Dreamer of Dune (23 page)

Bruce's relationship with his father was, in its own way, worse than mine. I confronted Dad, venting my anger, but my brother never did. This proved to have devastating consequences for the young man, as his pent-up rage and frustration would lead him to make very bad, even dangerous decisions.

J
ACK
V
ANCE
was a member of Mystery Writers of America, and earned considerable success in the field, winning an Edgar one year for the best novel. Through his encouragement, my mother and father made efforts to write and sell in that genre.

Early in 1964, Mom completed a new 65,000-word novel,
Marked Down for Murder
, and sent it off to Lurton for his efforts. She had not sold a piece of creative writing since the sale of “Corner Movie Girl” to
Modern Romances
in 1946, but had never given up hope that one day she might become a published author. For many years, she had been an avid reader of murder mysteries, so it was in this field that she felt most comfortable now. Unfortunately, Lurton had difficulty placing her novel and finally gave up. This book, like her earlier one, would need extensive rewriting, he said.

Dad, also interested in the genre, joined Mystery Writers of America. He was eligible for membership because of his publication credits in the science fiction genre, but my mother, without credits, could not join. In the spring of 1964, Dad sent a mystery novelette to Lurton,
The Heat's On
. The agent was unable to find a publisher for it. He praised it as an interesting story but said it was of a length that was no longer popular.

Worst of all,
Dune
in book form still had not found a publisher, as Sterling E. Lanier and Chilton Book company were still a year down the road.

On their eighteenth wedding anniversary that June, Dad gave Mom a bouquet of eighteen red roses with a handwritten note on a card:

Of course she did, and sometimes on special occasions she sent him singing telegrams, via Western Union.

Around this time, Mom increased her pressure on Dad to buy a house. They considered Santa Barbara to the south, where a number of Dad's uncles and aunts had settled, or the Santa Cruz Mountains, near the home of his author friend Robert Heinlein. But these were not practical locations. My father's writing income remained low, and for the near future he needed to stay tethered to the
Examiner.

Beverly Herbert left Macy's, hoping to concentrate more on her creative writing and on freelance work for
Plan Ahead
. She was despondent, however, over
Marked Down for Murder
, and thought she might be better off starting a new yarn. Dad told her she should rewrite her two novels, that both were potentially publishable. Subsequently she tinkered with each, then tried an entirely new yarn, and finally gave up creative writing altogether, with the exception of a handful of Christmas stories that were published as department store advertising supplements.

Within weeks, my parents applied for and obtained two bank loans. With the first, they bought a house in Fairfax, twenty miles north of San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge. With the second, they purchased a fifty-six acre unimproved parcel one hundred and forty miles north near Willits.

The Willits property was wooded with fir, cedar and pine trees, and had a long dirt road leading to a cleared building site where a previous owner had planned to construct a home. This remote property was Dad's ultimate destination. While living in Fairfax, he intended to spend weekends constructing a home in Willits, doing the work himself, along with volunteer labor from Jack Vance, me and anyone else willing to lend a hand. Dad intended to establish a small subsistence farm there, thus returning to the rural roots of his boyhood, a halcyon life that had been beckoning to him for years. He also intended to experiment on the farm with a number of alternative energy methods, such as solar and wind power, and power from methane obtained from chicken droppings. Years later, these experiments would become famous as Frank Herbert's “Ecological Demonstration Project.”

One day that summer, Mom and Dad were at a laundromat in Fairfax. Our recently acquired tabby cat Punkin strolled in. Assuming he had followed them, they took him home in the car and carried him inside. There they were startled to find Punkin already asleep on the knit rug by the fireplace. Quickly, Dad returned the impostor to the laundromat.

This became the seed of a new short story, “The Wrong Cat,” which Dad wrote in a few days. The story, while it featured a mix-up between two cats, involved quite a different situation. It was a 7,600-word mystery that Dad wrote under the pseudonym Stuart McCarthy. This name was a combination of my mother's Stuart family name on her father's side and Dad's McCarthy name on his mother's side. As a member of Mystery Writers of America, Frank Herbert planned to write a number of mysteries under the pseudonym.

Lurton was not favorably impressed with “The Wrong Cat,” saying the solution to the story was too obvious. He also expressed concern over my father's recurring problem, story length. It was too long for a mystery short story, and too short for a novelette, the latter being a category of increasing interest to publishers. Still, Lurton did his best to sell it as written. He was unsuccessful.

That fall I went away to Berkeley in the East Bay, renting a little room just off campus, on the second floor of a turn-of-the-century house. I was barely seventeen years old. Due to real estate expenditures, our family finances were tight, but I was used to that. I worked for part of my tuition and room and board at the school cafeteria and at a book store run by a lively old woman in her nineties who still drove a car. It was an interesting, historical time to be at the University of California at Berkeley, a campus of twenty-seven thousand students. The FreeSpeech Movement was germinating there, a movement that would spread to college campuses all across the country. I majored in Sociology.

In addition to his picture editor duties, Dad wrote feature stories, some about the student unrest at Berkeley. The campus situation there reached such epidemic proportions of madness and chaos that Dad coined the name “Berserkley” for the university community. This had a certain ring to it, and soon the term came into common parlance around the Bay Area.

Dad had two short stories published in the fall of 1964, “The Mary Celeste Move” (
Analog
, October) and “The Tactful Saboteur” (
Galaxy
, October). “Celeste” was a science fiction mystery, expertly drawn, in which a peculiar phenomenon of human behavior was investigated. “Saboteur” originally had a working title of “What Did He Really Mean by That?”, but Frederik Pohl of
Galaxy
renamed it “The Tactful Saboteur.” This was the second story to feature Jorj X. McKie, following “A Matter of Traces” in 1958. McKie would later appear in the novels
Whipping Star
(1970) and
The Dosadi Experiment
(1977). He was a humorous, gnomelike character, sometimes involved with making governmental agencies look foolish.

Also in the fall of 1964, Dad completed his second science fiction ecology book,
The Green Brain
, a novel about insects that created a powerful artificial intelligence in reaction to human attempts to eradicate them. The story concept was an extrapolation of modern conditions on Earth, in which insects developed a resistance to insecticides, such as DDT.
Amazing
published a short story version (“Greenslaves”) in its March 1965 issue. Ace Books purchased the soft-cover rights to the novel, for publication in 1966.
^*

Ecology was one of the recurring themes and subthemes of Frank Herbert stories. In a later novel,
Direct Descent
(1980), it would become a background detail. The central story thread concerned an ancient library, but mention was made of
Sequoia gigantica
trees (much loved by my father), trees said in the story to have only survived on a remote island of Earth.

It was shortly after the sales of “Greenslaves” and
The Green Brain
that Chilton Books made the offer to publish
Dune
in hardcover. Suddenly the name Frank Herbert was starting to mean something in the publishing world.

He completed a short story, “Do I Wake or Dream?”, about artificial intelligence.
Galaxy
picked up the serialization rights for their August 1965 issue. Dad wrote an expanded version entitled
Destination: Void
, and Berkley Publishing Group purchased the paperback rights to it, also for publication in 1966.

Two more of his short stories were published in 1965, “Committee of the Whole” (
Galaxy
, April) and “The GM Effect” (
Analog,
June). In “Committee,” one of many Frank Herbert stories with a political theme, politicians are made to look foolish. For the author, oft-frustrated by the conundrums of politics, this story was cathartic. “GM” touched upon a recurring Frank Herbert theme as well, genetic engineering—and in this case, as in
Dune
, he dealt with the issue of genetic memories that might be housed in the cells of all humans. In “GM,” instead of a Bene Gesserit sisterhood bearing such memories, Dad explored the possibility of genetic imprints revealing unsavory information about some of the most heroic figures in history, including Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ.

During the next decade, Dad would explore other aspects of genetic engineering. In the novel
The Eyes of Heisenberg
(1966) humans were genetically individualized through processes known only to a select group of rulers. Just a chosen few were permitted to have children in the traditional manner, and then under strict laboratory conditions. In the short story “Come to the Party” (1978), written with F. M. Busby, the writers dealt with the questions of long-dormant technical abilities revealed when ancient racial memories were brought to the surface. In
The White Plague
(1982), Dad wrote of the catastrophic consequences of uncontrolled genetic engineering, in which a terrible plague was unleashed intentionally upon the women of the world.

Early in 1965, when Dad was forty-four, he quit his job at the
Examiner
in order to devote more energy to writing. In addition to Mom's work for
Plan Ahead
, she freelanced, writing advertisements for a variety of department stores. Now both of my parents were free from the regimens of steady jobs. It was a good thing, too, because the commute from Marin County to San Francisco was getting crowded. Tens of thousands of people had recently moved to the Bay Area from all points of the globe.

When he wasn't writing, Dad began drawing up plans to remodel the Fairfax house. He wanted to expand the living room, enlarge the garage to accommodate two cars, and put on new exterior siding and interior paneling. A restless man who was never content with his surroundings, he was always looking ahead, always planning. His mind went in fifty directions at once.

On the strength of the
Dune
serializations in
Analog
, Dad was invited to be guest of honor at the 1965 Westercon science fiction convention, held in Long Beach, California. In his speech, he spoke of the haiku from which
Dune
sprang, and to demonstrate the concept he went on to reduce
War and Peace, Moby-Dick, The Grapes of Wrath
and other long, classic novels to haiku or tanka form—entire novels in only seventeen or thirty-one syllables. This was an example of his remarkable, cultured sense of humor. He brought the house down with laughter and applause.

My father was always impatient to achieve his plans. He had goals that were constantly eluding him. Now for the first time he could taste success, could feel it coming. But money was slow in arriving. He and Mom weren't earning enough, and they still owed back taxes to the IRS.

The Willits property had become an emotional and financial drain. The prior winter a storm had washed out the access road, requiring extensive bulldozer work. The property was more than a two-hour drive from Fairfax, too far away for a busy man to construct a home there part-time, especially with limited funds. Mom convinced Dad to sell it. Reluctantly, he agreed, and advertised it.

Shortly after the Westercon convention, Dad went back to work at the
Examiner
, four to five days a week. Abashedly, he told friends it was only on a short-term emergency basis, at the request of the paper. In reality he and the paper needed each other.

Chilton published
Dune
in August 1965. A thick hardcover with more than five hundred pages and a retail price of $5.95, it included a number of expanded passages, including stronger roles for some characters. A number of new epigrams were added as well, along with a glossary of terms and a map of the planet Dune, based upon my father's drawing. Four appendixes were included, too, providing important background information on the ecology, religion, history and politics of the planet.

For the book jacket, Chilton selected a John Schoenherr painting of Paul and Jessica crouching in a shadowy canyon. It was a dramatic scene with considerable sentimental appeal to my father. One day he would purchase the original art, along with other paintings by the same artist.

The first printing of
Dune
was only 3,500 copies, a typical hardcover run for the time. Of that amount, 1,300 were misprinted and had to be discarded. As a result, only 2,200 copies reached bookstores. Because of this small first printing and other factors, a first edition of
Dune
has become more valuable than any book in science fiction history. The first edition has a blue cover, with white lettering.
^*

Dad enlisted assistance from the DFPA advertising firm in Tacoma, and they did promotional work in the Pacific Northwest on the book, gratis. He arranged with a few local book stores to carry the book, and distributed twenty-five promotional copies to newspaper editors and columnists, as well as to radio and television commentators he knew in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. This was all he had the time or resources to do.