HERBERT, Brian (Patrick)

(1947-)

   US writer, son of Frank HERBERT, who began publishing sf with his third book and first novel, Sidney's Comet (1983), a comic SATIRE - the eponymous comet being composed of human garbage - set in the 27th century; the sequel, The Garbage Chronicles (1985), is also perhaps somewhat desultory. Both feature, inter alia, amusing parodies of his father's stylistic quirks. Sudanna, Sudanna (1985), set on a surreally conceived planetoid, describes the lives of its resident bureaucracy-ridden ALIENS in a tone that determinedly shifts from HUMOUR to gravity and back. Man of Two Worlds (1986), with Frank Herbert, frolics rather cumbrously with reality games, and its presentation of ALIENS who dream us up is not always coherent, though the final pages, when humans dream back, are more exhilarating. Prisoners of Arionn (1987) again juxtaposes aliens (conceived with an elaborate though somewhat skittish lightness of touch) and human society (in this case San Francisco) in a plot which uneasily details the former's kidnapping of the latter, while at the same time examining with genuine insight some family relationships. If BH was in fact wrestling with genres in an attempt to intermingle themfruitfully, an inadequate control over narrative structure was proving detrimental to the attempt. This sense of virtuous effort and only partial success persists through The Race for God (1990) and Memorymakers (1991) with Marie Landis (?1935-). It is, all the same, of continuing interest to follow his career; he is an author who, at any point it seemed, might get the note right.

   JC

   Other work: The Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune (1988), ed; Songs of Muad'Dib: The Poetry of Frank Herbert (coll 1992), ed.

   See also: TRANSPORTATION.