Dreamer of Dune (22 page)

If Frank Herbert could be categorized in a religious sense (and that is a very big “if”!) he came closest to Zen Buddhism. It was in that realm that he felt most comfortable, most certain of his footing. He did not participate in the dogma or rituals of any religion, though his deep commitment to ethics and the survival of humanity were apparent throughout his writings. He believed in quality of life, not merely in scraping by, and he spoke deftly (and at times didactically) about this through his characters. Sometimes in his characters, Frank Herbert spoke with Frank Herbert, exploring different avenues of his own belief systems, typically having to do with religion or the politics of power. At other times he spoke through people who represented, to him, anathematic types.

The mainstream of Buddhism is a highly ethical belief system, one that had great appeal to Frank Herbert. Of no little importance to him, Buddhists hold a spiritual reverence for nature and for the preservation of life on this planet. Dad also believed that Buddhists tend to be tolerant of the belief systems of others. Certainly there are exceptions, but for the most part he didn't see them in possession of the “holier than thou” missionary fervor of Western religions. It is interesting in this vein to note that the stated purpose of the C.E.T. (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.”

This is particularly revealing in light of the childhoods of my parents, when adults attempted to force-feed religious dogma to them.

Dune
, the first novel in what would ultimately become a series, contained hints of the direction he intended to take with his superhero, Paul Muad'Dib, clues that many readers overlooked. It was a dark direction. When planetologist Liet-Kynes lay dying on the desert, he remembered these words of his father, spoken years before and relegated to the back reaches of memory: “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.” And at the end of an appendix it was written that the planet had been “afflicted by a Hero.” These were sprinklings here and there, seeds of the direction Frank Herbert had in mind. The author felt that heroes made mistakes…mistakes that were amplified by the numbers of people who followed those heroes slavishly. By the second and third books in the series,
Dune Messiah
and
Children of Dune
, this message would become clear.

In another seed planted in
Dune
, he wrote, “It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.” This was an important reference to Greek hubris. Very few readers realized that the story of Paul Atreides was not only a Greek tragedy on an individual and familial scale. There was another layer, larger than Paul, and in that layer Frank Herbert was warning that entire societies could be led to ruination by a hero. In
Dune
and
Dune Messiah
he was cautioning against pride and excessive confidence, the hubris of Greek tragedies that led to the great fall. But it was societal-scale hubris he was warning against…the potential demise of an entire society.

Among the dangerous leaders of human history, my father sometimes mentioned General George S. Patton, because of his charismatic qualities—but more often his example was President John F. Kennedy. Around Kennedy a myth of kingship formed, and of Camelot. His followers did not question him, and would have gone with him virtually anywhere. This danger seems obvious to us now in the case of such men as Adolf Hitler, who led his nation to ruination. It is less obvious, however, with men who are not deranged or evil in and of themselves. Such a man was Paul Muad'Dib, whose danger lay in the myth structure around him.

One of my father's most important messages was that governments lie to protect themselves. They make incredibly stupid decisions. Years after the publication of
Dune
, Richard Nixon provided proof. Dad said that Nixon did the American people an immense favor. By example, albeit unwittingly, Nixon taught people to distrust government.

Frank Herbert believed in importance of long-range planning, particularly with respect to the environment. He spoke of adaptation, of setting forces in motion to change the attitudes of men toward their own planet. In
Chapterhouse: Dune
, the sixth volume of the series, Reverend Mother Dortujla used an aphorism familiar long before the publication of
Dune
: “Never damage your own nest.” That was Frank Herbert speaking, of course, since he believed we were doing precisely that to Earth.

One of the layers of
Dune
was an ecological handbook written by planetologist Pardot Kynes and his son, Liet-Kynes. Ahead of its time, it described the consequences of human actions. Environmental awareness was just awakening in the early 1960s, and Frank Herbert was one of the standard bearers. In 1962, Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring
, a monumental work that decried the killing of birds and harmless insects by toxic chemicals such as DDT. In 1963, shortly before the opening installments of
Dune
were published by
Analog
, the first clean-air act was passed in the United States. President Kennedy gave a couple of speeches that year about protecting the environment.

Analog
readers liked
Dune World
, and fans nominated it for the 1963 Hugo Award for best novel—rather unusual, since the story hadn't yet been published in book form. While
Dune World
did not win the award, its popularity was in no small part responsible for the awarding of a Hugo for best science fiction magazine to
Analog
and its editor, John W. Campbell. At the awards ceremony, held at the Pacificon II science fiction convention in Oakland in 1964, Dad accepted the award as Campbell's proxy and shipped it to him.

During 1964, however, a steady stream of publishers rejected
Dune World
and its allied manuscripts in book form. Dad lost hope that it would ever be published in anything more than a magazine.

Trying to maintain his sense of humor, Dad came up with this:

In the January 1965 issue,
Analog
began a new serialization of the 125,000-word completion of the story (Books II and III) under a single title Campbell preferred,
Prophet of Dune
. It would run in five monthly installments, ending in May.

Early in 1965, a few weeks after publication of the first installment of the new serial, Sterling E. Lanier, an editor with Chilton Book Company and a science fiction writer himself,
^*
contacted Lurton Blassingame. Lanier had read the
Analog
installments, and when he finally got his hands on a complete copy of all three manuscripts, he wanted to publish them in a single edition.

In the buy of an editor's lifetime, the literary coup of coups, the farsighted Lanier offered a $7,500 advance (plus future royalties) for the right to publish
Dune World
(Book I) and
Prophet of Dune
(Books II & III) in hardcover. His offer was accepted.

Lanier said there were a number of loose ends in the story and rough transition points between Books I, II and III requiring more work. He wanted the entire work expanded. When he discovered my father had drawn a map of the planet Dune, he asked for a copy, to include it in the book.

Lanier proposed a simple title:
Dune
, which he liked for its power and mysticism. For the cover art, he wanted to use John Schoenherr, who had done such a fine job on the
Analog
covers.

Chilton was best known as the publisher of a series of automobile repair manuals, leading Dad to quip that they might rename his work
How to Repair Your Ornithopter
. (Ornithopters were the birdlike flying craft of the planet Dune). At least Chilton had experience printing large books. Their auto repair manuals were huge.

A short while after the Chilton agreement was reached, Ace Books, a well-known publisher of science fiction titles, made an offer to publish the book in paperback. That edition would appear in 1966, a year after release of the hardcover, in order to allow the higher-priced hardcover to run its course before receiving competition from the paperback.

D
URING THE
period when Mom was working in downtown San Francisco and Dad was writing the most difficult segments of
Dune
, he became increasingly irritable and more intolerant than ever of the slightest interruption to his concentration. It reached the extreme where he took the house keys away from Bruce and me and told us he was going to write inside a locked house. We were commanded to go elsewhere after school and he didn't seem to care where. Dad and Bruce got into a big row over this, and Dad yanked a string with a house key on it off Bruce's neck. Prior to that, my brother had been in the habit of coming into the house after school to make a sandwich.

Unhappy with the way Dad was treating him, Bruce ran away, walking more than twenty-five miles. Only eleven years old, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County and hid in a creek bed for several hours. The more he thought about his predicament, however, the more Bruce realized how cold, lonely and hungry he would be if he didn't return home. And he realized how angry Dad would be at him for yet another interruption to his writing process.

It must be understood that the son of a writer is not without creative energies of his own. To avoid Dad's wrath, my little brother came up with a wild, rather ingenious tale. He contacted the nearest police precinct in Marin County and reported in a state of feigned hysteria that he had been kidnapped by two men and thrown in the back of a laundry truck. It was only through good fortune, he said, that he was able to escape.

The police believed Bruce, and had him go through books of mug shots in an attempt to find the bad guys. Dad and Mom were contacted, and they drove to the police station. A detective there assured Mr. and Mrs. Herbert that he would investigate the case thoroughly, and would find whoever had done this terrible thing. Their son was fortunate to be alive, he said.

In our San Francisco house we had a number of large brown corduroy pillows, triangular in shape, which we used to lean against while reading, or while watching the little black-and-white television. They were foam-filled. Bruce had one on his bed. After coming home from the police station, he went in his room and lay on the bed, with his head on the big pillow. It was quiet in the house. Then he heard familiar footsteps on the hardwood of the hallway, and his pulse raced.

Dad opened the bedroom door, stared in at Bruce and said, “You were lying, weren't you?”

Under the piercing, see-it-all stare, Bruce coughed. He felt his eyes burning, expected to see his father pull off the wide leather belt and administer the usual. But Dad said, in a calm tone, “I'm not going to spank you this time, but you're grounded for two weeks. Come straight home after school every day and do extra chores.”

In 1962, science fiction writers Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, and Poul Anderson went into partnership to construct a houseboat. I helped them, performing odd tasks such as painting the top white in blinding sunshine. The boat sank in a storm that year, and Dad lost every penny he had invested in it.

While working on the vessel, the men plotted a collaborative science fiction story. It was about a master thief whose specialty was underwater capers. They planned to publish it under the pseudonym “Noah Arkwright,” so named in honor of their partnership.
^*

In the summer of 1963, when I had just turned sixteen, I decided I needed a real job. I had been washing cars and doing landscaping in the neighborhood, but I wasn't earning enough money to buy the car that I wanted. Dad suggested that I apply for part-time jobs at the three major San Francisco newspapers. In August the
Examiner
called and offered me a copyboy position, at $1.25 an hour.

Just before I reported to the “Ex,” Dad took me aside and told me of a Mexican phrase, “la ñapa,” meaning “the addition.” It referred to something given as an extra, without remuneration, like the thirteenth item in a baker's dozen.
^**
He told me to follow this principle in my work at the
Examiner
and in every job I held during my life. “Always produce more than they pay you for,” he said. “That way they'll want to keep you around.”

This was a credo he had been following all of his working life.

In
The Santaroga Barrier
(1968), his protagonist, Dasein, felt antipathy toward the society represented by his employers. But he also felt “a compulsion somewhere within him to make an honest report to those who'd hired him…His own remembered sense of duty urged it. To do anything else would be a form of dishonesty, an erosion of selfdom. He felt a jealous possessiveness about his self. No smallest part of it was cheap enough to discard.”

Dad was the night picture editor, with responsibility for selecting photographs to be included in the paper and for writing captions beneath the photos. In this position, his experience as photographer, reporter, and freelance writer served him well. His desk was by a window, near the curved rim of the copy desk and the city desk. His 4:00
P.M
. to midnight schedule usually differed from mine, so I only rarely worked when he was there.

In the fall of 1963, Dad bought a 1959 Volkswagen camper from one of Jack Vance's musician friends, a car dealer named Earl Sheeler in Berkeley. It was orange and cream colored, with a sunroof, sink, refrigerator, small table, and bunks for two. Dad put a bumper sticker on the rear: “GIVE TO MENTAL HEALTH OR I'LL KILL YOU!”

He drove the camper to the
Examiner
every day. On his lunch or dinner breaks, depending upon his schedule, he wrote at the table of the camper with a ball-point pen, or set a timer and napped. A heavy sleeper, he could fall asleep in seconds, so the timer was a necessity. He said he didn't write that much in the van, that mostly he slept in it from the fatigue of getting up as early as he could each day to write before work.

In his spare time, Dad was always inventing things, much as his father had done before him. In Frank Herbert's case, most of his inventions consisted of descriptions of gadgets in his futuristic science fiction stories. Typically he conceived a world and the people to populate it, and then postulated the technology they might require. Thus he came up with an expandable underwater oil barge in
The Dragon in the Sea
to transport petroleum during dangerous wartime conditions, and, in
Dune
, stillsuits to recover precious wastewater from the body in the extreme desert conditions of the planet. These novels were filled with other inventions.

His 1965 short story “Committee of the Whole” described a homemade laser weapon, the secrets of which were released to the public by a “madman” who happened to think like Frank Herbert. Dad believed such technology should be made available to everyone, thus preventing dangerous people from monopolizing weapons and using them for their own ends. He wrote, “One man could destroy an aerial armada with it, knock down ICBMs before they touched atmosphere, sink a fleet, pulverize a city.”

In the 1970s he would write a highly inventive film treatment, entitled initially “Jonathon Ley” and then “Asa West.” It did not sell, but not for lack of imagination. Set on an alien planet, it described a Robo-Cop-type character, a man in an armored mask who was part human and part synthesized machine, with superhuman powers. Dad referred to his creation as “Supercop.” A virtually unstoppable fighting machine, it had the power to detect lies and could not be poisoned or gassed. Its body had pockets “concealed by invisible skin flaps,” compartments that contained many incredible weapons and tools. I found one device particularly interesting, in view of my father's passion for the outdoors. He called it a “caster,” which, like a fishing pole, released a fine line and seeker-tip to retrieve whatever Supercop wanted.

In the early 1950s Dad invented a special type of slide rule that he never got around to patenting. With a lifelong interest in cooking and guns, he also came up with what he called a “spice gun.” This was an ingenious device that looked like a target pistol, with a long sharp-pointed barrel on the end that was inserted into a roast. When the spice gun trigger was pulled, it injected spices into the meat. The tip was removable, with a second snap-on tip that had grating slots in it for injecting garlic juice.

Inspired by a conversation with Howie Hansen about the workings of a sextant, Frank Herbert also devised a navigation instrument that, in Howie Hansen's words, “used a beam of light to shine down into the inside of an arc to pinpoint a position.”

During slow times at the
Examiner
, Dad developed his own one-panel cartoon series, which I named “Tingle” when I saw the characters. They were simple lines forming people who looked like bent coat hangers. The basic cartoon person was a long, slightly curved vertical line, bending out where the derriere would be—with a horizontal, connected line at the bottom representing feet. A not-quite-closed circle was attached on top, representing a head. The figure had no arms. He drew a witch's hat on one, with the caption, “Anyone call for a doctor?” Another figure had no hat, but the middle section was curved, as in a drainpipe under a kitchen sink. “Did you call for a plumber?” the caption read. He also drew what he called Zen cartoons. One was a horizontal line with an arrow on each end, with the caption, “a longer line than the other one.” Another cartoon had an arrow pointing down, above the word “up”—and the caption, “up under some circumstances.”

In addition to their own Hearts card game variation, my parents also came up with a silly parlor game called “Frog-It.” To demonstrate, Dad would tell his dinner guests to talk in the tone of a frog croaking. “Like this,” he said, “Frog-it, Frog-it, Frog-it.”

After the guests practiced a bit, Dad would ask, “What's a nun frog?” And when no one came up with an answer, he said, “Hab-it, Hab-it, Hab-it.”

Then Mom might ask, “What's a jeweler frog?” Another pause, and then, “Lock-et, Lock-et, Lock-et.”

“And what are the four Safeway frogs?” Dad asked. “Why, Stack-it, Pack-it, Stock-it, and Bag-it.”

And so on, they would improvise.

In another improvisation described by Howie, my father would begin by saying, in a creaking, aged hillbilly accent, “Uh, Ma?”

To which she would respond, in like accent, her voice also creaking, “Yes, Pa?”

After a long pause: “Ma, I got somepin' to say.”

“Yes, Pa, what is it?”

“Ma, I'm a goin'. I'm a goin', Ma.”

“Yes, Pa, and what is it you wanna say?”

Another pause: “I wanna say I'm a goin', Ma. But before I go, I've got somepin' to say.”

“Yes, Pa?”

“I'm a goin', Ma.”

It would go on like this for several minutes, to the amusement of all present.

Early in the 1960s, Dad learned that a British company had developed flexible underwater barges based upon his concept in
The Dragon in the Sea
. The company was marketing them under the trade name “Dracone,” and, as this name suggested, they freely admitted the source of the idea. Science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and Fritz Leiber, friends of Dad, recommended that he take legal action to invalidate Dracone's patents. Dad consulted a number of people on this, including John W. Campbell, and learned from them, to his dismay, that he should have filed formal patent papers within two years of publication of his idea. The publication gave him “discovery rights” for that period, but his failure to file proper documents sent the idea into the public domain.

But an even bigger fish would be lost by my father as a result of this. Eventually
The Dragon in the Sea
would be published in Japan, where it would become very popular. The Japanese admitted creating overseas shipping containers as an adaptation of Dad's underwater barge concept!

Upon completion of the three segments of
Dune
(
Dune World, Muad'Dib
and
The Prophet
) in November 1963, Dad embarked upon a two-and-a-half-month leave of absence from the
Examiner.
He did some writing during that period, but mostly recuperated. He planned to take a vacation trip to the Pacific Northwest just before Christmas, and after that he intended to return to the newspaper.

Aside from the
Analog
serialization of
Dune World
, a very important sale, Dad sold only a couple of articles in 1963 to the San Francisco
Examiner,
for which he was paid small amounts in addition to his salary.

Mom left her job at The White House department store, and went to work in the advertising department of Macy's in San Francisco. She also wrote freelance for
Plan Ahead
, a national guide for advertising copywriters. She was working on a new mystery novel, too, entitled
Marked Down for Murder
. Her first novel,
Frighten the Mother
, which needed major rewriting, lay languishing in a file cabinet. She hadn't worked on it for several years.

At the age of sixteen I started drinking with friends, and experienced several near misses with death, invariably involving cars and alcohol. On occasion my parents had to bail me out of jail, where I had been placed in the drunk tank. The last time this happened, my mother said to me, “I've cried my last tear for you.” As a result of a number of open confrontations between me and my father, she also told me that if she had to choose between us, she would choose him.

My little brother was in trouble with Dad on a constant basis, over picayune matters. Sometimes Bruce looked in the refrigerator a little too long and couldn't make up his mind what he wanted, keeping the door open and wasting electricity. This was a violation of one of Dad's many house rules. Or Bruce left the lid loose on the strawberry jelly, causing Dad to drop it and break it when he lifted it from the shelf by the lid. Or, from his fascination with things electrical and electronic, Bruce wore the batteries out on every flashlight in the house. Or he didn't get good enough grades, despite scholastic aptitude tests indicating an extremely high IQ.