As he worked, he enjoyed listening to a wide variety of music, with the volume turned up. So it is not at all surprising that his best writing took on musical qualities. Writing was like a “jazz performance” for him, he said. He composed it as he went along. He could slow it down, speed it up, soften, intensify…
Some poetry in Dune was modeled after Provençal lyrics, the court poetry of troubadours in southwestern France and the Mediterranean between the late eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries. To understand this style, Dad read the lyrics of poets of the period, including the work of Bernard de Ventadour, whose “courtly love” poetry is considered the finest surviving example of that style. He also enjoyed Japanese tanka verse, with thirty-one syllables.
He even studied and wrote Italian and Shakespearean sonnets. Like Provençal lyrics, much of this poetic form originally concerned the subject of love.
The subjects commonly found in these poetic forms are interesting, as they correspond with key subject matters in Dune: Nature (in haiku and tanka) and Love (in Provençal lyrics and in sonnets). Thus the atmosphere of a universe was constructed, with small and large pieces, layer upon layer, like a painter.
In interviews later, including one with his friend and collaborator, Bill Ransom, Dad said poetry was like a baseball player swinging three bats as he walked up to the plate. Frank Herbert was building the muscles required for prose writing, developing a powerful sense of rhythm and word selection.
The Japanese haiku is a Zen Buddhist art form. And the prana-bindu discipline of the Bene Gesserit was based upon Zen disciplines. Aware of a simmering women’s liberation movement in the early 1960s and the desires of women in religious service for more recognition, Dad decided to postulate a “sisterhood” in control of an entire religious system. He thought readers would accept the premise of women with occult powers of memory, since females have traditionally been said to have “women’s intuition.”
St. Paul the Apostle was considered the greatest advocate of Christianity, so it seemed appropriate to Frank Herbert to name the messiah of his new desert religion Paul. The Christian thread in Dune is strong. An Orange Catholic Bible is in the book, suggesting a future merging of Protestantism and Catholicism, and there are numerous references to Christian ethics. Dad’s early religious influence was Catholic, from his maternal aunts, which formed one of the bases of the Bene Gesserit. “Gesserit” was a name selected intentionally to sound like “Jesuit.” Dad referred to the Bene Gesserit as “female Jesuits.” My mother’s early religious influence was strongly Protestant.
Many entries in the Orange Catholic Bible were Zen, speaking of sensing alternate worlds that were all around, and of great truths not easily expressible in words. Through his association with Irene Slattery, Dad knew of the studies of Professor Gilles Quispel of the Netherlands, a well-known religious historian. In the mid 1950s, Quispel became aware of an archaeological discovery near Naj Hammadi in Upper Egypt. An Arab found several ancient papyrus manuscripts in a large pottery jar there, many of which involved Gnostic Christian scripture that for political reasons had never been included in the Bible. At Quispel’s urging, the Jung Foundation in Zurich purchased one of the manuscripts, a leather-bound codex.
That codex contained The Gospel According to Thomas, which included a number of astonishing quotations ascribed to Jesus Christ—passages that sounded more like Eastern religious thought than Western. This was one: “Bring forth what is within you, and you will be saved.” The Orange Catholic Bible of Dune, with its cryptic, mystical entries, had a strong basis in historical fact.
There were sandtrout in the deserts of Arrakis, and the fish was an early Christian symbol. When in a sequel to Dune (Children of Dune, 1976) a character allowed sandtrout to attach themselves to his body, this was based in part upon my father’s own experiences as a boy growing up in Washington State, when he rolled up his trousers and waded into a stream or lake, permitting leeches to attach themselves to his legs.
There is much of the outdoors man Frank Herbert in Dune. The technique of “sandwalking,” in which a person moves without producing a rhythm that might attract giant worms, is a technique my father learned in his childhood. The hunter moves silently and downwind from wild game, so as not to alert the prey of his presence. The fisherman does not make a disturbance in or near the water, for fear of frightening away the fish.
Frank Herbert knew from personal experience that living in harmony with nature was best, moving through it without disturbing it—taking from it, but only in ways that permitted renewal. One day he would become a leading proponent of wind and solar power, and would even propose obtaining methane from chicken droppings: “Use every part of the chicken except the squawk,” he would quip.
On a philosophical level, living in the desert was not so different from the forest or the farm. Man had to pay close attention to resource preservation and recycling, to the preservation of systems. Nothing was wasted. The land was not to be stripped of its nutrients if it was expected to be usable in the future by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Dew precipitators were set up on the deserts of Arrakis to catch precious moisture, and humans traveling in desert regions wore stillsuits to recycle and preserve bodily fluids.
When Stilgar and Paul set hooks in giant worms and climbed up them to the top, it was like mountain climbing, driving metal pins into rock and ice for footholds. The hooks in worms were reminiscent of fishing as well, but an extrapolation beyond anything most people could ever imagine.
The Mentats of Dune, capable of supreme logic, were “human computers.” In large part they were based upon my father’s paternal grandmother, Mary Stanley, an illiterate Kentucky hill-woman who performed incredible mathematical calculations. Mentats were the precursors of Star Trek’s Spock, first officer of the starship Enterprise.
Frank Herbert was an investigator who turned over rocks and made human creatures scurry out of hiding places. A modern-day Socrates, he tore into what he termed “unexamined linguistic and cultural assumptions,” and in so doing he extrapolated words and traditions he thought might exist in the future. He observed that bits and pieces of the diversified past were entrenched in our own language and culture, and he saw no reason why this pattern of creation would not continue to hold course. He said there would be segments of the past…of today…nestled into words and customs thousands of years from now, like nearly forgotten detritus.
This accounts for the diversity of religious fragments encountered in Dune. It also accounts for Frank Herbert’s exceedingly broad selection of words. Many of the words in Dune were rooted in Arabic and Hebrew, and in numerous cases he combined syllables from two languages, two cultures, or even two religions. He referred to Zensunni teachings, for instance, whereby Zen Buddhism and the mystical Islamic denomination Sunni were joined.
Such words suggest past historical events without detailing them. They also point to a fact of history: Languages change. They are in a constant state of flux, never static. Words appear and evolve.
The words and names in Dune are eclectic. The word “sihaya” is Navajo; “Bene Gesserit” is rooted in Latin; “sietch” is Chakobsa, a language found in the Caucasus; Tleilaxu is based upon a word for salamander in the Nahuatl dialect of the Aztecs. Atreides, as I have said, is based upon House Atreus, from Greek mythology. The “Padishah” Emperor ruling the universe of Dune is from Persian, East Indian, and Turkish tradition. Jamis is an Old English name my father found when researching genealogical records.
“Jihad” is Islamic for holy war, and this word has the same meaning in Arabic as it does to the people of Dune. The Fremen language is based upon colloquial Arabic, in a form my father believed would be likely to survive for centuries in a desert environment. Alia is a name given to female descendants of the prophet Mohammed, a name that means “noble one” or “beloved of God.”
His desert is a great sea with giant worms diving into the depths, Shai-Hulud’s domain. Dune tops are like the crests of wa
ves, and there are powerful storms out there, creating extreme danger. On Dune, life emanates from the Maker (Shai-Hulud) in the desert-sea; similarly all life on Earth is believed to have originated in our seas. Frank Herbert drew parallels, used metaphors, and extrapolated present conditions into world systems that seem entirely alien at first blush. But close examination reveals that they aren’t so different from ordered assemblages we know…and the book-characters of his imagination aren’t so different from people familiar to us.
If Frank Herbert could be categorized in a religious sense (and that is a very big “if”!) he came closest to Zen Buddhism. It was in that realm that he felt most comfortable, most certain of his footing. He did not participate in the dogma or rituals of any religion, though his deep commitment to ethics and the survival of humanity were apparent throughout his writings. He believed in quality of life, not merely in scraping by, and he spoke deftly (and at times didactically) about this through his characters. Sometimes in his characters, Frank Herbert spoke with Frank Herbert, exploring different avenues of his own belief systems, typically having to do with religion or the politics of power. At other times he spoke through people who represented, to him, anathematic types.
The mainstream of Buddhism is a highly ethical belief system, one that had great appeal to Frank Herbert. Of no little importance to him, Buddhists hold a spiritual reverence for nature and for the preservation of life on this planet. Dad also believed that Buddhists tend to be tolerant of the belief systems of others. Certainly there are exceptions, but for the most part he didn’t see them in possession of the “holier than thou” missionary fervor of Western religions. It is interesting in this vein to note that the stated purpose of the C.E.T. (the Commission of Ecumenical Translators), as described in an appendix to Dune, was to eliminate arguments between religions, each of which claimed to have “the one and only revelation.”
This is particularly revealing in light of the childhoods of my parents, when adults attempted to force-feed religious dogma to them.
Dune, the first novel in what would ultimately become a series, contained hints of the direction he intended to take with his superhero, Paul Muad’Dib, clues that many readers overlooked. It was a dark direction. When planetologist Liet-Kynes lay dying on the desert, he remembered these words of his father, spoken years before and relegated to the back reaches of memory: “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.” And at the end of an appendix it was written that the planet had been “afflicted by a Hero.” These were sprinklings here and there, seeds of the direction Frank Herbert had in mind. The author felt that heroes made mistakes…mistakes that were amplified by the numbers of people who followed those heroes slavishly. By the second and third books in the series, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, this message would become clear.
In another seed planted in Dune, he wrote, “It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.” This was an important reference to Greek hubris. Very few readers realized that the story of Paul Atreides was not only a Greek tragedy on an individual and familial scale. There was another layer, larger than Paul, and in that layer Frank Herbert was warning that entire societies could be led to ruination by a hero. In Dune and Dune Messiah he was cautioning against pride and excessive confidence, the hubris of Greek tragedies that led to the great fall. But it was societal-scale hubris he was warning against…the potential demise of an entire society.
Among the dangerous leaders of human history, my father sometimes mentioned General George S. Patton, because of his charismatic qualities—but more often his example was President John F. Kennedy. Around Kennedy a myth of kingship formed, and of Camelot. His followers did not question him, and would have gone with him virtually anywhere. This danger seems obvious to us now in the case of such men as Adolf Hitler, who led his nation to ruination. It is less obvious, however, with men who are not deranged or evil in and of themselves. Such a man was Paul Muad’Dib, whose danger lay in the myth structure around him.
One of my father’s most important messages was that governments lie to protect themselves. They make incredibly stupid decisions. Years after the publication of Dune, Richard Nixon provided proof. Dad said that Nixon did the American people an immense favor. By example, albeit unwittingly, Nixon taught people to distrust government.
Frank Herbert believed in importance of long-range planning, particularly with respect to the environment. He spoke of adaptation, of setting forces in motion to change the attitudes of men toward their own planet. In Chapterhouse: Dune, the sixth volume of the series, Reverend Mother Dortujla used an aphorism familiar long before the publication of Dune: “Never damage your own nest.” That was Frank Herbert speaking, of course, since he believed we were doing precisely that to Earth.
One of the layers of Dune was an ecological handbook written by planetologist Pardot Kynes and his son, Liet-Kynes. Ahead of its time, it described the consequences of human actions. Environmental awareness was just awakening in the early 1960s, and Frank Herbert was one of the standard bearers. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a monumental work that decried the killing of birds and harmless insects by toxic chemicals such as DDT. In 1963, shortly before the opening installments of Dune were published by Analog, the first clean-air act was passed in the United States. President Kennedy gave a couple of speeches that year about protecting the environment.
Analog readers liked Dune World, and fans nominated it for the 1963 Hugo Award for best novel—rather unusual, since the story hadn’t yet been published in book form. While Dune World did not win the award, its popularity was in no small part responsible for the awarding of a Hugo for best science fiction magazine to Analog and its editor, John W. Campbell. At the awards ceremony, held at the Pacificon II science fiction convention in Oakland in 1964, Dad accepted the award as Campbell’s proxy and shipped it to him.
During 1964, however, a steady stream of publishers rejected Dune World and its allied manuscripts in book form. Dad lost hope that it would ever be published in anything more than a magazine.
Trying to maintain his sense of humor, Dad came up with this:
Chinese Rejection Slip
Illustrious brother of the sun and moon! Look upon the slave who rolls at thy feet, who kisses the earth before thee, and demands of thy charity permission to speak and live. We have read the manuscript with delight. By the bones of our ancestors we swear that never before have we encountered such a masterpiece. Should we print it, his majesty the emperor would order us to take it as a criterion and never again print anything which was not equal to it. As that would not be possible before 10,000 years, all tremblingly we return the manuscript and beg thee 10,000 pardons. See—my head is at thy feet, and I am the slave of thy servant.
In the January 1965 issue, Analog began a new serialization of the 125,000-word completion of the story (Books II and III) under a single title Campbell preferred, Prophet of Dune. It would run in five monthly installments, ending in May.
Early in 1965, a few weeks after publication of the first installment of the new serial, Sterling E. Lanier, an editor with Chilton Book Company and a science fiction writer himself,* contacted Lurton Blassingame. Lanier had read the Analog installments, and when he finally got his hands on a complete copy of all three manuscripts, he wanted to publish them in a single edition.
In the buy of an editor’s lifetime, the literary coup of coups, the farsighted Lanier offered a $7,500 advance (plus future royalties) for the right to publish Dune World (Book I) and Prophet of Dune (Books II & III) in hardcover. His offer was accepted.
Lanier said there were a number of loose ends in the story and rough transition points between Books I, II and III requiring more work. He wanted the entire work expanded. When he discovered my father had drawn a map of the planet Dune, he asked for a copy, to include it in the book.
Lanier proposed a simple title: Dune, which he
liked for its power and mysticism. For the cover art, he wanted to use John Schoenherr, who had done such a fine job on the Analog covers.
Chilton was best known as the publisher of a series of automobile repair manuals, leading Dad to quip that they might rename his work How to Repair Your Ornithopter. (Ornithopters were the birdlike flying craft of the planet Dune). At least Chilton had experience printing large books. Their auto repair manuals were huge.
A short while after the Chilton agreement was reached, Ace Books, a well-known publisher of science fiction titles, made an offer to publish the book in paperback. That edition would appear in 1966, a year after release of the hardcover, in order to allow the higher-priced hardcover to run its course before receiving competition from the paperback.
Chapter 15
Number Two Son
“What is the son but an extension of the father?”
—Frank Herbert, in Dune
DURING THE period when Mom was working in downtown San Francisco and Dad was writing the most difficult segments of Dune, he became increasingly irritable and more intolerant than ever of the slightest interruption to his concentration. It reached the extreme where he took the house keys away from Bruce and me and told us he was going to write inside a locked house. We were commanded to go elsewhere after school and he didn’t seem to care where. Dad and Bruce got into a big row over this, and Dad yanked a string with a house key on it off Bruce’s neck. Prior to that, my brother had been in the habit of coming into the house after school to make a sandwich.
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