| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
When the Durant's decide to claim their right to watch their embryo's "cutting" progress the unleash a political storm that will change things forever and uncover truths.
A very well documented and most intelligently written book, it has the political turmoil typical of Dune series, and ponders where certain roads of science and control could lead to. Lots of hidden interest and manipulative characters as in Fountain Society.
...And in its basic scientifical approach and application not too far from our society's attempts right now.
Some of the things he writes about are cutting edge science even today (taking about the way cells operate), so he has to get points for that: he was visionary and remains so. HOwever, this is not for everyone. A good read though.
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.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
