The Synopsis Treasury (6 page)

Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert, the visionary author of
Dune
, wrote more than twenty other novels, including
Hellstrom’s Hive, The White Plague, The Green Brain
, and
The Dosadi Experiment
. During his life, he received great acclaim for his sweeping vision and the deep philosophical underpinnings in his writings. His life is detailed in the Hugo-nominated biography
Dreamer of Dune
, by Brian Herbert.

There are many fascinating windows into the mind of Frank Herbert. He possessed an astounding intellect that stretched to the very limits of human consciousness. Everything interested him. My father once told me that he could not look something up on one page of an encyclopedia without wanting to read the opposite page that lay open on the table. A reviewer for the
New York Times
once quipped that Frank Herbert’s head was so overloaded with ideas that it was likely to fall off.

Some of Dad’s literary characters were like that, as he spoke through them. In
God Emperor of Dune
, he described Leto II, who through genetic processes acquired all human information. Outside the Dune series, Frank Herbert wrote of a vast Galactic Library, a storehouse containing the written wisdom of humankind. The author, like Leto II and the Galactic Library, was a repository of incredible, wondrous information. His words captivated millions of people all over the world.

Frank Herbert was a human dynamo, a force of nature. Everyone who knew him benefited from the relationship. He shared as much as he could with me, with his friends, and with his legions of fans. He wrote many letters, and in the days before faxes, e-mails, and text messaging, he sent his correspondence by what we call “snail mail” today. The letters he exchanged with Damon Knight between 1963 and 1965 are particularly interesting, focusing as they do on a novel about the creation of artificial consciousness (
Destination: Void
^*
).

Just before that exchange, back in the 1950s, Americans had been inundated with visions of a future that involved robots performing household chores for them and other tedious or boring tasks. Television commercials and science fiction stories depicted homes that were fully automated, with mechanical servants flitting about, and well-dressed housewives enjoying the benefits of futuristic kitchens. In that Utopian future, automation was supposed to make it possible for people to have more leisure and productive time—allowing them to more fully achieve their human potential.

In
Dune
and
Destination: Void
, Frank Herbert portrayed situations that were far different from those halcyon depictions of friendly, trouble-free machines that performed work we didn’t want to do. Flipping utopia over into dystopia, the author wrote about scenarios that might exist if machines were either given (or developed) artificial intelligence, and in the process became something quite dark. He asked the familiar science-fiction question, “What if?” What if AI-machines sought to dominate their creators, and in the process tried to take away human freedoms? What would be left of our humanity then?

Throughout the Dune series and other stories, Dad liked to explore myths and assumptions, and to compare them with reality. One of his major themes was to ask the question, “What does it mean to be human?” In his February 25,1965 letter to Damon Knight, he wrote, “The enlightened person sees what underlies all things, including himself, but he is always something other than what he sees.” This is, of course, a very Zen view of the universe, where wordless realities trump all human perceptions. Though he did not practice any religion, he said that he found Buddhism the most appealing of all religious and philosophical concepts.

During his newspaper career, Frank Herbert worked as an investigative reporter. Similarly, in his creative writing he liked to (as he put it) “turn over rocks and see what scurried out.” In the process, he analyzed the unexamined assumptions and myths under which we were living as a species. Ultimately, this was all about human consciousness. He saw people around him just plodding along with their lives, without really thinking much about their actions, Frank Herbert came to see that humans were actually perceiving the world around them through filters, and were expending the energies of their lives in seeking myths that they often didn’t even know existed. Thus, humans were driven by forces outside themselves, forces that involved the human species as a collective organism.

As Dad wrote to Damon Knight on January 20,1964, the project to create artificial consciousness (in
Destination: Void
) succeeds “only when those involved see that they have to aim at something far different from an Asimov robot.… They see that man is conscious and aware, in part, because of his animal inheritance—all the instinctual trappings out of some 400 million years of primate development. This project must find a substitute for that animal history and condense the development time into a scale manageable in a human lifetime.”

That’s an ambitious goal for Frank Herbert’s characters, and for his story. But big objectives did not deter Frank Herbert. For the planet Dune, he extrapolated what it might be like if all of Earth were to become like the Sahara Desert, and sand covered what had once been lush greenery. Then he asked what people would need to do in order to survive in such a hostile environment, and what sort of society and religion they might develop. Ultimately, people living on his desert planet would need to adjust to their environment—yet another aspect of the human condition. As he wrote in the novel
Dune
, “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” This human ability to adapt better than other species has led to its dominance on Earth, but Frank Herbert took that historical fact a step further, and asked what conditions might emerge that could further tax (and possibly break) this ability. As an author, he liked to keep raising the stakes, increasing the perils and challenges that his characters had to face.

In
Dune
, he also warned of the dangers of machines, envisioning a westernized, galaxy-spanning civilization of humans that—paradoxically—had no legal computers at all. This was because of past abuses thousands of years before, when humans were enslaved by “thinking machines”—a legendary time for
Dune
fans when mankind ultimately rose up in a heroic “Butlerian Jihad” to overthrow the mechanical masters and regain their freedom.

As he explored the alternate story of
Destination: Void
, Frank Herbert wrote to Damon Knight about the need for humans in a confined environment to survive against a hostile force—but in this case his story setting was a spaceship that was ostensibly full of cloned-human colonists bound for the Tau Ceti solar system. With the colonists in hybernation
⁺
, the vessel and its sophisticated computer systems would be operated by a conscious artificial mind that he called the OMC—the Organic Mental Core. Similar to his world-building for the novel
Dune
, Frank Herbert now speculated on what sort of religion might develop around the OMC, and on what humans would need to do in order to survive in a hostile environment.

Ultimately, the artificial sentience of
Destination: Void
would become godlike and uncontrollable, with a religion developing around it. On February 25, 1965, Dad wrote to Damon Knight; “Question: How do you escape from the domination of an omnipotent, omnipresent being?” This was a question that the fictional Dr. Frankenstein might well have asked after creating his powerful monster. As Mary Shelley and Frank Herbert knew from considering such matters in detail, the plans and intentions of human beings often go awry. It is a line of reasoning that can lead to speculation about the folly of attempting to control the science of atomic bombs, or of commanding the superhuman Kwisatz Haderach that the Bene Gesserit of Dune sought to produce through generations of careful breeding. It’s the old problem of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle once it’s out. Something always goes wrong when events spiral out of human control, and that makes for intriguing story possibilities.

Frank Herbert was not a trivial man. He wrote about things that matter to us as a species. The complexity of his writing often caused him severe difficulties in getting his stories published.
Dune
was rejected for publication in book form by more than 20 publishers, in large part because editors found the first 100 pages too dense. Concerning
Destination: Void
, Damon Knight wrote to Frank Herbert on December 15,1964, “I found the story heavy going up to about p. 50. After that it pulled me by the nose.…” Through these letters, we see that my father was learning how to swim in the strange waters of publishing, that it was necessary to entertain his readers first and then slip into the text what he called “a potful of message,” but in ways that would not bore the readers or interfere with the story. With that in mind, a number of his works can be read in layers.

Dune
is the most obvious example, where the discerning reader can choose to read it as an adventure story, or as an ecological handbook, or can delve into it for the politics, religion, philosophy, and beautiful poetry.
Destination: Void
has interesting layers as well, mirroring the mind of its creator.

Frank Herbert’s writings are like the melange of Dune, the spice that is never “twice the same.” The addictive substance is like life, he wrote, presenting “a different face each time you take it.” I encourage you to read these letters that my father exchanged with Damon Knight, and then go back and examine them again—just as Frank Herbert’s countless fans often do with his books. You will find something new and intriguing each time you consider his fascinating ideas, each time you peer into the remarkable mind of a genius.

—Brian Herbert

*
At the time of his correspondence with Damon Knight, Frank Herbert had two working titles for his novel about the creation of artificial consciousness:
When Shall I Awake?
and
Many Brave Hearts
. Herbert published these ideas first as a short story, “Do I Wake or Dream?” (
Galaxy
, August 1965), and then as a novel
Destination: Void
(Berkley, 1966). —BH

+
Frank Herbert intentionally spelled it “hybernation” instead of “hibernation” signifying that this was an enhanced form of hibernation. —BH

November 1, 1963

Dear Frank,

Can I interest you in doing a science fiction novel for Berkley Books? They are doing a series of these, with me as editor, under what I think are attractive terms. It works like this—you send me a bare sketch of an idea, just a paragraph or two; if I like it (and if we haven’t got one just like it in the works), we go on to a somewhat longer outline, then to a complete outline. The idea is that working through these successive outlines we iron out any trouble spots before they get into the finished script. The final outline goes to Tom Dardis for approval—then you get a contract and an advance: $500, followed by $1000 on delivery. The contract will state that Berkley will defer publication for eight months, to give you a chance to sell serial rights.

I don’t see how you can beat this for a quick $1500, plus a possible serial sale. Let me know how it strikes you.

Best,

Damon

12/3/63

Dear Damon,

Please forgive the delay in this answer to your letter, but I’ve been up to the hairline in work.

I have had an idea bouncing around in my skull which just might fit your needs. It’s concerned with an area which I believe Science Fiction has bypassed—consciousness.

What I’d like to do is build a yarn around a project to produce artificial consciousness. We accept the android in SF, but give not one second thought to what a profound breakthrough such a creature must be. We haven’t even defined consciousness to everyone’s satisfaction.

I see it as turning on four major characters—one female, director of the project; one chaplain, to speak the religious paradox inherent; one holdover from previous project that failed, to point up that this ain’t easy, Mac; and one bright young whizkid who doesn’t know the meaning of “can’t” and has the scars to prove it.

Does this tickle your fancy or your risibility?

Best regards,

Frank

December 6, 1963

Dear Frank,

That’s an intriguing idea—you’re right, this is one of the things s.f. writers have been taking for granted, the easy way out. If you have something new to say about it, and I gather you do, it ought to make an exciting and important book. Please tell me some more. When the project succeeds (does it?), what do you get? Just another Asimov robot? If not, what?

Here’s a curious thought that just struck me; throw it out if it doesn’t fit. Is a conscious mind, natural or artificial, necessarily one with buried levels of activity—a subconscious, an id, a superego? A ruler can’t measure itself, and a mind can’t be conscious of itself unless it’s split into at least two parts? If there is anything to this, that would make a robot brain a hell of a lot unlike any that’s been used in s.f. to date.