by IGMS
[Looks to audience.] Yes, he really did.
Then when I sold my very first novel I decided that I wanted to send the very first copy of my very first published novel to Frank Herbert. By selling the book to Signet Books, I was able to get the Science Fiction Writers of America membership directory, so I had Frank's home address. I had planned on doing this to thank him for everything that he did, but between the time the book was accepted and it was published, Frank Herbert passed away. So I never managed to get in touch with him and I never managed to meet him. But I managed to have a relatively successful career of writing my own fiction. I was nominated for a bunch of awards, and then I started working for Lucasfilm and The X-Files. Finally I got to the point where Brian was going to edit -- with Ed Kramer, the man who runs DragonCon -- an anthology of Dune short stories. I was one of the people invited to do it. But as a Dune fan, I wanted to know how the Dune saga ended. After Chapterhouse Dune, Frank Herbert just left this cliffhanger. When this idea came up, I just thought, All he can do is say no. It was pretty much a shot in the dark. I wrote a letter describing how much my interest was in Frank Herbert, my passion for the Dune universe, and I asked if Brian was ever going to finish the series himself, or if he had plans to work with somebody else, or if he would be willing to work with me. He kind of sat on my letter for a month or so, and then he called me out of the blue.
As Darrell can tell you, most science fiction people know each other. I already know most of the writers. We know most of the big fans, but I had never met Brian. He was an enigma to me. He was the son of my literary hero. And he called me up out of the blue and we started talking. Like I said, I've read everything Frank Herbert wrote. Brian's read everything Frank Herbert wrote, and within like three minutes - my wife was in the room and she said, "You guys just started speaking a different language." We were riffing off of each other and talking about nuances in Whipping Star or The Heaven Makers, or obscure Frank Herbert books, and finishing each other's sentences. We just clicked right away.
HERBERT: Sort of like a jazz performance.
ANDERSON: Yeah. Like a jazz performance. We were just going from there. I flew up to Seattle to spend some time with him. My wife and I went up, and we were brainstorming, and we off and running. We had climbed up on the wild Shai-Halud and we were running off.
HERBERT: I tried to dig up some dirt on Kevin before I called him, and I couldn't find any. Just the other day I met Bob Salvatore for the first time, and Bob said I should have called him. [Laughs.]
ANDERSON: I spread around bigger bribes.
SCHWEITZER: Brian, I notice that the first five or six books you published had nothing whatever to do with Dune.
HERBERT: Well, actually they do.
SCHWEITZER: All of them?
HERBERT: Sidney's Comet, my first novel, was my third book. The first two were humor books. But that is about a world that is too much consumerism and there is no room for garbage, there's no room for bodies and burials, so everything is catapulted into deep space. Garbage is littering the cosmos, but it is all coming back as a garbage comet, to wipe out the planet. So that's kind of an environmental theme, albeit funny. Futurama did something on that. I didn't know anything about it in time to take any legal action. But I think it was a satire. I think they did a half-hour cartoon show on Saturday morning on it.
SCHWEITZER: I can also remember a TV show called Quark, which was about galactic garbage collectors. So there is a garbage mythos in science fiction, if we think all the way back to Garbage World by Charles Platt - but maybe we don't need to.
HERBERT: My Time Web series is also on an environmental theme. I made it bigger than a planet. It's an entire galaxy that's an ecosystem, and there needs to be a galactic expert that can take care of all that. The galaxy is disintegrating and we can't just let it go.
SCHWEITZER: You must be in a position like Alexandre Dumas the Younger, in that in a hundred years people will be confusing your work and your father's.
HERBERT: I doubt that.
SCHWEITZER: Did you feel any need to distance yourself?
HERBERT: That's why I wrote two humor books and lots of satires. But then, in the 1990s I spent five years writing that biography of Dad, while I was doing other publishing projects. So I was on a path to write a Dune book. I knew too much about it not to.
SCHWEITZER: When you take up a series like that, how do you sense where you need to expand as opposed to where it is too much? I might be controversial and suggest that George Lucas was profoundly mistaken to make the second set of three Star Wars movies - the prequels - and should have that part to the imagination, because all we had was a trilogy in which we already knew how things were going to turn out, and a story-arc that involves a cute kid who grows up to be Hitler. It just did not work. So, how do you avoid this problem?
ANDERSON: Did it not work because that was the story, and you had this little kid who was going to grow up to be Hitler, or did it not work because Lucas didn't do it as well as he should have? I would argue that, although it's going to be dark, the concept of this cute little kid, who had everything going for him, whose life goes so tragically wrong that he ends up being the most hated man in the universe, Dark Vader - or Paul Atreides, depending on which one you're talking about - I would say that can be an incredibly compelling story.
One of the books I published a year ago was called The Last Days of Krypton. It's the story of Superman's planet and how it comes to its end. Yes, you know the planet blows up at the end and one little baby gets out, but that doesn't mean that there's no story that you can tell that's interesting. And what we did with the House books was tell the immediate prequels, the love story of Duke Leto and Jessica, the first battles with the Baron, the planetologist being sent to Dune. I think that when you have an immense universe that people care about, and they have characters that they love and want to revisit, we didn't need to have a Romulan ship and Spock coming back to reset the timeline to make it interesting. I loved that movie, but I wanted to go back and just see young Kirk and Spock. I didn't need to have any reason to go back.
HERBERT: We actually can see an end of the series as far as the major novels go. But with the House series, we are staying right on the Frank Herbert timeline. We found a chapter that Dad had written that he didn't include in Dune. It would be back-story of when Duke Leto and Lady Jessica met. Well, Kevin and I found that deleted chapter and we put it into House Harkonnen. So we have really stayed on course on Dad's story. We have two more under contract and then we have three more after that. All of them either go back to the history of the founding of the great schools, or other stories that Frank Herbert laid out, either in his notes or in his appendices, or just comments that he made. For example, in one of his sequels, he said that Tio Holtzman, a man, was not the one who invented the foldspace engine. Instead, it was a woman, Norma Cenva. So, since we knew that there strong women in the series, in the Butlerian Jihad series we developed Norma Cenva as the founder of the spacing guild, and all that.
Lady Jessica, by the way, is modeled after my mother, Beverly Herbert. So the strong female characters that you see in the series - there's a lot of expansion you can do there, and it is exactly what Frank Herbert wanted.
SCHWEITZER: At what point do you feel free to invent rather than follow his notes?
HERBERT: He had an appendix describing in outline form the Butlerian Jihad and he said that Abulurd Harkonnen had been a coward 10,000 years before. I thought that was interesting, but what we did was go back to that period, and all we had was a name like that and a couple of other names, and then we added all the other framework. But that was the time about which Frank Herbert had said that thinking machines had ruled mankind and we rose up in this great jihad. Well, Frank Herbert had been a reporter, and he was flipping over the myth that smiling robots are going to make our lives easier and save time. So I don't think we are inventing things. We are really explaining them. Dad had spent twenty years trying to explain why Paul Atreide
s went dark in Dune Messiah. We did it in a novel, Paul of Dune.
ANDERSON: So Frank Herbert gave us the road map, but we're doing the cross-country road trip. We can stop and see things along the way and explore little side-roads, but we know the main structure of the road system.
SCHWEITZER: But he's always there as the third collaborator.
HERBERT: Absolutely. I hear his voice when I'm writing.
SCHWEITZER: You said you see an end. Are you going to stop, or just go in another direction after that? You've got a whole galaxy full of people and all these minor characters. It could go on indefinitely.
HERBERT: But it won't, at least not in the big door-stopper novels like Kevin and I write. Our next book after this one will be in two years. We are alternating years now. It will be The Throne of Dune, where Shaddam Corrino comes back and tries to retake the throne. Then there will be Leto of Dune or maybe The Golden Path of Dune. It will be the first years of the God Emperor. After that, maybe three novels about the founding of the great schools, thousands of years before Dune. That would be The Sisterhood of Dune, The Mentats, and The Swordmasters. Beyond that, there are other stories, but we don't see them as major novels. Maybe some graphic novels that aren't dumbed down. You know, you have to keep up the intellectual level of the series.
ANDERSON: That's the real answer. On every one of these books that we do, while are names are on the cover, the biggest word on the cover is 'Dune.' There's a certain brand identity, that people expect something when it says Dune on the cover. You don't want to do, like, The Paperclips of Dune. It shouldn't be a little off-the-cuff adventure or small book. It needs to have the gravitas that a Dune book has. If we can't come up with stories that have that much to them, then it doesn't belong in the series.
SCHWEITZER: You don't want to turn out the soap opera version, which would be called As the Worm Turns.
ANDERSON: Or the musical comedy with dancing sandworms.
SCHWEITZER: Or the horror version, Charnel House Dune.
HERBERT: Well how about Gunga Dune?
[Rising laughter from the audience.]
HERBERT: Are we Dune yet?
ANDERSON: We just want to make sure that we don't water down Dune.
HERBERT: That would destroy the ecosystem.
SCHWEITZER: At this point I think we've gotten silly enough that we should turn for sensible guidance to the audience.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I remember reading that Frank was a lay psychoanalyst. Toward the end of the sixth book - you said he was writing the seventh?
HERBERT: He had started to make notes on it that I didn't know existed. I saw him using yellow highlighter, and it turned out eleven years later that there were notes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Towards the end of the series, when Duncan Idaho - not the real one, but the ghola - has a quasi-fight with a reverend mother, and then I'll skip ahead to where they are taking off, and there are all these pictures, American Gothic and other masterpieces, and then there's this pregnant woman - did your father explain any of that in the notes, where he was going with that? Was he going to go in to the reverend mothers more?
HERBERT: The estate of Frank Herbert was still open in 1997, even though he had died in 1986. My mother had died in 1984 and her estate was still open. It was very complicated, and an estate attorney named Walt Tabler called me and said there were two safe-deposit boxes, so what did I want to do of them? I had been an insurance agent for years and I always told my dad to keep copies of important manuscripts and documents off-premises in case there is a fire. Well, I didn't know he did it. So we went down there, and an estate attorney named Jan Cunningham had a yellow legal pad and started writing everything down. We had to break into the boxes legally. We had no keys. We found country and western lyrics. Dad had written some songs. That would be good, huh? We found some recipes, some letters, and a Tandy Radio Shack floppy disk that said "Dune 7 Notes." For the nay-sayers, I actually put that up on our website. We actually had an NSA security guy check to make sure there was nothing else on there except what we found with it, which was a thirty-page printout. It was the arc of the story, of the plot. It was various character analyses, and various focal points of what he thought were important. So that's what we wrote.
But Kevin and I had written the Butlerian Jihad series and the House series, so what Frank Herbert had envisioned in one novel, Kevin and I couldn't do in one novel. So we did it in two novels, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune.
ANDERSON: So that's what answers all those Chapterhouse questions. It picks up right after that. If you will notice in the later books that Frank Herbert wrote, when you read Dune it's this big adventure story and it's got all kinds of great things in it, but it has all these other layers; but as he got to other books, he got more interested in other things. The later books are a little more didactic. They're a little more dense and political. Frank wanted to talk about these issues that were interesting to him. So he would just fast-forward past things. In fact in The Heretics of Dune, when the Honored Matres wipe out the planet Dune; they turn it into a charred ball; he does that between chapters. He doesn't even show it. The ships are closing in and they are powering up their weapons, and then in the next chapter there are a couple people sitting around in a garden talking about what a shame it is that Dune was destroyed. So when Brian and I started writing his outline of Dune 7, well, we like to blow up planets and destroy things, so we wanted to flesh out and show all the action that Frank Herbert just alluded to, because he wanted to speed ahead and get to the next concept he wanted to talk about.
HERBERT: It was sort of jumping from Dune to Dune Messiah. In the meantime hundreds of billions of people are killed, but he starts Dune Messiah off by saying that it happened.
ANDERSON: But we like the gaps, because they give us novels to write.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: Can you speak a little bit about your collaboration and how you write?
HERBERT: To sell the first three books, the House series, Kevin and I talked for four months, and then he flew to Seattle, and we brainstormed in May of 1997. We produced a 140-page book proposal. Normally when you well a proposal you're going to have, like eight pages, and maybe a chapter or two that you send in to the publisher. We sent in this huge thing, because we had so much energy surrounding the project. So we come up with very big proposals for each of the trilogies that we put together, or other sets of books, and then, once we have sold the project to a publisher, Kevin and I will brainstorm again, and we will divide it up into, say, 100 chapters. Kevin will take fifty based on his strengths, and I will take fifty based on mine. He has a physics degree. He worked at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. I am a sociology guy with a degree from Cal. Berkeley, so I'll do the philosophy, the sociology, the Bene Gesserit type things.
Then we start rewriting each other's chapters, so Kevin, for example, would send me all his fifty, and I will go through all hundred chapters and start adding philosophy to his action, that kind of thing. Then he'll do the reverse when he gets it, in the next draft. It goes through about ten drafts.
ANDERSON: But we do it all on the computer, so I never see what he's marked and changed in my chapters, and he never sees what I've marked. That's what a collaboration's all about. You check the ego at the door. I trust whatever he's going to do to my prose and he trusts whatever I'm going to do. We go back and forth and back and forth so that what emerges in book form has been gone over so it has a unified voice that we think is better than either of us could have done individually.
HERBERT: But Kevin and I have collaborated before, and I have collaborated with my cousin Marie Landis to write a couple of horror novels. She and I just wrote odd and even chapters. It probably wasn't the best way to do it, but it turned out great. We had a lot of fun. But with Dad he was always so busy, that I collaborated on the last novel that Frank Herbert wrote, called Man of Two Worlds. I gave him the book proposal as a very serious novel. I had written a lot of satires before that. Then Dad was so busy that I
spent thirteen months writing the entire first draft. Then Dad took it for six or seven months and added a lot of the humor to it. So people think that humor is mine, but it actually isn't. It was Dad's. But the situation was different with Frank Herbert. He was so busy that we had to just block out some time that he had to work on it. With Kevin and me, I think we have the ideal way to do it.
ANDERSON: It depends on how your partnership works. This works for Brian and myself. Especially in science fiction, there's a lot more collaboration than you would ordinarily see in - I don't know - mystery historical novels. But in science fiction, a lot of writers like to hang out and brainstorm.
HERBERT: Well, Niven and Pournelle have done very well.
SCHWEITZER: Are you the kind of writers who can talk about a story at great length before you write it, or, if you talk about it too much is there danger of losing it? There seem to be two schools of thought on this.
ANDERSON: We are definitely of the same school of thought, especially because we are collaborating. These are very complex and intricate books, and each one of them has six or seven main storylines and main characters going back and forth, that we feel that if we just started off without working it out together, it would be like trying to build a grand skyscraper without bothering to do a blueprint first. We really want to map it out in great detail, so I know what he's doing in his chapter and he knows what I am doing in my chapter. But in no way does that stifle the creativity, because we've spent days doing the creative stuff, and drawing up the blueprint. We feel that designing the architecture is the creative part, not putting the bricks down.