Road to Dune (32 page)

On the heels of that message, Harlan Ellison wrote to Frank Herbert:

February 26, 1966

Dear Frank,

I’ve got to know soonest if you’ll make the banquet. We have to give them a final count at the restaurant, at least a week ahead of time, and also the proportion of prime rib dinners to rack of lamb dinners. So letting me know on the 9th is impossible.

Also, since I have won the short story award—and you can keep that news to yourself, fuzzyface—it would be a bit presumptuous of me to accept the novel award for you. It already looks like I bribed the membership. So you’ll just have to be there to take it yourself. (In the final event that you cop out on all of us determined to pay homage to your unquenchable ego, I’ll arrange to have some notable accept for you, and then ship the effing thing to you; but that is a
last
resort.)

Either way, you’d better fill in the enclosed, and send me a check for your ticket(s) just in case you can make it. If you can’t we’ll refund the money. Reluctantly, but we’ll refund it.

Don’t miss it, Herbert. It may be the one chance I get to officially insult you from a podium. Also the program looks to be extraordinarily exciting and maybe even profitable.

Be good. See you at the banquet. Don’t disappoint me.

Harlan

Only a few days later, sad news arrived, as Sterling Lanier announced that he and Chilton Books were parting ways. (Though he did not say so, part of this might have had to do with his strong advocation of the immense novel
Dune,
with all of the publication costs involved, and the fact that sales of the book still had not picked up.) The supportive editor wrote:

You have done a fantastic job, and I am deeply proud to have been even remotely associated with you. I honestly feel that my only
real
contribution was to see that the book was a great one and to go out and hunt for it. I had to track it down through the good offices of John Campbell. Arthur Clarke gave you a fantastic writeup, in a letter to me, which we are using in
The Library Journal
along with Faith Baldwin’s … Hope we meet someday, somewhere.

On March 11,1966, Donald Stanley from the
San Francisco Examiner
reported:

Tonight the [SFWA] meets in Los Angeles. The conventioneers will watch a couple of pilot films by director Gene Roddenberry from next season’s CBS series, “Star Trek.” The main business, however, will be the presentation of the first SFWA awards in science fiction.

Winner of the prize for best novel is Frank Herbert, a former picture editor at
The Examiner
who left last year to devote full time to writing.

The bearded Herbert used to come prowling into our book department asking for “anything you have on dry climate ecology.”

Most visitors want Burdick or O’Hara ; Herbert lusted after the desert. T. E. Lawrence, the Koran, Mojave botanicals, all were grist for his arid mill.

Late last year Chilton published the reason for all this sand-etched activity. “Dune” is the name of the novel that took Herbert some half dozen years of researching and writing and which the SFWA jury has chosen for its first award.

In April, Frank Herbert wrote from his study in Fairfax, California, to Damon Knight, who lived in Milford, Pennsylvania: “The Nebula sits on my windowsill now against a background of oaks and bays which are just getting their spring foliage. Please tell Kate [Damon’s wife, Kate Wilhelm] (and Mrs. Jim Blish) that there should be an award for the award. Thank God! Someone has at last broken away from the glistening phallic symbols with arms reaching toward heaven. This is a work of art.”

(“The glistening phallic symbols” was a reference to the Hugo Award—which Frank would also receive later that year for
Dune.
)

EARLY IN 1967, sales of
Dune
began to pick up, and Chilton went back to press for an additional printing. Frank Herbert wrote to his agent: “Book stores in this area can’t keep
Dune
in stock—selling out and reordering at a delightful pace. Hope this is a national thing.” Indications were good, because by January of 1968 Ace Books went back to press for an additional 25,000 copies of the paperback, too.

By early 1968, Frank Herbert was hard at work on a sequel to
Dune
but was having some difficulty with the title, first choosing
Fool Saint
and then
(The) Messiah,
before settling on
Dune Messiah.
He also considered and discarded the cryptic title
C Oracle,
representing a coracle floating on a sea of time.

John W. Campbell received a copy of the sequel that summer, and he didn’t like it at all. In a scathing letter, he wrote: “Paul commits acts of absolute folly—which you seek to explain on the basis of His Vision Requires It … Paul winds up as a God That Failed—he winds up, in Fremen terms, which he accepts as a useless-to-the-tribe cripple abandoned in the desert … In outline, it sounds like an Epic Tragedy, but when you start thinking back on it, it works out to ‘Paul was a damn fool, and surely no demi-god; he loused up himself, his loved ones, and the whole galaxy!’”

Frank Herbert began his major revisions to the manuscript. Some of the alternate or deleted chapters and scenes are included later in
The Road to Dune.

A month later, Frank completed rewrites and sent them to his agent, who reported back: “I think you did a good job on the revision of the
Dune
sequel. It reads better now than it did before, though it still is not the masterpiece that
Dune
is. I think Campbell will like it now. He has a copy.”

But Campbell still didn’t like it at all. In a reversal of the experience with
Dune,
at a time when book publishers were vying for the right to publish
Dune Messiah
in hardcover and paperback, the magazine editor took the opposite stance, and refused to serialize it in
Analog.
He wrote:

Herbert’s revision of “The Messiah” still didn’t satisfy me … In this one, it’s Paul, our central character, who is a helpless pawn manipulated against his will, by a cruel, destructive fate … .

The reactions of science-fictioneers, however, over the last few decades have persistently and quite explicitly been that they want
heroes
—not anti-heroes. They want stories of strong men who exert themselves, inspire others, and make a monkey’s uncle out of malign fates!

His list of complaints included the following:

… Item: If Paul can’t “see” where other oracles have muddied the waters of Time—then neither can they “see” where he is working. Because what he does, responding to his vision of the future, alters that future to indeterminacy—the future is unstabilized; it is
not
determinate.

… Item: a Hero leader who cuts and runs from the Climactic Battle is not a Messiah—even though, or particularly if, his side actually wins. Neither is he a martyr, nor a Victim of Fate.

Campbell didn’t understand and perhaps Frank Herbert didn’t explain adequately at the time that his intention was to write an anti-hero book, in order to warn about the dangers of following a charismatic hero. As Brian explained in
Dreamer of Dune:

Dune,
the first novel in what would ultimately become a series, contained hints of the direction (Frank Herbert) 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 in 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.” … The author felt that heroes made mistakes … mistakes that were amplified by the numbers of people who followed those heroes slavishly …

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. (pp. 191-192)

Despite Campbell’s rejection,
Dune Messiah
was picked up by
Galaxy
magazine, and would run in five installments, in the July-November 1969 issues. It was also picked up in hardcover by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and in paperback by Berkley Books. With sales and accolades on the upswing, an ebullient Frank Herbert wrote to his agent: “
Dune
is hot right now. A sequel is sure to capitalize on that fact. It’s required reading in several college lit and psych classes and is referred to on campuses as a ‘great underground book.’ Are all the publishers in New York asleep at the switch?”

He was not yet earning enough money from his writing to entirely quit working as a newspaperman, but things were heading in the right direction. In a couple of years,
Dune
and
Dune Messiah
would become phenomenal bestsellers and Frank Herbert would be lecturing on college campuses all over the United States.
Dune
would be picked up by the environmental movement for its desert ecology theme, and well-known movie producers would begin knocking on his door.

UNPUBLISHED SCENES AND CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION

W
hile poring over early drafts of the
Dune
and
Dune Messiah
manuscripts, we discovered alternate endings, additional scenes, and chapters that had been eliminated from the final published works.

Prior to its 1965 hardcover publication,
Dune
was serialized in
Analog,
but each segment was limited by the magazine’s length restrictions. The editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., worked closely with Frank Herbert to trim scenes and chapters, making them fit into the number of pages that Campbell wanted.

The following chapters were cut in this fashion and then never restored when the novel was published in book form. In one passage here, Frank Herbert mentions that spice has been used for only about a century, but in later versions, he expands the time frame to span many thousands of years. Many details are inconsistent with the published versions, and these scenes should be considered drafts, not “canon.”

These are interesting and enlightening additions to the stories and are available here for the first time. The context should be clear to anyone familiar with the early novels.

Some of the chapters from
Dune Messiah
are a radical departure from what was published as the final version, and some of the alternate endings are spectacular and shocking.

Deleted Scenes and Chapters from
Dune

PAUL & REVEREND MOTHER MOHIAM

(Several short scenes from the opening of Dune)

O
n the inner wall beneath the window was a loose stone that could be pulled out to reveal a hiding place for the treasures of his boyhood—fishhooks, a roll of meta-twine, a rock shaped like a lizard, a colored picture of a space frigate left behind by a visitor from the mysterious Spacing Guild. Paul removed the stone and looked at the hidden end of it where he had carved with his cutterray: “Remember Paul Atreides, age 15, Anno 72 of Shaddam IV.”

Slowly, Paul replaced the stone above his treasures and knew he would never remove it again. He returned to his bed, slipped under the covers. His emotion was sad excitement, and this puzzled him. He had been taught by his mother to study a puzzling emotion in the Bene Gesserit fashion. Paul looked within himself and saw that the finality of his goodbyes carried the sadness. The excitement came from the adventure and strangeness that lay ahead.

PAUL SLIPPED OUT of bed in his shorts, began dressing. “Is she your mother?” he asked.

“That’s a fool’s question, Paul,” Jessica said. She turned. “Reverend Mother is merely a title. I never knew my mother. Few Bene Gesserits of the schools ever do; you know that.”

Paul put on his jacket, buttoned it. “Shall I wear a shield?”

Jessica stared at him. “A shield? Here in your home? What ever put that idea into …”

“Why’re you afraid?” he demanded.

A wry smile tugged one corner of her mouth. “I trained you too well. I …” She took a deep breath. “I don’t like this move to Arrakis. You know this decision was made over my every objection. But …” She shrugged. “We haven’t time to dally here.” She took his hand the way she had done when he was smaller, led him out into the hall toward her morning room.

Paul sensed the oddness of her taking his hand, felt the perspiration in her palm and thought:
She doesn’t lie very well, either. Not for a Bene Gesserit she doesn’t. It isn’t Arrakis that has her afraid.