Operation Haystack

by Frank Herbert

Overview

Operation Haystack: A science fiction classic from Frank Herbert, author of DUNE!

Operation Haystack is a short science fiction space opera first published in 1959, a few years before Dune. The story is classic Frank Herbert and exhibit many of the themes from Dune; matriarchal societies, clandestine overthrow plots, distaste for politics, human colonies expanding through the vastness of space, and genetic manipulation through breeding in humans.

In the fictional setting, a galactic feminist conspiracy, weaved by a network of alpha women, threatens to take over the galactic government with the ultimate aim of establishing a cosmic matriarchy where females hold primary power, predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.

The story was published at the beginning of Second-wave feminism which first began in the early 1960s in the United States. Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (e.g., voting rights, property rights), second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.

Other Frank Herbert's short stories included in this print edition include Missing Link and Rambling House.

Frank Herbert was an American science fiction writer best known for the novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for science fiction, he was also a newspaper journalist, photographer, short story writer, book reviewer, ecological consultant and lecturer. Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology. The underlying thrust of his work was a fascination with the question of human survival and evolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781546404347
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	05/03/2017
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.17(d)

About the Author

Frank Herbert was an American science fiction writer best known for the novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for science fiction, he was also a newspaper journalist, photographer, short story writer, book reviewer, ecological consultant and lecturer.

Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology. The underlying thrust of his work was a fascination with the question of human survival and evolution.

Read an Excerpt

OPERATION HAYSTACK

When the Investigation & Adjustment scout cruiser landed on Marak it carried a man the doctors had no hope of saving. He was alive only because he was in a womblike creche pod that had taken over most of his vital functions.

The man's name was Lewis Orne. He had been a blocky, heavy-muscled redhead with slightly off-center features and the hard flesh of a heavy planet native. Even in the placid repose of near death there was something clownish about his appearance. His burned, ungent-covered face looked made up for some bizarre show.

Marak is the League capital, and the I-A medical center there is probably the best in the galaxy, but it accepted the creche pod and Orne more as a curiosity than anything else. The man had lost one eye, three fingers of his left hand and part of his hair, suffered a broken jaw and various internal injuries. He had been in terminal shock for more than ninety hours.

Umbo Stetson, Orne's section chief, went back into his cruiser's "office" after a hospital flitter took pod and patient. There was an added droop to Stetson's shoulders that accentuated his usual slouching stance. His overlarge features were drawn into ridges of sorrow. A general straggling, trampish look about him was not helped by patched blue fatigues.

The doctor's words still rang in Stetson's ears: "This patient's vital tone is too low to permit operative replacement of damaged organs. He'll live for a while because of the pod, but--" And the doctor had shrugged.

Stetson slumped into his desk chair, looked out the open port beside him. Some four hundred meters below, the scurrying beetlelike activity of the I-A's main fieldsent up discordant roaring and clattering. Two rows of other scout cruisers were parked in line with Stetson's port--gleaming red and black needles. He stared at them without really seeing them.

It always happens on some "routine" assignment, he thought. Nothing but a slight suspicion about Heleb: the fact that only women held high office. One simple, unexplained fact ... and I lose my best agent!