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The Santaroga Barrier
 | The Santaroga Barrier Frank Herbert Date: 01 September, 2002 — $6.29 — Book Rating: |
It's always hard to read an author's less-successful works last.
I'm a huge fan of Frank Herbert's, obviously, having apparently memorized Dune in my spare time quite by accident. I've also consumed Soul Catcher (my first exposure to Frank Herbert), the Destination: Void series (including The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect), the Whipping Star series (including The Dosadi Experiment, one of my favourites).
Mr. Herbert has a distinctive and recognizable and, judging from the poor efforts by his heirs in recent years, unreplicable style. (I gave up on reading the House Atriedes, House Harkonnen books because they were Robert-Jordan-esque crap!)
This book is one of his earlier works, I think, based on the lucidity of style and construction of ideas. There are no cut-quotes to begin chapters, his presentation of mystery is based on evasion rather than incomplete construction.
Yeah, I know. "What?" Well... imagine reading a mystery. Incomplete construction is based on missing information. "What was the murder weapon? When was the murder committed? Who did it? Why?" As you go through the mystery, you might find the murder weapon: a gun, from which two shots were fired. This might help point out the other answers, but it's still construction.
Evasion is something different: "They found the murder weapon," assuming that the reader knows it was a gun. It leaves the reader feeling incomplete.
That's what this book is like: an early hint of what Herbert's works would be, but lacking in the finer points that make his work such a pleasure to read.
Three stars. That's possibly generous, but the book has kept my interest, so it's not THAT bad.