IGMS Issue 14

by IGMS

  HERBERT: Dad and I would talk about it without taking notes. I know he did that with Bill Ransom, too, on the collaborations he did with Bill. At some point somebody said, "We'd better get this written down, before we forget it."

  ANDERSON: I find that it really energizes me to do brainstorming with Brian. It doesn't make me tired of the project at all. It makes me all fired up because I'll come up with this really good idea, and then he'll give something that makes it take a left turn and becomes a really great idea. That's how you just add to each other. It only gets better.

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: I wonder if you could tell me something about the linguistic aspects of your dad's work. I was introduced to it on a rainy weekend in Cape Cod, never having heard of the Dune series, and I couldn't put it down. One of the things I remember very sharply is the linguistic originality, or borrowings as the case may be.

  HERBERT: There's a poetic beauty to the words that he chose. Sihiya, a desert springtime, and some beautiful words. He based a lot of it on Arabic, at least the Fremen language, but then he would add Navaho and languages from the Gobi Desert. He was just able to absorb a lot of information. He did speak Latin and Spanish. He made up a lot of things. He liked to combine words, combine languages, combine concepts. He said that in the future - I was writing a story once and he said this - you can have a character named Ichuro Munoz. He's got a Japanese first name and a Mexican last name. You don't have to explain it. It's just detritus from the past, the way Dad put it. Look at the religions that he created, Zen Sufi, a combination there. The Orange Catholics. That's the Protestants and the Catholics. And others. Buddislamic. So he wasn't sticking to any one language. He was making things up. But there are actually some real words in there too, as certain experts have pointed out to me. There are some real Navaho words, for example.

  Dad believed that the Native American view of the universe was the better, as opposed to the way we live. So, for example, the character he identified with most was Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen. Dad's very best friend in the world was a Native American. By the way, that Native American said - I have to go to a little bit of a different subject - but Howie was his name. A Norwegian family had adopted him, and he was a full-blooded Native American, and Howie said, "The Frank Herbert that you know would not have existed had it not been for Beverly Herbert." He was there, the Native American best friend, when Dad met my mother at the University of Washington in 1946. That's a little off the question you asked, but that's how it is with answers about Frank Herbert.

  ANDERSON: Let me throw something back at you, when you're talking about the linguistics of Dune. Didn't you once tell me that Dune itself first started as a haiku?

  HERBERT: It was a haiku. Seventeen syllables. Most of the haikus that I've seen are about nature, these Japanese poems. The original haiku has not survived, but it was taped to his desk for a while. I have the desk, and I've looked all over it, and I can't find it.

  SCHWEITZER: That may be the most expanded haiku in the history of literature.

  [Laughter from audience.]

  HERBERT: Absolutely.

  ANDERSON: Especially if you count all the seventeen volumes of the Dune books.

  SCHWEITZER: Compared to that, my rewrite of The Lord of the Rings as a limerick is nothing.

  HERBERT: You can read Dune for the poetry, and then you can go back and read it for the philosophy, the politics, all these layers. Or you can just read the adventure story.

  FROM AUDIENCE: Do you think we will ever see another release of a theatrical film in the Dune universe, and, if so, who would you want to helm it?

  HERBERT: I usually answer that question, but I think Kevin knows the answer.

  ANDERSON: Well, funny you should ask. You are all aware of the David Lynch movie from 1984, and then the Sci Fi Channel did two six-hour miniseries. They each had their own advantages and disadvantages. But Paramount has now acquired the rights to do a big-budget, big-screen version - I hesitate to use the word "remake" - of the original Dune.

  HERBERT: It's a classic interpretation.

  ANDERSON: Right.

  HERBERT: This is why I answer the question, not him, because we've been told what we can say.

  ANDERSON: Instead of a remake, we want it to be done correctly in the first place. Thanks to Peter Jackson, who has proven with The Lord of the Rings that you really can do a movie of that big of a book and do it successfully, right now Peter Berg has signed on to be the director. He did Hancock and Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom. We've got some big name producers on it. We've met with the team and we're involved in some of the creative stuff. But right now it's still in the scriptwriting phase, and it's Hollywood, so don't hold your breath, but it's sort of moving along.

  HERBERT: Peter Jackson raised the stakes, so it has to be a good movie. You can't get everything in Dune into a movie. So that's the challenge. But we do have Richard Rubenstein as one of the producers, and he did the two television series, where he followed the plot very faithfully. So we have a good team.

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: A little background on the Bene Gesserit.

  HERBERT: Dad said they were like female Jesuits.

  QUESTION: Do you have any more information on how that concept came to be?

  HERBERT: My Dad had, I think it was, eleven Irish Catholic aunts. They tried to force Catholicism on him, and Dad rebelled. My mom similarly didn't have all those aunts, but they tried to force Pentecostalism on her. So I had no organized religion when I was growing up. Ultimately Dad was a non-practicing Buddhist, as it turns out. But the Bene Gesserit came from his Irish Catholic aunts. He saw them as a cluster of women who had this power about them and he somehow resisted it. But also, as was mentioned previously, my dad was a lay psychologist. That was in the early 1950s, the late '40s, when we lived in Santa Rosa California. At that time, good friends of our family were the Slatterys. He was a professor at Sonoma State, and he was a well-known psychologist who had studied with Carl Gustav Jung in the 1930s. Jung and she had notes that she brought to Dad and talked to him about. Jung had the concept of the Collective Unconscious, and so the Bene Gesserit with their genetic memory going back for thousands of years and the voices that are heard from within to guide that particular living sister is all based upon Jung. Then, the strong women. My mother was an incredibly strong women, and Dad felt that we needed more female energy in the universe, because men have pretty well messed things up for about ten thousand years. But I think that before that, some of the Goddess beliefs were unbalanced too. So, Dad wanted the pendulum to swing. In books Five and Six in the series, women are running everything.

  As they should.

  [Laughter from the audience.]

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: I have a two-part question. You mentioned how your mother was the inspiration for the strong women in Dune. But has there been anyone in your life who has been the inspiration for characters in your books, or for you Kevin?

  HERBERT: We dedicated this novel to our wives. We phrased it in such a way that we appreciate what they've had to put up with when Kevin and I vanished. Dad was like that, too. He would vanish into his study. She was a very brilliant person, but she would wait for him to come down out of his science fiction universe and then they could go do something.

  But in one of my early novels, Sudanna, Sudanna, I have this futuristic world that is all covered with goo, and there are these ships floating across through the goo, and one of the characters has problems with his wife because she keeps pulling the covers off, and that's my wife Jan. I had a rebellious daughter at the time, and there is a rebellious daughter in that story. But Kevin and I both have very supportive wives and very intelligent wives, who give us a different way of thinking, so when we write a female character wrong, they'll let us know.

  ANDERSON: Very clearly. My wife, Rebecca Moesta, and I have written over thirty novels together and we're still married, which is kind of an amazing thing. We do have a guest bedroom that sometimes I've had to go through after
brainstorming. But we've been married eighteen years, and even when she is not collaborating with me, she brainstorms with me all the time, and reads the whole manuscript. She gives me the really, really tough copyediting of the manuscript that copyeditors are scared to do. She'll just take a page and write BORING! on it.

  I haven't yet gotten that from a New York copyeditor, which is good, I suppose. She makes me be a much better writer. I think it's impressive I've been married for eighteen years, but that's nothing. He's -

  HERBERT: Forty-two years. I met her when she was very young and I was very young. It's not so much whispering, "You are mortal," because we are not pharaohs or anything, but one time I was talking to an audience like this and I was talking about the female characters that I have in my other books, and I felt like I was becoming something of a women's liberationist, and I heard my wife out there snickering in the audience, and deservedly so, because I didn't know anything.

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: First of all, guys, being a writer, you intimidate me whenever I read your work, because it's such great writing craft. But being a Norwegian myself, I don't have the Native American background. I see Rachel Carson coming through very strongly.

  HERBERT: That's true.

  QUESTIONER: Could you guys talk a little more about the environmental influence here?

  HERBERT: Obviously, Rachel Carson. Her great book had been published before Dune, and so Dad was aware of it. But Dad said to me that he had a lot of messages. If you look at Dune, the Whole Earth Catalogue referred to it as an ecological handbook. That is the message that catapulted Dune. It took until about 1970. The book was published in 1965. By 1970 there was a groundswell because of the environmental issue. Frank Herbert spoke at the first Earth Day in Philadelphia. Ira Einhorn organized that, by the way. He's got kind of a star-crossed history, there. Then Dad spoke on college campuses all over the United States, just on that environmental issue. There's so much more in there, the politics, and the religion, and all these incredible things. But Dad set up a detailed ecosystem. So, for example, at the end of the first movie of Dune it rains at the end. Well that can't happen or it would destroy the cycle of the sandworms. Frank Herbert explained that very carefully.

  So, he understood from when he was growing up as a nine-year-old boy. My grandparents were alcoholics and they spent all the money they had on booze. So Dad went out fishing and brought in the dinner for the day. In the process he met a Native American who had been an outcast. This was on Fox Island, near Tacoma Washington. Dad said the outcast had been a murderer in his tribe, and they sent him out to the island. Well, Dad kind of embellished things sometimes, so I don't know if he'd been a murderer, but it made a good story. So here's this nine-year-old kid adventuring, and this Native American taught Dad how to live in the woods, how to eat grub-worms and red ants, and how to fish, just totally another world-view. Dad would sometimes take his nine-foot rowboat out and he would hitch it on to tugboats that were towing barges, heading for Alaska, until he got caught and they would cut him loose. So he was always out there in the environment. That really comes through. Some people read Dune and they get thirsty. Well, Dad never lived in the desert but he certainly figured out how to write about it.

  ANDERSON: There is a background in it from where I come from. I live in Colorado and I spend most of my time when I get free time out hiking or mountain climbing. I have climbed to the top of all fifty-four of the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in the state of Colorado. I have done three hundred and twenty miles on the Colorado Trail. For years I have been a member of the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and The Colorado Trail Foundation, The Continental Divide, all these different things. Any chance that I get, I get out and do my writing with a tape recorder, so I am out in the mountains, in the forests, and that's where I am dictating things. In fact I have written a lot of Dune stuff in the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado or in Death Valley in California. My wife and I donate a lot of money to various charitable organizations, and it's always a tug-of-war between the two of us, because she wants to donate money to soup kitchens and feed the orphans and save the children and all that, and I want to spend money on The Sierra Club and The Colorado Trail, and she tells me that's being kind of cold-hearted because that's not helping people. But it's helping the whole world and the environment. Those are the nights that I sleep in the guest bedroom sometimes.

  HERBERT: The Sierra Club comment is interesting, because Dad was a Republican speechwriter in the 1950s. I think I mentioned that he was a non-practicing Buddhist. He was an anti-war leader in Seattle, and war is the biggest destroyer of the environment that there is. He was in the World Without War Council. So here is this big, bearded Republican speechwriter leading thousands of students in Seattle taking over the freeways. But Dad felt that The Sierra Club had gone too far. They had been too extreme. What Dad said is that they were so radical - this was back in the '60s - that a bunch of loggers just went in and clear-cut a whole, huge area because they were afraid of what would happen when The Sierra Club got their rules in. So Dad was a pragmatist and he believed in negotiating things from a reasonable standpoint.

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: I think one of the things that makes your collaboration so great is your adherence to the original. When we read one of your books, it is almost the same as reading the original by Frank Herbert. It sticks so much to the theme and the style of writing. That doesn't work with other writers. In particular I am thinking of Arthur Clarke and Gentry Lee, where if you read any of their collaborations, you can almost tell what Clarke wrote and what Lee wrote.

  HERBERT: As Kevin mentioned, we set out egos aside at the door. But we also have the same vision. If any of you have gone to Europe, for example, and one of you wants to shop and one of you wants to see the history, it doesn't work. Well Kevin and I are on this huge journey through the Dune universe, and we have the same vision. Sometimes he will come up with an idea that's the same idea that I've had. I've already had the idea, but I got my fax on his desk before he was able to fax me. The last one, I beat him too. But we are coming up with the same ideas in parallel. We don't try to outshine each other. We've talked about shining a light on each other, but ultimately we are shining a light on Frank Herbert. That's what it's about, going back and reading Dune again.

  ANDERSON: Somebody asked us a couple days ago at a book-signing, "Did you write this part or did Brian write this part?" We looked at each other. We can't even remember who wrote which part, because we rewrite each other's parts so much. But as far as the adherence to Frank Herbert, we really need to please the toughest Dune fans. And we are the toughest Dune fans. Brian and I, we live and breathe everything about Dune. We have immersed ourselves in these books and in the notes that Frank Herbert left and in our own stories. We're not just picking up an hors d'oeuvre. We're there for the whole banquet.

  HERBERT: Also, before I wrote a word with Kevin, I spent a year doing a concordance of all six Dune novels. So I know all the page references for the Sisterhood, the eye colors of all the characters, all the details, and so we refer to that all the time.

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: You refer to the Bene Gesserit as strong characters, but yet you have them with a computer.

  HERBERT: That's a secret of breeding records -

  ANDERSON: Shh! It's a secret!

  QUESTION: I am not saying it's bad, but they still have a computer, which is something they're not supposed to have.

  HERBERT: But it's secret. By the time of Dune, computers are illegal because of what they did to us 10,000 years before. But in the novel Dune, we don't know that yet. It's like Paul Atreides - you think he is a heroic figure by the end of Dune, and it turns out that there is a dark side to him. Well there is a dark side to the Bene Gesserit, too. If you just take a look at the Honored Matres, which are the dark side of the Bene Gesserit, and they are coming back and destroying all our heroines. And Dune. They have destroyed the planet Dune. Dad was not naïve enough to think that heroes or heroines would b
e pure.

  ANDERSON: They're also very pragmatic. They have their end-goal in sight and they are willing to bend some of their own rules to achieve it.

  HERBERT: But the Bene Gesserit, though, are many times talking about what it means to be human. That's an important theme to Frank Herbert. You can see that not only in the Dune series, but in his others books. And since there are no computers, for example, in the time of Dune, what do you have? You have mentats, which are like Frank Herbert characters all over the place. They're computerized brains. He's talking about human potential. Look the potential for women, too. That's why the series has really lasted, as opposed to other big series, nineteen or twenty-book series that were hinging on technology. This is not hinging on any aspect of technology or science. It's about people.

  QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: When you talk about how hard you work to follow Frank Herbert's whole universe, you do more than that. I've read all of your father's works and all of your works, and it's hard to tell the difference between Frank Herbert and your writing. How did you come up with the ability to write in that style? Okay, fine, they're different. You've created these books and you have the barest outline to go on, but then you've created a style which blends so perfectly with the original. How did that come about? Did you work at it deliberately?

  HERBERT: No. Partly it's admiration for Frank Herbert, but Dad believed in the oral tradition, and stories being passed on from generation to generation. I heard him reading all the Dune novels to my mother. So somewhere in my subconscious, I hear his voice reading to her. I hear his voice speaking to me, plus the details of what he taught me about writing. He taught me the care and feeding of editors,how to build suspense. The care and feeding of editors was kind of amusing. It was how to send a manuscript in so it won't get thrown into the slush pile.

  I sent him my Sidney's Comet novel. It was three hundred pages at the time. He edited twenty pages, sent them back from Hawaii, and he said, "This is how editing tightens the story. Go now and do likewise." So he was telling me from the beginning that I had to do the hard work. But I appreciate that comment.