Frank Herbert was not a trivial man. He wrote about things that matter to us as a species. The complexity of his writing often caused him severe difficulties in getting his stories published. Dune was rejected for publication in book form by more than 20 publishers, in large part because editors found the first 100 pages too dense. Concerning Destination: Void, Damon Knight wrote to Frank Herbert on December 15,1964, “I found the story heavy going up to about p. 50. After that it pulled me by the nose.…” Through these letters, we see that my father was learning how to swim in the strange waters of publishing, that it was necessary to entertain his readers first and then slip into the text what he called “a potful of message,” but in ways that would not bore the readers or interfere with the story. With that in mind, a number of his works can be read in layers.
Dune is the most obvious example, where the discerning reader can choose to read it as an adventure story, or as an ecological handbook, or can delve into it for the politics, religion, philosophy, and beautiful poetry. Destination: Void has interesting layers as well, mirroring the mind of its creator.
Frank Herbert’s writings are like the melange of Dune, the spice that is never “twice the same.” The addictive substance is like life, he wrote, presenting “a different face each time you take it.” I encourage you to read these letters that my father exchanged with Damon Knight, and then go back and examine them again—just as Frank Herbert’s countless fans often do with his books. You will find something new and intriguing each time you consider his fascinating ideas, each time you peer into the remarkable mind of a genius.
—Brian Herbert
* At the time of his correspondence with Damon Knight, Frank Herbert had two working titles for his novel about the creation of artificial consciousness: When Shall I Awake? and Many Brave Hearts. Herbert published these ideas first as a short story, “Do I Wake or Dream?” (Galaxy, August 1965), and then as a novel Destination: Void (Berkley, 1966). —BH
+ Frank Herbert intentionally spelled it “hybernation” instead of “hibernation” signifying that this was an enhanced form of hibernation. —BH
November 1, 1963
Dear Frank,
Can I interest you in doing a science fiction novel for Berkley Books? They are doing a series of these, with me as editor, under what I think are attractive terms. It works like this—you send me a bare sketch of an idea, just a paragraph or two; if I like it (and if we haven’t got one just like it in the works), we go on to a somewhat longer outline, then to a complete outline. The idea is that working through these successive outlines we iron out any trouble spots before they get into the finished script. The final outline goes to Tom Dardis for approval—then you get a contract and an advance: $500, followed by $1000 on delivery. The contract will state that Berkley will defer publication for eight months, to give you a chance to sell serial rights.
I don’t see how you can beat this for a quick $1500, plus a possible serial sale. Let me know how it strikes you.
Best,
Damon
12/3/63
Dear Damon,
Please forgive the delay in this answer to your letter, but I’ve been up to the hairline in work.
I have had an idea bouncing around in my skull which just might fit your needs. It’s concerned with an area which I believe Science Fiction has bypassed—consciousness.
What I’d like to do is build a yarn around a project to produce artificial consciousness. We accept the android in SF, but give not one second thought to what a profound breakthrough such a creature must be. We haven’t even defined consciousness to everyone’s satisfaction.
I see it as turning on four major characters—one female, director of the project; one chaplain, to speak the religious paradox inherent; one holdover from previous project that failed, to point up that this ain’t easy, Mac; and one bright young whizkid who doesn’t know the meaning of “can’t” and has the scars to prove it.
Does this tickle your fancy or your risibility?
Best regards,
Frank
December 6, 1963
Dear Frank,
That’s an intriguing idea—you’re right, this is one of the things s.f. writers have been taking for granted, the easy way out. If you have something new to say about it, and I gather you do, it ought to make an exciting and important book. Please tell me some more. When the project succeeds (does it?), what do you get? Just another Asimov robot? If not, what?
Here’s a curious thought that just struck me; throw it out if it doesn’t fit. Is a conscious mind, natural or artificial, necessarily one with buried levels of activity—a subconscious, an id, a superego? A ruler can’t measure itself, and a mind can’t be conscious of itself unless it’s split into at least two parts? If there is anything to this, that would make a robot brain a hell of a lot unlike any that’s been used in s.f. to date.
I am very much with this. Write soon.
Best,
Damon
1/20/64
Dear Damon,
Hope you had as full a holiday season as we did. All seems to be back on the track here and I can get down to some serious work.
You refer to the necessity for the mind to be in two parts for consciousness. At least two parts. There’s a great deal of technical literature in psychology on this, all loaded with terms such as “the dichotomy of awareness” or “self-reflexive consciousness.” What they mean is that there has to be self awareness for there to be consciousness.
Answering your question—yes, the project succeeds, but only when those involved see that they have to aim at something far different from an Asimov robot. (Asimovot?) They see that man is conscious and aware, in part, because of his animal inheritance—all the instinctual trappings out of some 400 million years of primate development. This project must find a substitute for that animal history and condense the development time into a scale manageable in a human lifetime.
The robot has to have instincts, in a word.
This means all the accompaniments of instincts, especially fears and guilts. This last, this guilt, is one of the major keys to the project’s success—call it the “Cain and Abel Syndrome.” The robot has to feel guilty for at least one moment in its development. (Think of the chaplain wrestling with that one!)
The project workers also have to define several other tough ones and find equivalents in their robot—conscience, for one. Is there such a thing as loyalty without conscience? Can the robot be permitted violence? Do they date free its mind to monitor the instincts they have given it?
There’s also the chemical background for consciousness. The chemistry of the awareness function is as complicated as all hell. (Among other things, acid phosphatase apparently plays a key role in awakening and, thereby, in consciousness. But acid phosphatase is one of the cornerstone chemicals of sexuality and reproduction.)
But this is only the mechanical background music for the story. Much of the plotting on this one was completed before I wrote you. I’ve been accumulating notes and ideas on this one for more than three years. Essentially, this has to be a story of people under the stress of finding out about themselves in spite of every attempt to hide their minds from what they discover. They have to find out about themselves, you see; otherwise they can’t duplicate the consciousness process.
Regards,
Frank
January 28, 1964
Dear Frank,
You are evidently way ahead of me on this one, and it continues to sound extremely intriguing. Please send an outline soonest—make it sketchy or full, whichever suits you. Ordinarily I would ask for a brief outline first, but it sounds to me as if you’ve got this one worked out in detail; & in that case, it would be foolish to hold you back.
I finished reading Dune World in Analog recently, and thought it was a magnificent job. Didn’t even mind the loose ends about the sandworms and the ecology of Arrakis; I have a feeling that the clues are all there, if I were not too lazy to put them together. B
ut I can’t help wishing there were going to be a sequel.
Best,
Damon
February 7, 1964
Dear Tom,
Here is an outline from Frank Herbert for a novel called When Shall I Awake? I have high hopes for this one. Herbert has been developing lately into one of the most exciting writers in the field, and I would dearly love to get him for Berkley.
Best,
Damon
November 16, 1964
Dear Tom,
I like Frank Herbert’s Many Brave Hearts (an awful title, by the way) very much, but I think the first fifty-odd pages are much too dense and technical for most readers. I also had a good deal of trouble keeping the four characters straight, partly due to the many shifts in viewpoint. I think both these faults, and some other less serious ones, can be easily corrected, and if there’s no objection, I’d like to write Herbert a long letter spelling out these suggestions in detail. If Lurton would like to be kept in the picture, I can send him a carbon of the letter.
Best,
Damon
December 15, 1964
Dear Frank,
Herewith Many Brave Hearts, with some comments. I must say first of all that although I liked this on a first reading, my opinion of it went up about 50% on second reading. Large portions of it which seemed more or less haphazardly put together when I first read them now seemed tight and snug; the ending seemed logical rather than contrived; and in short, I think this is a damn good novel on a very tough subject.
At the same time, I can’t help feeling that my difficulties with the story the first time around were not all my fault, and I’m concerned because I’m sure most people who read your book are not going to read it twice. I think for the sake of these readers, and for those who are not technically trained, some concessions ought to be made, particularly in the first fifty pages. I found the story heavy going up to about p. 50. After that it pulled me by the nose, but I’m terribly afraid that if I had been reading for pleasure instead of for professional reasons, I might have given up before that point.
A large part of my trouble, I think, was in keeping the four main characters separated. I never did succeed, throughout the first reading, in remembering for more than a page at a time which one was Timberlake and which Flattery. These names do not look much alike, but they scan the same way and perhaps have too many sounds in common. More to the point, it took me a long time to get any sense of difference in their personalities, and to a certain extent this was true even of Bickel. The physical descriptions of these people are given once, or perhaps twice, and then never referred to again. I would like an occasional glimpse of their faces and attitudes, gestures and so on throughout the book; I think that would help immeasurably in keeping track of the characters and in believing in them as people. It would help the story’s dramatic quality as well, I think, if we could see the physical expressions of these people’s stress and excitement.
The frequent shifting of viewpoints also caused me continual trouble throughout the book, not just in the first fifty pages. If the viewpoint had settled longer on any of the four characters, I felt I would have had a chance to learn who he was. I certainly won’t ask you to give up the multiple viewpoint method, which seems to be a natural tool in your hands, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to consolidate the viewpoints into somewhat larger chunks. Very often it seemed to me that the device was being used for no other purpose than to reveal, as on p. 142, that A does not know something B and the reader know; and most of the time this is redundant.
I felt a lack of background for all four collectively throughout most of the book, and I blame this partly on the mystification disease which afflicts many s.f. writers including myself. For example, the six previous failures are not mentioned until p. 51-B, although this information is vital to the basic problem which is introduced thirty pages earlier. Only on p. 58 is it explicitly revealed that the crew members are duplicates grown from biopsy material, although this can hardly help coloring all their attitudes toward themselves and each other. In short, I want to suggest that all this material, or nearly all—even including Flattery’s special mission—would be inserted in its natural order near the beginning of the novel, and that we should clearly understand, as soon as possible, the role of each character and of the project as a whole. Holding back information arbitrarily very often decreases suspense rather than increasing it, and I think that is true here. The real suspense here lies in What’s going to happen? And not in Who are these people? Moreover, if this material were dealt with in its natural place, it seems to me it would become easy to clear up the fuzziness about the four characters’ past lives. Bits and pieces of this background are scattered throughout the book; for example, it is never clear until p. 181 that there is always a wall between the manipulators and the sterile-environment people. This background fuzziness is a drawback not only in itself, but because it inevitably arouses the suspicion that the whole shipboard experience will turn out to be subjective or illusory. This suspicion is bound to arise anyhow, merely because the novel takes place entirely in an artificial environment, and I think it would either be exploited or disposed of as early as possible. The first suggestion in concrete terms that the ship may be a phony comes on p. 140, and although it falls dramatically here, it seems to me this is much too late.
(Parenthetically, I may as well say here that I’ve never felt sure I understood why the ship was not a phony. If the primary purpose is to create a conscious artificial mind, and this is to be done in a spaceship solely because it is too dangerous to attempt on Earth, why sacrifice three thousand “colonists” with each failure?)
Finally, I think I may have got off on the wrong foot in reading this story the first time because of the place where it begins. It begins just after a dramatic event which I would have liked to see. I think if you would let the reader see it—alarms sounding, the rush to the controls, the fine balance of power shifting as Bickel takes over and kills the OMC—most of the Who? What? Where? Problems which are now so vexing would be naturally and easily solved at the beginning.
Here are some scattered comments, most of them minor:
P. 14, I think this statement of the problem is premature and much too abrupt. This should wait for Hempstead’s introduction of it on p. 38, and I think the idea should be accepted more slowly by Bickel and Timberlake, to whom it presumably comes as a complete surprise.
P. 20: I found this long technical passage pretty heavy wading. Much later, during a similar long technical dialogue, we have a parallel sequence of Flattery’s thoughts to carry the story. Would some such device be possible here?
Hibernation is misspelled throughout. Do you want to change “dehyb” to “dehibe” or what?
P. 40 and elsewhere, when people think about Hempstead and the UMB labs, could we have something more visual and convincing?
If the UMB project is controlled by a number of nations, I forget how many—five? seven?—why are nearly all the names of Anglo-Saxon origin?
Prudence’s antireligious needling of Flattery, here & there throughout: it seems to be suggested that this is programmed, not merely her own personal bias or caprice, but what is its purpose?
P. 63 or thereabouts, we begin to have a sense of Bickel as a high-wire performer, attempting something exquisitely difficult and dangerous. Need this begin so late?
P. 72 and elsewhere, I find it maddeningly unclear how much Flattery and Weygand know. Flattery here produces as a hypothesis the danger of creating an autonomous conscious robot, and yet he and Weygand evidently know the UMB robot project was a fake. P. 82, top, seems to suggest that Weygand already knows the nature and purpose of the ship; middle & bottom, but that she does not but is beginning to suspect. Which is intended? (I note that on a first reading, I wrote at this point, “simulation device—means not real spaceship?”)
P. 91 A and elsewhere, what do Weygand’s “experiments” on her own body amount to unless she is able to run highly
sophisticated analyses of her body fluids—and even then, what can she expect to find out that will have any application to the Ox? The only suggestion of such application comes on p. 200; earlier than that it is not at all clear that she has any purpose in dosing herself.
P. 114, is there a word missing from the last sentence?
P. 123 & elsewhere (186, 215, 224) it is assumed that only humans have consciousness, not other organisms, even higher vertebrates. Do you really mean this?
P. 229, is there any reason why Bickel’s speech and the others’ reactions to it should not fall here?
The Synopsis Treasury Page 7