In Children of Dune, Leto II allowed sandtrout to attach themselves to his body, and 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.
The legendary life of the divine superhero Muad’Dib is based on themes found in a variety of religious faiths. Frank Herbert even used lore and bits of information from the people of the Gobi Desert in Asia, the Kalahari Desert in Southwest Africa, and the aborigines of the Australian Outback. For centuries such people have survived on very small amounts of water, in environments where water is a more precious resource than gold.
The Butlerian Jihad, occurring ten thousand years before the events described in Dune was a war against thinking machines who at one time had cruelly enslaved humans. For this reason, computers were eventually made illegal by humans, as decreed in the Orange Catholic Bible: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” The roots of the jihad went back to individuals my parents knew, to my mother’s grandfather Cooper Landis and to our family friend Ralph Slattery, both of whom abhorred machines.
Still, there are computers in the Dune universe, long after the jihad. As the series unfolds, it is revealed that the Bene Gesserits have secret computers to keep track of their breeding records. And the Mentats of Dune, capable of supreme logic, are “human computers.” In large part these human calculators were based upon my father’s paternal grandmother, Mary Stanley, an illiterate Kentucky hill-woman who performed incredible mathematical calculations in her head. Mentats were the precursors of Star Trek’s Spock, First Officer of the starship Enterprise … and Frank Herbert described the dangers of thinking machines back in the 1960s, years before Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movies.
Remarkably, no aliens inhabit the Dune universe. Even the most exotic of creatures, the mutant Guild Navigators, are humans. So are the vile genetic wizards, the Tleilaxu, and the gholas grown in their flesh vats. Among the most unusual humans to spring from Frank Herbert’s imagination, the women of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood have a collective memory—a concept based largely upon the writings and teachings of Carl Gustav Jung, who spoke of a “collective unconscious,” that supposedly inborn set of “contents and modes of behavior” possessed by all human beings. These were concepts my father discussed at length with Ralph Slattery’s wife Irene, a psychologist who had studied with Jung in Switzerland in the 1930s.
Frank Herbert’s life reached a crescendo in the years after 1957, when he focused his unusual experiences and knowledge on creating his great novel. In the massive piles of books he read to research Dune, he recalled reading somewhere that ecology was the science of understanding consequences. This was not his original concept, but as he learned from Ezra Pound, he “made it new” and put it in a form that was palatable to millions of people. With a worldview similar to that of an American Indian, Dad saw western man inflicting himself on the environment, not living in harmony with it.
Despite all the work Dune required, my father said it was his favorite book to write. He used what he called a “technique of enormous detail,” in which he studied and prepared notes over a four year period, between 1957 and 1961, then wrote and rewrote the book between 1961 and 1965.
As Dad expanded and contracted the manuscript, depending upon which editor was giving him advice, an error found its way into the final manuscript. The age of Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV is slightly inconsistent in the novel, but it is one of the few glitches in the entire Dune series. This is remarkable, considering the fact that Frank Herbert wrote the books on typewriters … more than a million words without the use of a computer to keep all of the information straight.
Late in 1961, in the midst of his monumental effort, Dad fired his literary agent Lurton Blassingame, because he didn’t feel the agent was supportive enough and because he couldn’t bear the thought of sending any more stories into the New York publishing industry, which had been rejecting him for years. A couple of years later, when the new novel was nearly complete, he got back together with Blassingame and went through the ordeal of rejection after rejection—more than twenty of them—until Chilton finally picked up the book and paid an advance of $7,500 for it. If not for a farsighted editor at Chilton, Sterling Lanier, Dune might never have been published, and world literature would be the poorer for it.
When my father and I became close in my adulthood and we began to write together, he spoke to me often of the importance of detail, of density of writing. A student of psychology, he understood the subconscious, and liked to say that Dune could be read on any of several layers that were nested beneath the adventure story of a messiah on a desert planet. Ecology is the most obvious layer, but alongside that are politics, religion, philosophy, history, human evolution, and even poetry. Duneis a marvelous tapestry of words, sounds, and images. Sometimes he wrote passages in poetry first, which he expanded and converted to prose, forming sentences that included elements of the original poems.
Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel’s layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again. A neat trick, and he pulled it off perfectly.
As his eldest son, I see familial influences in the story. Earlier, I noted that my mother is memorialized in Dune and so is Dad. He must have been thinking of himself when he wrote that Duke Leto’s “qualities as a father have long been overlooked.” The words have deep significance to me, because at the time he and I were not getting along well at all. I was going through a rebellious teenage phase, reacting to the uncompromising manner in which he ruled the household.
At the beginning of Dune, Paul Atreides is fifteen years old, around the same age I was at the time the book was first serialized in Analog. I do not see myself much in the characterization of Paul, but I do see Dad in Paul’s father, the noble Duke Leto Atreides. In one passage, Frank Herbert wrote: “Yet many facts open the way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he held for his son …” Late in his life, Dad responded to interview questions about my own writing career by saying, “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak tree.” He often complimented me to others, more than he did to me directly. To most of his friends he seemed like an extrovert, but in family matters he was often quite the opposite, preferring to retire to his study. Frequently, his strongest emotions went on the page, so I often feel him speaking to me as I read his stories.
Once, I asked my father if he thought his magnum opus would endure. He said modestly that he didn’t know and that the only valid literary critic was time. Now it has been forty years since Dune was published in hardcover, and Frank Herbert would be pleased to know that interest in his fantastic novel, and the series it spawned, has never waned. An entire new generation of readers is picking up Dune and enjoying it, just as their parents did before them.
Like our own universe, the universe of Dune continues to expand. Frank Herbert wrote six novels in the series, and I have written six more in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson. Kevin and I have four more Dune books under contract, including the chronological grand finale that millions of fans have been awaiting, Dune 7. Frank Herbert was working on that project when he died in 1986, and it would have been the third book in a trilogy that he began with Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune. In those novels he set up a great mystery, and now, almost two decades after his death, the solution is the most closely guarded secret in science fiction.
By the time we complete those stories, there will be sixteen Dune novels, along with the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch and two television miniseries—“Frank Herbert’s Dune” and “Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune”—both produced by Richard Rubinstein. W
e envision other projects in the future, but all of them must measure up to the lofty standard that my father established with his own novels. When all of the good stories have been told, the series will end. But that will not really be a conclusion, because we can always go back to Dune itself and read it again and again.
Brian Herbert
Seattle, Washington
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