Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science fiction author best known for the 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.
The Dune saga, set in the distant future, and taking place over millennia, explores complex themes, such as the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power in a future where humanity has long since developed interstellar travel and settled many thousands of worlds. Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time,[3] and the entire series is considered to be among the classics of the genre.
Frank Patrick Herbert Jr. was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington,[4][5] to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen (née McCarthy) Herbert.[6] His upbringing included spending a lot of time on the rural Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas.[7] He was fascinated by books, could read much of the newspaper before the age of five, had an excellent memory, and learned quickly.[8] He had an early interest in photography, buying a Kodak box camera at age ten, a new folding camera in his early teens, and a color film camera in the mid-1930s.[8] Due to an impoverished home environment, largely due to the Great Depression, he left home in 1938 to live with an aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon.[9]
Education
He enrolled in high school at Salem High School (now North Salem High School), where he graduated the next year.[9] In 1939 he lied about his age to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star.[10] Herbert then returned to Salem in 1940 where he worked for the Oregon Statesman newspaper (now Statesman Journal) in a variety of positions, including photographer.[9]
Herbert married Flora Lillian Parkinson in San Pedro, California, in 1941. They had one daughter, Penelope (b. February 16, 1942), and divorced in 1943.[1] During 1942, after the U.S. entry into World War II, he served in the Navy's Seabees for six months as a photographer, but suffered a head injury and was given a medical discharge. Herbert subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon where he reported for The Oregon Journal.[11]
After the war, Herbert attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students who had sold any work for publication; Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, the first to Esquire in 1945, and Stuart had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. They married in Seattle in 1946, and had two sons, Brian (b. 1947) and Bruce (1951–1993).[12] In 1949 Herbert and his wife moved to California to work on the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Here they befriended the psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery. The Slatterys introduced Herbert to the work of several thinkers who would influence his writing, including Freud, Jung, Jaspers and Heidegger; they also familiarized Herbert with Zen Buddhism.[13]
Herbert never graduated from college. According to his son Brian, he wanted to study only what interested him and so did not complete the required curriculum. He returned to journalism and worked at the Seattle Star and the Oregon Statesman. He was a writer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner'sCalifornia Living magazine for a decade.
Early career
In a 1973 interview, Herbert stated that he had been reading science fiction "about ten years" before he began writing in the genre, and he listed his favorite authors as H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Jack Vance.[14]
Herbert's first science fiction story, "Looking for Something", was published in the April 1952 issue of Startling Stories, then a monthly edited by Samuel Mines. Three more of his stories appeared in 1954 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories.[15] His career as a novelist began in 1955 with the serial publication of Under Pressure in Astounding from November 1955; afterward it was issued as a book by Doubleday titled The Dragon in the Sea.[15] The story explored sanity and madness in the environment of a 21st-century submarine and predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production.[16] It was a critical success but not a major commercial one. During this time Herbert also worked as a speechwriter for Republican senator Guy Cordon.[17]
Herbert began researching Dune in 1959. He was able to devote himself wholeheartedly to his writing career because his wife returned to work full-time as an advertising writer for department stores, becoming the breadwinner during the 1960s. The novel Dune was published in 1965, which spearheaded the Dune franchise. He later told Willis E. McNelly that the novel originated when he was assigned to write a magazine article about sand dunes in the Oregon Dunes near Florence, Oregon. He got overinvolved and ended up with far more raw material than needed for an article. The article was never written, but it planted the seed that led to Dune. Another significant source of inspiration for Dune was Herbert's experiences with psilocybin and his hobby of cultivating mushrooms, according to mycologistPaul Stamets's account.[18]
Dune took six years of research and writing to complete and was much longer than other commercial science fiction of the time. Analog (the renamed Astounding, still edited by John W. Campbell) published it in two parts comprising eight installments, "Dune World" from December 1963 and "Prophet of Dune" in 1965.[15] It was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers. One editor prophetically wrote, "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but..."[19]
Dune was not an immediate bestseller. By 1968 Herbert had made $20,000 from it, far more than most science fiction novels of the time were generating, but not enough to let him 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 studies and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970–1972). He worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as a social and ecological consultant in 1972. In 1973 he was director-photographer of the television show The Tillers.[23]
I don't worry about inspiration or anything like that.... 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."[24]
— Frank Herbert
By the end of 1972, Herbert had retired from newspaper writing and became a full-time fiction writer. During the 1970s and 1980s, he enjoyed considerable commercial success as an author. He divided his time between homes in Hawaii and Washington's Olympic Peninsula; his home in Port Townsend on the peninsula was intended to be an "ecological demonstration project".
[25][page needed] During this time he wrote numerous books and pushed ecological and philosophical ideas. He continued his Dune saga with Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). Herbert planned to write a seventh novel to conclude the series, but his death in 1986 left storylines unresolved.[26]
Herbert's change in fortune was shadowed by tragedy. In 1974, his wife Beverly underwent an operation for lung cancer. She lived ten more years, but her health was adversely affected by the surgery.[28] During this period, Herbert was the featured speaker at the Octocon II science fiction convention held at the El Rancho Tropicana in Santa Rosa, California, in October 1978. In 1979, he met anthropologist Jim Funaro with whom he conceived the Contact Conference. Beverly Herbert died on February 7, 1984.[2] Herbert completed and published Heretics of Dune that year. In his afterword to 1985's Chapterhouse: Dune, Herbert included a dedication to Beverly.
1984 was a tumultuous year in Herbert's life. During this same year of his wife's death, his career took off with the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune. Despite high expectations, a big-budget production design and an A-list cast, the movie drew mostly poor reviews in the United States. However, despite a disappointing response in the US, the film was a critical and commercial success in Europe and Japan.[21]
In 1985, after Beverly's death, Herbert married his former Putnam representative Theresa Shackleford. The same year he published Chapterhouse: Dune, which tied up many of the saga's story threads. This would be Herbert's final single work (the collection Eye was published that year, and Man of Two Worlds was published in 1986). He died of a massive pulmonary embolism while recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, aged 65.[25][29]
Criticism of government
Herbert was a strong critic of the Soviet Union. He was a distant relative of the Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he referred to as "Cousin Joe". However, he was appalled to learn of McCarthy's blacklisting of suspected communists from working in certain careers and believed that he was endangering essential freedoms of citizens of the United States.[30] Herbert believed that governments lie to protect themselves and that, following the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon had unwittingly taught an important lesson in not trusting government.[31][32] Herbert also opposed American involvement in the war in Vietnam.[33]
In Chapterhouse: Dune, he wrote:
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex[34] ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology. The underlying thrust of his work was a fascination with the question of human survival and evolution. Herbert has attracted a sometimes fanatical fan base, many of whom have tried to read everything he wrote, fiction or non-fiction, and see Herbert as something of an authority on the subject matters of his books. Indeed, such was the devotion of some of his readers that Herbert was at times asked if he was founding a cult,[35] something he was very much against.
There are a number of key themes in Herbert's work:
A concern with leadership. He explored the human tendency to slavishly follow charismatic leaders. He delved into both the flaws and potentials of bureaucracy and government.[16]
Herbert was among the first science fiction authors to popularize ideas about ecology[36] and systems thinking. He stressed the need for humans to think both systematically and long-term.[37]
The relationship between religion, politics and power.[38]
Human survival and evolution: Herbert writes of the Fremen, the Sardaukar, and the Dosadi, who are molded by their terrible living conditions into dangerous super races.[39]
Human possibilities and potential: Herbert offered Mentats, the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilax as different visions of human potential.
The nature of sanity and madness. Frank Herbert was interested in the work of Thomas Szasz and the anti-psychiatry movement. Often, Herbert poses the question, "What is sane?", and while there are clearly insane behaviors and psychopathies as evinced by characters (Piter De Vries for instance), it is often suggested that normal and abnormal are relative terms which humans are sometimes ill-equipped to apply to one another, especially on the basis of statistical regularity.[16]
The possible effects and consequences of consciousness-altering chemicals, such as the spice in the Dune saga, as well as the "Jaspers" fungus in The Santaroga Barrier, and the Kelp in the Destination: Void sequence.[16]
How language shapes thought. More specifically, Herbert was influenced by Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics.[40]Algis Budrys wrote that his knowledge of language and linguistics "is worth at least one PhD and the Chair of Philology at a good New England college".[41]
Dune and the Dune saga constitute one of the world's best-selling science fiction series and novels; Dune in particular has received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award in 1965 and sharing the Hugo Award in 1966, and is frequently considered one of the best science fiction novels ever, if not the best.[42]Locus subscribers voted it the all-time best SF novel in 1975, again in 1987, and the best "before 1990" in 1998.[43]
Dune is considered a landmark novel for a number of reasons:
Dune is a landmark of soft science fiction. Herbert deliberately suppressed technology in his Dune universe so that he could address the future of humanity, rather than the future of humanity's technology. Dune considers the way humans and their institutions might change over time.[44][45]
Frank Herbert was a great popularizer of scientific ideas; many of his fans credit Frank Herbert for introducing them to philosophy and psychology. In Dune, he helped popularize the term ecology. Gerald Jonas explains in The New York Times Book Review: "So completely did Mr. Herbert work out the interactions of man and beast and geography and climate that Dune became the standard for an emerging subgenre of 'ecological' science fiction."
Dune is considered an epic example of literary world-building. The Library Journal reports that "Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy". Arthur C. Clarke is quoted as making a similar statement on the back cover of a paper edition of Dune.[46] Frank Herbert imagined every facet of his creation. He lovingly included glossaries, quotes, documents, and histories, to bring his universe alive to his readers. No science fiction novel before it had so vividly realized life on another world.[16]
Herbert never again equalled the critical acclaim he received for Dune. Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula Award, although almost all of them were New York Times Best Sellers.[47]
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.
California State University, Fullerton's Pollack Library has several of Herbert's draft manuscripts of Dune and other works, with the author's notes, in their Frank Herbert Archives.[51]
In recent years, Frank Herbert's son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson have added to the Dune franchise, using notes left behind by Frank Herbert and discovered over a decade after his death. Brian Herbert and Anderson have written three prequel trilogies (Prelude to Dune, Legends of Dune and Great Schools of Dune) exploring the history of the Dune universe before the events of the original novel, two novels that take place between novels of the original Dune sequels (with plans for more), as well as two post-Chapterhouse Dune novels that complete the original series (Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune) based on Frank Herbert's own Dune 7 outline.[57][58][59]
References
^ abOregon Center For Health Statistics; Portland, Oregon, US; Oregon, Divorce Records, 1925–1945; Document no. 30939
^ abWashington State Archives; Olympia, Washington; Washington Death Index, 1940–1959, 1965–2017; Certificate no. 090281.
^"SCI FI Channel Auction to Benefit Reading Is Fundamental". PNNonline.org (Internet Archive). March 18, 2003. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved September 28, 2007. Since its debut in 1965, Frank Herbert's Dune has sold over 12 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling science fiction novel of all time ... Frank Herbert's Dune saga is one of the greatest 20th Century contributions to literature.
^Herbert, Frank (1990). Dune. Turtleback. ISBN978-0881036367. Retrieved January 21, 2018 – via Google Books. Frank Herbert was born Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. in Tacoma, Washington on October 8, 1920.
^O'Reilly, Timothy (1981). Frank Herbert. Frederick Ungar Publishing Company. p. 14.
^Turner, Paul (October 1973). "Vertex Magazine Interview". Vertex Magazine. Vol. 1, no. 4. Archived from the original on October 21, 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2012 – via "The Prelude to Dune Trilogy" at members.multimania.co.uk/Fenrir/ctdinterviews.htm. Well, I did read some Heinlein. I shouldn't really tie it down to ten years because I had read H. G. Wells. I'd read Vance, Jack Vance, and I became acquainted with Jack Vance about that time ... I read Poul Anderson.
^Herbert, Brian. Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. New York: Tor Books, 2003, pp. 257–258, ISBN0-765-30646-8 "[Frank Herbert completed] a half-hour documentary film based upon fieldwork he had done with Roy Prosterman in Pakistan [and] Vietnam ... Entitled The Tillers, it was written, filmed and directed by Frank Herbert. ... it appeared on King Television in Seattle and on the Public Broadcasting System."
^
Herbert quoted in Murray, Donald Morison (Editor) Shoptalk: learning to write with writers (1990) Cook Publishers, 1990.
^Shawn Speakman, Website History, Terrybrooks.net, archived from the original on September 14, 2012, retrieved June 22, 2011.
^ abHerbert, Frank P. (1987). Chapterhouse: Dune. New York City: The Berkley Publishing Group, Ace Books. pp. 59, 436. ISBN0-441-10267-0 – via Internet Archive. It was typical of her that she wanted me to call the radiologist whose treatment in 1974 was the proximate cause of her death and thank him...
^"This was Frank Herbert, speaking from his own heart... It was a philosophy of non-violence that would ultimately lead to his involvement in the movement to stop the war in Vietnam." Herbert, Brian. (2003). Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert. MacMillan. Retrieved February 13, 2015 (p. 157).
^"With its blend (or sometimes clash) of complex intellectual discourse and Byzantine intrigue, Dune provided a template for FH's more significant later works. Sequels soon began to appear which carried on the arguments of the original in testingly various manners and with an intensity of discourse seldom encountered in the sf field. Dune Messiah (1969) elaborates the intrigue at the cost of other elements, but Children of Dune (1976) recaptures much of the strength of the original work and addresses another recurrent theme in FH's work – the evolution of Man, in this case into SUPERMAN;..." "Frank Herbert", The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
^Herbert, Frank (July 1980). "Dune Genesis". Omni. FrankHerbert.org. Archived from the original on January 7, 2012. Retrieved February 14, 2014.
^McNeilly, Willis E.
"Herbert, Frank (Patrick)" in Gunn, James. The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
London, Viking, 1988. (pp. 222–24) ISBN0-670-81041-X . "Herbert felt strongly about many
causes, particularly ecology ..."
^"When I was quite young ... I began to suspect there must be flaws in my sense of reality ... But I had been produced to focus on objects (things) and not on systems (processes)." Frank Herbert,
"Doll Factory, Gun Factory", (1973 Essay), reprinted in The Maker of Dune:Thoughts of a Science Fiction Master edited
by Tim O'Reilly. Berkley Books, 1987, ISBN0425097854.
^"Frank Herbert's true stroke of
genius consisted ... in inviting a way of thinking about humanity, history, religion, and politics as complex and interdependent
as ecosystems themselves". Jeffery Nicholas, Dune and Philosophy:Weirding Way of Mentat. Open Court Publishing, 2011, ISBN0812697154, (p. 149).
^O'Reilly, Tim. Frank Herbert. New York, NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc. ,1981. (pp.59–60) ISBN0-8044-2666-X .
"Much of the Bene Gesserit technology of consciousness is based on the insights of general semantics, a philosophy and training method developed in the 1930s by Alfred Korzybski. Herbert had studied general semantics in San Francisco at about the time he was writing Dune. (At one point, he worked as a ghostwriter for a nationally syndicated column by S. I. Hayakawa, one of the foremost proponents of general semantics.)"
^Touponce 1988, p. 2"His dominant intellectual impulse was not to mystify or set himself up as a prophet, but the opposite – to turn what powers of analysis he had (and they were considerable) over to his audience. And this impulse is as manifest in Dune, which many people consider the all-time best science fiction novel, as it is in his computer book, Without Me You're Nothing."
^Herbert, Frank (January 1977). Dune (Berkley Medallion ed.). US: Berkley Publishing Corp. p. Back Cover. ISBN0425-04376-2.
^ abSpeaking at the 2006 induction of Herbert in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Kevin J. Anderson stated that Children of Dune (1976) "was the first SF novel ever to hit the New York Times bestseller list." Dune 7 Blog: Wednesday, June 21, 2006: The Science Fiction Hall of FameArchived July 21, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. By KJA. Dune: The Official Website. Retrieved July 17, 2011. KJA spoke and presented the award to son Brian Herbert.
^Malcolm Edwards, "Herbert, Frank" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. London, Orbit, 1994. ISBN1-85723-124-4 (p. 558–560).
^"Presenting the 2006 Hall of Fame Inductees". Archived from the original on April 26, 2006. Retrieved August 19, 2016.. Press release March 15, 2006. Science Fiction Museum (sfhomeworld.org). Archived April 26, 2006. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
Anderson, Kevin J. (December 16, 2005). "Dune 7 blog: Conspiracy Theories". Archived from the original on October 12, 2007. Retrieved October 12, 2008 – via DuneNovels.com. Frank Herbert wrote a detailed outline for Dune 7 and he left extensive Dune 7 notes, as well as stored boxes of his descriptions, epigraphs, chapters, character backgrounds, historical notes—over a thousand pages worth.
^Neuman, Clayton (August 17, 2009). "Winds of Dune Author Brian Herbert on Flipping the Myth of Jihad". AMC. Archived from the original on September 21, 2009. Retrieved June 16, 2020. I got a call from an estate attorney who asked me what I wanted to do with two safety deposit boxes of my dad's ... in them were the notes to Dune 7—it was a 30-page outline. So I went up in my attic and found another 1,000 pages of working notes.
"Before Dune, After Frank Herbert". Amazon.com. 2004. Archived from the original on April 9, 2009. Retrieved November 12, 2008. Brian was cleaning out his garage to make an office space and he found all these boxes that had 'Dune Notes' on the side. And we used a lot of them for our House books.
"Interview with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson". Arrakis.ru. 2004. Archived from the original on September 8, 2012. Retrieved November 12, 2008. We had already started work on House Atreides ... After we already had our general outline written and the proposal sent to publishers, then we found the outlines and notes. (This necessitated some changes, of course.)
^Ascher, Ian (2004). "Kevin J. Anderson Interview". DigitalWebbing.com. Archived from the original on July 3, 2007. Retrieved July 3, 2007. ... we are ready to tackle the next major challenge—writing the grand climax of the saga that Frank Herbert left in his original notes sealed in a safe deposit box ... after we'd already decided what we wanted to write ... They opened up the safe deposit box and found inside the full and complete outline for Dune 7 ... Later, when Brian was cleaning out his garage, in the back he found ... over three thousand pages of Frank Herbert's other notes, background material, and character sketches.
Adams, John Joseph (August 9, 2006). "New Dune Books Resume Story". SciFi.com. Archived from the original on December 19, 2007. Retrieved December 19, 2007. Anderson said that Frank Herbert's notes included a description of the story and a great deal of character background information. 'But having a roadmap of the U.S. and actually driving across the country are two different things,' he said. 'Brian and I had a lot to work with and a lot to expand...'
