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    The Dragon in the Sea
    The Dragon in the Sea
    The Dragon in the Sea
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Dragon in the Sea

    Written by Frank Herbert

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the twenty-first century, the United States has all but used up its oil supply. A new source must be found. Our atomic subtugs begin stealing oil from underwater deposits in enemy territory. But none of the last twenty tugs sent to bring back the desperately needed mineral have returned. Ensign John Ramsey of the Bureau of Psychology is planted aboard the Fenian Ram S1881 as an electronics officer. His assignment: find the saboteur in the four-man crew and bring back the oil.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 15, 2008
    ISBN9781400175673
    The Dragon in the Sea
    Author

    Frank Herbert

    Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.  He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind.  His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre.  Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy.  It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading.  He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author."  His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.  In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything.  If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know." His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.  He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him.  For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing.  It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500. His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores.  Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946.  At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication.  Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage.  Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine.  These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken. Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage.  For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times.  In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his.  They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work.  Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003).  After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford. In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.  All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment.  His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.  Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.

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    Reviews for The Dragon in the Sea

    4/5

    25 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Also called "Under Pressure", Mr. Herbert's breakthrough novel is a very suspenseful experience. For the Sci-Fi of the time, it has a lot of character development. The plot has still got relevance today, and the story line not impossible. It was a good time, and far ahead of the "New Science Fiction" of the Sixties.
    • 2/5
      It's a sci-fi story, though with very little speculative science in it, to be honest. There's a very strong Cold War note to it, being a 1960s book, with American submariners fighting Eastern Powers for no apparent reason. The story itself is about an undercover psychologist joining a crew to see why so many are disappearing (presumably destroyed, though you never find out). It's full of stuff about the nature of sanity, the madness of war, paranoia and a horror of radiation - all very of-its-time. It was okay, I suppose. I found it too long for the actual content, but I suppose he wanted to emphasise tone. Also quite dated. Also, the central mystery of the book never really gets an answer, as much as it acts like it does. Is the problem full-blown madness? Loss of survival instinct? Seeking any end to the horror of war? It just feels a bit strange and somewhat portentious (and pretentious), to be honest, as so many books of that era do. If this is a representative sample of Herbert's work, I won't be reading any more.
    • 2/5
      Not really SF. Deeps of the mind thriller. Not thrilling. As with any psychobabble book the answers are vague. Maybe the answers are in the authors head. Maybe I imagined not finishing this book.
    • 3/5
      Last night I finished reading Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert (1956). Dragon in the Sea is quite a departure from Dune. It's more akin to The Santaroga Barrier (my favorite Herbert book) in Herbert starts with a few ordinary events and then turns them into psychological dramas. For this book, he goes one step further and leaves off the chapter divisions to create a literary claustrophobia to match the claustrophobic conditions of the submarine. Some of the psychobabble to explain the captain's behavior was a bit silly but I'll forgive it for the otherwise enjoyable thriller with science fiction trappings.
    • 4/5
      In the 16th year of the war between the East and the West stealing of the enemy's underwater reserves are the only way to get oil. Herbert's first novel basically is an U-Boat drama with a hint of SF. Slightly outdated and average but entertaining...
    • 5/5
      an amazingly written book. being that the main character is a psychologist it sounds like herbert must've studied human habits for months to be able to make this book as good as it is.
    • 2/5
      Made it half way through this short novel before I gave up. I figured if not much had happened yet, then not much was going to happen. There was a cool line about submarines being like 2 guys in the dark with baseball bats but other than that, this book was putting me to sleep. The "new" cover makes this look like it's really sci-fi but reading it seemed more like a military novel (not really my kinda thing). All the characters kind of blended together so the "somebody's a spy" part of the plot was hard to follow.
    • 4/5
      Herbert, of course, is a science fiction writer famous for Dune and its sequels, an epic tale of an extreme environment where its people wear special suits to preserve and reclaim every bit of water. The oceans of our Earth are also extreme environments, one few science fiction authors have mined, despite it being about as forbidding and unknown a place for exploration as the moon. Before this, the only such novels I'd read in the genre were by Arthur C. Clarke, such as his novel Deep Range. The New York Times review compared it to tales of the sea by C.S. Forester and Herman Wouk. This does have a feel more of a book like Clancy's The Hunt for Red October than Clarke's The Deep Range.This was first published in 1955 under the title Dragon in the Sea (an allusion to the "Book of Revelations") and it is science fiction, dealing with a near future (for us now an alternate future) where oil is running out in the midst of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Small four-man "subtugs" have been stealing into the East to steal oil--but now they've been disappearing, sleeper agents are suspected, and crew are going insane. So Lt. John Ramsey of BuPsych is sent aboard one of the subtugs, replacing a member of the crew who had gone insane to find out what's causing the problems. Thus the title given to other editions of the book, including mine, "Under Pressure." It's a good book, well worth reading--better than the later Dune sequels, even if not as far as I'm concerned as memorable and groundbreaking as the first in that series.