described in my biography of him, Dreamer of Dune. Growing up in Frank Herbert’s household, I did not understand his need for absolute silence so that he could concentrate, the intense desire he had to complete his important writing projects, or the confidence he had that one day his writing would be a success, despite the steady stream of rejections that he received. To my young eyes, the characters he created in Dune and his other stories were the children of his mind, and they competed with me for his affections. In the years it took him to write his magnum opus, he spent more time with Paul Atreides than he did with me. Dad’s study was off-limits to me, to my sister Penny, and to my brother Bruce. In those days, only my mother Beverly really understood Dad’s complexities. Ultimately, it was through her love for him, and the love he gave back to her, that I came to see the nurturing, loving side of the man.
By that time I was in my mid-twenties, having rebelled against his exacting ways for years. When I finally saw the soul of my father and began to appreciate him for the care he gave my mother when she was terminally ill, he and I became the best of friends. He helped me with my own writing career by showing me what editors wanted to see in books; he taught me how to construct interesting characters, how to build suspense, how to keep readers turning the pages. After perusing an early draft of Sidney’s Comet (which would become my first published novel), he marked up several pages and then wrote me this note: “These pages … show how editing tightens the story. Go now and do likewise.” It was his way of telling me that he could open the door for me and let me peek through, but I would have to complete the immense labors involved with writing myself.
Beverly Herbert was the window into Frank Herbert’s soul. He shared that reality with millions of readers when he wrote a loving, three-page tribute to her at the end of Chapterhouse: Dune, describing their life together. His writing companion and intellectual equal, she suggested the title for that book, and she died in 1984 while he was writing it. Earlier in Dune, Frank Herbert had modeled Lady Jessica Atreides after Beverly Herbert, with her dignified, gentle ways of influence, and even her prescient abilities, which my mother actually possessed. He also wrote of “Lady Jessica’s latent (prophetic) abilities,” and in this he was describing my mother, thinking of all the amazing paranormal feats she had accomplished in her lifetime. In an endearing tone, he often referred to her as his “white witch,” or good witch. Similarly, throughout the Dune series, he described the heroic Ben Gesserit women as “witches.”
Dune is the most admired science fiction novel ever written and has sold tens of millions of copies all over the world, in more than twenty languages. It is to science fiction what the Lord of the Rings trilogy is to fantasy, the most highly regarded, respected works in their respective genres. Of course, Dune is not just science fiction. It includes strong elements of fantasy and contains so many important layers beneath the story line that it has become a mainstream classic. As one dimension of this, just look at the cover on the book in your hands, the quiet dignity expressed in the artwork.
The novel was first published in hardcover in 1965 by Chilton Books, best known for their immense auto- repair novels. No other publisher would touch the book, in part because of the length of the manuscript. They felt it was far too long at 215,000 words, when most novels of the day were only a quarter to a third that length. Dune would require immense printing costs and a high hardcover price for the time, in excess of five dollars. No science fiction novel had ever commanded a retail price that high.
Publishers also expressed concern about the complexity of the novel and all of the new, exotic words that the author introduced in the beginning, which tended to slow the story down. One editor said that he could not get through the first hundred pages without becoming confused and irritated. Another said that he might be making a huge mistake in turning the book down, but he did so anyway.
Initial sales of the book were slow, but Frank Herbert’s science fiction—writing peers and readers recognized the genius of the work from the beginning, awarding it the coveted Nebula and Hugo awards for best novel of the year. It was featured in The Whole Earth Catalog and began to receive excellent reviews, including one from the New York Times. A groundswell of support was building.
In 1969, Frank Herbert published the first sequel, Dune Messiah, in which he warned about the dangers of following a charismatic leader and showed the dark side of Paul Atreides. Many fans didn’t understand this message, because they didn’t want to see their superhero brought down from his pedestal. Still, the book sold well, and so did its predecessor. Looking back at Dune, it is clear that Dad laid the seeds of the troublesome direction he intended to take with his hero, but a lot of readers didn’t want to see it. John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog who made many useful suggestions when Dune was being serialized, did not like Dune Messiah because of this Paul Atreides issue.
Having studied politics carefully, my father believed that heroes made mistakes … mistakes that were simplified by the number of people who followed such leaders slavishly. In a foreshadowing epigraph, Frank Herbert wrote in Dune: “Remember, we speak now of the Muad‘Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies’ skins, the Muad’Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: ‘I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough.’ ” And in a dramatic scene, as Liet- Kynes lay dying in the desert, he remembered the long-ago words of his own father: “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”
By the early 1970s, sales of Dune began to accelerate, largely because the novel was heralded as an environmental handbook, warning about the dangers of destroying the Earth’s finite resources. Frank Herbert spoke to more than 30,000 people at the first Earth Day in Philadelphia, and he toured the country, speaking to enthusiastic college audiences. The environmental movement was sweeping the nation, and Dad rode the crest of the wave, a breathtaking trip. When he published Children of Dune in 1976, it became a runaway bestseller, hitting every important list in the country.
Children of Dune was the first science fiction novel to become a New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback, and sales reached into the millions. After that, other science fiction writers began to have their own best-sellers, but Frank Herbert was the first to obtain such a high level of readership; he brought science fiction out of the ghetto of literature. By 1979, Dune itself had sold more than 10 million copies, and sales kept climbing. In early 1985, shortly after David Lynch’s movie Dune was released, the paperback version of the novel reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. This was a phenomenal accomplishment, occurring twenty years after its first publication, and sales remain brisk today.
In 1957, Dad flew to the Oregon coast to write a magazine article about a U.S. Department of Agriculture project there, in which the government had successfully planted poverty grasses on the crests of sand dunes, to keep them from inundating highways. He intended to call the article “They Stopped the Moving Sands,” but soon realized that he had a much bigger story on his hands.
Frank Herbert’s life experiences are layered into the pages of the Dune series, combined with an eclectic assortment of fascinating ideas that sprang from his researches. Among other things, the Dune universe is a spiritual melting pot, a far future in which religious beliefs have combined into interesting forms. Discerning readers will recognize Buddhism, Sufi Mysticism and other Islamic belief systems, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism. In the San Francisco Bay Area, my father even knew Zen Master Alan Watts, who lived on an old ferryboat. Dad drew on a variety of religious influences, without adhering to any one of them. Consistent with this, the stated purpose of the Commission of Ecumenical Translators, as described in an appendix to Dune, was to eliminate arguments between religions, each of which claimed to have “the one and only revelation.”
When he was a boy, eight of Dad’s Irish Catholic aunts tried to force Catholicism on him, but he resisted. Instead, this became the genesis of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. This fictional organization would claim it did not believe in organized religion, but the sisters were spiritual nonetheless. Both my father and mother were like that as well.
During the 1950s, Frank Herbert was a political speechwriter and publicity writer for U.S. senatorial and congressional candidates. In that decade, he also journeyed twice to Mexico with his family, where he studied desert conditions and crop cycles, and was subjected unwittingly to the effects of a hallucinogenic drug. All of those experiences, and a great deal from his childhood, found their way onto the pages of Dune. The novel became as complex and multilayered as Frank Herbert himself.
