PG was a big fan of Frank Herbert’s original Dune way back when he was in college.
He did a bit of research and found that Herbert was born in 1920 and grew up in rural poverty in the Pacific Northwest. He lied about his age to get a job on a local newspaper after he graduated from high school in 1938.
World War II took him to the South Pacific with the Navy until he sustained a head injury and received a medical discharge. On his return to Oregon, he got a job with another local newspaper.
He attended the University of Washington, but never graduated, and got married and divorced while working for various Washington, Oregon and San Francisco newspapers.
Herbert read science fiction for about ten years before he started writing science fiction stories. He sold stories to Startling Stories, Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories.
Dune grew out of an assignment to write a travel magazine article about the Oregon Dunes, where a coastal mountain range is home to forty miles of temperate rain forests that receive from 80 to 200 inches of rain per year. The forests blend with sand dunes as high as 500 feet along the coast of the Pacific Ocean.
Photo Credit: Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. (2023, February 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Dunes_National_Recreation_Area – Original image created: 22 January 2013 by Themom51 – Own work CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported,
It took Herbert six years of researching and writing to finish Dune. Analog magazine published it in two parts comprising eight installments, “Dune World” from December 1963 and “Prophet of Dune” in 1965. Thereafter, the book was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers.
An editor of Chilton Book Company (known mainly for its auto-repair manuals) had read the Dune serials and offered a $7,500 advance plus future royalties for the rights to publish them as a hardcover book. Herbert rewrote much of the text prior to publication.
Upon publication, Dune was a critical but not a commercial success. The royalties were not large enough to allow him to stop writing articles for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspapers. Finally, in 1965, he was finally able to spend all his time writing books.
Herbert hoped it would be seen as an “environmental awareness handbook” and said the title was meant to “echo the sound of ‘doom'”.
DUNE is great.
As a standalone novel.
The sequels and prequels and what not…
I can (and do) live without them.
Besides DUNE, he wrote quite a few other novels, three of which are significant:
WHIPPING STAR
THE DOSADI EXPERIMENT
and my favorite UNDER PRESSURE (also mis-titled DRAGON IN THE SEA):
https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Sea-Frank-Herbert-ebook/dp/B004ZM0720/ref=sr_1_4?crid=28KHGO429X0IM&keywords=frank+herbert+under+pressure&qid=1702591261&sprefix=herbert+under%2Caps%2C206&sr=8-4
From wikipedia:
The Dragon in the Sea (1956), also known as Under Pressure from its serialization, is a novel by Frank Herbert. It was first serialized in Astounding magazine from 1955 to 1956, then reworked[2] and published as a standalone novel in 1956. A 1961 2nd printing of the Avon paperback, catalog # G-1092, was titled 21st Century Sub with the previous title in parentheses, and a short 36 page version of the novel was later collected in Eye. It is usually classified as a psychological novel.”
I wish he’d done more ConSentiency and way less DUNE followups.
The 4 he did are all a delight of weirdness that echo Cordwainer Smith’s own universe.
Herbert, Frank. “A Matter of Traces” (short story) Fantastic Universe, 1958
Herbert, Frank. “The Tactful Saboteur” (short story) Galaxy Science Fiction, 1964
Herbert, Frank. Whipping Star (novel) G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970
Herbert, Frank. The Dosadi Experiment (novel) G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977
FWIW, here’s the story on Cordwainer Smith:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith
“Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966), better known by his pen-name Cordwainer Smith, was an American author known for his science fiction works. Linebarger was a US Army officer, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare. Although his career as a writer was shortened by his death at the age of 53, he is considered one of science fiction’s more talented and influential authors.”
According to Frederik Pohl:
“In his stories, which were a wonderful and inimitable blend of a strange, raucous poetry and a detailed technological scene, we begin to read of human beings in worlds so far from our own in space in time that they were no longer quite Earth (even when they were the third planet out from Sol), and the people were no longer quite human, but something perhaps better, certainly different.”
Linebarger’s identity as “Cordwainer Smith” was secret until his death.[14] (“Cordwainer” is an archaic word for “a worker in cordwain or cordovan leather; a shoemaker”,[15] and a “smith” is “one who works in iron or other metals; esp. a blacksmith or farrier”:[15] two kinds of skilled workers with traditional materials.) Linebarger also employed the literary pseudonyms “Carmichael Smith” (for his political thriller Atomsk), “Anthony Bearden” (for his poetry) and “Felix C. Forrest” (for the novels Ria and Carola).
Some of Smith’s stories are written in narrative styles closer to traditional Chinese stories than to most English-language fiction, as well as reminiscent of the Genji tales of Lady Murasaki. The total volume of his science fiction output is relatively small, because of his time-consuming profession and his early death.
Smith’s works consist of one novel, originally published in two volumes in edited form as The Planet Buyer, also known as The Boy Who Bought Old Earth (1964) and The Underpeople (1968), and later restored to its original form as Norstrilia (1975); and 32 short stories (collected in The Rediscovery of Man (1993), including two versions of the short story “War No. 81-Q”).”
Few could write SF even vaguely close to his visions, but Frank Herbert could.
Thanks for this post, because it jogged my memory. Some time back someone had mentioned a book with a “Bureau of Sabotage,” which sounded like something I would get in to, but I’d forgotten to find out what the book was called. The whole thing slipped my mind.
I need to look for more of Herbert’s work. “The White Plague” was fairly good, although I thought he spent way too much time in the POV of the villain, who was dull. The book includes one of the rare scenarios where I think polyandry would “work” when the husbands aren’t brothers.
The Kindle prices are annoyingly ridiculous. Fortunately he’s on my list of authors for BookBub to alert me to when there’s a sale.
Not all his weird work is great but he did look at a lot of unconventional societies.
HELLSTROM’S HIVE…
https://www.amazon.com/Hellstroms-Hive-Frank-Herbert-ebook/dp/B003ZDNZYW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=F4SWG4Y188KR&keywords=hellstrom%27s+hive&qid=1702601452&sprefix=hellstr%2Caps%2C655&sr=8-1
“Hellstrom’s Hive is a 1973 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. It is about a secret group of humans who model their lives upon social insects and the unsettling events that unfold after they are discovered by a deep undercover agency of the U.S. government.
Dr. Nils Hellstrom, an entomologist, is a successful film maker and influential scientific advisor with strong political ties. Living and working with a small staff on a farm in rural Oregon, he attracts the attention of an unnamed government organisation when documents are discovered that hint on cult-like activities and a secret weapon project.
An operative from the government is sent, but is quickly assassinated by Hellstrom’s operatives. Further operatives are sent and it is revealed that the farm is situated above a vast system of tunnels and caves, hosting a hive-like subterranean society of nearly 50,000 specialized hybrid human-insect workers. Hellstrom, thanks to advanced bioengineering, has been the appointed hive leader for more than 100 years. He is completely convinced of the superiority of the hive and its abandonment of conventional morals and ethics: sexuality or violence, indeed, any individual action, is rated strictly whether it strengthens or weakens the hive as a whole. The government spies soon learn the hive has progressed to using sexual “stumps,” both male and female — “the stump of a human body from about the waist to the knees”[1] — as a method of harvesting “wild” genes or maintaining certain breeding lines when the individuals are no longer trustworthy members of the hive. The hive have also developed a secret weapon that it will use to displace humans as the dominant intelligent species on the planet.
The story is told from various perspectives of members of both the nameless organisation investigating the farm and plotting against each other, as well as Hellstrom and several high-ranking hive members collectively dealing with the threat of being discovered and probably extinguished by “the wild ones”.[2] In the end, the hive’s weapon project is ready to protect the hive and the upcoming ‘swarming’ – the gradual displacement of individual-based humanity.”
“In an interview with Tim O’Reilly, Herbert stated: “I said, ‘In terms of what we want now, as we think of our world now, what would be the most horrible kind of civilization you could imagine?’ And then I said, ‘Now I will make… [the members of that civilization] the heroes of the story, by taking negative elements of the surrounding society and treating them as the villain.’ That creates a very peculiar kind of tension.”[4]
and THE SANTAROGA BARRIER…
“The Santaroga Barrier is a 1968 science fiction novel by American writer Frank Herbert. Considered to be an “alternative society” or “alternative culture” novel,[2] it deals with themes such as psychology, the counterculture of the 1960s, and psychedelic drugs.[3] It was originally serialized in Amazing Stories magazine from October 1967 to February 1968, and came out in a paperback from Berkley Books later in 1968.[4] The book has been described as “an ambiguous utopia,”[5][6] and Herbert told Tim O’Reilly that The Santaroga Barrier was intended to describe a society that “half my readers would think was utopia, the other half would think was dystopia.”[5] O’Reilly writes:
“In deliberate imitation of [B.F.] Skinner’s Walden Two, the story is organized around a “conversion” theme, in which a hostile outsider is persuaded of the merits of a society he initially criticizes. Where Skinner makes a sincere attempt to sell a utopian ideal, however, Herbert’s deeper concern is to re-create the process by which a man gives up his individual perspective for a group dream.”
…both are thought provoking and readable but I haven’t felt the need to reread. Those are not nice places to visit. 😉
My favorite book, still. It’s definitely a lost-on-an-island book, a carry-it-with-you-into-space book. It’s got everything: intrigues, sword fights, romance, all on another world. Planetary romance, and it’s my jam.
I hope the movies spur more people to read “Dune.” I see it’s been adapted as a graphic novel. If the art is good, I might get it in that format just to let it serve as a “gateway drug” as it were.
Dune is a treasure – and one of my gateway books. It requires/rewards patience, a science background, and the ability to keep complex storylines and characters in mind and in memory – plus being full of new and old concepts and applications. If he were still writing, I’d be waiting for each new episode of his universe.