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Frank Herbert
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Frank Herbert

Frank Patrick Herbert (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science fiction author.

As an author Frank Herbert was both critically acclaimed and a worldwide commercial success. He is best known for the novel, Dune, and the five other novels in the series that followed it. The Dune saga dealt with themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics and power. It is considered by many fans of the genre to be the best science fiction epic ever written, and is certainly one of the most popular. Dune was awarded the Nebula award in 1965 and shared the Hugo award in 1966. The film of the novel Dune, made by David Lynch, while flawed, remains a classic of the genre. Dune was made into a TV mini-series by the Sci Fi Channel (United States) in 2001. This was commercially successful and the Sci-Fi channel continued the Dune saga with a further mini-series in 2003 entitled Children of Dune. Other notable novels were The Dosadi Experiment, The White Plague and The Godmakers.

Table of contents
1 Biography
2 Legacy
3 Ideas and Themes
4 Quotations
5 Other Quotations
6 Status and Impact in Science Fiction
7 Controversies
8 Bibliography
9 Books About Frank Herbert and Dune
10 Artistic works set in the Dune Universe
11 External links

Biography

Frank Herbert was born in 1920 in Tacoma, Washington. He was a very precocious, intelligent young boy and from a very early age knew what he wanted to do in life. On his eighth birthday, Frank walked down to breakfast at his family home in a pompous and portentous fashion (his own retrospective opinion) announced "I wanna be a author."

As an initial career he chose the next best thing — journalism. He lied about his age in order to get his first newspaper job on the Glendale Star in 1939.

There was a temporary hiatus to his writing career as he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. During this time his romantic life was eventful. He married Flora Parkinson in 1941, but later divorced her in 1945 after fathering a daughter.

After the war he attended the University of Washington, where he met his soon-to-be second wife Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. At the time they were the only students in the class who had as yet sold any work for publication—Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, and Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. This connection grew into something greater and they got married in Seattle on June 20, 1946. Their first son, Brian Herbert, was born in 1947. Frank Herbert did not graduate from college, according to Brian, because he only wanted to study what interested him and so didn't complete the required courses. One should also bear in mind he had the more demanding reason that he now had the parental responsibilities of bringing up a young child.

After college he went back into journalism and took a number of different roles working all over the West coast, including posts at the Seattle Star and the Oregon Statesman, and was a writer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner's California Living magazine for a decade. Quite obviously the fifties and early sixties were a frustrating time professionally for Herbert, with two young children (Peter arrived in 1951) it meant he had to put more into his journalistic work than he probably liked, yet at the same time his part-time writing probably undermined his success as a serious journalist. Frank Herbert was never conventional and very independent. He switched from job to job, town to town, never really living the fully conventional life.

Frank Herbert started reading science fiction in the forties, and in the fifties decided that this was the type of fiction he wanted to write. In the 1950s his short stories appeared among others in Startling Stories. During the next decade he was an infrequent contributor to science fiction magazines, producing fewer than 20 short stories.

Clearly, Frank Herbert's turn of mind did not serve him well as a conventional breadwinner. He relates in an interview with McNelly that the novel Dune originated when he was supposed to do an article on sand dunes in Florence, Oregon, but he got too involved in it and ended up with reams more raw material than he would ever need for a magazine article. Indeed he never actually handed in this article, but it served as the seed for the ideas that created Dune.

Herbert started his career as a novelist with the publishing of The Dragon in the Sea in 1955, where he used the environment of a 21st-century submarine as a way to explore sanity and madness. The book predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production. It was a critical success, but it was not a major commercial one, and so it did not really affect his life circumstances.

He began researching Dune in 1959 and from that point on he was able to devote himself more wholeheartedly to his writing career. It seems clear that with the children being older, his wife was more able to support the family, being able to work full time as an advertising writer for department stores, so becoming the main breadwinner during the sixties. Not that Beverly gave up writing entirely, she became Herbert's editor in chief and sounding board, and though it seems fair to ascribe the books to Frank Herbert, Beverly played a role that ought not to be underestimated in the development of his novels.

Meanwhile Frank focused more single-mindedly on writing his masterpiece. After six years of research and writing, Dune was completed by 1965. But Dune was rejected by more than twenty publishers before one finally accepted it. One publisher prophetically wrote back "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but...," before rejecting the manuscript. But publisher number twenty made what would be the wisest choice — and Herbert received a $7500 advance, and Dune was soon a critical success. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award in 1966. Dune was the first ecological science fiction novel, containing a multitude of big, inter-relating themes and multiple character viewpoints, a method which ran through all Herbert's mature work.

The book's popularity among the public was slow-burning. Frank Herbert only made $20,000 from it by 1968, and so he was not able to take up full time writing. However, the publication of Dune did open doors for him. He was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's education writer from 1969 to 1972 and lecturer in general and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970–2). He worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as social and ecological consultant in 1972. Frank was only able to take up full-time writing in 1972. In 1973 he was director-photographer of the television show The Tillers.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Frank Herbert finally enjoyed commercial success as an author. He lived between Hawaii and Washington State. During this time he wrote numerous books and pushed ecological and philosophical ideas. He continued his Dune saga, following it with Dune Messiah, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune. Other highlights were The Dosadi Experiment, The Godmakers, The White Plague and the books he wrote in partnership with Bill Ransom: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor.

But his change in fortune was shaded by tragedy. In 1974, Beverly underwent an operation for cancer which gave her gave her ten more years of life, but adversely affected her health. She died on February 7, 1984. In his afterword to Chapterhouse Dune, Frank writes a moving elegy for the woman who was his life partner.

1984 was a tumultuous year in Herbert's life. In the same year his wife tragically died, his career ironically took off as well with the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune. Despite high expectations, big-budget production design and A-list cast, the movie drew mostly poor reviews in the United States. However, despite a disappointing response in the USA, the film was a critical and commercial success in Europe and Japan. Also in 1984 Herbert published the fifth book in the Dune saga, Heretics of Dune, which many readers believe to be as good as Dune itself. Finally, with the passing away of Beverly, Frank married Theresa Shackelford later in the year.

Beverly apparently made Frank promise to finish the sixth book in the Dune sequence. In 1986, Herbert published Chapterhouse: Dune, which tied up many of the saga's story threads. This was to be Herbert's final single work — he died of pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, at the age of 65.

Legacy

Frank Herbert left a rich posthumous legacy for his readers. He left behind notes for both the history of the Dune universe before the events of Dune and the novel he had planned to follow Chapterhouse: Dune. In recent years, his son Brian Herbert and an associate, Kevin J. Anderson, have used those notes to write a very successful series of novels based on the pre-Dune materials and are preparing to write the post-Chapterhouse novel which fans refer to as Dune 7.

The film version of Dune is now a cult classic, doing very well on video and DVD and his Dune saga is as of 2003 being serialized by the Sci-Fi Channel. Dune the mini-series has been released to considerable acclaim and commercial success, and the channel have recently released a new mini-series called Children of Dune which actually merges the plots in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

Herbert's books have grown more popular as time passed thanks to a growing fanbase inspired by the release of the Dune 1984 film, the television mini-series and the aforementioned "Prelude to Dune" series. Dune remains his most successful and popular novel — it has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. Herbert's other books have also sold well, particularly the subsequent novels in the Dune saga, which have been reprinted year after year.

Ideas and Themes

Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology, which have inspired many of his readers to become interested in these areas. The underlying thrust in Frank Herbert's work was his fascination with the question of human survival and evolution. Frank Herbert has attracted a fanatical fanbase, many of whom have tried to read everything Frank Herbert has written, fiction or non-fiction, and see Frank Herbert as something of a guru. Indeed such was the devotion of some of his readers that Frank Herbert had to be careful to avoid attracting followers, having at times to vigorously discourage such slavishness.

There are a number of key themes in Herbert's work:

Frank Herbert carefully refrained from offering his readers firm answers to many of the questions he explored.

Quotations

On Writing

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing. for example. or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two.

On Science Fiction

I think science fiction does help, and it points in very interesting directions. It points in relativistic directions. It says that we have the imagination for these other opportunities, these other choices. We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, "Well, the only answer is...." or, "If you would just. . . ." Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. We may be contriving a strictly controlled police culture. B. F. Skinner worries the hell out of me. He is right out of Huxley. He is standing there like a small boy saying, "Please let me have a world like this because I feel safe in it!" He is saying, "I want to control it." He may be very accurate in his assessment that our total society is going in that direction and that maybe he is opting for the lesser of numerous evils, in his view. But what kind of a society would that produce?

Other Quotations

Litany Against Fear
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear is gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Bene Gesserit litany against fear. (Page 19, Dune)

On Systems Thinking/Ecology/Long Term Thinking
The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained miss the collapse until too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
Kynes (Page 570, Dune)

On Belief
Remember your philosopher’s doubts, Miles. Beware! The mind of a believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
Taraza (Page 164, Heretics of Dune)

On Life
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
Darwi Odrade (Page 45, Chapter House Dune)

On Learning
Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis for the speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries a lesson.
from "The Humanity of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan (page 83, Dune)

On Self deception
Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.
Jessica speaking to Thufir Hawat (Page 182, Dune)

On Leadership
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
Law of Governance,The Spacing Guild Manual (page 141, Children of Dune)

Status and Impact in Science Fiction

Herbert is acknowledged as one of the finest science fiction (SF) writers of all time — his Dune is recognized as a seminal novel of the genre. It is the best-selling science fiction novel, and the Dune saga is the best-selling science fiction series of all time. In addition, Dune has received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award in 1965 and sharing the Hugo Award in 1966. According to contemporary Robert A. Heinlein, Herbert's opus was "Powerful, convincing, and most ingenious." Arthur C. Clarke wrote that Dune was "unique among SF novels...I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings."

Dune is also considered a landmark novel for a number of reasons:

Spark Notes conclusion about Dune is that:
"Dune is the masterpiece by which all other science fiction novels are judged just as Lord of the Rings is to the genre of modern fantasy. While its significance in the more general literary canon is debatable, Dune is unquestionably one of the most important works of science fiction, and perhaps of American literature in general, in the twentieth century."

Herbert wrote over twenty novels after Dune that some regard being of variable quality. Books like The Green Brain, The Santaroga Barrier and Hellstrom's Hive seemed to hark back to the days before Dune when a good technological idea was all that was needed to drive a sci-fi novel. And some fans of the Dune saga are critical of the follow-up novels — particularly Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune — as being sub-par.

Herbert never equalled the critical acclaim he received from Dune. Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula. Some felt that Children of Dune was almost too literary and too dark to get the recognition it may have deserved, and that The Dosadi Experiment lacked an epic quality fans had come to expect. Critics point out problems in Herbert's difficult writing style which they contend was inconsistent, and that Herbert sometimes let his enthusiasm for interesting ideas get in the way of the story.

To conclude, Malcolm Edwards in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction wrote:

"Much of [Herbert]'s work makes difficult reading. His ideas were genuinely developed concepts, not merely decorative notions, but they were sometimes embodied in excessively complicated plots and articulated in prose which did not always match the level of thinking...His best novels, however, were the work of a speculative intellect with few rivals in modern [science fiction]."

Controversies

Since his death the main controversy within the science fiction community is whether the new Dune books by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson should be considered canonical. Critics argue that these books do not have the quality of the original series, especially with regard to the articulation of complex ideas about human life that was such a concern of Frank Herbert.

Also Herbert's close friend Dr. Willis E. McNelly (1920–2003) compiled a Dune Encyclopedia in 1984. It was written by fans of Dune, including McNelly. There's a considerable debate about how "canonical" the encyclopedia is: Herbert wrote the introduction and read and approved every essay, but in subsequent books of the Dune series he contradicted a few points. Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, offended many diehard fans when they decided against using the Dune Encyclopedia as a reference for their new Dune books, so their series often contradicts material presented in McNelly's work.

Be that as it may, the new books are enormously popular among fans. Aficionados of the original series await the seventh book with anticipation — eager to discover where Herbert intended to take the landmark series, but concerned that the new book would be a major departure from Herbert's original vision.

Bibliography

Fiction

Novels

Short Fiction Collections:

Short Fiction

Non Fiction Books:

Non Fiction Books:

Essays and introductions

Significant Newspaper Articles

Other Publications

Poetry

Some Audio Recordings

Limited Bibliography by universe

Dune series:

Con-sentiency series: Destination: Void universe:

Books About Frank Herbert and Dune

Artistic works set in the Dune Universe

The original series by Frank Herbert:

The short story A Coproduction with Jim Burns who made the illustrations. Itīs written like a tourist guide to the planet Dune.

Prelude to Dune There is also a prequel trilogy to Dune, known as the Prelude to Dune. It was written by Brian Herbert (son of Frank) and Kevin J. Anderson and based in part on Frank Herbert's notes, found after his death. These books have been extremely successful and have introduced the Dune universe to a new generation of fans. This trilogy is set in the years leading up to the events in Dune.

Legends of Dune Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson followed this with a second prequel trilogy called the Legends of Dune This trilogy is set at the beginning of time — in regard to the Dune universe — when Humans and sentient machines fight a devastating war.

Other Artistic works based on Frank Herbert's books:

External links