Road to Dune Read online
Road to Dune
Herbert, Brian Anderson, Kevin J. Herbert, Frank
Macmillan (2006)
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SUMMARY:
Frank Herbert's Duneis widely known as the science fiction equivalent of The Lord of the Rings.Now The Road to Duneis a companion work comparable to The Silmarillion,shedding light on and following the remarkable development of the bestselling science fiction novel of all time. In this fascinating volume, the world's millions of Dunefans can read--at long last--the unpublished chapters and scenes from Duneand Dune Messiah. The Road to Dunealso includes some of the original correspondence between Frank Herbert and famed editor John W. Campbell, Jr., along with other correspondence during Herbert's years-long struggle to get his innovative work published, and the article "They Stopped the Moving Sands," Herbert's original inspiration for Dune. The Road to Dunealso features newly discovered papers and manuscripts of Frank Herbert, and Spice Planet,an original novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, based on a detailed outline left by Frank Herbert. The Road to Duneis a treasure trove of essays, articles, and fiction that every reader of Dunewill want to add to their shelf.
Road to Dune
Herbert, Brian Anderson, Kevin J. Herbert, Frank
Macmillan (2006)
* * *
* * *
SUMMARY:
Frank Herbert's Duneis widely known as the science fiction equivalent of The Lord of the Rings.Now The Road to Duneis a companion work comparable to The Silmarillion,shedding light on and following the remarkable development of the bestselling science fiction novel of all time. In this fascinating volume, the world's millions of Dunefans can read--at long last--the unpublished chapters and scenes from Duneand Dune Messiah. The Road to Dunealso includes some of the original correspondence between Frank Herbert and famed editor John W. Campbell, Jr., along with other correspondence during Herbert's years-long struggle to get his innovative work published, and the article "They Stopped the Moving Sands," Herbert's original inspiration for Dune. The Road to Dunealso features newly discovered papers and manuscripts of Frank Herbert, and Spice Planet,an original novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, based on a detailed outline left by Frank Herbert. The Road to Duneis a treasure trove of essays, articles, and fiction that every reader of Dunewill want to add to their shelf.
Table of Contents
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
SPICE PLANET - The Alternative Dune Novel
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
PART TWO - SECOND YEAR ON DUNEWORLD
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
THE ROAD TO DUNE
“THEY STOPPED THE MOVING SANDS”
THE LETTERS OF DUNE
UNPUBLISHED SCENES AND CHAPTERS
Deleted Scenes and Chapters from Dune
Deleted Scenes and Chapters from Dune Messiah
SHORT STORIES
INTRODUCTION
A WHISPER OF CALADAN SEAS
HUNTING HARKONNENS
WHIPPING MEK
THE FACES OF A MARTYR
SEA CHILD A TALE OF DUNE
FOR BEVERLY HERBERT
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE DUNE SERIES
HUNTERS OF DUNE
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WE ARE GRATEFUL to the people who contributed to this book, in particular to Frank Herbert, Beverly Herbert, Jan Herbert, Rebecca Moesta, Penny Merritt, Ron Merritt, Bruce Herbert, Bill Ransom, Howie Hansen, Tom Doherty, Pat LoBrutto, Sharon Perry, Robert Gottlieb, John Silbersack, Kate Scherler, Kimberly Whalen, Harlan Ellison, Anne McCaffrey, Paul Stevens, Eric Raab, Sterling E. Lanier, Lurton Blassingame, Lurton Blassingame, Jr., John W. Campbell, Jr., Catherine Sidor, Diane Jones, Louis Moesta, Carolyn Caughey, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, and Eleanor Wood.
FOREWORD
FRANK HERBERT HAD more fun with life than anyone I’ve known. He laughed more, joked more, and produced more than any writer I’ve ever met. With modest beginnings just across the Puyallup River from my own birthplace, and passionate about outdoor life, he judged people by their creativity, and by whether they met hardship with humor or with bile. Humor helped him to endure hardship and to enjoy his rise above it. Frank believed the suffering-in-the-garret stereotype was foisted onto writers by publishers so that they could get away with small advances. The only true currency that Frank recognized was time to create.
“Here it is, Ransom,” he said. “First class buys you more time to write.”
Never ostentatious, he lived as comfortably as he wanted but not as extravagantly as he could, always with close ties to the outdoors. Enjoyment A.D. (“After Dune”) came from trying new writing adventures and from helping others succeed; Frank offered opportunities, not handouts, saying, “I’d rather give a man a hand up than step on his fingers.” This echoes my favorite Dostoevsky line: “Feed men, then ask of them virtue.”
Everything and everyone fell into two rough categories for Frank: It/he/she either contributed to his writing time or interfered with it. I’ve always had pretty much the same attitude. We knew of each other through our publication successes, but we noticed each other’s successes because we both came from the Puyallup Valley, we both had fathers who were in law enforcement in the same district, and we’d had shirttail relatives marry. We moved to Port Townsend in the same week in the early seventies and discovered this when the local paper ran stories on each of us. I wanted to meet him, finally, but I wanted to be respectful of his writing time. Frank wrote a piece under a pseudonym for the Helix, my favorite underground newspaper in Seattle, just a few years earlier. I dropped Frank a postcard addressed to the pseudonym (“H. Bert Frank”), saying I wrote until noon but would love to meet for coffee sometime. The next afternoon at 12:10 he called: “Hello, Ransom. Herbert here. Is that coffee on?” It was, and thus began our fifteen-year routine of coffee or lunch nearly every day.
Frank believed poetry to be the finest distillation of the language, whether written in open or closed form. He read voraciously in contemporary poetry through literary and “little” magazines, and he wrote poetry as he worked through issues of life and of fiction. As a very young man, he discovered that he could make somewhat of a living from his nonfiction prose style, which was far more readable than most of the journalism of the time. His prose style, his eye for detail, and his ear for true vernacular coupled with that ever-persistent “What if?” question in his ear made for a natural transition to fiction. Success came to Frank in prose, but inspiration filled his notebooks and his fiction with poetry.
My first poetry collection, Finding True North & Critter, was nominated for the National Book Award the same year Frank’s Soul Catcher was nominated in fiction. Perhaps if Frank and I had both been fiction writers off the bat, or both poets, our friendship may have developed differently. As it was, we refreshed and reenthused each other with our writing, and encouraged each other to risk somet
hing in our work, like crossing over into other genres, such as screenplays. The greatest risk of all, to friendship and to our writing reputations, came when we cowrote The Jesus Incident and submitted it under both of our names. Frank pointed out that if the book were published we would each face specific criticisms for working together. People would say that Frank Herbert ran out of ideas, and that Bill Ransom was riding on the coattails of the Master. When these statements did, indeed, come up, we were better prepared psychologically for having predicted them in advance. Circumstances leading up to our collaboration were complex, but our personal agreement was simple: Nothing that either of us wanted would stand in the way of the friendship, and we shook hands. Nothing did, not even the publisher’s preference that we release it just with Frank’s name (the advance offer under this potential agreement was larger by a decimal point than what we received with both names on the cover). The power people also would accept a pseudonym, but they were adamant that a novel acknowledged to be by two authors would not fly with the reading public, and equally adamant about talking only with Frank. In addition, they believed that my reputation in poetry circles would contribute nothing toward marketing the book; therefore, I should get 25% and Frank 75% of whatever we agreed on. Frank literally hung up the phone and bought a ticket to New York. The way he told the story upon his return with contract in hand, he simply repeated a mantra throughout his visit: “Half the work earns half the credit and half the pay.” Frank took a 90% cut in pay and split the cover byline in order to work with me, only one example of the strength of his character and of his friendship.
The gamble paid off. We’d heard that The New York Times Book Review would cover it, and I was nervous. “Relax, Ransom,” Frank said. “Even a scathing review in The New York Times sells ten thousand hardbacks the next day.” John Leonard wrote a wonderful review, and we were launched. Now the publisher wanted two more books in the series, The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor, with no further discussion about names on the cover. For two rustic, self-taught Puyallup Valley boys who ran traplines as kids, we did well because our focus always was on The Story. We had no ego conflicts while writing together, largely because Frank didn’t have much ego as “Author.” I learned from him that authors exist merely for the story’s sake, not the other way around, and a good story had to do two things: inform and entertain. The informing part must be entertaining enough to let readers live the story without feeling like they’re on the receiving end of a sermon. Writing entertainment without information, without some insight into what it is to be human, is a waste of good trees.
Frank believed that poetry was the apex of human language; he also believed that science fiction was the only genre whose subject matter attempted to define what it is to be human. We use contact with aliens or alien environments as impetus or backdrop for human interaction. Science fiction characters solve their own problems—neither magic spells nor gods come to their aid—and sometimes they have to build some intriguing gadgets to save their skins. Humans go to books to see how other humans solve human problems. Frank admired and championed human resolve and ingenuity in his life and in his work. He had a practical side about this, too: “Remember, Ransom,” he said, “aliens don’t buy books. Humans buy books.”
Frank raised chickens, and he even did that first-class, with a two-story, solar-heated chicken house with automatic feeders that abutted the garden to enrich the compost. Beside the chicken mansion, but mercifully out of sight of the chickens, was a processing station complete with wood stove, steamer, and automatic plucking machine. Every activity of Frank’s daily life was fair game for ingenuity and fun. He admired the very intellectual writers, like Pound, but had a particular soft spot for other blue-collar, self-taught writers who investigated human nature, such as Hemingway and Faulkner.
William Faulkner’s work influenced Frank in many ways, not the least of which was creating a believable fictional universe built on a complex genealogy. Frank saw science fiction as a great opportunity to reach a very wide audience with “the big stuff.” He was moved by Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and he took it to heart in everything he wrote: “ … the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat … the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Story itself provides the foundation for every human culture, and storytellers must respect this responsibility.
Frank had a guardian angel, someone who protected him and his writing time at all costs for almost four decades. Beverly Stuart Herbert honeymooned with him in a fire lookout, packed the kids up in a hearse to live in a village in Mexico while he wrote, and encouraged him to quit dead-end jobs to write what he loved, come what may. She had uncanny radar for detecting buffoons, hangers-on, con artists, and other fools, and Frank was pretty good at this, too. Not many got past Bev to test Frank. But Bev had the diplomacy and good graces to protect Frank while also protecting the dignity of those who would intrude on him. Later, over coffee and homemade pie, came the jokes.
Bev was the one who suggested that we collaborate on a novel. She was Frank’s first reader and critic, and her opinion held serious water. Over our daily coffee sessions we’d been tossing a story back and forth just for fun. “You two should just write this story and get it out of your systems,” she said. Each of us took on the project for very different reasons. I wanted to learn how to sustain a narrative for a novel’s length, and Frank wanted to practice collaboration because he was interested in screenwriting, a notoriously collaborative medium. We both got what we wanted, and with his usual wit Frank referred to our process as “ … a private act of collaboration between consenting adults.”
Not all of our experiences together were celebratory. My writing work with Frank is bracketed by sadness for both of us. We began our first collaboration when Bev was diagnosed with cancer and I was going through a divorce; we wrote The Lazarus Effect as Bev fought her second round of illness (Frank wrote The White Plague at the same time) and it was published shortly before her death. Our collaboration on The Ascension Factor ended with Frank’s death.
An unexpected benefit of our exercise in collaboration became Frank’s collaboration with his son Brian. Frank said that he had hoped that one day one of his children might follow in Dad’s writing footsteps, and Brian began with some humorous science fiction. Father and son working together on Man of Two Worlds marked a breakthrough for Frank after the long ordeal of Bev’s final illness. Brian learned the fine art of collaboration at Frank’s side, and Frank would be proud that the dual legacies of the Dune universe and the Herbert writing gene survive him. Brian and Kevin J. Anderson are having the kind of fun with writing that Frank and I enjoyed, and they’ve added a new physical depth and enriched the sociopolitical detail of the greater tapestry on which Dune was woven.
I was at about mid-point in writing the first draft of The Ascension Factor when the morning radio announced that Frank had passed away. Typically, he believed he would beat this challenge as he’d beaten so many others. Also typically, he was typing a new short story into a laptop when he died, a story that he’d told me might lead to another non-genre novel like Soul Catcher. In the crowding and confusion of those final lifesaving attempts, that laptop and his last story were lost, like Einstein’s final words were lost because the nurse at his side didn’t speak German.
I think of Frank every time I touch a keyboard, hoping I’m writing up to his considerable standards. In the Old English, “poet” was “shaper” or “maker.” Frank Herbert was a Maker on a grand scale, the most loyal friend a person could ask for—and a funny, savvy, first-class guy. He continues to be missed.
—Bill Ransom
PREFACE
A beginning is the time for taking the most deli
cate care that the balances are correct.
—FROM FRANK HERBERT’S Dune
IT WAS LIKE finding a buried treasure chest.
Actually, they were cardboard boxes stuffed full of folders, manuscripts, correspondence, drawings, and loose notes. Some of the box corners were sagging, crumpled by the weight of their contents or partially crushed from languishing under a stack of heavy objects.
As Brian described in his Hugo-nominated biography Dreamer of Dune, Frank Herbert’s wife, Beverly, was very ill in her last years and unable to keep up with the deluge of paper. For a long time before that, she had kept her prolific husband highly organized, using an ingenious filing system to keep track of old manuscripts, contracts, royalty reports, correspondence, reviews, and publicity.
In the boxes we found old manuscripts for Frank Herbert’s various novels, along with unpublished or incomplete novels and short stories, and an intriguing folder full of unused story ideas. There were old movie scripts, travel itineraries, and legal documents from Frank Herbert’s work on various films, including The Hellstrom Chronicle, Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience, The Tillers, David Lynch’s Dune, and even Dino de Laurentiis’s film Flash Gordon, on which Frank had worked in London as a script consultant. There were contracts and screenplays for numerous uncompleted film projects as well, including Soul Catcher, The Santaroga Barrier, and The Green Brain.
Salted among the various boxes full of materials for Dune Messiah and God Emperor of Dune (under its working title of Sandworm of Dune), we found other gems: drafts of chapters, ruminations about ecology, handwritten snippets of poetry, and lyrical descriptions of the desert and the Fremen. Some of these were scrawled on scraps of paper, bedside notepads, or in pocket-sized newspaper reporter notebooks. There were pages and pages of epigraphs that had never appeared in Frank’s six Dune novels, along with historical summaries and fascinating descriptions of characters and settings. Once we started the laborious process of sifting through these thousands of pages, we felt like archaeologists who had discovered a verified map to the Holy Grail.