Witcover is an editor and writer whose fiction and critical essays appear regularly in magazines and online. In the following essay, Witcover discusses myth and religion in Frank Herbert's novel Soul Catcher.

Frank Herbert is justly famed as the author of one of the greatest science fiction epics ever written, the classic Dune series. The most popular and successful book in this series was the first, also called Dune, but readers who stop there, with the thrilling victory of Paul Atreides, a.k.a. Muad'Dib, over his evil enemies, thus fulfilling the ancient messianic prophecies of the Fremen of his adopted planet, Arrakis, and the secret genetic engineering program of the Bene Gesserit order, miss an extraordinary reversal of fortune for the immensely likeable young hero. In the next two novels, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, Herbert boldly and systematically traces Paul's downward path from liberator...