Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  1. Herbert, Frank. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  3. Science fiction—Authorship. 4. Dune (Imaginary place). I. Title.

  PS3558.E63 Z68 2003

  813’.54—dc21

  [B]

  2002042951

  *The surname—Herbert—was not adopted until Otto’s parents entered the United States. The original family name has been lost.

  *This time they were using shovels. On other occasions, young Frank dug for geoducks—large, burrowing clams—with a crowbar, which he could use to get under the creature more quickly and pop it out of the sand.

  *For years, and ultimately into adulthood my father was referred to as “Junior” (Frank Herbert, Jr.) by family members who knew both Franks—a moniker the younger loathed.

  *Colonel Kenneth Rowntree, Sr., was a commanding officer of Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington, during World War II. He also wrote an artillery handbook that was used for years as a textbook at West Point.

  *The comment was also reminiscent of the poetry of Ezra Pound, which my father read voraciously:

  And life slips by like a field mouse

  Not shaking the grass.

  *This date is based upon the marriage certificate. In the dedication to Chapterhouse: Dune, the date was shown incorrectly as June 20, 1946.

  **For years afterward, whenever Howie said to someone, “I was best man at Frank’s wedding,” my father would quip, “He was the second best man. I was the best man!”

  *They never completed the book or published any part of it.

  *A decade later he would also meet the Zen master Alan Watts. Zen was an ideal adjunct to the Slatterys’ studies of Freud and Jung, where unconscious behavior was emphasized. In analyzing patients, the Slatterys paid close attention to mannerisms, what came to be called “body language.” The Zen influence permeates the Dune novels.

  *Maurine Neuberger was also one of the first politicians to oppose the tobacco industry, and became only the third woman elected to the U.S. Senate herself.

  *The junk mail trick continued for a number of years after that, until one day Dad saw a royalty check in the fireplace with flames curling around it. He didn’t get to it in time, and had to request reissuance of the check. In ensuing years he always cursed the arrival of junk mail.

  *Campbell’s 1938 story “Who Goes There?” had been turned into a film in 1951, The Thing. The film had one of the most campy promotional lines of all time: “A monster so horrible it doesn’t even have a name…The Thing!” It was remade by John Carpenter in 1982.

  *Charles F. Kettering, a General Motors research executive.

  *The case of Joseph A. Daugherty, who stabbed his wife seven times and subsequently pled insanity, saying that this had to do with the seven sacraments of the Bible, and that Christ had put the knife in his hands to kill. Ralph Slattery was called as an expert witness, and testified that Daugherty was insane. The jury ruled otherwise, and convicted Daugherty of first-degree murder. He was executed at San Quentin in 1954.

  *Grosero: rough and course.

  *Refrescos: cold drinks.

  *In ensuing years, my father would do more research, including a visit to an agricultural research station in Oregon that was studying the control of sand dunes, which are an extreme state of erosion. His understanding of the importance of grass and other plantings in inhibiting soil erosion would one day form an integral part of the ecology of Dune.

  *Frank Herbert told me that he invented containerized shipping in Dragon, which was later made commercially successful by the Japanese. A number of other commercial ventures have been undertaken based upon this idea, including one by an English company, Dracon, utilizing subtugs that were very similar to the novel. Also, General Dynamics came out with a “submarine tanker,” a fully contained sub designed to transport oil from the arctic under the ice to ice-free ports in Greenland or Newfoundland. And Gianfranco Germani, an Italian, recently constructed giant bladders to transport fresh water from watersheds to parched regions of the earth.

  *A rumor began to circulate in the 1960s that The Dragon in the Sea tied with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies for the 1955 International Fantasy Award. This was inaccurate. For many years my parents even believed Dragon had shared the award, and it was reported incorrectly that Frank Herbert was the only writer ever to win all three major science fiction awards, the Nebula, the Hugo, and the International Fantasy Award.

  *On her mother’s side she was a Landis, descending from Swiss Mennonites. On her father’s side she was a Stuart, said to be a descendant of Scottish royalty.

  *A later version, written in 1965, also didn’t sell. In the second version, there were not only web-footed mermen, but shark goddesses as well.

  **The “boob tube” or “Cyclops,” as Dad called it at various times, arrived in our household amidst all sorts of dire warnings from him about how it would harm our bodies (by emitting X-rays within six feet of it) and our minds (through idiot programming and the devious, subliminal messages of advertisers). In The Santaroga Barrier (1968) he would make a scathing attack upon television, implying that people who watched too much of it had their mental faculties sucked away. In describing the town of Santaroga, which differed from normal American society, he wrote: “Dasein grew aware of an absence…about the houses he saw: No television flicker, no cathode living rooms, no walls washed to skim-milk gray by the omnipresent tube.”

  *Two decades later, Frank Herbert would write in Chapterhouse: Dune: “Some precious stones could be identified by their impurities. Experts mapped impurities within the stones. A secret fingerprint. People were like that. You often knew them by their defects. The glittering surface told you too little. Good identification required you to look deep inside and see the impurities. There was the gem quality of a total being. What would Van Gogh have been without impurities?”

  *John Campbell favored stories that dealt with ESP. In the Dune material, Paul could see sporadically into the future, while his sister, Alia, could see into the past.

  *Remarkably, Frank Herbert had an even bigger story in mind, and in the writing of Dune World, Muad’Dib and The Prophet he wrote large sections of material for two additional books, making a total of five. In fact he did have the makings of a trilogy, but the form it would take was substantially different from his initial proposal. The first three books would be combined into one novel, Dune (1965), while the latter two would ultimately form portions of the novels Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976).

  *In the sequel to Dune, Dune Messiah, Paul continues in the classic pattern of a hero, when: (h) for a time he reigns uneventfully, and (i) prescribes laws, but (j) later he loses favor and (k) he meets with a mysterious death and (l) his body is not buried.

  *Stirling Lanier wrote the novels Hero’s Journey and Under Marswood.

  *Because of work pressures, Jack and Poul couldn’t get to the project, and a few years later Dad wrote it himself under the title “The Primitives.” (Galaxy, April 1966).

  **There is a Creole French counterpart, “lagniappe,” sounding very similar since both are from a Latin root. What a wonderful concept this is. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone followed it in all their relationships!

  *The “Greenslaves” title had historical significance in our family, since our reputed ancestor King Henry VIII was said to have composed the classic song “Greensleeves.”

  *As noted by Levack and Willard in Dune Master: A Frank Herbert Bibliography, the first edition “States ‘First Edition’ on the copyright page. No date on the title page…The fifth and later printings all state ‘First Edition’ without further printing statements…”

  *One evening I was hitchhiking near Carmel, California. A young couple in a Volkswagen bug gave me a ride. They asked me what my Dad did for a living, and I replied that he was a newspaperman and had also written a couple of science fiction books. “Oh?” the man said as he drove. “What has he written?” “Uh, a novel back
in the nineteen fifties and another one more recently…Dune.” “Dune?” the man exclaimed, causing the car to veer as he looked back at me in the shadows of the rear seat. “That’s a great book!” “It is?” I said. Then—unfortunately—I forgot about this incident until years later.

  *This was the story that was based upon the sensational 1952 murder trial in Santa Rosa. It had been written and rewritten several times as we moved up and down the West Coast between the United States and Mexico, with the working titles As Heaven Made Him and Storyship.

  *As discussed in Chapter Fourteen, there are strong Greek influences in Dune. This is continued in the sequel. When the Tleilaxu give the gift of a ghola to Paul it is something of a Trojan horse, for hidden in that gift is the means of Paul’s destruction, an implanted obsession to kill him.

  *The organizer of Earth Day was Ira Einhorn, a charismatic hippie guru who later became the international fugitive and convicted murderer known as “the Unicorn Killer.” Frank Herbert and Einhorn wrote a number of letters to each other.

  *The Herbert family later placed all copies of these recordings into the custody of one of the tribes for spiritual safekeeping.

  *In two years, Frank Herbert would meet the poet Bill Ransom, and they would collaborate to write a series of novels. Bill, who had extensive knowledge of Native American myths and customs, disagreed with Howie. “I think it’s a gutsy ending,” Bill told me in an interview. He went on to say that Katsuk didn’t follow the Quileute way throughout the story anyway, and had in fact become an abomination who was making a mess of Indian rituals. “It’s a tough ending that Americans can’t handle,” Bill said, “…it’s not a Quileute ending but it’s…proper…for what Frank set up. There is no other way out of the (story dilemma) except melodrama.”

  * A The Dragon in the Sea (Doubleday, 1956): Accurately predicted the worldwide petroleum shortage that would occur two decades later.

  (B) Dune (Chilton Books, 1965): Considered an environmental handbook by many, the novel extrapolated existing world conditions in which deserts were encroaching upon arable land, and envisioned an entire planet covered by sand.

  (C) The Green Brain (Ace Books, 1966): Based upon insects that actually developed a resistance to insecticides, such as DDT, Frank Herbert extrapolated and described a society that created a massive and powerful insect intelligence in reaction to human attempts to exterminate them.

  (D) Hellstrom’s Hive (Doubleday, 1973): Extols the benefits of insect society as opposed to human society, including the way insects co-exist better with their environment than humans do.

  *Laetrile was developed in France in 1840, and by the 1970s it was a fad cancer cure, replacing another fad cure of the 1960s, krebiozen. By the 1980s, most medical authorities felt there was no evidence of any anti-cancer properties in laetrile.

  **My mother and father rarely spoke to me of religion when I was living with them. Mom explained this was because religion had been shoved down their throats when they were children, and they did not want to inflict anything like that upon Bruce, Penny, or me. They wanted us to make our own decisions about God, with all choices open to us. Later in her life, Mom would have a change of heart, saying our lack of religious experience gave us nothing to fall back upon during times of extreme difficulty. In her own way, she would one day form a strong relationship with God.

  *The 1982 movie An Officer and a Gentleman was filmed there.

  *Due to the danger of methane explosion, the reader should not attempt to replicate this system.

  *But Bruce was brilliant. In the 1960s, he invented the “karaoke” music system. Without naming it or attempting to exploit it commercially, he simply set it up for personal use in his own household.

  *Frank Herbert, while not formally religious, knew scripture. In Luke 10:37 of the New Testament, Jesus told his followers the story of the good Samaritan, and then said, “Go, and do thou likewise.”

  *Milton Howell had been the attending physician for aviator Charles Lindbergh when Lindbergh died at Hana in 1974. Lindbergh loved this tropical paradise, and it was where he chose to live during the final months of his life.

  *Dad had read a medical report to the effect that complex carbohydrates could reduce the effects of jet lag. For that reason, he and Mom invariably ate pasta after returning home from trips.

  *One of the people he helped, Mom’s friend Frankie Goodwin, said that he taught her to never use the word “very” in anything she wrote. If she ever had the urge to use it, he told her to substitute the word “damn” instead.

  *For years Dad had been on a regimen of twelve to fifteen vitamins daily. Bottles of them were lined up on the bathroom counter. Since vitamin A was retained in the body and he could overdose on it, he took it every other day. And, since vitamin D came from the sun, he took it on alternate days while in Hawaii and daily on the mainland. He said that every person should take a different quantity of vitamin C, and that it had to be taken with vitamin B for best assimilation. He based this on the fact that some people needed sixty milligrams a day to avoid scurvy, while others only needed five milligrams. He said each person could determine his proper amount by loading up on the vitamin until the stool started to loosen—and then backing off a little on the dosage. When vitamin E became popular in the early 1980s, ostensibly for its ability to inhibit the aging process, both of my parents took it. They found an additional property for it as well, which my mother described for me. A gelatin capsule of vitamin E could be opened and spread on a cut, she said, in order to make it heal faster.

  *Victoria Schochet—the wife of noted author Eric Van Lustbader.

  *One evening we were enjoying a sparerib dinner, along with a big bottle of Chianti. Dad told a story about a group of literati gathered in New York City, discussing which foods went with certain wines. Science fiction writer Ben Bova was talking about Chianti, and a pretentious woman asked, aghast, “What food could possibly go with a wine like that?” To this, Bova responded, “Peanut butter.” When the diners thought about it, they realized he was absolutely right. Only one wine, Chianti, had a strong enough flavor to keep from being drowned out by the flavor of peanut butter! My father found the discussion highly amusing.

  *While my father admired the special effects, he had a contractual reason for disputing the use of Edric in the Dune movie, as noted in Chapter 44.

  *New apartment wing, attached to the main house by a covered walkway.

  *In Frank Herbert, William Touponce said that “many strong independent women’s voices” could be heard in Chapterhouse: Dune. This is an indication not only of my father’s grief concerning my mother, who died during the writing of the book, but of his recognition of the contribution she made to the Dune series and to his other writings.

  *I learned later that this plane—a twelve-seat, twin-engine turbojet—had originally been reserved for by Dad in order to fly Mom back to the mainland to see their children and grandchildren. Unfortunately she never felt up to such a trip.

  *In 1985 the prose piece would appear as a testimonial in Chapterhouse: Dune, eliciting an outpouring of supportive letters from fans.

  *Frank Herbert was not the only one of us to report the paranormal influence of my mother after her death. When Margaux was eight years old, she was about to step in front of a truck on a busy street. Suddenly she felt “a gasp of air” that pushed her back onto the sidewalk to safety. No one was near her. Thinking back, however, she recalled seeing a dark-haired woman beside her, just before the incident. Years later, as I was completing this biography, I was contacted by Frankie Goodwin, who had been Mom’s best friend back in the 1940s. Frankie filled in details on the courtship of my parents. Then she added, “I don’t know what made me write to you after all these years.” I smiled and said, “My mother had a hand in this.” As proof, I described a number of events to Frankie, many of which are detailed later in this biography.

  *Actually he had experienced writer’s blocks before, but not since the late 1950s and
early 1960s.

  *In Frank Herbert, William Touponce postulated that Man of Two Worlds “is obviously a send-up of many science-fiction themes—creator figures and races, their responsibilities, and the chance that humankind may be a casual toy.”

  *One of our characters in the story, a Dreen alien named Prosik, had changed the shape of his body for security purposes, taking the form of a snake. Dad wrote a passage in which Prosik, while in that shape, was caught in a sliding door and then run over by a power mower.