23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I love the writing, but this is definitely an early work, September 30, 2003
Yes, the great author behind the Dune series also wrote other books. In The Eyes of Heisenberg, he investigates a world made up of normal humans and eternal beings.
This was an earlier work, so you can see a number of themes that Dune explored so well in their infancy here. Normal humans are being genetically manipulated by scientists to help keep society running smoothly. Occasionally a 'super human' is created who can live forever. It is these "optimen" who really control society.
Everybody thinks the optimen are naturally intelligent and wise - but they are actually no smarter or dumber than normal humans. They simply have thousands and thousands of years with which to refine their points of view and educate themselves as they wish.
Of course normal humans begin to rebel against the restrictions in their life and by the end of the story, a male and female want to have a baby the "old fashioned way".
I found a number of flaws with the story, and the ending was rather abrupt and made you feel like it was rushed. The beauty of the story is with the character development and the interactions. Having worked for a biotech, the techno-babble about the DNA was interesting, but it unnecessarily confused things for most readers, and the intriguing events brough up are never resolved. It's as if Herbert originally intended to make a hard core story, but then wandered off into a personality drama and at the end wasn't sure what to do so sort of tied everything up randomly.
If you're wondering what Heisenberg had to do with all of this, he's the Quantum Mechanics physicist who came up with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." In essence, when you try to focus too closely on one thing, you aren't able to focus on other things. You can only give a probability of WHERE something is if you're focussing on HOW FAST it is going.
Another way of looking at this is that by focussing on something, you are altering it. So while you then may figure out what it is you are examining, you have changed other aspects of it. If you bounce a light beam off of something to see how far away it is, you might actually move it or alter its course with that bounce.
In any case, a good story to see more of Herbert's work, but not a classic like Dune.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful and Interesting, September 3, 2005
This book, as others here have said, is not on the same scale and not the same quality that Herbert's Dune books are. It is a very interesting book, though, that deals with several themes that Herbert would later revisit. The strongest point in the book is the characterization. It is very complex for most of the characters, especially, to me, the Optimen, the governing immortal races in the novel. There is a mix of playfulness and disinterestedness about them that is unusual, especially when they gradually and then suddenly shift late in the novel. I will not disagree that the ending is rushed and there is almost too much technical talk in the book, but to me it kind of represents the aspect of being shown this world and revelling in it, for only a short amount of time and then being whisked away again. You can see in the references to the past in the novel that there was quite a lot of backstory that we will never know and that kind of makes it more interesting and distant. But it is enough to take the themes and questions in the novel about genetic manipulation and immortality and apply them to ourselves in our own age with history and backstory each alike.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Grim vision of genetic engineering by the author of Dune, November 18, 2000
This book takes place in the distant future, tens of thousands of years from now. It is a grim look at a world shaped by genetic engineering which is run by the Optimen, sterile humans whose genetic makeup supposedly allows them to live forever though pharmacology. Even "meres"--"normal" humans live for hundreds of years, so to control the population various things such as contraceptive gas are used, and breeding is strictly controlled. Against the regime of the Optimen are the Cyborgs and a group of humans supporting natural birth, and a mysterious outside force--could it be Nature itself, or perhaps God? One of the major resolutions smacks of a Greek Deus ex machina, and the very ending stuck me as pretty horrifying, but Herbert didn't really explore the ethical consequences of his "solution." However, it was a pretty good, albeit quick read--it's a slim volume. Worth a look if you run across it, not really worth going out on a hunt for.
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