Authors: Brian Herbert,Kevin J. Anderson,Frank Herbert
Frank raised chickens, and he even did that first-class, with a two-story, solar-heated chicken house with automatic feeders that abutted the garden to enrich the compost. Beside the chicken mansion, but mercifully out of sight of the chickens, was a processing station complete with wood stove, steamer, and automatic plucking machine. Every activity of Frank’s daily life was fair game for ingenuity and fun. He admired the very intellectual writers, like Pound, but had a particular soft spot for other blue-collar, self-taught writers who investigated human nature, such as Hemingway and Faulkner.
William Faulkner’s work influenced Frank in many ways, not the least of which was creating a believable fictional universe built on a complex genealogy. Frank saw science fiction as a great opportunity to reach a very wide audience with “the big stuff.” He was moved by Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and he took it to heart in everything he wrote: “ … the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat … the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Story itself provides the foundation for every human culture, and storytellers must respect this responsibility.
Frank had a guardian angel, someone who protected him and his writing time at all costs for almost four decades. Beverly Stuart Herbert honeymooned with him in a fire lookout, packed the kids up in a hearse to live in a village in Mexico while he wrote, and encouraged him to quit dead-end jobs to write what he loved, come what may. She had uncanny radar for detecting buffoons, hangers-on, con artists, and other fools, and Frank was pretty good at this, too. Not many got past Bev to test Frank. But Bev had the diplomacy and good graces to protect Frank while also protecting the dignity of those who would intrude on him. Later, over coffee and homemade pie, came the jokes.
Bev was the one who suggested that we collaborate on a novel. She was Frank’s first reader and critic, and her opinion held serious water. Over our daily coffee sessions we’d been tossing a story back and forth just for fun. “You two should just write this story and get it out of your systems,” she said. Each of us took on the project for very different reasons. I wanted to learn how to sustain a narrative for a novel’s length, and Frank wanted to practice collaboration because he was interested in screenwriting, a notoriously collaborative medium. We both got what we wanted, and with his usual wit Frank referred to our process as “ … a private act of collaboration between consenting adults.”
Not all of our experiences together were celebratory. My writing work with Frank is bracketed by sadness for both of us. We began our first collaboration when Bev was diagnosed with cancer and I was going through a divorce; we wrote
The Lazarus Effect
as Bev fought her second round of illness (Frank wrote
The White Plague
at the same time) and it was published shortly before her death. Our collaboration on
The Ascension Factor
ended with Frank’s death.
An unexpected benefit of our exercise in collaboration became Frank’s collaboration with his son Brian. Frank said that he had hoped that one day one of his children might follow in Dad’s writing footsteps, and Brian began with some humorous science fiction. Father and son working together on
Man of Two Worlds
marked a breakthrough for Frank after the long ordeal of Bev’s final illness. Brian learned the fine art of collaboration at Frank’s side, and Frank would be proud that the dual legacies of the
Dune
universe and the Herbert writing gene survive him. Brian and Kevin J. Anderson are having the kind of fun with writing that Frank and I enjoyed, and they’ve added a new physical depth and enriched the sociopolitical detail of the greater tapestry on which
Dune
was woven.
I was at about mid-point in writing the first draft of
The Ascension Factor
when the morning radio announced that Frank had passed away. Typically, he believed he would beat this challenge as he’d beaten so many others. Also typically, he was typing a new short story into a laptop when he died, a story that he’d told me might lead to another non-genre novel like
Soul Catcher
. In the crowding and confusion of those final lifesaving attempts, that laptop and his last story were lost, like Einstein’s final words were lost because the nurse at his side didn’t speak German.
I think of Frank every time I touch a keyboard, hoping I’m writing up to his considerable standards. In the Old English, “poet” was “shaper” or “maker.” Frank Herbert was a Maker on a grand scale, the most loyal friend a person could ask for—and a funny, savvy, first-class guy. He continues to be missed.
—Bill Ransom
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
—FROM FRANK HERBERT’S
Dune
IT WAS LIKE finding a buried treasure chest.
Actually, they were cardboard boxes stuffed full of folders, manuscripts, correspondence, drawings, and loose notes. Some of the box corners were sagging, crumpled by the weight of their contents or partially crushed from languishing under a stack of heavy objects.
As Brian described in his Hugo-nominated biography
Dreamer of Dune
, Frank Herbert’s wife, Beverly, was very ill in her last years and unable to keep up with the deluge of paper. For a long time before that, she had kept her prolific husband highly organized, using an ingenious filing system to keep track of old manuscripts, contracts, royalty reports, correspondence, reviews, and publicity.
In the boxes we found old manuscripts for Frank Herbert’s various novels, along with unpublished or incomplete novels and short stories, and an intriguing folder full of unused story ideas. There were old movie scripts, travel itineraries, and legal documents from Frank Herbert’s work on various films, including
The Hellstrom Chronicle
,
Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience
,
The Tillers
, David Lynch’s
Dune
, and even Dino de Laurentiis’s film
Flash Gordon
, on which Frank had worked in London as a script consultant. There were contracts and screenplays for numerous uncompleted film projects as well, including
Soul Catcher
,
The Santaroga Barrier
, and
The Green Brain
.
Salted among the various boxes full of materials for
Dune Messiah
and
God Emperor of Dune
(under its working title of
Sandworm of Dune
), we found other gems: drafts of chapters, ruminations about ecology, handwritten snippets of poetry, and lyrical descriptions of the desert and the Fremen. Some of these were scrawled on scraps of paper, bedside notepads, or in pocket-sized newspaper reporter notebooks. There were pages and pages of epigraphs that had never appeared in Frank’s six Dune novels, along with historical summaries and fascinating descriptions of characters and settings. Once we started the laborious process of sifting through these thousands of pages, we felt like archaeologists who had discovered a verified map to the Holy Grail.
And this was just the material in the attic of Brian Herbert’s garage.
It didn’t include the two safe-deposit boxes of materials found more than a decade after Frank’s death, as we described in the afterword to our first Dune prequel,
House Atreides
. In addition, Frank had bequeathed dozens of boxes of his drafts and working notes to a university archive, which the university generously opened to us. After spending time in the silent back rooms of academia, we uncovered further bounty. Kevin later returned for more days of photocopying and double-checking, while Brian tended to other Dune projects.
The wealth of newly discovered material was a Dune fan’s dream come true. And make no mistake:
We are Dune fans
. We pored over hoards of wondrous and fascinating information, valuable not only for its historical significance but also for its pure entertainment value. This included an outline (along with scene and character notes) for
Spice Planet
, a completely different, never-before-seen version of
Dune
. We also found previously unpublished chapters and scenes from
Dune
and
Dune Messiah
, along with correspondence that shed light on the crucial development of the Dune universe—even a scrap of paper torn from a notepad on which Frank Herbert had written in pencil: “Damn the spice. Save the men!” This, the defining moment in the character of Duke Leto Atreides, might well have been written when Frank Herbert switched on his bedside lamp and jotted it down just before drifting off to sleep.
The Road to Dune
features the true gems from this science-fiction treasure trove, including
Spice Planet
, which we wrote from Frank’s outline. We are also including five of our original short stories: “A Whisper of Caladan Seas” (set during the events of
Dune
) and three connecting “chapters” surrounding our novels in the Butlerian Jihad saga: “Hunting Harkonnens,” “Whipping Mek,” and “The Faces of a Martyr.” We also wrote an original lead-in to
Hunters of Dune
, “Sea Child,” which was first published in ELEMENTAL, the tsunami relief anthology.
Had Frank Herbert lived longer, he would have presented the world with many more stories set in his fantastic, unparalleled universe. Now, almost two decades after his untimely death, we are honored to share this classic legacy with millions of Frank Herbert’s fans worldwide.
The spice must flow!
—Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
The Alternative Dune Novel
by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson,
from Frank Herbert’s original outline
FINDING SUCH A wealth of notes was just one step down the road, but the fresh material, ideas, clues, and explanations suddenly crystallized many things in the chronology of the Dune epic. It rekindled in us a kind of honeymoon excitement for the whole universe.
We photocopied boxes of this material and then sorted, labeled, and organized everything. The biggest challenge was to make sense of it all. As part of the preparation work before writing our first Dune prequel, we had compiled a detailed concordance and electronically scanned all the text from the original six novels so that we could better search the source material. Now, with highlighter pens, we marked important information in the stacks of notes, illuminating unused blocks of text and descriptions that we might want to incorporate into our novels, character backgrounds, and story ideas.
Scattered among the boxes, we found some sheets of paper marked with letters—Chapter B, Chapter N, et cetera—that were at first puzzling. These pages gave brief descriptions of dramatic scenes that dealt with sandworms, storms, and unexpected new spice-mining techniques. Some of the action took place in recognizable but skewed places, as if viewed through a fractured lens: Dune Planet or Duneworld instead of Dune, Catalan instead of Caladan, Carthage instead of Carthag, and the like. In
Spice Planet,
unlike
Dune,
the characters do not break the rhythm of their strides on the desert sand to prevent a sandworm from hearing them and attacking. Apparently, this had not yet occurred to Frank Herbert in the evolution of
Dune
.
The chapters of
Spice Planet
were populated by unfamiliar characters—Jesse Linkam, Valdemar Hoskanner, Ulla Bauers, William English, Esmar Tuek, and a concubine named Dorothy Mapes. These strangers were interacting with well-known characters such as Gurney Halleck, Dr. Yueh (Cullington Yueh instead of Wellington Yueh), Wanna Yueh, and a familiar-sounding planetary ecologist named Dr. Bryce Haynes. Although a minor character (a spice smuggler) had been named Esmar Tuek in the final published version of
Dune,
he was quite different in the newly discovered notes, a major player and clearly the original model for a well-loved figure, the warrior-Mentat Thufir Hawat. Dorothy Mapes filled a role similar to that of Lady Jessica. The nobleman Jesse Linkam himself was obviously the basis for Duke Leto Atreides, and Valdemar Hoskanner was the embryonic Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.
When we arranged all the chapters and read through the remarkable outline, we found that
Spice Planet
was a unique and worthy story in its own right, not just a precursor to
Dune
. Although the harsh desert is very similar to the one familiar to millions of fans, the tale itself is thematically different, focusing on decadence and drug addiction instead of ecology, finite resources, freedom, and religious fanaticism. In part of the short novel, the main character, Jesse Linkam, must survive in the desert with his son, Barri (an eight-year-old version of Paul Atreides, without his powers). This scene echoes the escape in
Dune
of Lady Jessica into the desert with her son Paul.
Spice Planet,
like
Dune,
is filled with political intrigues and a ruling class of self-indulgent noblemen, so there are plenty of parallels. Above all, this earlier concept gives us an insight into the complex mind of Frank Herbert.
Somewhere along the way, the author shelved his detailed outline for
Spice Planet
. Starting from scratch, with input from legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr., he developed the concept into a much more vast and more important novel, yet one that he found nearly impossible to sell. It was rejected by more than twenty publishers before being picked up, finally, by Chilton Book Co., best known for publishing auto repair manuals.