The King of Sci-Fi Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert Jr. (1920-1986) Novelist, essayist and journalist.
“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”-Frank Herbert (FH)
Frank Herbert Jr. was born 1920 in Tacoma, Washington, USA, only son to Frank Herbert Sr. an auto-bus line operator between Tacoma and Aberdeen. When Frank was eight his family moved to a small farm in Burley, this grounded him in a rural childhood freedom that would birth his passion for the environment and societies, their politics, and their relationships to their environment. Frank was drawn to writing like a moth to the flame and began his writing career as a journalist for the Glendale Star at nineteen, fresh out of high school, determined and impatient to get started.
“You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die”-FH
It was to be a brief start, as he was soon whisked away to World War II to serve as a Navy Diver and Photographer. In 1941 while still serving he married his first wife Flora Parkinson and they had a daughter together, Penny Herbert in 1942. Honourably discharged in 1943, Frank went to work at the Oregon Journal until 1945, when he divorced Flora and went to attend the University of Washington.
He was to meet his second wife Beverly Ann Stuart in his creative writing class at the U.W.; they were initially drawn together, by being the only published writers attending the class. Frank did not graduate from W.U. and later stated he only wanted to study the things that interested him. Bev and Frank were married in 1946 and had their first son Brian in 1947 in Seattle, where Frank was now employed as a roving journalist at the Seattle Star and Oregon Statesman, and as editor/writer for the San Francisco Examiner.
His first fiction publication was in a pulp Sci-Fi magazine, Startling Stories in 1952, a short story entitled Looking for Something. Over the next ten years he would publish over twenty short stories in various magazines. His first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, was published in 1955 and received critical acclaim and won the International Fantasy Award. It was a dark tale that explored the line between sanity and madness, set in a claustrophobic submarine, in a world at war over fading oil resources and their consumption. It clearly showed the direction Frank was to pursue, in using his writing to express his thoughts and concerns about present human society and its impact and future on this planet.
“Ecology is the science of understanding consequences”-unknown -FH
In 1959 Frank was asked to write an article on the shifting beach sands in Oregon and how a group had come up with a practical solution. What he initially discovered was how they had succeeded by planting the dunes first with pioneer grasses and sturdy shrubs and then introducing a diversity of plants in the resultant stability. He immediately saw the great massive dunes as being very slow waves with fluid dynamic properties. The fact and how that they had managed to essentially halt the tide was positively fascinating to Frank. He without delay asked his editor if he could do a serial feature on this and related subjects and was given an extension that was to be never fulfilled.
“It’s been my belief for a long time that man inflicts himself on his environment, that is, Western man.”-FH
In two months he amassed so much research material he realised that this project could never be related in a small article series and was nearly big enough for a novel. Bev went back to fulltime work in 1960 and with the extra income Frank could concentrate on his novel exclusively. He continued researching for four more years and in 1963 a small taste was released as Dune World and then Prophet of Dune in Analog magazine. Frank wrote, re-wrote and completed a new version, it was among the longest single Sci-Fi stories to be written at the time, and was rejected by twenty publishers over two years. In 1965 it was accepted by Chilton, a publisher of auto-repair manuals, it was not a bestseller but did win the very first Nebula Award for a Novel that same year and was also awarded the Hugo Award for a Novel in 1966.
With Dune, Frank Herbert seemed to successfully break many conventions that held in the 1960’s Sc-Fi writing period. Whilst technology was an integral part of Dune it, was not its driving force, it was a more complex novel. Frank created an entire multifaceted galaxy intricately woven and multilayered that focused, embraced and examined in a minute detail, a host of social, political, religious, and environmental issues. In this Frank Herbert stands as the Tolkien of Science Fiction, both writers created an entire world through long term dedicated research and in-depth thought, before they wrote the first word of a novel.
“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. . . . the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive… tribal organisation is a natural organisation of humankind. We tend to fall into it, given any chance at all, given the proper stresses, or given the proper lack of stresses…I set up the situation in “Dune” where the natural evolvement was a classic feudalism, and for a very specific purpose. I wanted the lines of power to be clear…Now the Bene Gesserit see this (absolute power corrupts absolutely). You see how they keep themselves in the background… They want a user of power they can control.”-FH
By 1968 Dune had earned Frank $20,000, good for Sc-Fi book but not enough to live on. It did however allow Frank more professional opportunities and he wrote for the Seattle Post and lectured at W.U. He also widely travelled and went to Vietnam and Pakistan as an ecological consultant in 1972, by which time he quit journalism to become a fulltime writer as his book sales began to climb.
“To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”-FH
In 1974 Bev was diagnosed with cancer and they moved to a large property in Olympic Peninsula, Washington State. Here Frank created a project in ecological self-sustainability and continued to write, lecture and publish both his fiction and non-fiction. An outspoken advocate for ecological awareness and promoting change, he used his home project as a living demonstration of the issues and practical possibilities of ecological living.
“Western man has assumed that all you need for any problem is enough force, power, and that there is no problem which won’t submit to this approach, even the problem of our own ignorance.”-FH
Frank considered himself a scientist though not actually paper qualified, and was greatly interested and involved in various aspects of the sciences ranging widely from marine biology to evolution. In psychology and psychiatry, he was a fan of anti-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.
"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic." -Thomas Szasz
The unseen realms of mythology and the unknown were a continuous theme of fascination for Frank, as was the subtle communication inherent in everyday life.
“Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly... The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are supreme.”-FH
He believed in the power of verbal communication and always wrote verbally intending his words to be spoken. The use of the voice as a weapon in Dune has sometimes been assailed and even completely misinterpreted, as a flight of fancy but Frank was always keen to point out.
“…if you know the individual well enough, if you know the subtitles of his strengths and weaknesses, that merely by the way you cast your voice, by the words you select… You can control him. Now if you can do it in a gross way, obviously with refinement you can do it in much more subtle fashion, and it’s done all the time in politics”-FH
In an interview with Willis E. McNelly in 1969 he goes on to explain and demonstrate:
“And it’s amazing to me that anybody could even begin to question this as a fact of our existence. And they couldn’t see it, so I said, well, I’ll give you an example. I’m going to describe a man to you. You know this man. And I’m going to give you a task of controlling him by voice after I’ve described him and after you recognise him. I said, this is a man who was in World War I as sergeant, came home from World War I to his small town in the mid-west, married his childhood sweetheart and went into his father’s business, raised two children, who he didn’t understand…and they don’t understand him…He joined the VFW and the legion, went on every picnic, every convention, lived by the double standard (he thought). Now on the phone, strictly by voice, I want you to make him mad.”-FH
In the original recording the audience then began to laugh at point well made. Take a look a Neurolinguistic programming of NLP today; it seems to be acting upon what Frank Herbert was on about back then. Frank was a man of persistent learning; he rarely used a dictionary for a meaning of a word. He preferred to read and research holistically drawing upon as many resources as possible to come to an in-depth understanding. This is evidenced in the true depth in all his novels.
In 1966 he published Destination Void, a small novel that would be the basis of a writing partnership with Bill Ransom. In 1979 they released The Jesus Incident; like a Dune on crack, it was survival of the fittest as a daily event. Settlers in an interstellar ship that finally reach their destination Pandora, a harsh and alien environment that fundamentally changes the settlers who strive to gain a foothold on its unforgiving surface. Continuing and expanding the themes of the first book, they released The Lazarus Incident in 1983 and The Ascension Factor (released in 1988). Bill Ransom was his only writing partner apart from one novel with his son Brian Herbert, Man of Two Worlds (released in1986).
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear is gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”-FH
In 1984 tragedy struck and Bev succumbed to her cancer and died just as Heretics of Dune was being released. It was also the same year the Hollywood movie version of the first book was made by David Lynch; it bombed at the box office and seemed to miss the essence of the book. In particular the careful characterisations Frank had given to Paul were force moulded into a more stereotypical character hero, and lost that sense of anti-hero ambiguousness. Frank on the record, had no problems with the movie, but he was profoundly distracted and wounded by the death of Bev, and wrote a long dedication to her in Chapterhouse Dune which was published in 1985.
Soon after Frank Herbert, whilst recovering from an operation to remove a cancer, suffered a massive coronary and died in February, 1986. It is too his esteemed credit and our grateful knowledge enrichment, that he left behind a body of work that has stood the test of time, and has become a testament and inspiration for each new generation that reads his work. He remains as much a present force of vocal affirmation, teaching and examination of us and our environment, as he did when he lived.
“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”-FH
He left his last book number seven of the Dune saga unfinished and in note form only, which was collected and written into Hunters of Dune by his son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, published in 2006. They, previous to Hunters of Dune went back to write six books, The Preludes to Dune first, before attempting to write Frank Herbert’s last book of Dune. A wise choice as by 2006 Frank Herbert’s Dune fans run in the millions and this book was eagerly anticipated as, Chapterhouse Dune was purposeful cliff hanger.
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”-FH
Over Frank Herbert’s prolific and productive writing career, he published over 63 works of fiction from novels to short stories, as well as innumerable essays, articles and lectures and at least 9 non-fiction books.
The selected Works of Frank Herbert:
The Dragon and the Sea (1956)
Dune (1965)
The Green Brain (1966)
Destination Void (1966)
Heisenberg’s Eyes (1966)
The Santoroga Barrier (1968)
Dune Messiah (1969)
Whipping Star (1970)
Hellstrom’s Hive (1973)
Children of Dune (1976)
The Dosadi Experiment (1977)
The Priest of Psi (1980)
God Emperor of Dune (1981)
The White Plague (1982)
Heretics of Dune (1984)
Chapter House Dune (1985)
Eye (1985)
(Hunters of Dune (2006) Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson)
Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom:
The Jesus Incident (1979)
The Lazarus Effect (1983)
The Ascension Factor (1988)
“Here lies a fallen god His fall was not a small one, We did but build his pedestal An narrow and a tall one”-FH
“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”-Frank Herbert (FH)
Frank Herbert Jr. was born 1920 in Tacoma, Washington, USA, only son to Frank Herbert Sr. an auto-bus line operator between Tacoma and Aberdeen. When Frank was eight his family moved to a small farm in Burley, this grounded him in a rural childhood freedom that would birth his passion for the environment and societies, their politics, and their relationships to their environment. Frank was drawn to writing like a moth to the flame and began his writing career as a journalist for the Glendale Star at nineteen, fresh out of high school, determined and impatient to get started.
“You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die”-FH
It was to be a brief start, as he was soon whisked away to World War II to serve as a Navy Diver and Photographer. In 1941 while still serving he married his first wife Flora Parkinson and they had a daughter together, Penny Herbert in 1942. Honourably discharged in 1943, Frank went to work at the Oregon Journal until 1945, when he divorced Flora and went to attend the University of Washington.
He was to meet his second wife Beverly Ann Stuart in his creative writing class at the U.W.; they were initially drawn together, by being the only published writers attending the class. Frank did not graduate from W.U. and later stated he only wanted to study the things that interested him. Bev and Frank were married in 1946 and had their first son Brian in 1947 in Seattle, where Frank was now employed as a roving journalist at the Seattle Star and Oregon Statesman, and as editor/writer for the San Francisco Examiner.
His first fiction publication was in a pulp Sci-Fi magazine, Startling Stories in 1952, a short story entitled Looking for Something. Over the next ten years he would publish over twenty short stories in various magazines. His first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, was published in 1955 and received critical acclaim and won the International Fantasy Award. It was a dark tale that explored the line between sanity and madness, set in a claustrophobic submarine, in a world at war over fading oil resources and their consumption. It clearly showed the direction Frank was to pursue, in using his writing to express his thoughts and concerns about present human society and its impact and future on this planet.
“Ecology is the science of understanding consequences”-unknown -FH
In 1959 Frank was asked to write an article on the shifting beach sands in Oregon and how a group had come up with a practical solution. What he initially discovered was how they had succeeded by planting the dunes first with pioneer grasses and sturdy shrubs and then introducing a diversity of plants in the resultant stability. He immediately saw the great massive dunes as being very slow waves with fluid dynamic properties. The fact and how that they had managed to essentially halt the tide was positively fascinating to Frank. He without delay asked his editor if he could do a serial feature on this and related subjects and was given an extension that was to be never fulfilled.
“It’s been my belief for a long time that man inflicts himself on his environment, that is, Western man.”-FH
In two months he amassed so much research material he realised that this project could never be related in a small article series and was nearly big enough for a novel. Bev went back to fulltime work in 1960 and with the extra income Frank could concentrate on his novel exclusively. He continued researching for four more years and in 1963 a small taste was released as Dune World and then Prophet of Dune in Analog magazine. Frank wrote, re-wrote and completed a new version, it was among the longest single Sci-Fi stories to be written at the time, and was rejected by twenty publishers over two years. In 1965 it was accepted by Chilton, a publisher of auto-repair manuals, it was not a bestseller but did win the very first Nebula Award for a Novel that same year and was also awarded the Hugo Award for a Novel in 1966.
With Dune, Frank Herbert seemed to successfully break many conventions that held in the 1960’s Sc-Fi writing period. Whilst technology was an integral part of Dune it, was not its driving force, it was a more complex novel. Frank created an entire multifaceted galaxy intricately woven and multilayered that focused, embraced and examined in a minute detail, a host of social, political, religious, and environmental issues. In this Frank Herbert stands as the Tolkien of Science Fiction, both writers created an entire world through long term dedicated research and in-depth thought, before they wrote the first word of a novel.
“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. . . . the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive… tribal organisation is a natural organisation of humankind. We tend to fall into it, given any chance at all, given the proper stresses, or given the proper lack of stresses…I set up the situation in “Dune” where the natural evolvement was a classic feudalism, and for a very specific purpose. I wanted the lines of power to be clear…Now the Bene Gesserit see this (absolute power corrupts absolutely). You see how they keep themselves in the background… They want a user of power they can control.”-FH
By 1968 Dune had earned Frank $20,000, good for Sc-Fi book but not enough to live on. It did however allow Frank more professional opportunities and he wrote for the Seattle Post and lectured at W.U. He also widely travelled and went to Vietnam and Pakistan as an ecological consultant in 1972, by which time he quit journalism to become a fulltime writer as his book sales began to climb.
“To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”-FH
In 1974 Bev was diagnosed with cancer and they moved to a large property in Olympic Peninsula, Washington State. Here Frank created a project in ecological self-sustainability and continued to write, lecture and publish both his fiction and non-fiction. An outspoken advocate for ecological awareness and promoting change, he used his home project as a living demonstration of the issues and practical possibilities of ecological living.
“Western man has assumed that all you need for any problem is enough force, power, and that there is no problem which won’t submit to this approach, even the problem of our own ignorance.”-FH
Frank considered himself a scientist though not actually paper qualified, and was greatly interested and involved in various aspects of the sciences ranging widely from marine biology to evolution. In psychology and psychiatry, he was a fan of anti-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.
"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic." -Thomas Szasz
The unseen realms of mythology and the unknown were a continuous theme of fascination for Frank, as was the subtle communication inherent in everyday life.
“Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There are things that can only be experienced wordlessly... The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are supreme.”-FH
He believed in the power of verbal communication and always wrote verbally intending his words to be spoken. The use of the voice as a weapon in Dune has sometimes been assailed and even completely misinterpreted, as a flight of fancy but Frank was always keen to point out.
“…if you know the individual well enough, if you know the subtitles of his strengths and weaknesses, that merely by the way you cast your voice, by the words you select… You can control him. Now if you can do it in a gross way, obviously with refinement you can do it in much more subtle fashion, and it’s done all the time in politics”-FH
In an interview with Willis E. McNelly in 1969 he goes on to explain and demonstrate:
“And it’s amazing to me that anybody could even begin to question this as a fact of our existence. And they couldn’t see it, so I said, well, I’ll give you an example. I’m going to describe a man to you. You know this man. And I’m going to give you a task of controlling him by voice after I’ve described him and after you recognise him. I said, this is a man who was in World War I as sergeant, came home from World War I to his small town in the mid-west, married his childhood sweetheart and went into his father’s business, raised two children, who he didn’t understand…and they don’t understand him…He joined the VFW and the legion, went on every picnic, every convention, lived by the double standard (he thought). Now on the phone, strictly by voice, I want you to make him mad.”-FH
In the original recording the audience then began to laugh at point well made. Take a look a Neurolinguistic programming of NLP today; it seems to be acting upon what Frank Herbert was on about back then. Frank was a man of persistent learning; he rarely used a dictionary for a meaning of a word. He preferred to read and research holistically drawing upon as many resources as possible to come to an in-depth understanding. This is evidenced in the true depth in all his novels.
In 1966 he published Destination Void, a small novel that would be the basis of a writing partnership with Bill Ransom. In 1979 they released The Jesus Incident; like a Dune on crack, it was survival of the fittest as a daily event. Settlers in an interstellar ship that finally reach their destination Pandora, a harsh and alien environment that fundamentally changes the settlers who strive to gain a foothold on its unforgiving surface. Continuing and expanding the themes of the first book, they released The Lazarus Incident in 1983 and The Ascension Factor (released in 1988). Bill Ransom was his only writing partner apart from one novel with his son Brian Herbert, Man of Two Worlds (released in1986).
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear is gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”-FH
In 1984 tragedy struck and Bev succumbed to her cancer and died just as Heretics of Dune was being released. It was also the same year the Hollywood movie version of the first book was made by David Lynch; it bombed at the box office and seemed to miss the essence of the book. In particular the careful characterisations Frank had given to Paul were force moulded into a more stereotypical character hero, and lost that sense of anti-hero ambiguousness. Frank on the record, had no problems with the movie, but he was profoundly distracted and wounded by the death of Bev, and wrote a long dedication to her in Chapterhouse Dune which was published in 1985.
Soon after Frank Herbert, whilst recovering from an operation to remove a cancer, suffered a massive coronary and died in February, 1986. It is too his esteemed credit and our grateful knowledge enrichment, that he left behind a body of work that has stood the test of time, and has become a testament and inspiration for each new generation that reads his work. He remains as much a present force of vocal affirmation, teaching and examination of us and our environment, as he did when he lived.
“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”-FH
He left his last book number seven of the Dune saga unfinished and in note form only, which was collected and written into Hunters of Dune by his son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, published in 2006. They, previous to Hunters of Dune went back to write six books, The Preludes to Dune first, before attempting to write Frank Herbert’s last book of Dune. A wise choice as by 2006 Frank Herbert’s Dune fans run in the millions and this book was eagerly anticipated as, Chapterhouse Dune was purposeful cliff hanger.
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”-FH
Over Frank Herbert’s prolific and productive writing career, he published over 63 works of fiction from novels to short stories, as well as innumerable essays, articles and lectures and at least 9 non-fiction books.
The selected Works of Frank Herbert:
The Dragon and the Sea (1956)
Dune (1965)
The Green Brain (1966)
Destination Void (1966)
Heisenberg’s Eyes (1966)
The Santoroga Barrier (1968)
Dune Messiah (1969)
Whipping Star (1970)
Hellstrom’s Hive (1973)
Children of Dune (1976)
The Dosadi Experiment (1977)
The Priest of Psi (1980)
God Emperor of Dune (1981)
The White Plague (1982)
Heretics of Dune (1984)
Chapter House Dune (1985)
Eye (1985)
(Hunters of Dune (2006) Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson)
Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom:
The Jesus Incident (1979)
The Lazarus Effect (1983)
The Ascension Factor (1988)
“Here lies a fallen god His fall was not a small one, We did but build his pedestal An narrow and a tall one”-FH
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