United States National Public Radio's
Science Friday Book Club in 2014 read
Dune by
Frank Herbert.
Readers were asked to
record their favorite quotes and submit it to the show. The whole series is incredible. Here are a few quotes I recorded. You can listen to the
ones NPR selected from all listeners.
The text is available on line at
archive.org. But buy the book. Also, check out the
Calvin and Mu'addib Tumblr.
Prescience
The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it
revealed — at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy
intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw.
And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here,
wherein the most minute action — the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand —
moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so
many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.
The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its
consequences .
The countless consequences — lines fanned out from this cave, and along most of these
consequence-lines he saw his own dead body with blood flowing from a gaping knife wound.
Kynes's Father on the Masses and the Leavings
"Arrakis is a one-crop planet," his father said. "One crop. It supports a ruling class that
lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of
semislaves exists on the leavings. It's the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention.
These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected."
Keynes's Last Thought
Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other
scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and
error .
Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.
