The Eyes of Heisenberg

An immortal, genetically elite ruling class called the Optimen maintains control by sterilizing the general populace, the Folk, and dictating mandatory genetic alterations for all unborn children.

Parents Lizbeth and Harvey Durant decide to invoke a rarely used law, allowing them to watch the genetic alteration of their embryo. However, their genetic surgeon, Dr. Potter, intentionally refuses to rearrange the embryo's highly unusual DNA structure.

This defiance threatens the established order, as the Optimen rely on total genetic stagnation to retain their immortality and absolute power. The rulers launch a desperate hunt to find, use, or destroy the unedited embryo before it can mature and challenge their supremacy.

While escaping, the show more Durants and Dr. Potter are caught in the crossfire of a power struggle between the Optimen and a faction of modified humans and cyborgs, who extend their lives with mechanical and computer enhancements to overthrow the ruling class. show less

A cautionary tale about the pitfalls of genetic tinkering set thousands of years in the future to a time when all mankind is subject to the whims of an immortal master race. But immortality comes with a hidden price tag... It's a strange brew of hard science with mythological trappings all wrapped up in a dark dystopian melodrama that reads like a comic book. Definitely not one of his best.

Herbert's writing was not at the same level as Dune in The Eyes of Heisenberg. Still, this novel deals with a lot of issues mirrored in the Dune series in a completely different way. Here the immortality of the God Emperor is a weakness. Herbert is also writing about issues like genetics that are not dealt with by most sci-fi authors until much later. It's a good, but not great book.

Lately I have been buying a lot of cheap second hand science fiction novels, most from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I try to stick to writers I know of, and sometimes those books who sound interesting. What I have noticed is that most books from the early eighties and before are pretty thin, about 150 to 200 pages, whereas most book I read now are at least 350 and often more.
This is an oldy by Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) from 1966. We are many (tens of thousands) years in the future. Mankind is kept sterile and kept that way by the Optimen, prime humans who are immortal. The humans are basically slaves and pets for the Optimen. Some humans are allowed to breed, but the embryos are grown vats after being submitted to a cut, where unwanted show more elements are cut out of their DNA. This also cuts the bond with the parents, essentially making it that nobody has a past or a future. But then Durants appear, with an exceptionally good embryo. It seems to mutate on its own, and then it turns out that the embryo is also strangely fertile. Somehow cyborgs are also involved, working a plot against the optimen.
All in all, the basics of the story sound like it could be a very good scifi story. But all in all the book is too short. You are dumped right in the middle of it, and hardly anything is explained. You very slowly figure out where and when you are, what the world is like at that moment, and who and what is acting why and how. It could have done with a lot more world building. Now it was a bit of a jumble with a lot of interesting ideas but not a good story. show less

I enjoyed this book, though I wish more had been given for the history of this world. It seems entirely plausible that this is a future planet in Frank Herbert's Dune, one of the societies founded in the Scattering. The ideas presented in this book are engaging if sketchy. Overall 4.5/5 stars.

Short sf novel from 1966 about a far distant future where genetic engineering has brought longer lives for all and immortality for a minority -- but at the cost of genetic engineering being both compulsory and necessary, as humans no longer reproduce naturally. Many are naturally sterile, and for the rest, there is the contraceptive gas that ensures that only the chosen few with a potentially viable gene mix are allowed to try their luck at creating a zygote for the gene surgeons to improve. The immortal Optimen have ruled, largely by consent, since not long after the first of them was created some eighty thousand years ago, but there are challenges to their rule.

This is one of the sf books I first read as a teenager, and was hoping show more would still hold up. I had occasional problems with suspension of disbelief, but it's staying on the keep pile rather than going into the Oxfam box. The opening sequence with a genetic surgeon preparing to cut a new embryo with Optiman potential, and finding that it is something even greater and forbidden -- that still has the power to evoke sensawunda for me. The rest of the novel doesn't quite hit the same heights, but there's still a worthwhile story about the price and effects of immortality. And while this short novel doesn't have the same depth of world-building as Dune, there are still some lovely little details, such as the hand-pressure language used by the Parents Underground to communicate secretly in public. show less

Set in the far future in a time when Optimen lived for tens of thousand of years, The Eyes of Heisenberg is kind of like 1984 on Steroids. In this society, the rulers only allow certain people to procreate, and when they do so, genetic engineers manipulate the embryo seeking to make these superhumans, who can virtually live forever. The concept is okay, but I thought by and large the execution is poor. For one thing, I think to fully understand the story, you need an advanced degree in biochemistry. Secondly, it was never fully explained why things were happening. Why the embryos are engineered, what was so important about the embryo belonging to the Durants, which is the focus of the story, that makes all hell break loose. The other show more thing that really annoyed me was how Herbert jumps from one scene to another skipping all sorts of scenes in between that are necessary to set up the scene. It almost seemed like I was reading an abridgement. So although the concept was interesting, and there was good character development in the story, I found the novel more exasperating than anything else.
Carl Alves - author of Blood Street show less