The man known to history as Frank Herbert
was born on the 8th of October 1920 as Franklin Patrick Herbert Junior in Tacoma, Washington,
located in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Frank would drop Junior
from his name later in his life. His father was Frank Patrick Herbert Senior.
Herbert Senior worked variously as a motorcycle patrolman, an electrical equipment salesman
and the operator of a bus-line. Herbert Senior’s parents moved to Washington in the early 1900s,
during the period in which some scholars would later claim was the closing of the American
West. The Herbert family was a little odd, having come to Washington to live in a utopian
community which had been established there in the 1890s. The Herberts would never quite
lose their affinity for esoteric thought. Frank’s mother was Eileen Marie MacCarthy,
a woman of Irish descent from Wisconsin. Frank’s early years were eccentric given his father’s
mixed career paths and also the wider family’s unusual activities. Family lore has held that
while Frank was a child in the 1920s, the Herberts operated a speakeasy called the Spanish
Castle Ballroom off of Highway 99 between their native Tacoma and the city of Seattle
during the era of American Prohibition. If this is true then the Herberts were responsible
for running one of Washington State’s most well-known illegal bars during Prohibition.
While his family perhaps ran a speakeasy, Frank himself was developing into a precocious
reader during these years. By the age of five he was an avid reader of the local newspapers
and also displayed the wide-ranging interests which would come to characterise his later
work and the multi-faceted nature of the science fiction world he created. For instance, as
a child he took an interest in photography, buying a Kodak Box camera when he was just
ten years old, while also developing a fondness for outdoors activities such as camping, fishing
and hunting. But it was also a troubled childhood in some respects. Frank’s parents were binge-drinkers
and often he had to care for his younger sister, Patty Lou, who was considerably younger than
him, having been born in the early 1930s. Herbert’s troubled home life, which was
compounded by poverty in the 1930s as the Great Depression wreaked havoc across the
United States and the western world, led him to leave high school in Washington early and
to leave his home state to go and live with his aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon. There
he enrolled in North Salem High School and completed his secondary education before acquiring
a job in 1939 with the Glendale Star, a local newspaper. This was in line with the interests
Herbert had developed back in Washington where he had begun writing for the school newspaper,
though he had to lie about his age to get the job and attended the interview in Oregon
smoking a pipe to make himself look older than he was. It was the beginning of many
years of working for newspapers, a job which doubtlessly honed his writing abilities, while
also providing a solid income in the 1940s and 1950s while he wrote science fiction in
his spare time. By 1940 he had acquired a position with the Oregon Statesman, doubling
as a photographer and a writer. Shortly after he joined the Oregon Statesman
Herbert met Flora Lillian Parkinson while visiting San Pedro in California in 1941.
They were married a short time later after driving over night to Herbert’s native Tacoma
and having the ceremony carried out before a night judge. They soon had a daughter named
Penelope who was born in 1942 and the suspicion is that theirs was a shotgun wedding when
Flora realised she was pregnant. She was, though, the only child they would have. Flora
soon vanished with Penelope and her mother would not tell Herbert where they had gone.
Eventually he petitioned for a divorce and received the same in 1943, with Flora retaining
majority custody of their daughter. It may have also been during the early 1940s that
Herbert also first experimented with drugs such as cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms.
These later influenced his depiction of the concept of prescience as conferred by consumption
of the spice melange in the world of Dune. Perhaps why Herbert’s first marriage broke
up as quickly as it did was owing to his absence on military service. In the autumn of 1939,
the Second World War had broken out in Europe after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, leading
Britain and France to in turn declare war on the Nazis. The United States avoided becoming
directly embroiled in the conflict in its early years but had provided extensive covert
aid to Britain in the shape of arms and financing, particularly so after France fell to the Germans
in the summer of 1940. Despite domestic resistance to becoming more involved in what many saw
as a European war, the US was dragged into the conflict in December 1941 when the Empire
of Japan, Germany’s Asian ally, attacked the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbour
in the Hawaiian Islands. Outraged, and spurred on by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts, Americans
mobilized across the country to aid the Allies. Initially Herbert was drafted into the Seabees
with the US Navy, where his skills as a photographer were employed at a naval base in Virginia.
There he suffered a head injury after tripping on a tent-tie and was given an honourable
discharge in 1943. Consequently, he spent the remaining two years of the war back in
Oregon where he obtained a new post as a reporter with the Oregon Journal. In the aftermath of the Second World War Herbert
returned to his native Washington and began a course at the University of Washington on
creative writing. It was the first major sign that he intended to embark on a career as
a fiction writer rather than committing wholly to journalism. He did so on the G.I. Bill
which allowed veterans of the war from poorer backgrounds to attend universities across
the United States and which became a driving force of American post-war prosperity through
the 1960s. Herbert, always a precocious individual, had already acquired his first paid publishing
contracts by 1946 when a story of his was accepted by Doc Savage magazine. As a result,
he decided to quit the University of Washington before he finished his degree and courses.
Still, his time there was not wholly unproductive. While there he had met Beverly Stuart Forbes
who was taking the same class as him. He was smitten and they began seeing each other,
quickly marrying in the summer of 1946. They would go on to have two sons, Brian, born
in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951, and remained happily married for nearly forty years. Brian
would eventually become his father’s intellectual successor of sorts, acting as custodian of
the Dune estate and the fictional world his father created for decades to come. Herbert’s
relationship with his youngest however was far more complicated owing to his son being
gay. Frank struggled to accept this aspect of his child’s life which led to a lifelong
estrangement. The Herbert family moved to California at
the end of the 1940s to work for the Press-Democrat in Santa Rosa. Frank did not remain there
long and continued to have a fairly itinerant writing career, often moving from publication
to publication. But he was talented enough that he was never unemployed for long, always
finding work when he needed it. In the early 1950s he even became a political speech-writer,
while a growing list of publications of his own work added to the family income. But it
was still a precarious life. When Beverly’s mother gave the family a piece of land on
Vashon Island in Puget Sound in Washington, they began building a house here, but ran
out of money before it was finished, leading the bank to take the house and partial ownership
of the land too. It was this which led them to head south to California, where they developed
habits which were eccentric by the standards of the time. The couple spent much time with
Irene and Ralph Slattery, a pair of Jungian psychologists, while Frank grew out his beard
and began taking an interest in Zen Buddhism. As his son Brian would later recount, Frank
was “a beatnik before they came into vogue.” It was also during these years that Herbert
firmly set himself to writing in the science fiction genre. Science fiction is in many
ways a very old genre and one could argue that ancient tales of fantastical travels
by individuals with abnormal powers are the precursor of the genre, extending all the
way back as far as Sumerian, Egyptian and Greek mythology. For instance, as early as
the second century AD the Greco-Roman author, Luciano di Samosata, presented a story of
an individual travelling through outer space in his True History and meeting non-human
life forms. There are many of the themes which have characterised the genre in modern times
already on display here in Lucian’s work, notably the concept of advanced civilizations,
interplanetary warfare and societies capable of doing things which humans can only conjecture
at. Lucian’s work was ultimately a piece of
satire and while many stories followed in medieval and early modern times in this vein,
science fiction, in its modern form, is really a product of the second half of the nineteenth
and first half of the twentieth centuries. This came about owing to the rapid technological
developments pursuant from the Industrial Revolution. A landmark was Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, published in 1818, which explores the problems which human technological development
could bring about in the guise of a science fiction horror story. Later in the century
authors like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells produced canonical works in the genre such as Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The War of the Worlds, while by the 1920s and 1930s
the genre was advanced enough that it gave birth to the pulp magazine which featured
serialised science fiction stories. Herbert grew up on these and in his youth in Tacoma
and then in Oregon he would have read stories by prominent science fiction authors of the
time such as Olaf Stapledon and John W. Campbell, while he was also seemingly influenced by
the Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in the early 1920s and comprising
a commentary on the nature of totalitarianism that would also go on to influence writers
like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. By the 1940s and 1950s, as Herbert entered his adult
years and began to truly commit to science fiction writing, the genre was coming into
a golden age, as writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Frederick Pohl, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac
Asimov began publishing extensively. It was into this field that Herbert threw himself
in the post-war years. Dune was the work which Herbert would eventually
become known for, but it was not the first science fiction world he built up, nor what
he was preoccupied with in his earlier writing years. Instead he primarily started out writing
short stories in the second half of the 1940s and developed his skills in the process, finding
publishers for some of these works in magazines like Fantastic Universe and Amazing. These
early stories explored various science fiction worlds, some being entirely distinct from
earth and some being based on alternate versions of our own world. An example of the latter
which garnered praise when it was published in the 1950s was ‘Cease Fire’, a story
set on earth in 1972 where a low-level war is being fought against a mysterious alien
entity in the far north of the North American continent in the Arctic regions of Canada
and Alaska. Herbert was soon expanding out his vision into novellas and books. For instance,
in 1956 he published The Dragon in the Sea, a story focused on a battle for oil between
the East and the West, two different powers in conflict with each other undersea. This
science fiction world was created in the light of the Cold War between the US-dominated ‘west’
and an eastern nexus of communist China and the USSR. Thus, by the second half of the
1950s Herbert was using science fiction to explore political and societal issues of America
in the middle of the twentieth century. Herbert began work on the Dune world and books
around 1959. He was inspired to do so on the back of his experiences in the mid-1950s with
the issue of floating or moving sand dunes on the Oregon coastline, which were causing
environmental problems there, engulfing whole houses in some cases. Herbert actually chartered
a plane to fly over the dunes in order to get a bird’s eye view of the problem. During
these years Herbert’s general interest in and engagement with ecological issues increased
considerably. He had also been taking a large amount of psilocybin mushrooms around this
time and believed it stimulated his imagination. The result was the manuscript for Dune, the
first book in the series produced in the early 1960s, one which his agent sold the first
part of to Analog magazine in 1963, resulting in a $2,295 advance to continue writing. Owing
to this, Herbert ploughed on with his work and by the mid-1960s had written drafts of
each of the first three books in the series, Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. He
imagined these should be published as a trilogy of novels all together in one book, but he
would never be able to find a publisher who would agree to this. One facet of Herbert’s
first Dune book which is seldom noted is that he struggled enormously to get it published.
He submitted Dune to twenty-three different publishers in the 1960s that all rejected
it. But eventually he did manage to find a publisher, though a less than auspicious one
in some respects. The publishing house which picked up Dune after more than twenty others
had passed was Chilton Books, primarily known at the time for publishing manuals on repairing
automobiles and other books on a range of engineering topics and whose marquee publication
was a magazine called Iron Age. This is maybe not as irregular a backstory for a successful
book series as it first appears. Consider that J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry
Potter series and the creator of a multi-billion dollar franchise today, had the manuscript
for her first book in that series rejected by a dozen different publishing houses in
the 1990s before Bloomsbury agreed to publish it. Other well-known works which were initially
rejected like Herbert’s include Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, William Golding’s The
Lord of the Flies, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the
Rye. Perseverance was critical for Herbet as much as any other famous author. Despite its somewhat tortuous publication
history, Dune was a success. It was instantly well received and tied with Roger Zelazny’s
The Immortal to win the Hugo Award in 1966. The Hugo Award is the marquee annual award
for the best publication the previous year in either the fields of science fiction or
fantasy writing. Herbert also became the first individual to win the Hugo and Nebula double,
having been awarded the inaugural Nebula award, an accolade which is also given out to one
of the foremost works of science fiction and fantasy published the previous year. In winning
both honours in 1966 Herbert set a precedent for esteemed works which would later include
Larry Niven’s Ringworld in 1971, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama in 1974,
Frederick Pohl’s Gateway in 1978 and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods in 2003. In each
instance, the book in question was published the previous year or the year before that
and was awarded both the Hugo and Nebula after critical evaluations had come in. In the longer
term Dune would go on to become one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century
and is believed to be the best-selling work of science fiction ever written. It has, for
instance, been translated into over twenty languages and has sold over twenty million
copies, placing it on a par with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Consequently, Dune is unquestionably one of the foremost
works of science fiction and fantasy ever written. Dune is set in an alternate universe where
intergalactic travel is made possible by an organisation called the Navigation Guild that
uses a substance known as the spice melange to enter a state of limited prescience and
thus successfully navigate ships through folded space. The universe is vast, though Herbert
kept his exposition of the world involved limited in order to allow his readers to use
their own imagination as to exactly how enormous it is. The perception conveyed is of thousands
or tens of thousands of inhabited planetary systems. Yet these are united under the rule
of an emperor, Shaadam IV, who controls the systems using his army of Sarduakar, elite
soldiers who live only to fight for the imperial government. Herbert would expand on other
parts of the world in subsequent books, notably groups such as the Tleilaxu and Ix, however
in the first novel in the series matters focused largely on two noble houses, those of the
Harkonnen and the Atreides. The Harkonnen are a brutal merciless people who hail from
Giedi Prime, an inhospitable fire planet, while the Atreides are a much more honourable
group who come from Caladan, a river planet. As the book commences, the Harkonnen are being
removed from their position as custodians of Arrakis, the sand planet at the centre
of the novels which is the only source in the universe of the precious spice melange.
They are to be replaced by the Atreides on the order of the emperor, but exactly why
the emperor has chosen to remove the Harkonnen and what political scheming might be afoot
is unclear. What is clear is that the Harkonnen and Atreides are two of the most powerful
groups in the empire but are mortal enemies. The novel, and indeed Herbert’s subsequent
two Dune novels, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, have Paul Atreides as the central
character. Paul is the son and heir of Duke Leto, head of the House of Atreides. As the
narrative begins Paul is still on Caladan preparing to depart for Arrakis. There he
is trained by his sword-masters and other tutors, men such as Duncan Idaho and Gurney
Halleck. He also has a run-in with the Bene Gesserit early on, an organisation of matriarchal
seers who Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica, had once been under the wing of. When they arrive
on Arrakis they soon learn more about the planet, which is effectively a vast sand sphere,
hence the title Dune in reference to ‘sand dune’. It is almost entirely lacking in
civilization and the only reason the Harkonnen and now the Atreides are there is to oversee
the harvesting of the spice from the capital, Arrakeen. Apart from this the planet was populated
by the Fremen, a seemingly primitive group who live out on the sands, using water reclamation
suits to retain any precious water which they can. More sinister are the sandworms, giant
worms which coarse around Dune destroying anything they come into contact with. That
is except for the Fremen, who have learned to ride the sandworms when needed. There is immediate political chicanery when
the Atreides install themselves on Caladan. They are double-crossed by the Harkonnen who
kill Paul’s father the duke and reclaim control of the government of Arrakis. Paul,
however, escapes, along with his mother and flees to the Fremen. There he spends many
years becoming knowledgeable in their ways and learning everything there is to know about
the planet, particularly the fact that the spice melange is produced by the sandworms.
In the process the Fremen also begin to recognise that he is a prophesied messiah who they have
long waited for, as he has prescience which he has acquired from his mother’s Bene Gesserit
heritage. Later he drinks the Water of Life, a substance which is believed to be fatal
to males, but which he survives. After reconnecting with Gurney Halleck and learning of the situation
with the Harkonnen and the Emperor, Paul and the Fremen ride sandworms to the capital of
Arrakis and attack the Sarduakar and Harkonnen there. There Paul kills Feyd-Rautha of the
House of Harkonnen and informs the emperor that he can destroy all of the spice production
on Arrakis if he does not cede his throne to him. The emperor, realising he is out of
options, does so and gives Paul the hand of his daughter, Princess Irulan, in a marriage
to cement the succession. The themes which are explored in Dune and
in its sequels are numerous and quite complex. For starters, this is a book or series of
books which are set within a science fiction setting and so they follow some of the classic
tropes of the genre. For instance, there is a young protagonist who rises from a position
of some simplicity at the beginning to become the hero of the piece. There is a father figure
who is killed early on and there are wise, sage figures in the shape of the Bene Gesserit
and Paul’s mentors, Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho, though the degree to which the Bene
Gesserit are a malevolent force is left deliberately unclear. Then there are the evil enemies in
the shape of the Harkonnen and Paul has to go through a process of maturation and growth
before he can defeat them. This is all in line with a wide range of literature. For
instance, the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table in medieval times
presented stock characters such as these and they heavily influenced the science fiction
genre in the twentieth century. Indeed Herbert did state on occasion that he was substantially
influenced by the Arthurian Legend. But Herbert also had his own unusual take on them, presenting
Paul’s journey as a process of enlightenment which would have consequences for the world
around him and the Fremen in particular. As such, Herbert raises moral and philosophical
questions through Paul’s odyssey about the nature of fate and destiny and whether or
not human beings have free will. Much of this was based on Herbert’s growing awareness
of psychoanalysis and also nineteenth and twentieth-century European philosophy. The foremost theme of Dune, beyond Paul’s
own journey, is a concern with ecological matters. Arrakis is presented as a desolate,
unliveable desert, one which is also prized for the spice melange. The Fremen are the
only ones who can survive out on the dunes and this is only owing to their careful preservation
of water supplies. All Fremen wear suits to preserve water, for instance, and spitting
on the ground next to someone is considered a mark of respect, as one is shedding precious
water in doing so. As the novel, and indeed the wider series, progresses, it becomes clear
to Paul and others that Arrakis is actually capable of being changed ecologically, as
there are water reserves or canals underground which the Fremen are able to exploit. The
Fremen have been collecting water from these for generations with the goal of potentially
terraforming parts of Arrakis into a greener environment and making it more hospitable.
However, this runs contrary to the designs of almost all other powers in the universe.
If Arrakis is terraformed it will destroy the environment which the sandworms live in
and without them the supply of the spice melange which sits on the surface of Arrakis and allows
for space travel will begin to dry up. Thus, Herbert’s book offers a meditation on the
nature of technological desire and ecological necessity and how the two can clash with each
other. This, more than most of the themes and ideas in Herbert’s writings, is arguably
the one which has resonated most over time as we have become increasingly aware that
humanity’s technological progress can be at odds with the preservation of the planet
and the maintenance of other forms of life on it. A wide range of other themes are also explored
throughout Dune and its sequels. One is the nature of declining empires. The first book
in the series explores the decline of both the Emperor and his House of Corrino and the
House of Harkonnen, both bloated and ghastly through their materialism and excessive behaviour,
whereas House Atreides and in particular the Fremen present a counterpoint of a vital and
active new force in the universe. In his characterisations, Herbert had the decline and fall of the Roman
Empire in mind and its replacement by new powers in the Mediterranean world such as
the Germanic tribes who arrived into Europe and the Arabs who conquered the Middle East
and North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries BC. There are also extensive commentaries
on the nature of gender politics within the books, with the female Bene Gesserit acting
as a sage group of women who were concerned are the long-term preservation of the universe
and humanity, while the Fremen are a largely egalitarian society from a gender perspective.
These may seem like conventional ideas today, but they weren’t when Herbert was writing
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Finally, there are all manner of coded themes within
the book, from the spice melange being an analogy for the seeming growing dependence
of the western world on oil-producing countries in the Middle East in Herbert’s time, to
veiled criticisms of the growing overpopulation of the planet, which was already a major concern
for many thinkers in the 1960s. The world of Dune is also one which interweaves
a great array of historical references. Arrakis itself can be read as an analogy to the Middle
East, with the Fremen effectively being the Bedouin tribes which populated the Arabian
Peninsula for centuries and who eventually allied with the British to overthrow the Ottoman
Turkish rule during the First World War. For the spice melange one need only read the word
‘oil’ in some senses, while the reference to Paul Atreides as a kind of messiah named
Muad’Dib was perhaps a thinly veiled allusion by Herbert to the ‘Mahdi’ leader of the
revolt against British rule in the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s. There is even reference
to the Fremen engaging in jihad or ‘holy war’, but all of this is not to suggest
that Herbert was trying to write some parable about western interference in the Muslim world.
He simply borrowed from such contemporary political concerns. Other aspects of the world
are taken from elsewhere. Perhaps the portrayal of the Atreides and Harkonnen was grounded
on English and French rivalry and tensions over the centuries, while the picture presented
of how both houses functioned is resoundingly feudal and medieval. Finally, there are historical
references sprinkled throughout the book and there are numerous clever literary allusions.
The Tleilaxu are a societal group that become more and more important to the world of Dune
throughout Herbert’s novels. The name itself is a close allusion to groups like the Tlaxcala
who were the primary rivals of the Aztecs amongst the Nahuatl-speaking people of Central
America before the Spanish arrived on the scene and conquered all of them in the early
sixteenth century. While Herbert did continue to work as a journalist
and environmentalist following the initial publication of Dune, the book’s critical
success and the winning of both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1966 led to growing sales
of the book, which had been critically celebrated, but which did not translate into instant financial
success. For instance, by 1968 Herbert had only made $20,000 from sales of the book,
not an insignificant amount by the standards of the late 1960s, but certainly not a huge
sum either given its success and what authors of such works could have hoped to make back
in the 1960s. This was in part because his deal with Chilton was not advantageous to
Herbert and he had only agreed to it on the back of having the book rejected by so many
other publishers. With a wife and young family, it was not enough for Herbert to commit himself
to writing 100% of the time, but the book’s success did open up other opportunities for
Herbert career-wise and financially as a lecturer and author on other topics. Thus, while Dune’s
commercial success was a slow burner which would really only take off in the 1970s and
1980s, the book did allow him enough leeway to begin committing more and more time to
writing. He would become more productive in the course of the late 1960s, 1970s and early
1980s. The first result of all of this was the preparation
in the late 1960s of the sequel to Dune for publication. Entitled Dune Messiah, it was
originally published in serial form in Galaxy magazine and then as a stand-alone novel by
Putnam in late 1969. Both it, and Herbert’s third novel in the series, Children of Dune,
was substantially written in the 1960s, with lengthy drafts prepared before Dune itself
was ever published. Dune Messiah was a considerably shorter work than Dune, running to about 200
pages in most modern paperback editions. It continues the story of Paul Atreides, picking
up twelve years after the events which occurred at the end of Dune. Paul rules as emperor
of the universe, but he is an unconventional one. More dramatically, his conquest of Arrakis
and the rise of the Fremen has set off a galactic jihad or ‘holy war’, which has spread
to countless planets and star systems and led to the deaths of billions of people. In
this Herbert was influenced by the historic events which had followed the rise of Islam
in the Arabian Desert under the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century AD and the subsequent
Arab conquests which had seen the Bedouin people, a clear analogue for the Fremen, spread
out across the Middle East and North Africa, eventually conquering a vast region from Spain
in the west to Pakistan in the east and from the Caucasus south into the Sahara Desert.
Yet as bloody as both the Arab Conquests and the Fremen jihad were, the idea is meant to
be that both will bring a universal peace once the known world or universe is united
under the same religious and philosophical maxims. Thus, while Herbert has Paul deeply
regret the jihad he has created, he also emphasises that Paul sees the ultimate goal of it all.
Despite this, Paul is a tortured figure in Dune Messiah. He is surrounded with plots
by agents such as the Bene Gesserit and the Tleilaxu to assassinate him or remove him
from power. Eventually these culminate in Paul being blinded during the use of a Tleilaxu
nuclear weapon. This creates a quandary amongst the Fremen who are of the view that any Fremen
who is blinded must walk out into the desert alone, effectively committing suicide, as
without the ability to see he or she becomes a burden on the community. Yet Paul stuns
everyone by revealing that the spice melange now allows him to see even without the use
of his eyes, such is the level of his prescience. Nevertheless, as the plots mount and the scheming
becomes ever greater, Paul ultimately decides to abdicate in favour of his twin children,
Leto and Ghanima. He then walks out into the desert, seemingly to meet his death at the
end of the novel. Dune Messiah was ultimately a more meditative book with less action than
the original Dune. In it Herbert was keen to emphasise more the philosophical elements
of the world he had created and to explore a number of moral themes through Paul’s
ethical and psychological turmoil. Who was the man who was developing this sandy
world with its complex technology and serious moral and philosophical questions? Herbert
was something of an enigma. On the one hand he was an early version of the West Coast
libertine, an individual who grew his beard out before it became fashionable, who experimented
with marijuana and psilocybin when many people across America barely knew what these things
were and who was vastly concerned with ecological and environmental matters. As he grew older
he also became interested in issues surrounding sustainable archaeology and how home-building
could integrate elements of the natural environment. He was surprisingly progressive in all these
pursuits, elements of his personality which were driven by his boundless curiosity, a
trait which also led to his interests in things like photography, gardening, horticulture
and eventually the technology of computers. But there was another side to Herbert which
was decidedly less appealing to modern audiences. He was an authoritarian father, one who used
corporal punishment on his sons. This was perhaps not uncommon by the standards of the
1950s and 1960s, but his use of a US Navy lie detector test to question them when he
believed they were deceiving was decidedly more unusual. He was also known to lock the
children out of their home when Beverly wasn’t there so that he could concentrate on his
writing. But the most difficult element of his family life was unquestionably his relationship
with his younger son, Bruce, who was gay and who clashed repeatedly with Frank about this.
He did not disown him, but in the end Bruce largely sundered contact with Frank as he
became frustrated with his father’s incessant claims that Bruce had chosen his sexual orientation
and needed to return to heterosexuality. It placed a strain on the Herberts’ family
life over decades, though Brian, the older son, later stated that he had forgiven his
father and come to admire him. Herbert’s politics have been a matter of
considerable speculation, although this is itself somewhat peculiar because they seem
relatively straight-forward and opaque. He was unquestionably a conservative and a firm
defender of American values during the hottest period of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.
Indeed, one could in many ways read the House of Atreides in the world of Dune as being
analogous to the United States and the Harkonnen being an analogue for the Soviet Union. But
Herbert’s values in this respect went beyond the commonplace support for the United States.
Herbert was a fairly fervent supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the communist
witch hunts which took place during the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s. McCarthy was a distant
relative who Herbert affectionately referred to as ‘Cousin Joe’. Moreover, Herbert
earned part of his living in the 1950s by acting as a speech writer for Guy Cordon,
a district attorney for South Oregon who subsequently served as one of the senators for the state
between 1944 and 1955. Cordon has been deemed the last conservative senator to serve in
the state. More broadly, Herbert became a growing believer in the idea of a slimmed
down, small federal government which did not overtly interfere in the lives of citizens
and which, if Herbert’s troubled tax affairs over many years is anything to judge by, did
not impose high taxes on people. Perhaps why people have found Herbert’s
political views hard to understand, is that these stances on small government, taxation,
US attitudes towards the Soviet Union and the labour and communist movement within the
US, contrast so sharply with Herbert’s other political and personal stances, not to mention
his precocious affinity for psychotropic drugs and elements of what would later be simplistically
derided as beatnik culture. While his views on small government, taxation and foreign
policy would fit quite smoothly with the Republican Party throughout much of its modern history,
Herbert’s environmentalism and ecological stances certainly do not correspond with many
in the modern American conservative movement, particularly compared to the modern progressive
movement. Because of this, there are seemingly many clear contradictions in Herbert’s political
views. But it is worth remembering that the Republican Party which he supported in the
1950s was a very different party to that which Ronald Reagan reshaped in the 1980s and certainly
that of the early twenty-first century. Herbert was ultimately closer to the Republican Party
of figures like Ulysses S. Grant who began the process of ecological preservation in
the nineteenth century through the formation of Yellowstone National Park. If we were to
define Herbert’s political stances in modern terms he probably could be viewed most accurately
as a Libertarian rather than an adherent to any of the two major parties in the United
States. Despite the success of Dune and then Dune
Messiah, Herbert continued to work in other fields into the 1970s. Although he finally
quit his job as a journalist in 1971 and would never return to newspapers thereafter, he
replaced this activity with work elsewhere, teaching a course, for example, on creative
writing and science fiction at the University of Washington which he called ‘Utopia/Dystopia’.
He also continued his interest in a wide range of ecological projects. For instance, he and
Beverly purchased a property in Port Townsend in Washington State which they named Xanadu.
Here they began developing what were radical environmental projects by the standards of
the 1970s and which were well ahead of their time. For instance, a swimming pool was installed,
one which was heated using solar panels installed on the roof of the house. A poultry house
was also installed, one which was heated by using the methane from the bird droppings.
He also visited countries such as Vietnam and Pakistan to consult with government bodies
on various ecological projects, while he was in high demand as a reviewer by publication
houses which published science fiction or fantasy novels. Herbert, for example, was
instrumental in launching the career of Terry Brooks, one of the foremost fantasy writers
of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Herbert was also writing other works during
these years. Though he is primarily remembered today for his work on Dune and its numerous
sequels, he wrote dozens of short stories, numerous novellas and even entire series of
books based in different worlds to the one he had created for Dune. For instance, between
the mid-1960s and early 1980s he wrote four books in the WorShip or Pandora Series, which
begins with Destination: Void, a book which returns to Herbert’s concern about the prospect
of artificial intelligence being developed. This series is based on earth. However, in
this series the narrative shows how AI, having once been developed in Washington State with
disastrous consequences for humanity. In the series, following the disaster of AI, experiments
were being conducted on the moon to avoid AI fighting humanity. There are also other
themes within the series such as the issue of human or mammal cloning, again all scientific
ethical issues which would become concerns of human society decades after Herbert first
wrote about them. Nor was the Pandora Series the limit of Herbert’s non-Dune productivity.
He wrote well over a dozen standalone novellas, several of which remained unpublished during
his lifetime, but others such as The Santaroga Barrier were published and well enough received
for their exploration of the concepts of utopia and philosophical concerns. The last decade of Herbert’s life was in
many ways the most productive of all. In 1976 the third novel in the Dune series appeared.
Children of Dune begins nine years after the events of Dune Messiah. Arrakis has been transformed
into a liveable planet where green vistas are able to support Fremen villages and even
towns, a device which allows Herbert to expand on the ecological ideas which he first presented
back in the 1960s. However, all is not well amongst the Atreides. Paul’s sister Alia
is effectively acting as regent for her young niece and nephew, Paul’s children, Leto
and Ghanima, but she is succumbing to a process called Abomination, whereby the spirit of
the old Baron Harkonnen is taking over her mind. At the same time, a mysterious figure
known at the start only as ‘The Preacher’ has appeared out of the desert and has gained
notoriety amongst the Fremen. Over time it is revealed that this is actually Paul Atreides
and that he has somehow survived for years out in the desert. Extensive political machinations
occur in what was the lengthiest book yet in the series, eventually resulting in Leto’s
ascendancy as Emperor. It was nominated for a Hugo award, but did not win it. The fourth book in the series, God Emperor
of Dune, which was first published in 1981, was the most dramatic departure for Herbert
and his writing style. It was the first Dune novel to not focus on the character of Paul
Atreides, but rather focused on his son and successor Emperor, Leto, as its principal
character. The novel is set 3,500 years after the events of Children of Dune. Leto has transformed
into a hybrid of a human and a giant sandworm and rules as a tyrant over the universe. Arrakis
itself has been completely terraformed into a green planet. The greening of Dune led to
the death of the other sandworms which produce the spice melange. Accordingly, Leto has become
the only producer of the vital substance and holds god-like powers owing to his ability
to control the last remaining supply of the product. He has rendered the people of the
universe into an almost infantile position, limiting their technology and ability to space
travel, while the Fremen are a broken people who have given up their warlike ways. As it
proceeds we learn that new groups such as the Ixians are working on alternative methods
of space travel in response to Leto’s tyranny. Overall, the book was a meditation on the
cyclical nature of history and how revolutions give way to tyranny only to be followed by
subsequent revolutions. God Emperor of Dune was followed in 1984 by Heretics of Dune.
This is set a millennium and a half after the events of the previous novel, a time in
which humanity has scattered to the furthest reaches of the universe. It focuses primarily
on the Bene Gesserit and their efforts to perceive the Golden Path, a plan devised by
the long deceased Emperor Leto to save humanity from destruction. This plan was created in
the wake of the return of some human groups from the scattered universe towards the older
systems bent on conquest. As things evolve the Bene Gesserit determine to destroy Arrakis,
renamed Rakis since it was terraformed, and to bring a sandworm to their planet Chapterhouse
where they will transform it into a sandtrout and terraform the planet to become like Arrakis
was in the days of Paul Atreides. This story is then directly picked up in the sixth and
last book written by Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune. However, the grand story arc would ultimately
be left incomplete due to Herbert’s death. Herbert had been working on a seventh book
which would complete the story of the Bene Gesserit and others on Chapterhouse at the
time of his death. He left copious notes, which his son Brian later used in conjunction
with Kevin J. Anderson, to attempt to produce sequels based on Frank’s notes and ideas. That Frank was unable to complete the books
he had planned was in some ways owing to his personal circumstances in the early 1980s.
Beverly had been diagnosed with lung cancer in 1980, a virtual death sentence in an age
of limited forms of treatment. While there was no hope of curing her, they did try to
prolong her life by largely relocating to Hawaii, hoping that the warmer climate and
drier air might do her lungs some good. Here they built an elaborate house replete with
a swimming pool and other amenities, secure financially for the first time in their lives
as Frank continued to earn more and more from book royalties and also payments for selling
the film licences to Dune. The fourth and fifth instalments in the book series also
earned Herbert large advances. Thus, he was able to spend much of his time either writing
or caring for Beverly. She died in 1984, following which Frank married for a third and final
time in 1985, this time to Theresa Shackleford, a representative from his publisher, the Putnam
Press. It would be a brief, but happy final marriage. Herbert did not survive Beverly for long,
but his last years were certainly ones of activity. His son Brian took over some of
the bookkeeping work Beverly had performed on the Herberts’ finances in 1984 and soon
discovered that Frank had accumulated large debts on his construction projects and owed
the IRS a substantial amount of money in unpaid taxes. Unperturbed, Frank carried on with
expanding the building work in Hawaii by adding a waterfall and a carp pond. He was also planning
the construction of a new house on the Herbert property at Port Townsend in Washington State
for his daughter from his first marriage, Penny, and her husband, who were caretakers
there when Frank was absent. More ambitiously, he was planning a trek to Nepal in his mid-sixties
with a friend, Jim Whittaker, during which they also planned to cross into Tibet so that
Herbert could become the oldest man to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a feat Whittaker
had managed already himself years earlier. But these dreams would not be realised. In
November 1985 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, an illness which remains one of the
most incurable types of cancer even forty years later. Experimental treatment and surgery
followed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison to allay a disease which had an average
life expectancy of less than six months after diagnosis. It was there that he passed away
after suffering a pulmonary embolism on the 11th of February 1986 at 65 years of age. Even before his death, there were concerted
efforts underway to adapt Dune into a motion picture. The first of these was commenced
in the 1970s by the Chilean-French director, Alejandro Jodorowsky. Much of his previous
work focused on elements of mysticism, religion and philosophy and so Dune was an intriguing
topic to take on. A French consortium bought the rights to the film from Herbert in 1974
and Jodorowsky began work on a production. Early signs were promising and intriguing.
A large budget of ten million dollars was provided and Jodorowsky managed to convince
the Spanish-French actor and dilettante, Salvador Dali, to play the role of the Emperor, while
the acclaimed American director, Orson Welles, was to feature as the Baron Harkonnen and
a role was envisaged for Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Bizarrely, Dali agreed only
on the condition that it would be a piece of performative art, being paid $100,000 per
hour of filming and becoming the highest paid actor in motion picture history in the process,
terms to which Jodorowsky agreed, planning to cut Dali’s time on set to one hour in
order to afford him. Dali also insisted that his throne on set was to be comprised of a
toilet seat and two intersecting dolphins at the back. Jodorowsky’s vision soon became too convoluted
and it was not just from Dali’s excessive demands. By 1976 the director was planning
a fourteen hour long movie, one which caused Herbert concern, as Jodorowsky was also planning
on departing too far from the source material. In the end Jodorowsky’s Dune was never made,
though an American-French produced documentary on the project and Jodorowsky’s efforts
to produce the film, one which was very well-received, was released in 2013. However, in the 1970s,
the rights to the film were ultimately sold to the American surrealist filmmaker, David
Lynch, who in the end produced a film in 1984 starring Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides
and the singer Sting as Feyd-Ruatha, the Baron Harkonnen’s nephew. The film was a box office
bomb, having been produced on a very large budget, and was critically derided, although
it did subsequently develop a cult following, based largely on how bad some of the set pieces
and set-design are. Lynch subsequently disowned the film, claiming the final cuts were not
his own. Nor was the world which Herbert created abandoned
with his own passing. Prior to his father’s death, one of Herbert’s children, Brian
Herbert, had become an emerging author himself, typically writing science fiction. Then, beginning
in the mid-1990s, he began work on what would eventually become a prequel trilogy to Dune
itself, with three novels entitled Dune: House Atreides, Dune: House Harkonnen and Dune:
House Corrino, exploring the rise of the two rival houses and that of the imperial house
Corrino. It was the beginning of Brian’s extension of the Dune universe and in total
he has produced nearly two dozen Dune books since and numerous short stories. Nor was
Brian Herbert alone in this. As rights were extended to other authors, numerous other
books on the Dune universe began to appear in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. For instance,
in 1999 Joseph M. Daniels published The Stars and Planets of Frank Herbert’s Dune: A Gazetteer,
which sought to explore the physical realities of Herbert’s invented universe in a way
which Herbert had only ever really alluded to in his novels. Nor is the Dune universe
exclusive to published books. Several successful video games have appeared as part of the franchise,
notably Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis, a strategy simulator released in 1992 which
became one of the most successful video games of its era. Table-top games have also been
developed. More strikingly, many of the geographical features on the moon Titan, which orbits the
planet Saturn in our solar system, have been named in recent decades after geographical
places named in the Dune novels. Therefore Herbert’s legacy now extends to space itself.
There have also been renewed efforts to film Dune after the abortive efforts of Jodorowsky
in the 1970s and the lacklustre final product which Lynch ended up with in the 1980s. The
Sci-Fi Channel produced a series of mini-series in the early 2000s based on the first three
novels in the saga. However, the foremost endeavour in this respect is the trilogy of
films which the Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve, is creating. One of these, based on the first
half of Dune, has already appeared in cinemas in 2021 and was considered a vast improvement
on earlier versions, thus, Herbert’s world and vision is alive and well. Herbert’s legacy is immense today, particularly
in the realm of science fiction writing, although curiously he divides opinion amongst many
science fiction enthusiasts, many of whom find his prose plodding and difficult, while
others consider him one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. This is entirely
owing to Dune and the world in which it is set, as well as some of the sequel novels.
Science fiction, at its best, is considered to be a medium for exploring issues which
confront humanity in the here and now or which will do so in decades to come. In this respect
Dune and its sequels were prescient. For instance, Herbert portrayed a world in which advanced
types of technology and in particular artificial intelligence were almost entirely prohibited
for widespread use on the basis of how much damage they could inflict upon society if
unregulated. In this respect Herbert has never been more relevant than in the early 2020s.
But his books, with their emphasis on environmentalism and ecological disaster and their discussion
of power relations between states, or houses in the case of Dune, are also enormously relevant.
Herbert was writing about many of the issues which would come to define the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries decades before they ever entered mainstream consciousness.
This perhaps explains why Dune’s popularity was such a slow build. It sold well in the
1960s and 1970s, but really it was from the 1980s as issues around climate change and
the post-Cold War world order came into vogue that it became hugely successful. Thus, Herbert
was something of a prophet of the future and this has provided the basis for the enduring
popularity of all-things Arrakis and the world he created. What do you think of Frank Herbert? Was he
the greatest science fiction writer of all time and were his ecological ideas as presented
in Dune prescient of the problems which humanity faces in the twenty-first century? Please
let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
