The time he spent writing was not always productive. He recalled staying up into the wee hours one night working on a novel, writing what he thought at the time was some of the best material he had ever produced. But when he looked at it the next day, it was so bad he had to throw it all away.
Dad didn’t talk about his secret worlds while they were in development, except to my mother and occasionally to other members of the family. This was a piece of advice given to him in the 1950s by the noted western writer Tommy Thompson, the favorite author of President Eisenhower. “Save your energy for putting words on paper,” Thompson counseled. “You use the same energies talking about a story as you use writing it.” He said young writers often talked their stories to death and never actually wrote them.
My father took this advice to heart, and as he adopted it he rather enjoyed playing a little game with anyone questioning him, rarely letting out the secrets he was conjuring until they were printed. His conservation of energy was an interesting example of the man…almost mirroring a facet of his most famous story, Dune. In his writing he conserved energy as if it were precious water in the desert.
This technique was also an effective psychological ploy used by the writer on himself, as the energies of his story became pent up, needing release. Ultimately ideas exploded through his fingertips to the typing keys to the page.
Frank Herbert believed his creative processes were partly in his fingers, the result of natural processes enhanced by years of training at a typing keyboard. He described it as a kinesthetic link, in which thoughts flowed from his brain through his body to his fingers and onto the paper. He tapped into something in that process, a powerful creative vein, and stories emerged.
Some of his favorite ideas came from examining what he called “our dearly beloved assumptions.” One set of assumptions, found in the Jorj X. McKie stories (The Dosadi Experiment, Whipping Star, and other tales) was that big centralized government structures helped people cope with rapidly growing, bewildering technology and that justice could always be achieved through perfected systems of laws.
His fervent political views provided an endless source of story ideas. He was particularly intrigued by the myths in which we live, by the “unconscious assumptions” we make regularly—assumptions that cause us to behave in predictable ways.
In Children of Dune, he wrote:
These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness….
Myths are not always old, he taught. Mankind is constantly in the process of creating its own. The Camelot of John F. Kennedy was the myth of a better society, in which leisure was king and everything man could desire was obtained effortlessly. It was linked with the long familiar, ever-recurring myth of a heroic young leader, fulfilled in the minds of millions of Americans by the youthful President Kennedy.
Other story ideas of my father’s were extrapolations of present world conditions, a common source for science fiction writers. In the industry, the process is known as “What if?” What if a new form of humans could be created, whose members could pass unnoticed in our society? (Hellstrom’s Hive.) What if mankind could travel instantaneously from one side of the universe to the other? (Whipping Star, Man of Two Worlds, Dune.) What if women dominated a political and/or religious hierarchy? (The God Makers, Dune.)
The setting of Dune was my father’s best-known extrapolation, in which a historical pattern of desert encroachment upon arable land was taken to the extreme, creating a world entirely covered by sand. In his 1959 short story “Missing Link,” which later became part of The God Makers, he described “planet-buster” bombs, which were an extrapolation of city-buster atomic weapons then available. In The Dragon in the Sea, historical oil shortages were extrapolated, and he postulated technology that might exist in a world where oil was far more precious than it was today.
There are many themes in the stories of Frank Herbert. Frequently he wrote about politics, religion, philosophy, water and water worlds, ecology, machines, genetics and myths. I found a number of subthemes or motifs particularly interesting as well, since he employed them as plot vehicles.
He went to the well many times with stories of investigators traveling to far-off lands or strange places to unravel mysterious events, not unlike an investigative reporter going out to do a story. His variations were highly creative and interesting, and show how he successfully accomplished the Ezra Pound adage, “Make it new.”
Dad’s first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, employs this motif. Ensign John Ramsey is assigned to the subtug Fenian Ram on a dangerous wartime mission to determine why crews on prior missions have not been able to endure psychological stresses. It is suspected that an enemy “sleeper agent” may be aboard as a saboteur, and it is Ramsey’s duty to find out for certain.
Perhaps my father’s most memorable use of the investigator technique in a novel occurred in The Santaroga Barrier. A supermarket chain has not been successful in expanding to the insular town of Santaroga, and sends a university psychologist, Gilbert Dasein, to find out why. Prior investigators sent to the town have met with unfortunate “accidents.” Dasein becomes immersed in the affairs of the town and comes to empathize with the reasons the townspeople don’t want his company’s supermarkets. Still, he feels a strong obligation to his employer—and thus we have the seeds of conflict within the protagonist.
In The God Makers, a galactic empire is trying to reassemble itself after a series of terrible “Rim Wars.” The story’s protagonist, Lewis Orne, is charged with investigating various planets to ensure that all is peaceful and that no seeds of warfare are germinating anywhere. One of his investigative missions, the climactic one, involves a trip he must take for his own sake, to the priest planet of Amel.
Hellstrom’s Hive concerns a mysterious underground hive of humans that is being investigated by a government agent. The hive, it turns out, is secretly a staging ground for humans who are adapting insect methods to improve the odds of survival of the species. An earlier agent has disappeared on this dangerous assignment.
In The Dosadi Experiment, Jorj X. McKie is sent to investigate a secret psychological experiment in which the population of an entire planet is confined—an experiment that threatens to harm the whole galaxy.
Other Frank Herbert short stories and novels involve the investigator motif, sometimes involving colonization, exploration and experiments away from Earth—all used as plot vehicles. In Destination: Void, scientists are trying to develop an artificial intelligence, but due to failures and deaths in prior experiments they plan to perform future experiments away from Earth, on the distant planet Tau Ceti. The experiments are highly secret, and are concealed in an apparent colonization mission to Tau Ceti.
The colonization plot is closely allied with another recurring motif in my father’s work—survival and adaptation to difficult circumstances. This is the subject of his early short stories, “Survival of the Cunning” and “The Jonah and the Jap,” as well as of the novel Dune, where the planet is covered with sand and the most precious commodities are water and a mysterious spice-drug, melange, found only on Dune. Expressing his philosophy about the necessity for adaptation, Dad wrote that this drug is “like life—it presents a different face each time you take it.”
In The Dragon in the Sea, Captain Sparrow’s definition of sanity is “The ability to swim…the sane person has to understand currents, has to know what’s required in different waters…Insanity is something like drowning. You go under, you flounder without direction…” In Dune, this variation appears as a Bene Gesserit axiom: “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
Hellstrom’s Hive is about species adaptation a
nd survival—about whether mankind might survive longer on Earth by utilizing insect methods.
In Destination: Void, a complex ship’s computer (Organic Mental Core) fails entirely while the ship is in deep space, stranding three thousand passengers. To avoid certain death, the occupants must come up with a method of performing mind-boggling calculations previously done by the computer.
There are inhospitable planets in a number of stories, where characters must adapt to new and dangerous conditions. These include the desert planet Arrakis (Dune) of the Dune series, the water world Pandora of The Jesus Incident and two sequels, and the overcrowded war-torn world Dosadi of The Dosadi Experiment.
He wrote often of beings with godlike powers, entities that took on differing forms. In God Emperor of Dune, the entity was part sandworm, part human, with a Frank Herbertlike mind containing a vast storehouse of knowledge. In Destination: Void and The Jesus Incident, the entity was a supercomputer. In Whipping Star, it was a celestial body, a star. In The God Makers and Dune, the gods were in human form.
Sometimes story ideas came to my father in dreams, or as he lay in bed half-awake. These would be scribbled on a notepad by his bed. He called them his “dream notes.” One night he came up with the most remarkable story idea of his entire life, even better than Dune. Upon awaking in darkness, he flipped on the lamp by his bed and scribbled the story idea down, intending to work on it the following day. When he awoke the next morning, he read the notepad. It said only, “Great idea for a story!”
When I began writing novels, my father told me rather ominously that editors made decisions about stories based upon the first three pages. “If you don’t hook them by that time, they’ll probably toss it.” A powerful narrative hook is essential in the beginning of the story, he said. Sometimes Dad placed his narrative hook in an epigram preceding the text of the story, and sometimes it was enmeshed into the early action of the tale. But always it was there.
He taught me how to ground a reader quickly and solidly, much in the fashion of a newspaper story, and how to coax the reader to delve further into the tale. As with so many facets of writing, it was a balancing act, he said, as the writer doesn’t want to overwhelm his reader with too much information too soon…like turning on a fire hose.
Dad liked to end scenes and chapters on a note of suspense, and did this to keep the reader turning the pages, to maintain his interest. This was Frank Herbert’s definition of plot: “Stringing words together to make a reader want to read the next line.” He put his characters under mounting tension in a story, pressure situations where they had to improvise and adapt in order to survive. Mirroring real life, his story-people were constantly presented with surprise situations, wild-card events. In Destination: Void, each leading character had what he called “a dominant psychological role” to perform, based upon Jungian archetypes. This squared the characters off against one another, and made the predicaments in which they were placed more challenging and suspenseful than they might normally have been.
After examining one of my early attempts at novel-writing, Dad looked at me and said, “I can’t see what you’re trying to describe. It’s not coming alive for me.” The answer lay in providing more details, he said, but only the right kind of details. During a writing session on Sidney’s Comet, he was wading through a number of my passages in which I described characters getting up, sitting down, walking around, moving their heads and the like. “Too much business here,” he said, using a ballpoint pen to line things out. Another time he said, “Cut, cut and cut again.”
While working on Sidney’s Comet, I had a scene that wasn’t going anywhere, and I telephoned Dad to ask for advice. After describing the situation to him, he said I had a plot problem, and that I should go back and examine closely the motivations of my characters. “That’s how I always free a story,” he said. I tried it, and to my excitement it worked.
Another time I was having trouble making my dialogue sound realistic. Dad said it would help me to listen in on conversations in restaurants and other public places. “I’ve always been a shameless eavesdropper,” he confided, a phrase that he repeated at writing workshops. He also suggested that writers speak their dialogue aloud, to make it flow more smoothly.
My father taught me a great deal about his craft, and sometimes as I write now, many years after our earliest and most basic writing sessions, I hear him speaking to me, counseling me in ways that I might improve my work.
Chapter 27
We Used to Visit Them All the Time
AT XANADU in July of 1980, Dad sat in the living room with Jan and me, drinking coffee and talking about art. Jan had recently been accepted into the interior design program at the prestigious Cornish Institute in Seattle, and I had just received my second book contract, for Incredible Insurance Claims. He said if I kept working at it, I would eventually be a published novelist.
“Now that you’re both getting into artistic endeavors,” my father said, “you’ll experience more exaggerated highs and lows than most people have. You’ll need to lean on one another for support during the low times, and when you succeed, the good times will be all the sweeter.”
He gave us other advice, and said that Jan and I would become best friends through an understanding of one another’s work. Then he looked over at Mom, who was needlepointing a pillow. “There’s my best friend,” he said.
Director Ridley Scott was in the early production phases on the Dune movie, operating from an office at Pinewood Studios in London. He had retained the services of the noted production designer H. R. Giger (who had worked with him on the 1979 science fiction film Alien), to make drawings and storyboards. Scott had also conducted an exhaustive search for a screenplay writer capable of handling Dune, and after many interviews had settled upon Rudolph Wurlitzer.
Other movie people were interested in Soul Catcher, with two rival groups looking at the screenplay. One production company was headed by Robert Redford, the other by Marlon Brando and Henry Fonda. Dad expected a call at any moment from Redford.
My mother and I stayed up talking that evening after Dad went to bed, and she told me that Hana, the town nearest their new home, was named after a Japanese word for flower. A very spiritual place, it was inhabited by native Hawaiians who seemed locked into a bygone time, with a slower, less hectic pace of life. I understood this, but expressed a great deal of sadness to her about the move.
The following day Dad called me at home. He said he’d been talking with Mom, and they had decided to keep the Port Townsend house now, with the place at Kawaloa and a third home—an apartment in Paris or London.
In ensuing weeks, Robert Redford called my father to ask about acquiring the option to film Soul Catcher. Dad referred him to Ned Brown in Beverly Hills, his movie agent. “Redford is the buyer,” my father said, “and I make it a practice never to negotiate directly with buyers. That’s what I hire agents for.”
On a Saturday later that month Jan and I pulled onto the gravel driveway in front of my parents’ house at shortly before 6:00 P.M. The children were not with us. I noticed an ominous presence on one side of the parking area—a large trans-ocean shipping container. From telephone conversations, I knew it was almost full and would be picked up in a few days.
In the house later that evening, we spoke of many things. I noticed the final draft of Sandworm of Dune open to page 516 beside my mother’s chair, near the conclusion of the just-completed manuscript. Dad said it was a totally new type of love story, unlike anything ever written before.
Just before ten o’clock Dad bid us good night at his usual time, so that he could rise early the next morning and write. He kissed Mom and whispered something in her ear, which caused her to smile. As he shuffled off to bed he yawned, simultaneously making a drawn-out, mid-range tone that was punctuated with a high pitched “yow” at the end. He entered the master bedroom and closed the door behind him.
On Sunday morning Jan and I were intending to leave after breakfast, because
of long ferry lines in the summer. The worst times were Sunday evenings, when many people returned to Seattle from weekends on the Olympic Peninsula. When I got up, Jan told me she’d been out on the deck with my parents, looking over the pond and the trees, and Dad said he wanted us to stay for dinner. It might be our last moments together in Xanadu for a long time.
We told them we would stay, and my father generously set out a very special bottle of 1970 Chateau Mouton Baron Philippe Pauillac, a Bordeaux red.
Robert Redford would be in Port Townsend on July 21, Dad said, for a “very secret” meeting with him. He didn’t elaborate and seemed hesitant to discuss whatever was in the wind. I only knew it had something to do with a potential Soul Catcher movie.
Dad had just reached agreement with Berkley Books for a huge advance on the paperback rights for the fifth Dune book, to be entitled Heretics of Dune. It was scheduled for completion in 1981. The title of the fourth, soon-to-be released book was now God Emperor of Dune instead of Sandworm of Dune.
Under the terms of the Heretics sale, payments were to be stretched over a number of years. Mom was feeling the financial pinch of everything they were trying to do, and she mentioned a much-needed royalty check that arrived ahead of its due date in recent days, for French sales of Dune. “Just when we need money, it seems to arrive,” she said.
It was a warm day, and we all went swimming in the pool. Mom did two-thirds of a lap underwater, while Dad remained alert, ready to help her at any moment. When it was nearly time for dinner, he got the kamado (a Japanese barbecue) going, and cooked steaks, which we enjoyed with the Pauillac wine at a picnic table on the patio.
Dad told a funny story about two Irishmen who met two Mexican girls in Scandinavia. Then he asked me how I was coming on the rewrite of Sidney’s Comet. I told him I was around 190 pages into it, and I didn’t think I could complete it before they left for Hawaii later in the month.
Dreamer of Dune Page 33