A press release from Bob R Bogle:
A quarter of a century has passed since the death of Frank Herbert, author of the acclaimed Dune series. In that time interest in Herbert’s greatest works of fiction has not diminished. What has changed, however, is that a new generation has grown up with these prototypical masterpieces of modern science fiction: a generation generally unfamiliar with the context out of which Herbert’s greatest works of imagination arose.
Frank Herbert: The Works, a new critical biography by Bob R Bogle, provides that context.
Besides recounting the contemporaneous events unfolding during the decades of his life—the history that informed and shaped his literary oeuvre often in unsuspected ways. The Works also reveals how Herbert’s lesser known compositions often served as testing grounds for his philosophical ruminations. That is, Herbert used his lesser novels and stories to field-test notions he pursued in grander scale later.
For example, Frank Herbert was famously preoccupied with modeling as complete an understanding of the functional architecture of consciousness as possible. The Works traces his focused exploration of the subconscious mind, especially in the novel The Santaroga Barrier, and of the potentials of hyperconsciousness in Destination: Void. While these concerns fill the Dune series, readers best appreciate Herbert’s own evolving comprehension through careful examination of these works of his, and others.
This kind of comprehensive, synthetic analysis of all the works of Frank Herbert, fiction and nonfiction, also better arms the informed reader to conjectures about what Herbert may have intended with the final book in the Dune series which, regrettably, he did not live to write. Informed speculation about the unwritten Dune 7 that arises directly out of careful study of the complete works is presented here as well.
Bob R Bogle has been a cell biologist, a phycologist, an oceanographer, a clinical chemist, a histocompatability technologist, a hematologist, a microbiologist, a transfusion medicine technologist, an appreciator of psychedelic and impressionist art, a Dylanologist, an aficionado of Frank Herbert, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, a father, and a life-long writer. Most of his professional training was at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Interested readers can join the discussion about Frank Herbert: The Works at www.facebook.com/FrankHerbertTheWorks