks it’s lots of long
phone conversations with various entities through which I must
adult. It’s been very interesting, but there
hasn’t been much time for reading, especially since my JCC membership and its
correlated forty minutes of stationary cycling ended a few weeks ago. When I got the reminder email over the
weekend that my turn at this blog was coming up Monday, I slid open my credenza
and browsed my book collection for a suitably ancient previously read title
with an appropriately garish cover. I
grabbed Frank Herbert’s “The Eyes of Heisenberg,” which I read in the fall of
2015, and called it a night.
I vividly recall buying this
book. It was September of 2015, and I
had been separated from my husband and living in my hep yet dilapidated dwelling on Independence Street for about a month. I was eager to explore my artsy, funky new
neighborhood, and my sister’s October 5th birthday was rapidly approaching, so
I headed down to the monthly Piety Street Market to see if I could find her
something cool. After perusing several
tables of jewelry and artisan baked goods infused with what seemed to be the
contents of your elderly aunt’s potpourri sachets, I found a table of old books
priced one for five dollars, two for seven.
I found two slim volumes by “Dune” author Frank Herbert. “Hellstrom’s Hive,” about a secret group of
people led by Dr. Hellstrom who model their lives upon social insects, was
destined to be my sister’s, seeing as how she had recently gotten engaged to
her now-husband whose name is also Dr. Hellstrom (a PhD of aerodynamic
engineering, not of making people chew up wood and barf out paper or whatever
the hive did in the book). The other was
the gorgeous tome you see above.
The cover of “The Eyes of
Heisenberg” is right up my alley. First
of all, the title referencing Heisenberg – no, it’s not a book about Walter
White “slingin’ blue glass and makin’ fat stacks” as Skinny Pete might say, but
anything that even makes me kind of think of one of my all-time favorite
fictional universes and characters is going to press my “yes” button. Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” still makes me tear
up. Secondly, let’s examine the
particulars of this cover. “World-Famous
Creator of DUNE and THE JESUS INCIDENT.” I haven’t read “Dune.” I did watch the first few minutes of some miniseries
based on the book, but all I remember from that is some space guy saying “I eat
duty for breakfast.” “The Jesus
Incident” is also not within my realm of knowledge, but it sounds pretty
noteworthy. Then there’s the
Frankenfurter-faced gold-bikinied being.
At first I thought she was wearing a big red pope hat but it’s actually
a smaller pseudo-Cambodian headdress resting upon some super luxe floating massage
chair that was probably 70% off at the store closing sale at your mall’s
Brookstone last year. Come on, did you
really think you could just go in there and sit in those vibrating chairs and
not buy something trip after trip and they’d just always be there for you? You couldn’t have at least bought some of
that gross wet sculpting sand? It was only
$19.99 for pete’s sake! Below the chair
on the uber-googie platform, we see the brass ring we are all to reach for in
life. Wait, I just noticed the
shoes. What are they, orthopedic
slippers for a mummy? They’re ruining
this whole thing for me.
So what was “the most terrifying
mutation ever!”? If you flip the book
over, you’ll see that it had something to do with a “rogue embryo.” In the dystopian future described in this
book, all human reproduction is done in the lab to ensure that only the best
genes make it through to the next generation.
This book came out in 1966, over a decade before the advent of IVF, so
it was fascinating to read how close and yet how weirdly far Herbert got to
scientific reality (one of the main draws of vintage science fiction, I’m
sure). The “cut,” which is a mandatory
process for manipulating the genes of the embryos in the book, is somewhat
similar to a procedure that exists today, but the procedures in the book
involve a lot of vats. In fact, nobody
gets pregnant anymore, babies are just grown in these vats. There are two genetic classes of people, the “Optimen”
and the “Folk.” The Optimen (including
goldieboobs on the cover) are the genetically superior ruling overlords. Everyone takes special enzymes and even the
Folk live for hundreds of years, but the Optimen are basically immortal. Only the Folk can reproduce, though, and of
them, only a select few are chosen to do so (there’s some birth control gas
keeping everyone from fruitful boot knockin’).
All Optimen are sterile from conception.
However, resistance is a’brewing, and when one of the embryo surgeons
discovers an embryo that appears to be a fertile potential Optiman who
technically shouldn’t exist and must be destroyed, the plot of this book
happens. There are cyborgs and clones
and bored Optimen who’ve all humped each other already yet have never witnessed
violence until all this kerfuffle over the dangerous embryo.
It was a decent read, and I’m glad
it had this cover and not this alternate one I found online, because mama don’t
do sliced up brains ponging their inner glands betwixt their hemispheres while the
eye that gets sliced open in that Dali movie wonders if it forgot to turn off the stove before leaving for work this morning:
3 comments:
Am I the only one who thinks of Flash Gordon when looking at that first cover? I'm with you on that second cover - WTH?
Flash is also not within my wheelhouse sadly so I can't confirm or deny that association. I MAY have seen a few minutes of "Flesh Gordon," though . . .
He he. "Duty for breakfast." I remember that.
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