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    The Godmakers
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    The Godmakers
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    The Godmakers
    Ebook257 pages3 hours

    The Godmakers

    By Frank Herbert

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    On the edge of a war-weary and devastated galaxy, charismatic Lewis Orne makes planetfall on Hamal. His assignment: to detect any signs of latent aggression in this planet’s population.

    To his astonishment, he finds that his own latent extrasensory powers have suddenly blossomed, and he is invited to join the company of “gods” on this planet.

    And people place certain expectations on their gods....

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordFire Press
    Release dateApr 21, 2013
    ISBN9781614750611
    Unavailable
    The Godmakers
    Author

    Frank Herbert

    Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.  He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind.  His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre.  Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy.  It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading.  He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author."  His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.  In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything.  If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know." His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.  He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him.  For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing.  It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500. His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores.  Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946.  At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication.  Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage.  Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine.  These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken. Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage.  For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times.  In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his.  They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work.  Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003).  After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford. In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.  All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment.  His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.  Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.

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    Reviews for The Godmakers

    3.5/5

    167 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A visit to the idea of bending people to your will, if you can control the inputs. As usual there will be consequences.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      Sadly, it's another book I didn't like too much. I picked up this 1972 copy of this out-of-print book because I'd never read anything by Herbert except the first 5 'Dune' books, and thought I'd check out a non-related work. Unfortunately, this book has none of the complexity or depth of 'Dune.'
      'The Godmakers' gives us Lewis Orne, an agent for a military-style organization that is charged with enforcing peace. After a disastrous interstellar war, no sign of warlike qualities in a culture will be tolerated - and any sign of an incipient militaristic attitude would justify blasting that civilization out of existence.
      The first half of the book shows us Orne in a series of episodic missions to different planets, basically swaggering around chauvinistically (yeah, yeah, we KNOW you don't like women running your life... get over it already) and saving the day.
      Then, suddenly, Orne develops psi powers, and travels to the religious planet of Amel, where they decide that he has the remarkable potential to be a 'god.' Orne now must undergo psychic training ordeals... What will he do with his new and unprecedented power?
      Herbert was very obviously trying to make several philosophical statements regarding peace vs. war (and the irony/futility of trying to enforce peace through military action), and religion - but the writing here is too choppy for it to seem more than awkward...
    • 4/5
      bad formatting (kept having to use bookmarks to save my place) - good book
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      Not much action. Mostly about some guy thinking deep thoughts about the universe and solving a few problems. 50% or more of the book was philosophical stuff which I mostly disagreed with.And the end of the book was about him finally using his "God" powers. Blah.
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure what to make of this. Lewis Orne is a member a group that searches out signs of war and violence on planets around the galaxy. He learns a few things about hiding signs of war as well as himself and his many talents. Meanwhile on a planet called Amal, the priest planet, the Abbod convenes a gathering and summons a new god in to existence. Things weave together, prophecy is fulfilled, and so on, but I honestly have no idea what the point was. When I first read it years ago I had no idea what was going on at all, so that has improved, but still...Interesting story and a fun read but what for?
    • 2/5
      Very creative but never really came together for me. I would not recomend it.