Road to Dune (29 page)

It makes an exciting story with a very nice conservation twist and some excellent human angles. Let’s see if somebody wants it.

I’m still plugging along on the new novel. You’ll see it soon.

Best regards,
Frank

THE PROPOSAL:

The small Oregon coastal town of Florence is the scene of an unsung victory in the fight that men have been waging since before the dawn of recorded history. The fight is with moving sand—with dunes.

Sand dunes pushed by steady winds build up waves like ocean waves—except that they may move as little as twenty feet a year instead of twenty feet a second. But these slow motion waves can be every bit as devastating to property as a seismic wave—and the damage can be more lasting.

Wind-driven dunes have swallowed whole cities and towns from ancient times down to modern times. Ask any archaeologist about sand covered Tel Amerna, the city of the Horizon of Aten built by Akhenaton and his wife, Nefertiti, on the Nile banks. Here are only a few of the communities that have fought a losing battle with sand: Murzuk in the Sahara, Washari and a string of other settlements of the Kum-tagh desert in Sinkiang, hundreds of towns along the Hadhramaut coast of Arabia, Inca settlements and more recent ones on the Peruvian and Chilean coast from Trujillo south past Callao and Caldera.

Dunes have swallowed rivers—on the Guinea coast of Africa and in French West Africa near Njeil—and there are other recorded instances.

Dunes have threatened harbors—on Samar in the Philippines, along Africa’s Guinea Gulf, along the Inca coast of Peru and Chile—and the port of Siuslaw, Oregon, where the solution was found.

Millions of acres of Chilean and Peruvian coast have been made unfit for humans by shifting sands. Israel fights a constant battle with surrounding deserts. Harbors all over the world are plagued by this problem.

In 1948, several federal and state agencies centered a study of dunes at Florence, Oregon, a town threatened by moving sand. Efforts were focused on the Port of Siuslaw and the Siuslaw River, both in the path of advancing dunes.

It took ten years, but this group, under the direction of Thomas Flippin (work unit conservationist for the Siuslaw Soil Conservation District), has come up with the first enduring answer to shifting sands in all history. It’s so successful that Israel, Chile, Egypt, the Philippines and other nations have sent experts to Oregon to learn how to fight their sands.

Briefly, the scientists working the Oregon coast found that sand could be controlled only by use of one type of grass (European beach grass) and a system of follow-up plantings with other growth. The grass sets up a beachhead by holding down the sand in an intricate lacing of roots. This permits certain other plants to gain a foothold. The beach grass is extremely difficult to grow in nurseries, and part of the solution to the dune problem involved working out a system for propagating and handling the grass.

More than 11,000 different types of grass were tried by this group in Oregon before they hit on a way of handling beach grass—and they were working against time because the sand invasion along this stretch was swallowing houses, railroad tracks, Highway 101, the port of Siuslaw and a nearby lake … and it was drowning out game cover along forty miles of coast.

How the group in Oregon solved the many problems that go into taming the sands and how their solution works make an exciting story with an excellent conservation twist and human interest through the people who won the battle.

July 29, 1957

Dear Frank,

Control of sand dunes may be a story; it is fairly limited in appeal but certainly worth trying if you’ll make your outline a little more detailed. You should put it on a page without any date, just an outline, and give the answers to the questions I’ve written along the margins. We should also know how widespread the use of this grass is now and how rapidly it is being multiplied.

Cordially,
Lurton

(Note: Lurton Blassingame sent two letters with the same date on them.)

July 29, 1957

Dear Frank,

There may be a piece in your battle of the sand dunes but your outline still doesn’t indicate it. You give much more space here to telling about the cities the sand has destroyed than you do in telling us how the battle has been won. There’s no statement about the size or the number of dunes moving on Florence and Port Siuslaw. We don’t know the size of either of these towns. You don’t tell us how many miles of road and railroad were destroyed. I presume that the victory has been won and, if so, how far apart are Florence and Siuslaw? This outline is so vague. What has happened to the railroad? If the battle has been won, has the crew gone back to some other kind of work or are they rushing on to fight the moving sand dunes somewhere else in the country?

The outline and the story should deal with the battle to save these towns. If you put in any history, it will be just to let us see how hopeless the battle seemed, since it had never been won before. And the story probably should be tied around the man in charge so that there can be human interest in it. American editors don’t give a damn about Murzuk and Kum-tagh; they don’t even know what these names mean. If you’re going to get an okay for a piece, you’re going to have to devote the major space in your outline to interesting a U.S. editor NOW.

Cordially,
Lurton

THE LETTERS OF
DUNE

O
n an odyssey to understand his enigmatic father, Brian researched the biography
Dreamer of Dune
and then wrote new Dune novels with Kevin. During this process, we pored over Frank Herbert’s notes, correspondence, and drafts. The files were in several locations, spread across more than a thousand miles. Unraveling the mysteries of this legendary author, and of his masterpiece,
Dune,
was formidable and fascinating.

Frank Herbert’s correspondence files yielded interesting gems that show an author’s passion and his continuing drive to find a publisher for a massive novel that he knew was good but which did not fit into the marketing niches of the time.

FOR YEARS after his initial article idea of “They Stopped the Moving Sands,” Frank Herbert toyed with the story about a desert world full of hazards and riches. He plotted a short adventure novel,
Spice Planet,
but set the outline aside when his concept grew into something much more ambitious.

When Herbert finally presented an early draft of
Dune
to Lurton Blassingame in the spring of 1963, the agent wrote back:

April 5, 1963

Dear Frank,

Congratulations! You have a novel that is big in many ways, not only in sheer size, but in ideas and story value. It is not a
Once and Future King
of the future because I think it stumbles too often, but it did make me think of that delightful book.

For some readers it may prove to be too slow and I wouldn’t be surprised if some editor asked you to cut. But the main thing right now is to know when you will have in the remainder—or the outline of the remainder. There isn’t much science here, but you have a very good adventure story laid in the future and I suppose that is all that matters. That, and the fact that you have done a good job with your characters.

I think this will be called a better book than
Dragon in the Sea
and that has won many songs of praise. I bow three times—and hold out my hands for the rest of the story.

Cordially,
Lurton

Later in the month, Frank Herbert replied, sending additional chapters. He wrote:

The science in these books is essentially broad-focus—the shaping of politics, the transformation of an entire planet, religion (the transformation of an entire people), and does not dwell long on specific single tools—although I’ll be surprised if you don’t discover that the “stillsuit” concept is a new one, and it plays a key part in the stories. And for that matter, human individuals are treated as ecological
tools,
so what this adds up to is that we’re looking at science in a different way here.

I did 70 pages final draft last week (part enclosed) and don’t see why I can’t duplicate that this week and mail it off to you about next Tuesday. The rest of it can come to you at about the same rate. (Think of it as a weekly serial.)

Blassingame liked the new chapters but said: “I am quite pleased with your story and your way of telling it. Length is the only problem that worries me. I will look forward to more chapters. I find the work very interesting—but how in the world are we going to sell the serial rights when it runs so long?”

The mechanics of Frank Herbert working with his agent were quite different in those days from what they might be today. Blassingame was a hands-on agent, even assisting in the preparation of the manuscript pages before sending them to
Analog
editor John W. Campbell, Jr.:

May 24, 1963

Dear Frank,

I had a call from John Campbell this morning. He is interested in
Dune
and I am seeing him Monday to hear what he has to say.

The original copy went to him last week after I had corrected all pages, deleting, adding and substituting certain pages. In places where one to half a dozen words had been substituted, the old lines were X’d out and new words either typed above old lines or printed in by pen.

Here are seven pages to retype. Certainly those pages where additions have been added in the left margin must be retyped. We had time only to start page 210, enclosed with returned pages, for you to follow with the others if you wish. I’m sorry we have no time to do all the others but I’m sure you will understand. I’d like to get this carbon copy to Doubleday next week. The margin inserts on original copy were typed, the sheet cut and the new lines scotch taped onto the page and the page folded up at the bottom to the length of uncut sheets. These pages look OK.

I’m looking forward to receiving the rest of the book!

Cordially,
Lurton

Five days later, Blassingame wrote again, somewhat concerned about the sheer amount of information Frank Herbert was introducing at the start of the novel:

One way that might help us solve the problem is to do a little more with your history with which you precede each chapter of the book. Opening this novel, you might quote from some encyclopedia, “When the Duke Leto inherited Arrakis in the year____, the planet had no oceans, no streams. In the northern section, there were the cities (in a few sentences you can tell about the water problem on the planet for the cities and the desert). The Duke’s reign lasted only____, then the Harkonnens fell upon him and (here you can add about the wiping out of the troops, the killing of the Duke, the escape of Paul and Jessica).”

You’ll do better than this, but I do think we need to have a little more background on the planet and the situation into which you plunge us. And your clever use of quotes at the beginning of each chapter gives you a chance to provide us with this information.

Campbell purchased the story in a matter of days, for serialization in the magazine, paying $2,550 (three cents a word) for it (a net of $2,295 to the author after agent’s commission). Early in June 1963, the legendary editor wrote the first of many letters he would exchange with Frank Herbert in ensuing years.

Concerning the leading character, Paul Atreides, Campbell wrote: “Congratulations! You are now the father of a 15-year-old superman!” He then went on for four pages to give suggestions on how to fit the powers of the superhero into the novel, culminating in this comment: “If ‘Dune’ is to be the first of three, and you’re planning on using Paul in the future ones … oh, man! You’ve set yourself one hell of a problem! You might make the next one somewhat more plottable if you didn’t give Paul quite so much of the super-duper.”

Frank Herbert did not agree, and adhered to his basic view of Paul’s powers, in which he had future vision, but with some limitations. Frank wrote a detailed and philosophical five-page response discussing the nature of metaphysics, time, and prescience. After Blassingame read a copy of this response, he wrote to Frank: “I think you did a brilliant job of defending your position. So far [Campbell] has known of only two ways of handling supermen and I hope he will accept your arguments and say that in future he knows of three ways.”

Campbell did accept the defense. Five days later, he responded in a three-page letter, continuing the esoteric discussion but adding: “I’m not suggesting you drop Paul’s time-scan ability because I dislike it—but because I suspect it might make adequate plotting damn difficult. Your suggestions as to the limitations of the ability are sound.”

The interchange between editor and author proved thought provoking in more than just the specific story at hand. A few weeks later, Frank Herbert wrote back to Campbell:

Your letters on Time set off a prolonged conversation here the other night between Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, and myself. We missed you.