Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  Unhappy with the way Dad was treating him, Bruce ran away, walking more than twenty-five miles. Only eleven years old, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County and hid in a creek bed for several hours. The more he thought about his predicament, however, the more Bruce realized how cold, lonely and hungry he would be if he didn’t return home. And he realized how angry Dad would be at him for yet another interruption to his writing process.

  It must be understood that the son of a writer is not without creative energies of his own. To avoid Dad’s wrath, my little brother came up with a wild, rather ingenious tale. He contacted the nearest police precinct in Marin County and reported in a state of feigned hysteria that he had been kidnapped by two men and thrown in the back of a laundry truck. It was only through good fortune, he said, that he was able to escape.

  The police believed Bruce, and had him go through books of mug shots in an attempt to find the bad guys. Dad and Mom were contacted, and they drove to the police station. A detective there assured Mr. and Mrs. Herbert that he would investigate the case thoroughly, and would find whoever had done this terrible thing. Their son was fortunate to be alive, he said.

  In our San Francisco house we had a number of large brown corduroy pillows, triangular in shape, which we used to lean against while reading, or while watching the little black-and-white television. They were foam-filled. Bruce had one on his bed. After coming home from the police station, he went in his room and lay on the bed, with his head on the big pillow. It was quiet in the house. Then he heard familiar footsteps on the hardwood of the hallway, and his pulse raced.

  Dad opened the bedroom door, stared in at Bruce and said, “You were lying, weren’t you?”

  Under the piercing, see-it-all stare, Bruce coughed. He felt his eyes burning, expected to see his father pull off the wide leather belt and administer the usual. But Dad said, in a calm tone, “I’m not going to spank you this time, but you’re grounded for two weeks. Come straight home after school every day and do extra chores.”

  In 1962, science fiction writers Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, and Poul Anderson went into partnership to construct a houseboat. I helped them, performing odd tasks such as painting the top white in blinding sunshine. The boat sank in a storm that year, and Dad lost every penny he had invested in it.

  While working on the vessel, the men plotted a collaborative science fiction story. It was about a master thief whose specialty was underwater capers. They planned to publish it under the pseudonym “Noah Arkwright,” so named in honor of their partnership.*

  In the summer of 1963, when I had just turned sixteen, I decided I needed a real job. I had been washing cars and doing landscaping in the neighborhood, but I wasn’t earning enough money to buy the car that I wanted. Dad suggested that I apply for part-time jobs at the three major San Francisco newspapers. In August the Examiner called and offered me a copyboy position, at $1.25 an hour.

  Just before I reported to the “Ex,” Dad took me aside and told me of a Mexican phrase, “la ñapa,” meaning “the addition.” It referred to something given as an extra, without remuneration, like the thirteenth item in a baker’s dozen.** He told me to follow this principle in my work at the Examiner and in every job I held during my life. “Always produce more than they pay you for,” he said. “That way they’ll want to keep you around.”

  This was a credo he had been following all of his working life.

  In The Santaroga Barrier (1968), his protagonist, Dasein, felt antipathy toward the society represented by his employers. But he also felt “a compulsion somewhere within him to make an honest report to those who’d hired him…His own remembered sense of duty urged it. To do anything else would be a form of dishonesty, an erosion of selfdom. He felt a jealous possessiveness about his self. No smallest part of it was cheap enough to discard.”

  Dad was the night picture editor, with responsibility for selecting photographs to be included in the paper and for writing captions beneath the photos. In this position, his experience as photographer, reporter, and freelance writer served him well. His desk was by a window, near the curved rim of the copy desk and the city desk. His 4:00 P.M. to midnight schedule usually differed from mine, so I only rarely worked when he was there.

  In the fall of 1963, Dad bought a 1959 Volkswagen camper from one of Jack Vance’s musician friends, a car dealer named Earl Sheeler in Berkeley. It was orange and cream colored, with a sunroof, sink, refrigerator, small table, and bunks for two. Dad put a bumper sticker on the rear: “GIVE TO MENTAL HEALTH OR I’LL KILL YOU!”

  He drove the camper to the Examiner every day. On his lunch or dinner breaks, depending upon his schedule, he wrote at the table of the camper with a ball-point pen, or set a timer and napped. A heavy sleeper, he could fall asleep in seconds, so the timer was a necessity. He said he didn’t write that much in the van, that mostly he slept in it from the fatigue of getting up as early as he could each day to write before work.

  In his spare time, Dad was always inventing things, much as his father had done before him. In Frank Herbert’s case, most of his inventions consisted of descriptions of gadgets in his futuristic science fiction stories. Typically he conceived a world and the people to populate it, and then postulated the technology they might require. Thus he came up with an expandable underwater oil barge in The Dragon in the Sea to transport petroleum during dangerous wartime conditions, and, in Dune, stillsuits to recover precious wastewater from the body in the extreme desert conditions of the planet. These novels were filled with other inventions.

  His 1965 short story “Committee of the Whole” described a homemade laser weapon, the secrets of which were released to the public by a “madman” who happened to think like Frank Herbert. Dad believed such technology should be made available to everyone, thus preventing dangerous people from monopolizing weapons and using them for their own ends. He wrote, “One man could destroy an aerial armada with it, knock down ICBMs before they touched atmosphere, sink a fleet, pulverize a city.”

  In the 1970s he would write a highly inventive film treatment, entitled initially “Jonathon Ley” and then “Asa West.” It did not sell, but not for lack of imagination. Set on an alien planet, it described a Robo-Cop-type character, a man in an armored mask who was part human and part synthesized machine, with superhuman powers. Dad referred to his creation as “Supercop.” A virtually unstoppable fighting machine, it had the power to detect lies and could not be poisoned or gassed. Its body had pockets “concealed by invisible skin flaps,” compartments that contained many incredible weapons and tools. I found one device particularly interesting, in view of my father’s passion for the outdoors. He called it a “caster,” which, like a fishing pole, released a fine line and seeker-tip to retrieve whatever Supercop wanted.

  In the early 1950s Dad invented a special type of slide rule that he never got around to patenting. With a lifelong interest in cooking and guns, he also came up with what he called a “spice gun.” This was an ingenious device that looked like a target pistol, with a long sharp-pointed barrel on the end that was inserted into a roast. When the spice gun trigger was pulled, it injected spices into the meat. The tip was removable, with a second snap-on tip that had grating slots in it for injecting garlic juice.

  Inspired by a conversation with Howie Hansen about the workings of a sextant, Frank Herbert also devised a navigation instrument that, in Howie Hansen’s words, “used a beam of light to shine down into the inside of an arc to pinpoint a position.”

  During slow times at the Examiner, Dad developed his own one-panel cartoon series, which I named “Tingle” when I saw the characters. They were simple lines forming people who looked like bent coat hangers. The basic cartoon person was a long, slightly curved vertical line, bending out where the derriere would be—with a horizontal, connected line at the bottom representing feet. A not-quite-closed circle was attached on top, representing a head. The figure had no arms. He drew a witch’s hat on one, with the caption, “Anyone
call for a doctor?” Another figure had no hat, but the middle section was curved, as in a drainpipe under a kitchen sink. “Did you call for a plumber?” the caption read. He also drew what he called Zen cartoons. One was a horizontal line with an arrow on each end, with the caption, “a longer line than the other one.” Another cartoon had an arrow pointing down, above the word “up”—and the caption, “up under some circumstances.”

  In addition to their own Hearts card game variation, my parents also came up with a silly parlor game called “Frog-It.” To demonstrate, Dad would tell his dinner guests to talk in the tone of a frog croaking. “Like this,” he said, “Frog-it, Frog-it, Frog-it.”

  After the guests practiced a bit, Dad would ask, “What’s a nun frog?” And when no one came up with an answer, he said, “Hab-it, Hab-it, Hab-it.”

  Then Mom might ask, “What’s a jeweler frog?” Another pause, and then, “Lock-et, Lock-et, Lock-et.”

  “And what are the four Safeway frogs?” Dad asked. “Why, Stack-it, Pack-it, Stock-it, and Bag-it.”

  And so on, they would improvise.

  In another improvisation described by Howie, my father would begin by saying, in a creaking, aged hillbilly accent, “Uh, Ma?”

  To which she would respond, in like accent, her voice also creaking, “Yes, Pa?”

  After a long pause: “Ma, I got somepin’ to say.”

  “Yes, Pa, what is it?”

  “Ma, I’m a goin’. I’m a goin’, Ma.”

  “Yes, Pa, and what is it you wanna say?”

  Another pause: “I wanna say I’m a goin’, Ma. But before I go, I’ve got somepin’ to say.”

  “Yes, Pa?”

  “I’m a goin’, Ma.”

  It would go on like this for several minutes, to the amusement of all present.

  Early in the 1960s, Dad learned that a British company had developed flexible underwater barges based upon his concept in The Dragon in the Sea. The company was marketing them under the trade name “Dracone,” and, as this name suggested, they freely admitted the source of the idea. Science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and Fritz Leiber, friends of Dad, recommended that he take legal action to invalidate Dracone’s patents. Dad consulted a number of people on this, including John W. Campbell, and learned from them, to his dismay, that he should have filed formal patent papers within two years of publication of his idea. The publication gave him “discovery rights” for that period, but his failure to file proper documents sent the idea into the public domain.

  But an even bigger fish would be lost by my father as a result of this. Eventually The Dragon in the Sea would be published in Japan, where it would become very popular. The Japanese admitted creating overseas shipping containers as an adaptation of Dad’s underwater barge concept!

  Upon completion of the three segments of Dune (Dune World, Muad’Dib and The Prophet) in November 1963, Dad embarked upon a two-and-a-half-month leave of absence from the Examiner. He did some writing during that period, but mostly recuperated. He planned to take a vacation trip to the Pacific Northwest just before Christmas, and after that he intended to return to the newspaper.

  Aside from the Analog serialization of Dune World, a very important sale, Dad sold only a couple of articles in 1963 to the San Francisco Examiner, for which he was paid small amounts in addition to his salary.

  Mom left her job at The White House department store, and went to work in the advertising department of Macy’s in San Francisco. She also wrote freelance for Plan Ahead, a national guide for advertising copywriters. She was working on a new mystery novel, too, entitled Marked Down for Murder. Her first novel, Frighten the Mother, which needed major rewriting, lay languishing in a file cabinet. She hadn’t worked on it for several years.

  At the age of sixteen I started drinking with friends, and experienced several near misses with death, invariably involving cars and alcohol. On occasion my parents had to bail me out of jail, where I had been placed in the drunk tank. The last time this happened, my mother said to me, “I’ve cried my last tear for you.” As a result of a number of open confrontations between me and my father, she also told me that if she had to choose between us, she would choose him.

  My little brother was in trouble with Dad on a constant basis, over picayune matters. Sometimes Bruce looked in the refrigerator a little too long and couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted, keeping the door open and wasting electricity. This was a violation of one of Dad’s many house rules. Or Bruce left the lid loose on the strawberry jelly, causing Dad to drop it and break it when he lifted it from the shelf by the lid. Or, from his fascination with things electrical and electronic, Bruce wore the batteries out on every flashlight in the house. Or he didn’t get good enough grades, despite scholastic aptitude tests indicating an extremely high IQ.

  Bruce’s relationship with his father was, in its own way, worse than mine. I confronted Dad, venting my anger, but my brother never did. This proved to have devastating consequences for the young man, as his pent-up rage and frustration would lead him to make very bad, even dangerous decisions.

  Chapter 16

  Honors

  JACK VANCE was a member of Mystery Writers of America, and earned considerable success in the field, winning an Edgar one year for the best novel. Through his encouragement, my mother and father made efforts to write and sell in that genre.

  Early in 1964, Mom completed a new 65,000-word novel, Marked Down for Murder, and sent it off to Lurton for his efforts. She had not sold a piece of creative writing since the sale of “Corner Movie Girl” to Modern Romances in 1946, but had never given up hope that one day she might become a published author. For many years, she had been an avid reader of murder mysteries, so it was in this field that she felt most comfortable now. Unfortunately, Lurton had difficulty placing her novel and finally gave up. This book, like her earlier one, would need extensive rewriting, he said.

  Dad, also interested in the genre, joined Mystery Writers of America. He was eligible for membership because of his publication credits in the science fiction genre, but my mother, without credits, could not join. In the spring of 1964, Dad sent a mystery novelette to Lurton, The Heat’s On. The agent was unable to find a publisher for it. He praised it as an interesting story but said it was of a length that was no longer popular.

  Worst of all, Dune in book form still had not found a publisher, as Sterling E. Lanier and Chilton Book company were still a year down the road.

  On their eighteenth wedding anniversary that June, Dad gave Mom a bouquet of eighteen red roses with a handwritten note on a card:

  Darling—

  Will you renew my option?

  Love, Frank

  Of course she did, and sometimes on special occasions she sent him singing telegrams, via Western Union.

  Around this time, Mom increased her pressure on Dad to buy a house. They considered Santa Barbara to the south, where a number of Dad’s uncles and aunts had settled, or the Santa Cruz Mountains, near the home of his author friend Robert Heinlein. But these were not practical locations. My father’s writing income remained low, and for the near future he needed to stay tethered to the Examiner.

  Beverly Herbert left Macy’s, hoping to concentrate more on her creative writing and on freelance work for Plan Ahead. She was despondent, however, over Marked Down for Murder, and thought she might be better off starting a new yarn. Dad told her she should rewrite her two novels, that both were potentially publishable. Subsequently she tinkered with each, then tried an entirely new yarn, and finally gave up creative writing altogether, with the exception of a handful of Christmas stories that were published as department store advertising supplements.

  Within weeks, my parents applied for and obtained two bank loans. With the first, they bought a house in Fairfax, twenty miles north of San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge. With the second, they purchased a fifty-six acre unimproved parcel one hundred and forty miles north near Willits.

  The Willits property was wo
oded with fir, cedar and pine trees, and had a long dirt road leading to a cleared building site where a previous owner had planned to construct a home. This remote property was Dad’s ultimate destination. While living in Fairfax, he intended to spend weekends constructing a home in Willits, doing the work himself, along with volunteer labor from Jack Vance, me and anyone else willing to lend a hand. Dad intended to establish a small subsistence farm there, thus returning to the rural roots of his boyhood, a halcyon life that had been beckoning to him for years. He also intended to experiment on the farm with a number of alternative energy methods, such as solar and wind power, and power from methane obtained from chicken droppings. Years later, these experiments would become famous as Frank Herbert’s “Ecological Demonstration Project.”

  One day that summer, Mom and Dad were at a laundromat in Fairfax. Our recently acquired tabby cat Punkin strolled in. Assuming he had followed them, they took him home in the car and carried him inside. There they were startled to find Punkin already asleep on the knit rug by the fireplace. Quickly, Dad returned the impostor to the laundromat.

  This became the seed of a new short story, “The Wrong Cat,” which Dad wrote in a few days. The story, while it featured a mix-up between two cats, involved quite a different situation. It was a 7,600-word mystery that Dad wrote under the pseudonym Stuart McCarthy. This name was a combination of my mother’s Stuart family name on her father’s side and Dad’s McCarthy name on his mother’s side. As a member of Mystery Writers of America, Frank Herbert planned to write a number of mysteries under the pseudonym.

  Lurton was not favorably impressed with “The Wrong Cat,” saying the solution to the story was too obvious. He also expressed concern over my father’s recurring problem, story length. It was too long for a mystery short story, and too short for a novelette, the latter being a category of increasing interest to publishers. Still, Lurton did his best to sell it as written. He was unsuccessful.